[烛光生存狂]-复仇女神

Chapter 1

Youre my little girl! How will you survive there without borshcht?

Searchlight beams run across the night sky and meet, having caught their target, a small, slow biplane, which in this light looks like a helpless silver-winged moth. Its pilot and navigator are blinded by the unbearable light. One more second, and the plane is on fire.

Comrades of the doomed crew are able to watch the burning plane from the ground, as the night bombers target is not far away tonight. Girls clad in flying suits watch in a daze as the ball of fire starts falling slowly; the pilot and navigator dont have parachutes so will only survive by a miracle. The chief of staff Rakobolskaya rushes to the log book where flights are registered in order to see who is burning.

Four of the crews sent by Rakobolskaya to bomb the Blue Line in the Kuban on that terrible night never came back. After the search for them proved in vain, Rakobolskaya wrote to the families of the eight girls to tell them that they had gone missing. Polina Gelman, whose best friend, the navigator Galya Dokutovich died that night, kept waiting for a long time for Galya to come back, until eventually she accepted the loss and decided that if she survived the war and if she ever had a daughter, she would call her Galya.

The 588 all-female night bomber regiment continued to retrain navigators as pilots, and mechanics as navigators in order to make up for the losses. New crews were now engaged in the fighting and the advance towards the powerful chain of fortifications on the Taman Peninsula dubbed the Blue Line was replaced for a while by battles in the air. The Soviet side was pulling together resources for a new offensive.

This was the third year of war on the Eastern Front. The fighting, unprecedented in its scale, causing incalculable destruction and claiming millions of lives, was at its fiercest. But by the August of 1943 the Red Army had seized the strategic initiative. The turning point had been the Battle of Stalingrad, followed by the breach of the Leningrad encirclement and victory in the Battle of Kursk. Memories were still fresh of the disaster of 1941, the rapid German advance resulting in the encirclement and capture of a great part of the regular Soviet army, colossal casualties and the loss of great territories, major industrial centres and key agricultural regions. Before Stalingrad it was hard to believe in victory. After Kursk, victory began to feel like a real possibility. Two or three girls among Katya Perederas comrades in the sniper platoon were even convinced that if their dispatch to the front was delayed they would not get the chance to cover themselves with glory as the war would soon be over.

The Germans, compelled to retreat in the spring of 1943 from the Caucasus, were determined at all costs to hold the Taman Peninsula both to shield the Crimea and as a bridgehead for new attacks. Rounding up local women and children to work for them, they created an almost impregnable line of fortifications from the Sea of Azov to the Black Sea, exploiting the potential of the terrain marshes and lagoons in the northern sector, and mountainous, forested terrain in the south and in the middle built multiple rows of fortifications with minefields and barbed-wire entanglements in front of them. The Germans called this line the Gotenkopf, or Goths Head, but the Russians had kept the Blue Line, the name the Germans had used in their early planning. The Soviet North Caucasian Fronts spring offensive had failed to have a major impact owing to a lack of resources. Continuing for a week, it succeeded only in moving forward a short distance to the Cossack village of Krymskaya on the approaches to the Blue Line.

Katya Peredera first came here, to the area around the Cossack village of Kurchanskaya, in August 1943. The front line was only three kilometres away and the no-mans-land between the German and Russian positions was a treacherous expanse of lagoons and nameless small islands.1

Katya had arrived together with 19 Cadet Infantry Brigade, to which her sniper platoon was attached. Such platoons were a great novelty: so many snipers had been trained by 1943 that whole platoons of them, around thirty soldiers apiece, were being sent to accompany regular units. These platoons were considered extremely valuable, even if they consisted, like Katyas, exclusively of girls.

At first, everything was relatively quiet. They were on the defensive. Only occasionally did a burst of rifle fire come from the reed beds, and in the mornings the Germans staged five-minuters, a short spell of untargetted artillery shelling.2 The girls had been familiarised with front-line rules and local conditions: no marching in columns; when you needed to move, you stooped down and moved one at a time, often scuttling across open ground. If a Frame appeared, a German Focke-Wulf reconnaissance aircraft, you hit the ground. (The girls instantly hated the Frame for forcing them to muddy their uniforms.) If you needed water to drink or wash with, you headed for the nearest shell or bomb crater, of which there were plenty. Water in the lagoon, an immense area of shallow water, was unfit for drinking, bitter and salty. Only those few girls who had grown up in the vicinity of lagoons could drink it with impunity (and felt very superior to their weakling sisters as a result).

Their platoon was accommodated in nine dugouts, and again, as in Medvedovskaya where they had been trained, the girls made the place more civilised with reeds from the lagoon. These were fashioned into beds, used to line the dugouts ceilings to prevent soil trickling down, and as floor coverings. They also used reeds to make campfires.

Forces were being built up ready for the new offensive, but in the relative peace before it was launched seventeen-year-old Galya Koldeyeva, the youngest girl in the sniper platoon, would quietly sneak off to bathe in the shallow lagoon. Nikolai Zainutdinov, a good, brave, if uneducated, Tatar lad, became the girls guardian and mentor. He had learned to shoot accurately while tending flocks of thousands of sheep in the steppe. Wolves often attacked, and the shepherd became expert at despatching them.3 Trained as a sniper at the front, Zainutdinov rapidly earned respect; so much so, indeed, that he was put in charge of a platoon. When he found the snipers entrusted to his care were girls, he was undismayed. Because he was so tall, the girls called him One-and-a-Half Ivans, made fun of his less than impressive education, sulked when he imposed discipline, but in general got on well with him.4 There were endless dogfights in the air above them, anticipating the offensive that began on 10 September 1943. 19 Brigade was not immediately drawn into it; instead they watched the troops mass before they were sent forward. For several days in early September new units had been arriving, while others left for the front line. In the evenings shots would ring out in the vicinity of the girls dugouts, one, or two, or three. Then, almost immediately, one or other of them would emerge. This was a prearranged signal, calling the girls out for a tryst, sent by soldiers who were not allowed into their female comrades quarters. These brief en-counters and walks by the lagoon rarely led to anything serious; passions flared, but the next day or the day after, the boys unit, after its brief respite, would go forward to the Blue Line. Only a few exchanged addresses and continued their romance by correspondence. Katya Peredera barely had time to chat to likeable Sergeant Lyova. Their plan to dally in an empty dugout was thwarted by the stern and vigilant One-and-a-Half Ivans, who was there in a flash to enquire, And where might you be going? He shooed them away and threatened to write to their parents.5 The next morning, Lyova was wounded in the eye and Katya heard no more of him.

The girls had no illusions: they knew an offensive was imminent and that many of these soldiers would die. They had heard about the earlier fighting here. We had not encountered fortifications like these ones in Kuban. Here they were dug in, everything was underground. They had thoroughly prepared it all in advance and clearly had no intention of leaving. It took us two days to walk the 10 kilometres of the Blue Line, a soldier who fought there recalled.6 Even now, seventy years later, search parties are finding and re-burying bodies. They rarely manage to identify them: in November 1942 soldiers Bakelite capsules containing an identifying slip of paper were abolished. The authorities had decided that the instruction booklet carried by every soldier could serve the same function although, of course, this was not the case: the books rapidly mouldered, or deteriorated in water. In the view of many researchers, the motive for abolishing the capsules was that the government preferred its millions of casualties to remain anonymous. That had many advantages. There was no need to bury them, no need to pay a pension to bereaved families who had lost their breadwinner, and they wanted to conceal the huge scale of the losses.7 In spite of these obstacles, the search parties are sometimes successful: people who feared remaining unidentified after they were killed would scratch their names on a comb, a spoon or mess tin, or make medallions for themselves out of spent cartridges.

The guitar was in splinters. Thank God, its owner, Olga Korotkevich, had survived the shelling, but she was wounded and it looked serious. Olga was fun, loud, all-singing, all-dancing, the best singer in their platoon. When she left home to learn to be a sniper, she took her guitar with her and was inseparable from it, even right at the front. Now, her face contorted with pain, she asked repeatedly, Wheres my guitar? Dont worry, Olga, youll get your guitar! Olgas sniper partner was Katya Peredera, and she was being as reassuring as she could while hastily, and not very expertly, bandaging her wound. She needed to get Olga out, and fast.8 There was fierce fighting all around them: this time the Red Army would succeed in breaking through the Germans Blue Line.

The 19 Cadet Infantry Brigade had suffered a great deal in the September offensive of the North-Caucasian Front. The platoon of female snipers, who acted as ordinary infantry soldiers during the advance, also suffered casualties. In the course of a few days at Temryuk their platoon of thirty-three was reduced to twenty-three.9

Katya was right: Olga survived and bought another guitar, but she did not return to the front, and was crippled for the rest of her life.

Katyas new sniper partner was Zhenya Makeyeva, a tall, handsome girl, dark-eyed and dark-skinned, sharp-tongued, sociable and courageous. Zhenya became Katyas closest friend: they were inseparable until 7 May 1944, when Zhenya was killed, and Katya was unable to bury her.

Most of the girls in Katyas platoon had been conscripted in Krasnodar, a big city in the south of Russia close to the Black Sea, but Katya and Zhenya were both from Kropotkin in the Krasnodar province. They lived in different parts of the small Kuban town and so did not know each other before meeting up at sniper school. Like the other girls in the platoon, they were called up immediately after the Krasnodar region was liberated in February 1943.

The Germans had reached Kropotkin on 4 August 1942. The town was built on raised ground, and Katya and her family looked down the valley towards the Caucasus and saw German units advancing. When they broke through, Katya, though never faint-hearted, jumped down into the cellar without bothering to use the ladder. She sat there, joined by her mother and sisters, while the Germans drove into town in cars and on motorcycles. When the girls emerged to see what was happening, the troops were already in the streets, plundering, taking eggs and milk from the housewives and shooting hens.10

Katya remembered the occupation as a time of fear and hunger, although she did not personally witness any atrocities. The only terrible thing that happened immediately after the Germans entered was the execution of a small number of retreating Soviet soldiers whose carts were intercepted.

After that, things seemed to settle down. Many of the townspeople were happy to help the Germans, and pro-German companies of Cossacks and Crimean Tatars roamed the streets. People who had been at odds with the Soviet regime before the war went to work in the police or local administration. The worst thing I remember, a Krasnodar resident recalls, was a canvas-covered truck driving up and thirty or forty people in fascist uniforms piling out. All of them were speaking Russian.11 Workers, if they had a job, just went to work as usual under the German occupation: they had a family to feed.12 The Germans tried to catch anyone in the Soviet resistance and atrocities were taking place nearby, but Katyas family knew about it only through rumours. The Germans demanded milk and eggs from the townspeople. They made expeditions by motorcycle to remote villages and farmsteads that still had a lot of poultry, and would take away live ducks and geese. The village boys quickly learned that when they heard motorcycles coming they should take long rods and drive the birds down to a river, lake or stream to wait for the uninvited guests to depart. Otherwise, the Germans let local people get on with their lives, although they made it plain that they regarded them as subhuman. Sometimes they did not simply requisition food but exchanged it for their ersatz (the word refers to surrogate, inadequate, replacements of foods such as butter or bread, and was borrowed by the Russian language from German during the war). Not a few of the local people said some openly, others in private that if the Germans just gave them land to farm, life under them would be better than under the Soviets.

Kropotkin was liberated by Soviet troops after heavy fighting some six months later, and soon Katya and many of her contemporaries received conscription notices. Boys of her age had already been conscripted in 1942. Many girls had no wish at all to go to the front, and hid with their grandmothers or other relatives. Katya enlisted as a matter of conscience: she knew that many of the boys in her class had already been killed.13 The country had lost so much of its male population during the first two years of the conflict that it now had no choice but to start using women in the army, on an even larger scale than before. In a country that proclaimed 100 per cent equality of the sexes, it did not seem strange to anyone that an extensive mobilisation of women for the army should take place. There are no reliable statistics as to the number of women who served in the Red Army during the Second World War; women went down in the lists of their units together with men. The estimates range from 500,000 to nearly a million. Apart from serving as secretaries, nurses, telephone operators and cooks, women were also employed as signallers, aviation technicians, personnel of anti-aircraft artillery and machine-gunners. Marina Raskovas female pilots became famous throughout the land. There were also female tank crews and marines. From 1943 onwards, thousands of young female snipers appeared at the fronts. Some researchers later claimed that the decision to train women as snipers was made on the basis of serious research proving that women had the potential to be better snipers than men, because they were calmer and more patient. In fact, the main factor that played a role here was the desperate shortage of men.

Most of Katya Perederas new friends, including herself, had only a very vague idea of what their future role as a sniper would entail, and were curious to find out what the training was going to be like. A group of about a hundred girls, enough to form a company of snipers, were given a ride in open railway goods trucks full of salt, and brought to Krasnodar. The ancient city, the beautiful capital of Kuban, which occupied the land of the ancient Bosporan Kingdom by the Black Sea, was severely damaged. The factories had been blown up by the N.K.V.D. ahead of the German arrival, and even worse destruction was to be wrought by shells, bombing, and arson by the Germans before they were driven out.14

From Krasnodar, the prospective snipers were taken to the Cossack village of Medvedovskaya, a peaceful spot at the confluence of two rivers, with small white houses set in orchards and with huge vegetable gardens. Here they were to be trained. They were billeted in a pigsty, there being nowhere else, and the girls accepted that with a war going on this was no time to be picky. They cleaned out the pigsty and made themselves mattresses from the plentiful reeds in the lagoon. They put the mattresses by the walls, wooden benches in the middle, hung a sheet of paper with the days routine on the wall, and were ready to begin their new lives.15 Womens uniforms were not standard issue for the Red Army at that time so, like hundreds of thousands of others who had been enlisted already, they were given hugely oversized mens uniforms and boots. Their tunics came to the knees of the shorter girls and their boots kept falling off. You could cry about it, or laugh. Along with all other girls at the front, they were given a cropped haircut like boys. For centuries, a plait coiled round the head had been the pride and joy of Cossack girls, and most of the snipers-to-be had never cut their hair. Parting with these plaits was very upsetting, and many wept and begged to be excused the sacrifice. The sergeant, lame from his time at the front, referred to orders from above and was unrelenting.16 Their hair remained a source of anguish until the end of the course, and when it was over they had it permed in Krasnodar for the first and last time in the war.

After a few theory lessons, the battle-hardened sergeant taught them everything he thought they would need to know at the front. The trainee snipers began square-bashing and had shooting practice in a gully. Targets were set up and the sergeant taught them how to aim and manage the recoil the strong jerking movement of the rifle that followed the shot. That, however, was only the half of it: he also taught them the camouflage skills essential for a sniper (a sniper should be invisible!), and even had them sitting underwater in the lagoon breathing through a straw.17 It is a wonder they had the strength for such strenuous training, because their food was terrible, often consisting of nothing but barley porridge, which was cold and turning blue well before it ever reached them at the firing range. Katya recalled her mothers lamentation as she saw her daughter off to the front: Youre my little girl! How will you survive there without borshcht?18

The culture and traditions of Kuban are closer to those of Ukraine than of Russia, and neither before nor after the war could Katya imagine a life without borshcht. Her mother found a way to cheer her daughter up by coming to see her in Medvedovskaya, covering the 150 kilometres on foot and by getting lifts in trucks. She arrived together with the mother of Zhenya Makeyeva. Nobody knows how they met or who told them their daughters were in Medvedovskaya, but Katya and Zhenya were aware that their mothers were coming to see them, and prepared a welcome. They asked the local women to let them wash the tunics they had muddied during training exercises, and stitched on clean undercollars. Their mothers brought a little food, but it was already in short supply even in Kuban. Zhenyas elder brother was fighting (and he too would not return from the war). Katyas mother told her that her elder sister, Nina, was currently serving somewhere nearby as a nurse.19

In May the weather warmed up and flowers appeared. The girls picked posies and their barracks was untypically fragrant for the army.20 At the end of May, they were given blank cartridges and dummy hand grenades for an exercise: the snipers mission was to destroy an enemy assault group that had supposedly broken through to the railway, and liberate the station. By all accounts the dummy operation was a great success. At the end of their training, they heard they were to be examined on theory, drill and shooting by a front-line commission. This was to include Lyudmila Pavlichenko, a sniper who, before she was injured, had also been fighting on the North Caucasian Front. They had heard and read a lot about her in propaganda leaflets: she was said to have exterminated more than 300 fascists, so it was a great disappointment for the girls and their mentor the sergeant when the celebrity failed to turn up.

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