Lieutenant Colonel Nikolai Baranov was killed on May 6 while escorting Petlyakovs bombing German ground troops. It was a bitter irony that only two days previously he had given a talk to a meeting of Party members on “The State of Discipline in the Unit.” According to a report filed by Political Officer Krainov, when Baranov was taking off on his last mission, he was drunk. There were battles on the approaches to Stalino, with German fighters involved. Several other pilots did not return from the mission, which saw intense fighting, so Baranov might have been shot down even if he had been sober. Nevertheless, the commander had broken a golden rule he was always drumming into his pilots: never drink before takeoff, wait until you are safely back. According to Krainov, Baranov was leading a group of fighters but, on the way back from their target, lost touch both with the bombers they were escorting and his own fighter group. He engaged enemy fighters solo and was shot down over enemy territory. One of his pilots saw the plane falling, and noted that Baranov did not manage to bail out.
The crash was witnessed by two teenage boys who lived on the western outskirts of Shakhtyorsk, fifty kilometers from Stalino. The description of Baranov’s death given by one of them, Vasiliy Ruban, differs marginally from Krainov’s account, which was also based on eyewitness testimony.429 The boys were waiting eagerly for the Red Army to liberate Shakhtyorsk and, early in the morning of May 6, spotted three Soviet aircraft, a heavy bomber and two fighters, flying at high altitude above them. First one and then a second pair of Messerschmitts intercepted them and a dogfight began. The bomber and one of the fighters made their escape, but the second Yak fought on alone, shooting down one of the German fighters. (There is no confirmation of this in the regimental records.) The Yak was hit by machine-gun fire and caught fire. A speck separated from it. The pilot had bailed out, but his parachute was on fire and he was doomed. Whether Nikolai Baranov died “the worst death,” falling without a parachute, or whether the other pilot was right in saying he never managed to jump, we cannot tell.430 The boys found the dead pilot next to the wreckage of his plane, took the documents from his shirt pocket, and saw his name was N. I. Baranov. Germans soon drove up, took the documents from the boys, and removed two Orders of the Red Banner from Baranov’s tunic. They told the boys to clear off but, as soon as the Germans had gone, Vasiliy and his friend returned, dug a grave, and buried the pilot. They took a propeller blade from the Yak’s wreckage and put it on the grave mound in place of a headstone.
Vasiliy Ruban pointed out Baranov’s grave twenty years later when he returned to his home village and retold the story. Archival documents were researched and investigators from Shakhtyorsk succeeded in tracking down Baranov’s mother, wife and son. In 1963, his remains were reburied.
The regiment waited several days for Batya to return, unable to believe he could have been killed. They felt orphaned, as if they all really had lost their father.431 Although he had seemed to them an old man, he was only thirty-one. He was mourned by Nina Kamneva, also known as “Tiny Nina,” the tall, ample armorer who was his mistress. He was mourned too by everyone else in his unit, which had been fighting under his command since the war began and had become a Guards regiment under his leadership. People said that without Baranov the regiment could never be the same again. “The death of Guards Regiment Commander Lieutenant Colonel Baranov was accompanied by circumstances of personal indiscipline,” Major Krainov noted in his report.432 He must have known that the real cause was the inhuman stress imposed on Batya by the heavy responsibility he carried for the lives of so many people, a strain he had lived with since the outbreak of war. The vodka was a way of coping with that burden.
Batya was succeeded as commander by Ivan Golyshev who, like Baranov, was a fine pilot and good commander, but was otherwise entirely dissimilar. He was well-educated, well-spoken and highly disciplined, but a man of few words.433 Although many in the regiment were still reluctant to believe Batya was really dead, Golyshev took command on May 7. That same day Alexey Salomatin and Lilya Litvyak further increased their tally of kills, bringing down one Messerschmitt apiece. The report notes that Salomatin “drove the enemy fighter into the ground.” Ivan Soshnikov, a pilot who had only recently joined the regiment but was already on friendly terms with Valya Krasnoshchyokova, also distinguished himself.434
Valya’s close friend Faina Pleshivtseva was in love and forever disappearing off somewhere, so she was feeling lonely. Fortunately, Valya had already been accepted by the other girls and made friends with some of the pilots, including cheery Ivan Soshnikov and tall, handsome Alexander Yevdokimov who, when they were stuck at an airfield in Chuyevo, gave her his photo.435 They were friends, but no more. In affairs of the heart, Valya was a complete ingénue. There was plenty of questionable behavior going on around her, but somehow it all passed Valya by. On one occasion, she and Faina were invited by some of the pilots to join them in wetting their new medals. This was accomplished by dropping the medal in a tumblerful of vodka that had then to be drunk down in one. Valya noticed a small packet on the table and picked it up. “Is this a spare part for the medal?” she asked. There was a roar of laughter and Valya, confused, realized it must be a condom.436 These were a rarity at the front at that time and had usually been captured from the Germans, who had a more than adequate supply. Needless to say, Soviet condoms bore no comparison in quality with their “fascist” counterparts.
Zhenya Rudneva categorically disagreed with people who took the view that casual wartime romances were perfectly defensible. Her idealism, her childish naivety, and her youthful dogmatism are all reflected in an article “Varya’s Error,” which she wrote for the in-house literary magazine of the Night Witches regiment.437
The Night Witches had wanted to produce a magazine for a long time. Their regiment had its poets, its writers and artists. Polina Gelman even set up a philosophy club, but it did not flourish. It was as if nobody felt they had the time or energy to devote to the kind of intense thought such an endeavor would demand. Publishing a literary journal, however, was self-evidently a good idea. The girls had a backlog of poems, stories, and drawings, and it was time to bring them together in one place.
Galya Dokutovich agreed to be the editor, and the first issue contained two articles by Zhenya. One was about a real or fictional girl called Varya who unwisely put her trust in some gigolo. Varya’s error, according to Zhenya, was not that she had forgotten Alexey, the boy she loved, and indulged in a fling, but more seriously that she had not seen fit to renounce all else for the sake of victory. Her error was in failing “to see through him, to know him for what he was, and in failing to see that, even if he had been a really good person, she had given him grounds to hope for something more than just a date. This she should not have done under any circumstances.”
Zhenya, who had never been in love before, talks earnestly about a “petty bourgeois understanding of happiness,” warning girls against intimacy with their “brothers” in the male regiment that the Air Division constantly placed them next to. “It is no surprise that friendship arises, and sometimes infatuation. That does not make people bad people. It does not mean they lose their dignity and honor. What is far more serious is when we sometimes hear people complaining that their youth is passing and that soon they will be old women. This attitude is a step in the direction of the swamp, and is now one of our greatest enemies.” Zhenya rounded off her naive reflections on a rousing note: “Our girls will proudly bear the banner of their regiment, never allowing it to become sullied.”
For the present, Zhenya herself was only falling in love with girlfriends. Her romantic heart needed passionate enthusiasms, whether that was for their training exercises, for books or for people. She fell in love first with Galya Dokutovich. Galya found Zhenya’s ardent declarations of love an embarrassment. She could do without all that. On April 14, 1943, she noted in her diary:
I am afraid too that I have upset Zhenya. She has given me her photo inscribed, “To my Galya.” I did not ask her why she wrote that, but expected she would explain later. But now! She has written a story about two friends who love one another deeply, and cherish that feeling through all the difficulties they face during their entire lives. To one of these friends Zhenya has given the name Galya . . . She has been thinking that perhaps I am the one person she could have that kind of friendship with. It is really like a declaration of love!
Well, what can I say to her proposal to be her friend? If I said, “Fine,” that would be a lie. We are just very different. Zhenya is a splendid, intelligent, affectionate, sincere girl, and a much better person than I am, although I think I am stronger than her. We simply won’t be able to be lifelong friends. I can see that clearly, but why can’t Zhenya?
Anyway, if you respect someone and love them and want to be their friend, why would you talk about it? Polina and I have never said a word about our being friends. We have taken no oaths and promised each other nothing.
In fact, Galya was inseparable from Polina, whom she also considered weaker than herself, often criticized, and had done so for the past ten years. Now, however, even Polina no longer had pride of place in her heart. That she had given to blue-eyed Misha, to whom she wrote often in letters, and in her diary which was for nobody’s eyes but her own. When Misha was ill and unable to fly, she wrote an unsent message to him in her diary: “How is life treating you there? Are you better yet? Oh, Mishka, my sweet imp, stay well! When you are ill I feel sorry for you, and I don’t like it myself when people are sorry for me. Right now, though, I am not worrying. I know you are alive and not in danger and no enemy bullet can hurt you. Perhaps I would think about you less, and I would definitely worry about you less, but I would also be less proud of you if you were never facing danger.” That same day, she continued, “Oh, Misha, do you love flowers? There are so many roses around now, red, and white.”
One time, just as she was about to take off on a sortie, she was brought a letter from Misha. She had no time to read it and, during the mission, when the German anti-aircraft guns started up, her heart suddenly sank at the thought that, if she died, she would never get to know what he had written.