[烛光生存狂]-复仇女神

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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