Anya Skorobogatova had been on duty on the evening of August 1. It was the last time she heard Lilya Litvyak’s voice over the radio. Lilya said, “Here goes!” and fell silent.499 Anya was not particularly surprised, because that was a common occurrence. The radio signal was unreliable and Litvyak tended to be taciturn while she was flying. It was only when Anya finished her tour of duty that she learned Lilya had not returned.
Nikolai Menkov, who had seen Lilya off on her last flight, was there to meet the other pilots of her group and carried on waiting for the return of his plane, although he knew it would have run out of fuel long ago. Eventually, crushed, he had walked away from the airfield.
When in 1979 a Moscow publishing house brought out Valeriy Agranovsky’s semi-documentary, semi-fictional novella about Lilya Litvyak, her disappearance, and the search for her remains and aircraft, Lieutenant Colonel (Retired) Nikolai Menkov wrote the author a long letter which began, “I have been very moved to read The White Lily, because for two months in June and July 1943 I worked in the same Third Squadron of 73 Wing as fighter pilot Lilya Litvyak.” Menkov decided to contact Agranovsky in the hope that his information would assist in the search. Menkov, the father of two children, a former army engineer and now a schoolteacher, after all these years still remembered the minutest details of the missing plane in which he had invested so much effort, and of the pilot who had vanished along with the aircraft.
The top of the joystick had the letters “LL” scratched on it (for “Lilya Litvyak.” She scratched them on with a knife while on call one time). On the top of the instrument panel she had scratched “Mum.” In the cockpit the foot controls were set as far back as possible because Litvyak was quite small. The skin of the aircraft was gray. The tail wheel guards had plates with hidden riveting. The tank had been repaired and must have had welded seams on it. The number on the tail of the aircraft was “18.”
On the middle finger of her left hand Lilya Litvyak had a gold-plated signet ring. She had two gold crowns (visible when she smiled) on the teeth on the left side of her upper jaw. Lilya’s clothing at the time of the flight was: chrome leather boots with short tops, dark-blue flying breeches, a khaki tunic, and she always tucked her dark-blue beret away in her map case.
On the day she disappeared Lilya made four sorties, mostly in support of Ilyushins attacking German ground troops. The Germans threw all their operational reserves at the area of the Soviet breakthrough. They redeployed substantial numbers of aircraft from the Belgorod-Kharkov sector to the Donetsk coal-basin.500 The Southern Front regrouped urgently in order to counter-attack on July 31, but this plan was foiled by the transfer of three German armored divisions from Kharkov. On July 30 the Germans succeeded in inflicting major damage with a large number of tanks, repeating the maneuver the following day. According to Soviet reports the Germans had 400–500 tanks. These were given effective air support. The troops of the Southern Front were ordered to retreat to the left bank of the River Mius.
Attack aircraft continued their missions with fighter escorts. On her third sortie Lilya shot down a Messerschmitt.501 When she came out to her aircraft to fly a fourth sortie, Menkov felt obliged to try to talk her out of it, even though as a mechanic he had no right to question the judgment of a senior officer. He commented that it was “very punishing for one person to fly so many missions in this heat,” and added, “Do you really need to do so much flying? There are other pilots!” Litvyak told him, “The Germans have started using weaklings. They are wet behind the ears and I feel like blasting one more of them!”502 Before taking off, Lilya as always said good-bye to her mechanic, “smiled and nodded her head.” Then she raised her left hand to close the canopy and moved to take off.
Six Yaks had been allocated to escort a group of eight Ilyushins. Lilya, as she often did, was leading Alexander Yevdokimov. Without waiting for them, the Ilyushins took off for the front line and, as they approached, the fighter pilots could see they were already engaged in combat near the River Mius. The fighters managed to take out two Messerschmitts and keep all the Ilyushins safe. Their only loss was Litvyak, who was shot down as they were leaving the battle zone. The crash was witnessed by Sasha Yevdokimov and Borisenko, who saw her plane falling out of control but not on fire. Its pilot did not bail out, manifestly having been killed or seriously injured in the air. On returning from the mission, Yevdokimov reported to their commander that Litvyak had come down behind enemy lines in the vicinity of Dmitrievka. Borisenko reported that he saw a Messerschmitt suddenly emerge from the clouds, fire off a round at the tail of the nearest Yak, which was unprotected, and promptly vanish. He believed the plane fired on was that of Litvyak.
A regimental document entitled “Information on Aviation Incidents, Combat and Non-Combat Losses of 73 Guards Stalingrad Fighter Regiment. August 1–9, 1943,” contains an entry reporting that Guards Flight Commander Junior Lieutenant Litvyak, Lidia Vladimirovna “did not return to base after accomplishing a combat mission at 1040–1150 hrs. providing cover for Soviet troops.” There are already two mistakes evident here: the sortie took place in the evening, and the flight was not to cover troops but to escort attack aircraft. The document goes on to assert, “In the vicinity of Marinovka they engaged in combat several groups of Me-109s totaling up to 12 attack aircraft and up to 30 Junkers Ju 87s.” The likelihood is that the author has confused this sortie with a mission flown on July 16, when Lilya really did engage with a group of thirty bombers.503 The information about the location of her crash does, however, agree with the observations of Yevdokimov and Borisenko. “Crews engaged in the battle saw one Yak-1 fall 4–5 km northeast of Marinovka.” The author of this document concludes that the aircraft was “evidently shot down and the pilot is presumed to have perished.”
Veterans’ memoirs tell us that the whole regiment was in mourning. Almost no one had the stomach for dinner.504 In spite of all the evidence, people waited and hoped, but Lilya did not return. The next day Boris Sidnev, commander of 6 Guards Air Division (formerly 268 Fighter Aviation Division), appeared in the regiment and stutteringly reproached one of the flight commanders, “Wh-what kind of men are you not to be able to keep one g-girl safe?”505 The whole of 8 Air Army grieved for her.
A day later, when Soviet troops had been able to advance a little, Alexander Yevdokimov and Nikolai Menkov went in search of the crashed aircraft.506 They scoured the area where the fighting had occurred, from Dmitrievka to Kuibyshevo. They went round all the villages and gullies, but found nothing. There were almost no civilians remaining in the front-line villages, and soldiers “offered contradictory explanations.” They were, after all, engaged in fierce fighting right on the front line and had no great interest in a missing plane. Many aircraft had crashed there in those days.
Lilya’s last letter to her mother, which she dictated to the squadron’s adjutant while sitting on call in the cockpit of her fighter, contains no suggestion of weariness or anxiety. Just that she was greatly missing her mother and home. She wrote:
Everything here, the meadows and the sparse woodland, remind me now of our own dear countryside around Moscow where I grew up and spent so many happy days. It has been a long time since I heard the bustle of the streets of Moscow, the clattering of the trams, and the cars hurrying everywhere. Life in the army has completely swallowed all that. It is even difficult for me to snatch a moment to write a letter to tell you I am alive and well, and that what I love most in all the world is my Motherland and you, my dear mother.
I have a burning desire to drive those German reptiles out of our land just as soon as may be, so that once again we can live a happy, peaceful life, so I can come home to you and tell you all the things I have been through in the days since we parted. Dear Mum, this letter has been written by our adjutant while I was on call. So long. I love and kiss you. 28.7.43507
Lilya’s mother, Anna, was forever asking Valya Krasnoshchyokova when she came to visit after the war, “Valya, was Lilya ill? How did she look? Was she terribly tired?”508 There was nothing Valya could tell her. People who wrote about Litvyak claimed that in the last weeks before she died she was exhausted and depressed, the death of Katya having affected her so much that she was acting out of character. Their source is a tale told by Faina Pleshivtseva, but as we have seen, Pleshivtseva left the regiment in late May or early June, and did not return. None of the mechanics or pilots who were working with Lilya in those last days said anything about her being tired or depressed. She was fighting with the same determination as ever. Menkov tells us that her mood as she took off on her last flight was “bright and cheerful.”509
In August 1943 Kharkov was retaken and the Soviet Army moved deeper into the territory of the Ukraine. Aircraft with red stars on their wings now invariably outnumbered those with German crosses. The fighter regiment flew to the airfield at Makeyevka and Menkov and Yevdokimov again went out looking for any sign of Lilya, but again found nothing.510 On August 25 Alexander Yevdokimov was killed as they were moving to another new airport, his “air awareness” having lapsed. He and Pilot Byvshev were shot down over Soviet territory by a pair of Messerschmitts. When the regiment learned that he jumped with a parachute that failed to open everyone was terribly saddened. He was such a young, handsome and likable man and this was “the most terrifying death, hurtling earthward, fully aware of your situation.”511 After Alexander died they undertook no further searches, and registered Lilya’s name in perpetuity in the list of 73 Guards Fighter Regiment. Komsomolskaya Pravda, where she had been so warmly received just four months before, wrote about her death. Everyone was expecting that she would be posthumously awarded the title of Hero of the Soviet Union, but things took a different turn.
It all changed about a month and a half later, when a pilot from a neighboring fighter regiment who had been taken prisoner returned and unexpectedly claimed he had seen Litvyak in captivity.
Valya Krasnoshchyokova now faced an ordeal. After the death of Lilya and Katya, she was very lonely, and then in September she found herself being called in for questioning by the Special Department who, for some reason, were suddenly taking an interest in Lilya.512 What kind of Komsomol member had she been? What did she talk about? Could she have gone over to the side of the Germans? Valya indignantly told them exactly what she thought. Lilya had been a devoted Komsomol member. She could only have been captured if she had been seriously wounded. There was no way she would have gone over to the Germans; it was ridiculous even to suggest it. Nikolai Menkov also found himself summoned, but only once. The other mechanics and pilots were called in too, one by one. At first no one could understand what was going on.
The rumors spread and multiplied. The ground was only too fertile: a beautiful girl fighter pilot had vanished without trace. There had been no shortage of gossip about Lilya while she was alive, and even now someone could not leave her in peace. It was asserted that local people had said a plane landed behind the front line right on the road. The village was even named. A diminutive girl pilot with a straight nose and blonde hair had climbed out and been driven off in a car with Germans.
Others swore they had heard someone say the Germans buried Lilya in Kramatorsk with full military honors. There had supposedly been a parade through the town with a band because “the fascists wanted to keep up their own troops’ failing morale” and decided to show them the example of a “Russ heroine.”
There was even a rumor that someone had seen a German leaflet with her photograph that said the aviatrix Lilya Litvyak was well and happy with the Germans.
Gradually, however, it became known that all this bizarre nonsense was based solely on the testimony of a pilot who had escaped from captivity. Officially, of course, nobody could say anything out loud, but they whispered his name: Vladimir Lavrinenkov.513 That was difficult to believe. Anyone else, but surely not brave, honest Lavrinenkov. He just did not look like a man capable of slandering a fellow soldier.
Lavrinenkov was a famous fighter pilot who had shot down twenty-six German planes. He was a Hero of the Soviet Union and was a favorite of Timofey Khryukin, commander of 8 Air Army. Khryukin personally had ordered him at the end of August to shoot down a Frame spy plane that was conducting reconnaissance overhead.514 Proud and excited, Lavrinenkov took off to perform the task, watched from the ground by the high command. It maneuvered so adroitly that he was finding it difficult to make the kill. Remembering his lessons, he pursued the Frame, guns blazing. He was not entirely sure what happened next. Whether he hit the plane and it went out of control, or whether he underestimated his own speed, at all events Lavrinenkov collided with it, damaging the Frame and also his own Airacobra. The Frame fell earthward, but one wing came off his own plane. His biographers later claimed he had deliberately rammed the German plane, but in his memoirs the pilot describes the incident more honestly. Bailing out, he found himself drifting helplessly behind enemy lines.515
He did not conceal his identity in captivity and was well treated, not beaten or starved like others. After the initial interrogations it was decided to send him to Germany; he was evidently considered an important potential source of information. On the way there, he and other fellows in misfortune escaped from the train and walked for many days back toward the front.
They did not make it to the front line, instead coming upon a partisan guerrilla unit that, after they had been questioned, they were invited to join. Soon their detachment joined up with the advancing Red Army and Lavrinenkov, wearing a greatcoat taken from a dead German, returned to 8 Air Army. Seeing Khryukin’s joy at his return, Lavrinenkov was met with open arms as a hero by the others. His awards were returned to him without further ado and he was promoted. Soon he was back in his own regiment.
Lavrinenkov says in his memoirs that he was very lucky; even after his heroic participation in guerrilla operations he might not have been believed, sent to a Soviet prison camp for interrogation, or been “exposed” as a spy. Another famous Soviet fighter pilot, Mikhail Devyataev, was less fortunate. For his feat of escaping from captivity in a German plane and bringing a number of other Soviet prisoners back with him he was rewarded by his homeland with ten years in a prison camp, his interrogators having decided that a fighter pilot could not possibly know how to fly a bomber and must, therefore, have been sent back as a spy by the Germans.
In his memoirs Lavrinenkov mentions that for a month and a half after his return to the regiment he was not allowed to fly while he was investigated by the Special Department. They contacted the partisan detachment he had fought with and Lavrinenkov had to write many pages of detailed testimony explaining where he had been and what he had done. Is this evidence still extant? Will it ever be made public? What did the Special Department ask Lavrinenkov and what did he volunteer on his own initiative? In his own memoirs and in memoirs about him there is not a single word about any incrimination of Lilya Litvyak.
Could Lavrinenkov, unquestionably a fearless soldier, have slandered his dead comrade-in-arms, a girl he greatly admired? Would he have done what was demanded of him, perhaps under duress? It is difficult to believe, but for Vladimir Lavrinenkov flying was his life. He knew that pilots who returned from captivity were not allowed to continue to fly. As for Litvyak, she was dead and he might have reasoned that he could not hurt her personally, only her reputation. “There is something fishy about the whole business,” Boris Yeremin, commander of 31 Fighter Wing, was to remark many years later, but without saying he believed the story told by a pilot in jeopardy after returning from captivity was a lie.516 In his last days Lavrinenkov himself repudiated what he had said.517
Many years have passed and none of those involved in this story are any longer alive, but we know that almost certainly Lavrinenkov lied, smearing the reputation of a deceased pilot. If Litvyak had agreed to cooperate with the Germans, or had even still been alive and their captive, their propaganda would assuredly have trumpeted the fact to the world. However, there was no mention of her, no photograph of her on a German leaflet, not a word from any of the radio transmitters which broadcast in Russian to Russian soldiers, not a single remark by prisoners returning from prisoner-of-war camps about a girl the like of whom they would assuredly have remembered. Lilya, almost certainly, died and, like 800,000 other Soviet soldiers, lies unburied in the earth of the Mius Front.
The myth of the captive Lilya was confirmed, as was later discovered, also under duress, by Andrey Golyuk, an 85 Regiment pilot who was returned from German captivity after the war.518 He too claimed to have seen Litvyak as a prisoner, which appeared to discredit her conclusively. He subsequently made no secret of the fact that he had been compelled to make this false assertion. At a veterans’ reunion Valya Krasnoshchyokova found an opportunity to talk to him in private and ask why he had done so. Golyuk made no attempt to justify himself and replied that he had been forced to defame Lilya. He had been warned that failure to do so would entail major unpleasantness for him, as his own conduct in captivity could be called into question. Valya was incensed. As she walked away from him, she contemptuously amended his surname: “Govnyuk!” she hissed. “Shithead!”
So Golyuk was forced to defame Lilya Litvyak, confirming false testimony which somebody, most probably Lavrinenkov, had given earlier. But if he too had been coerced, what was going on? Was there a leaflet? Had some informer claimed Lilya was planning to defect? Did the Special Department know her father had been purged? Why did Sidnev not stamp on this campaign of defamation against her? Or Khryukin, who also followed her fighting career with admiration? If they decided to take no action, was it because they were uncertain Lilya had died?
When these rumors reached Lilya’s own women’s 586 Fighter Regiment, many were only too ready to believe them. Valya Krasnoshchyokova found that unsurprising. Other girls envied Lilya her looks, her popularity, her skill as a pilot and, after summer 1943, her national celebrity.519 They whispered that her victories had been ascribed to her only because she had pretty eyes, and even many years after the war were still writing and talking in this vein, unashamedly vilifying her memory. When one of the pilots of the women’s Fighter Regiment many decades after the war thought she had recognized Lilya in a Swiss or Swedish TV program about a Soviet aviatrix who had been captured and gone on to live a prosperous life in Sweden or Switzerland, many agreed that of course it must have been Lilya.520
Faina Pleshivtseva, or Inna Pasportnikova as she became known after her marriage (Inna was a more fashionable variant of Faina), revered the memory of Lilya Litvyak and for many years joined schoolchildren from the town of Krasny Luch in the Ukraine and their teacher Valentina Vashchenko in organizing expeditions to find the remains of Lilya and her plane. They discovered many other pilots, including Commander Golyshev, but were unable to locate Lilya. They did learn that in the 1970s the remains of an unknown woman pilot had been found by village boys when they were trying to pull a grass snake out of its hole. This was near the village of Marinovka, but what was left of the plane had long been sent to the scrapyard. The school expedition discovered that the find had been registered and the remains then buried in a mass grave. According to Valentina Vashchenko, the list of items included fragments of underwear—namely a brassiere made from parachute silk—and, in addition, fragments of a flying helmet and bleached hair.521 Alas, today a copy of that list is nowhere to be found and nobody has any suggestions as to where to begin looking for it.1
Poetry, particularly lyric poetry, was something the girls in Marina Raskova’s regiments needed desperately. They dreamed of love, their hearts longed for tenderness, and their feelings were the more acute because they were risking their lives. Men fighting in the war had the same experiences, but for girls the longing was even stronger. Konstantin Simonov’s poem “Wait for Me,” published in Pravda on January 14, 1942, and copied out in notebooks hundreds of thousands, and probably even millions, of times, was the voice of their generation, the song of those at war who longed for home, and of those who were waiting for them at home. It was the prayer of those who might be killed, and of those who waited.
The poem was written in the early months of the war when Simonov, as the reporter of a front-line newspaper, saw the horror and chaos of the retreat, bade a last farewell to friends he had only just met, and narrowly escaped death himself. “If I had not written it, somebody else would have,” he once said of this front-line anthem. He added, “There is no great backstory to ‘Wait for Me.’ I went away to war, leaving behind the woman I loved, so I wrote her a letter in verse.” Writer Lev Kassil, at whose dacha he was staying at the time, told Simonov that it was a good poem but that this was not the time to publish it. The editor of the Army’s Red Star newspaper, for which he was working, had a similar reaction. “This poem has no place in an Army newspaper,” he said. “There is no point in unsettling our soldiers.”522
The poem, however, made its own way. Wherever Simonov went, the soldiers at the end of a stressful day would ask him to read them poetry. After once reading “Wait for Me” on the Northern Front, he went on to read it many times more. In December 1941 he read it on the radio and on January 14 it was published in Pravda. The poem moved an entire nation, and after it was published Simonov was a celebrity, known even to those with little interest in literature. People came to believe that, if they just waited faithfully enough, no harm would come to those they loved.
From then until the end of the war on trips to the front to gather material for his reports, Simonov, thawing out after the cold and the dangers with a front-line vodka ration or some diluted spirit in the company of officers at the front, was happy to read them his poetry invariably including, of course, “Wait for Me.”
Wait for me, and I’ll return,
Only really wait.
Wait for me when autumn rains
Make you sad.
Wait when snows sweep over the land,
And in the summer’s heat.
Wait when others are not waited for,
Just yesterday betrayed.523
It was rumored that the actress Valentina Serova, for whom the poem was written, did not wait too long for Simonov, embarking on a romance with the dazzling young Marshal Rokossovsky, but how much does that really matter? She was still the muse of a poet who wrote the most important Russian poem of the Second World War.
Many years after the war Simonov would receive letters from those whose wait had been rewarded, and from others who had waited in vain. Some women whose husbands or sons did not return wrote that his poem had left them feeling guilty all their lives that they must not have waited hard enough.
Lilya Litvyak’s mother, left without a death certificate and thus without the pension automatically paid to anyone whose breadwinner had died at the front, lived in penury after the war. For her, however, the words “lost without trace” in the official letter she received from 73 Guards Fighter Regiment were infinitely preferable to “died a hero’s death,” because it left room for hope. Around her, if only very rarely, miracles did happen. Some people whose families had been sent notification of their death in action came home safe and sound. Every time she saw Valya and Faina she would ask the same unanswerable question: “If she’s alive, why has she not let us have some news at least about herself?” Then she would shake her head and say, no, Lilya could not still be among the living. And yet, right to the end of her life she lived in hope. Others around her were waiting too for their loved ones to come back from the war, thousands, hundreds of thousands, millions of people.
Konstantin Simonov went on to read “Wait for Me” at literary evenings for twenty years after the war, but then decided it was time to stop. “Everybody who was going to come back had come back. There was no longer anyone to wait for.”524
1 We cannot just take the word of “Pasportnikova.” If we were to believe everything she said, she not only saw Litvyak off on her last flight but even sewed that bra for her. It was supposedly Pleshivtseva Lilya sent to get the peroxide bleach. She claimed Litvyak also told her shortly before her death that she could not afford to go missing because then the purging of her father would resurface. In fact, Faina Pleshivtseva was not there shortly before Lilya died, and in any case in those years nobody would have discussed such things with anyone, no matter how close to them. As so often happens, Faina Pleshivtseva played an ambiguous role in the posthumous reputation of Lilya Litvyak. By devoting herself to perpetuating her memory, she did much that was positive; but in the process she surrounded Lilya’s reputation with so many fictions that she caused no small amount of damage herself.