[烛光生存狂]-第二章

Chapter 2

Who would think of powdering their nose in a war?

In late August 1942, almost every Soviet magazine, and many in the West, reported an amazing visit. Soviet front-line fighters had arrived as part of an official Young Communist League delegation to an International Student Assembly in the United States. There was much more to the visit than that, however. The delegation was to stay in the US for several weeks, travelling all over the country and addressing a wide variety of audiences in order to draw attention to the perilous situation on the Eastern Front.

There had never before been, and would not be for many decades afterwards, so much interest and friendly feeling towards the U.S.S.R. as in the autumn of 1942. Russia, which until very recently had been considered a rogue state, a secretive, backward, aggressive colossus that had made a pact with the Germans and attacked neighbouring countries in order to seize territory, was now being viewed quite differently. It was a land desperately fighting a powerful and ruthless aggressor. Communists and trade unionists in the U.S. and Europe demanded that their governments should support Russia more effectively. The Germans had captured a huge swathe of Soviet territory and were fighting for Stalingrad: if Russia lost that battle it could lose the war, and the consequences of that could affect the whole world. People followed the news from the Eastern Front eagerly. Russia was on everybodys mind and many families identified closely with the victories of the Red Army.

There could not have been a better time for a delegation from the U.S.S.R. to visit the U.S., and this one included two highly decorated front-line fighters. The head of the delegation was, predictably, not a war hero but a bureaucrat, Nikolai Krasavchenko, the propaganda secretary of the Moscow Young Communist League. He was involved, at least administratively, in forming groups to be dropped behind the German lines, which was sufficient for him to be introduced to American audiences as a partisan fighter.21 Two other members of the delegation were snipers who, before the outbreak of war, had been students: Hero of the Soviet Union Vladimir Pchelintsev and Lyudmila Pavlichenko.

Why were two snipers chosen, rather than two pilots or tank commanders? Most probably because at that moment the other branches of the Red Army were suffering a seemingly unbroken series of conspicuous reverses at the hands of their opponents. The sniper movement, on the other hand, was something to shout about. The Germans feared Russian snipers and the Soviet press devoted a great deal of space to them, often exaggerating their exploits. Moreover, these two personable young snipers were outstanding representatives of authentically Communist youth. Both were educated, having gone straight from university to the front, were ideologically primed, and more than capable of speaking on varied topics. Both had an affiliation with the N.K.V.D., the much-feared Soviet secret police, Pchelintsev through his unit and Pavlichenko through her father.22 They were people who could safely be sent abroad.

Vladimir Pchelintsev gives a detailed account of that trip to the U.S. At the time of the visit he was already a famous sniper on the Leningrad Front, and rightly considered one of the founders of the sniper movement in the Red Army.23 The trip came as a complete surprise to him. The 22-year-old sniper had just been recalled from active service to work at the sniper school near Moscow. He was woken during the night and taken to meet Nikolai Mikhailov, first secretary of the Young Communist Leagues Central Committee. Mikhailov immediately explained the reason for the summons, but Pchelintsev could not believe his ears. He was to be sent to America? For a moment he was taken aback. Have I misheard? Did he just say something about America? How can I possibly go to America when there is a war on?24

Mikhailov confirmed that, yes, he was to go to a student assembly being held in America. Pchelintsev still could not believe it, and merely grunted. To him America was as remote as Mars. American imperialism embodied all the horrors of capitalism, with corrupt morals, endemic racism, a decaying economy and venal press. People believed the propaganda unquestioningly, because almost nobody had ever been to America, or indeed anywhere outside the U.S.S.R. Soviet people did not travel abroad. In fact, peasants, who represented the bulk of the population, did not have even internal passports, so could not travel outside their own collective farms, the Soviet pseudo-cooperatives that had been forced upon the nations peasants with rigid, and costly, brutality.

Right now, however, Vladimir Pchelintsev reflected in perplexity, the fate of the country was in the balance. How could they just go off to America? He had little time to ponder the matter. In Mikhailovs office the next day he met Lyudmila Pavlichenko, whom he had seen before at the sniper school in Veshnyaki, and a tall young man, Nikolai Krasavchenko. They were taken to see Georgiy Alexandrov, director of the Propaganda Department of the Soviet Communist Partys Central Committee, who explained to them the great importance of their trip, and were then immediately kitted out for their journey. Within a few hours, uniforms for Vladimir and Lyudmila had been made to measure at the store that was usually reserved for Soviet generals, on to which their lieutenants insignia of rank were sewn. They were given dapper civilian clothes, underwear, shoes and coats of a quality they could never have dreamed of before. They were supplied with delicacies to surprise the capitalists with, and a substantial amount of currency so they would not have to borrow money from anyone.

Soon they were flying a long, complicated route with numerous landings in order to bypass German-occupied countries. They flew via Tehran, where they were struck by the dazzling shop windows in the wealthy centre of the city and the multitudes of extremely persistent beggars; and through Cairo, where there were more beggars, but also the pyramids and a shop selling watches, where Pchelintsev acquired a Swiss chronometer, a piece of equipment essential for any sniper. In Cairo, the members of the delegation saw ingenious white cupboards at the Allied airbase, which turned out to be refrigerators. These were quite unknown in the U.S.S.R. At a reception in Lagos, at the time the capital of Nigeria, the representatives of the U.S.S.R. decided the black waiters must be wearing white gloves to serve the guests in order to prevent them from being disgusted by their skin colour. In Accra, the capital of the Gold Coast, at a reception given by the British governor, Vladimir tasted a strange fruit that filled his mouth with a disgusting, soapy taste and made him feel sick. It was out of the question to spit it out, so he just had to swallow it. That was his first encounter with a grapefruit. Vladimir liked a tricky fruit the size of a small melon and with peel like the skin of a crocodile, with thorns and sharp needles, its flavour was a cross between an orange and a strawberry He would learn later that it was a pineapple.

Then a leap across the ocean and a short stop (We could hardly believe it) in Brazil, where the plane was fumigated against the plague and they had some glass tubes stuck in their mouths: thermometers, which they were also seeing for the first time. They flew along the coast Brazil, French Guiana, Devils Island, Suriname, Venezuela and landed on the island of Trinidad. They could not tear themselves away from looking at the Caribbean through the portholes: The colour of the water was amazing. On the fourteenth day of their journey they reached Washington. They were taken straight to the White House where, it was announced, as a special honour, the Soviet delegation would stay overnight.

The president was away, but they were looked after by Eleanor Roosevelt personally, who made a big impression. Upright, tall and elegant, with a rather coarse face heavily marked by wrinkles, she was an intelligent, erudite woman whose influence in society did not depend on her position as First Lady.

The next morning the delegation found a huge crowd of journalists and photographers waiting for them at the Soviet Embassy, and were blinded by flashbulbs. Indeed, flashbulbs attended them everywhere they went on the tour, and it was not long before they were being bombarded by the assembled journalists initial questions. The public wanted to know everything about the Soviet delegation, especially the snipers, and particularly Lyudmila. To Western ears, the word sniper had unpleasant overtones: a sniper was a marksman who killed stealthily rather than in a fair fight. Now America had an opportunity to make the acquaintance of an attractive young woman who had ambushed and murdered over 300 people.

On 29 August 1942, many newspapers reprinted a brief report to the effect that,

Twenty-six-year-old Lieutenant Lyudmila Pavlichenko, a bewitching warrior princess who has the highest individual score among the best snipers of the Red Army, yesterday did two things she could never have imagined when, a few weeks ago, during the defence of Sevastopol, she shot her 309th fascist.

1) She arrived in Washington, becoming the first Amazon of the Red Army to visit the capital of the United States.

2) She spent the night at the White House as a guest of President Roosevelt and Americas First Lady.

Miss Pavlichenko has been awarded the Order of Lenin and wounded on four occasions.25

She really did not look like a killer. It fell to Pavlichenko and Pchelintsev to blow away quite a few stereotypes. Here were Red Army officers, communists, snipers with tallies of hundreds of victims, appearing before the American public as perfectly normal, likeable young people. The enigmatic girl sniper was, naturally, the centre of attention.

As Pchelintsev recalls, the trickiest, and sometimes downright impertinent, questions were directed at Pavlichenko. There were no bounds to the journalistic fraternitys curiosity. Do girls wear lipstick at the front line and what colour do they prefer? Which brand of cigarettes do they smoke? Will Miss Pavlichenko agree to have her portrait on cigarette packs? The company is prepared to pay a million dollars! What underwear does Lady Pavlichenko prefer and what colour does she like?26

Pavlichenko was bashful at first, but soon overcame her shyness and thereafter was never short of a pithy reply. Once she had learned how to handle impudent questions, she stopped being defensive and went on the attack. A number of brief video clips of the trip have survived,27 and it is enough to watch them for a couple of minutes to see the kind of girl she was, with a delicate face and expressive eyes, lively, sharp-tongued, and with a distinctive south Russian accent. I have to say honestly that she was quite good with people. Guests and hosts were very taken by her smile and unaffectedness. Nikolai and I were no match for her, Pchelintsev recalled.28

Nevertheless, it was hard work. Every step of the way there was incessant attention from the press: flashbulbs, questions, curiosity about every detail. The newspapers reported that she had had to take a break from giving speeches to have a gold front tooth replaced by a white one while that was being done she could not speak on the radio because of a whistling sound she made.29 They wrote about her stocky figure, her high Russian Army boots, and her demure olive-green uniform. The press opined that it did not fit her very well. They reported, to the indignation of the Soviet embassy, that her skirt was the wrong length and that, were it shorter, Pavlichenkos figure would look better. They commented that the Soviet sniper was not very tall, that she was rather solid, even plump. Pchelintsev himself remarks in his memoir that the beer, of which they were drinking a lot because of the heat, caused her problems: Our Lyuda began putting on weight.

Who knows, perhaps the Soviet diplomats, when they saw Pavlichenko in real life or in newspaper photos, may have been anxious that the capricious Western public might start to doubt whether this stout young woman could really crawl for hours on her belly, and sometimes go for several days without food some of her duels with German snipers, she told people, could last a day or more.

However, enthusiasm for the girl sniper far outweighed any criticism or ridicule. Young Russians like her were currently seen to be saving the world from fascism, so journalists wrote about her enchanting smile, her eyes shining like cold stars in her lovely face, and quoted the bold, witty answers she gave to their tricksy questions.

Lyudmila was never short of an answer, Pchelintsev noted enviously. Her education in the history faculty stood her in good stead. She answered directly and vividly, and people remembered her responses. When asked about cosmetics, she retorted, Who would think of powdering their nose in a war?30 As for underwear and the length of her skirt, she replied it was of no interest to her how long her skirt was or whether or not she had silk underwear under it. This is a Soviet uniform, and I wear it with pride.31 To the question she was asked in front of a huge audience in Chicago as to why she, a girl, had chosen such a profession, she gave a response which was subsequently to be quoted hundreds, indeed thousands, of times, Gentlemen, I am twenty-five years old and I have already managed to kill 309 of the fascist invaders. Do you not think, gentlemen, that you have now been hiding behind my back for rather too long?32 The crowd froze for a moment, but then exploded in a great roar of approval.

The young people had, of course, found themselves addressing more conservative, even hostile, audiences, for example, on the campus of the University of Pittsburgh.33 Where the audience was working class, however, the Soviet representatives, and especially Lyudmila, were received rapturously. The U.S., Canada, the United Kingdom . . . meetings, rallies, interviews. The tour lasted two months. From newspaper articles, radio and television interviews, and quotations from Pavlichenkos speeches to U.S., then Canadian, and later English, audiences people were able to gain some idea of this heroic womans biography.

By now, anyone interested in her story knew that Pavlichenko was twenty-five (in fact she had just turned twenty-six, because she was born on 12 July 1916), that she had completed her schooling while simultaneously working at a factory as a polisher, enjoyed gliding and shooting under the auspices of the quasi-military Osoaviakhim sports association, and had volunteered for the front at the outbreak of war, despite having just one more year of her history course at Kiev University to complete.

She opened her tally as a sniper in August 1941, before twice suffering concussion as well as a minor injury. Despite that, Pavlichenko managed to raise her tally to 187.

After the fall of Odessa, the Independent Maritime Army, of which she was a member, was sent to reinforce the Crimea, and Lyudmila Pavlichenko spent eight months defending Sevastopol. This was where the major events in her career as a sniper occurred. Together with her partner, she destroyed an enemy observation point, trained novice snipers, and regularly fought duels with German snipers. Pavlichenko accounted for thirty-six of them. During one of these duels she lay in the same position for twenty-four hours, stalking a cautious enemy. When, at dawn on the second day, she finally managed to spot and shoot him, Pavlichenko took from the corpse not only his rifle but also his snipers logbook, which revealed that he had begun his career as a sniper at Dunkirk and that, by the time he met his match in a Russian girl, he had despatched 500 of his opponents soldiers and officers.

At Sevastopol Lyudmila was again wounded and concussed. In all she had three wounds and four cases of concussion. She was evacuated by submarine to Novorossiysk, where she was hospitalised. Upon her discharge, the military command decided Lyudmila Pavlichenkos life was too valuable to risk, and she was transferred to a sniper school to train others.

Lyudmila Pavlichenko told enthralled Western audiences that the Germans knew of her existence and feared her. They even invited her by loudspeaker to go over to their side, promising to make her an officer and give her chocolates and cakes.34 She described having to lie motionless in one place for 1520 hours (even in winter). She described how four marksmen were sent specially to assassinate her, and how she managed to despatch them all. She brought their identification documents and four assault rifles back to Soviet troop positions. She described how the Germans had threatened they would cut her into 309 pieces, one for every enemy soldier she had shot, when they caught her.35

In America the delegation was a sensation. Paul Robeson sang for them, Woody Guthrie wrote a song about Lyudmila Pavlichenko, and she recalled how the great Charlie Chaplin, in front of everybody, carefully sat me down on a sofa and began kissing my fingers. Its just incredible, he kept saying, that this little hand has killed Nazis, has scythed them down by the hundred, without missing, at close range.36

In Britain, where a year and a half previously nothing of the sort would have been imaginable, the Soviet delegation, and particularly Lyudmila, found a no less rapturous welcome waiting.

On 6 November 1942 the Derby Evening Telegraph described Lyudmila Pavlichenko inspecting a company of the Home Guard in London. Wearing the uniform of a Red Army sniper, Lieutenant Lyudmila Pavlichenko today jumped out of a car in front of the Ministry of Information. Without more ado, she inspected a Home Guard company drawn up in her honour . . . She marched down the line in her high Russian boots, periodically stopping to take someones rifle, draw back the bolt and look down the barrel. When photographers asked her to aim it, she spun round towards them and took aim at the leading photographer.

Girl Sniper Receives Three Gifts from Brits, reported the New York Times on 23 November, describing another rapturous reception accorded the heroine by an audience of 2,000 women.37 A girl from an arms factory presented her with a revolver to use against the enemy. An Oxford student gave her history books she would find useful in her studies after the war, and a housewife gave her a silver teapot as a symbol of life in peacetime. During the meeting, more than £350 was collected for medicine and bandages for Russia. The pupils from a home for disabled children, having no money, donated their collection of rare butterflies.

There were, of course, many people who were concerned about the morality of exalting a sniper, even if the sniper was a young and extremely brave woman. What nobody doubted was the veracity of her story. The times were such that neither in the U.S.S.R. nor in the West did anybody ask awkward questions. Today, however, they are somewhat harder to avoid.38

In its October 1942 issue, New Advance, a Canadian magazine for young people, published an article by Jesse Storey, a delegate to the International Student Assembly. Writing about the Soviet delegation, Storey said,

What a remarkable woman Red Army Lieutenant Lyudmila Pavlichenko is! I learned an interesting fact that helps us to better understand her anti-fascist temper at a breakfast in the White House which Mrs Roosevelt gave for the Canadian delegation. We were in the reception room, chatting casually with Mrs Roosevelt, when she suddenly said she had received the Soviet delegation there the day before. One of the questions Mrs Roosevelt asked Lyudmila was, how could she, a woman, bring herself to shoot at Germans after seeing their faces in her sights? American women find that difficult to understand! Lieutenant Pavlichenko replied tersely, I have seen with my own eyes my husband and child killed. I was next to them.

This story is quoted here from Pchelintsevs memoirs.39 Did he know that was untrue? Pavlichenko told another Western reporter after the war that she had recently had a son. That too is far from the truth. In 1946, Pavlichenkos son, Rostislav, was fourteen years old. Lyudmila gave birth to the boy at the age of fifteen, and her marriage to a student called Alexey Pavlichenko, who was older than her, immediately collapsed. As a result of the scandal the family had to move from the town of Belaya Tserkov to Kiev. The boy was raised by his grandmother, allowing Lyudmila to work, study and go off to fight. Pavlichenkos biographers studiously avoid all mention of Rostislav, who lived an unhappy life in the shadow of his famous mother. He does not fit into the edifying story of the girl sniper.40 Even the guidebook to the Novodevichiy Cemetery, where Rostislav Pavlichenko is buried next to his mother, omits any mention of how they were related.41

Russians are superstitious. They believe, for instance, that if you lie that are ill, you will assuredly fall sick. As for the death of ones child, no one would dream of lying about that. The Canadian journalist may have made a mistake, or Pchelintsev may have misunderstood him, but other statements and stories of Lyudmila Pavlichenko also give rise to serious doubts.

What are we to make of the tale she told of how she regarded the 300th German she had killed as a birthday present to herself? Lyudmila Pavlichenkos birthday was 12 July, but Sevastopol had already been captured by the Germans at the end of June, and even the main Soviet news agency, the Informbyuro admitted the citys fall in its bulletin on 3 July. According to Soviet sources, Pavlichenko was evacuated with serious injuries, but no wounded soldiers were evacuated from Sevastopol after mid-June. Pavlichenko herself in her memoirs, published for some reason only in 2015, mentions that she was evacuated on 22 June 1945.42 Even if she and her biographers have got the date of her injury and evacuation wrong and she did indeed give herself a birthday present of her 300th enemy soldier on 12 July, when did she find the time to kill another nine? If we are to believe Pavlichenkos account, German propagandists shouted through a loudspeaker that they would cut her into 309 pieces (Which meant they knew my tally! she claimed). She must logically have remained at the front long enough after her birthday for the Germans to have discovered her tally.43 But where was this all taking place if Sevastopol had long since fallen?

Celebrity came to Lyudmila Pavlichenko suddenly, and only after her personal tally had supposedly reached nearly 200 enemy soldiers killed. It has to be said that the story, as related in the very first publication about Pavlichenko in the national Soviet press, is odd. The article was in the form of a letter from a certain Sergeant Grigorov, who had suddenly decided to tell the country about the exploits of the woman who had achieved the highest personal tally of all Soviet snipers. Why had no reporter been sent out earlier? In her memoirs, Pavlichenko says that at that time no one really knew what snipers did on the front line, and that in any case they were not very cheerful and talkative people, unlike, for example, machine-gunners. Nina Onilova, a machine-gunner in the same regiment, had a lot written about her.44

In his letter, Sergeant Grigorov described the following episode: Lyudmila spotted a German observer hiding in some bushes and started to stalk him. He was an experienced soldier and it was difficult to get him in her sights. She waited. First, the German showed her a helmet on a stick, but the keen-eyed Young Communist League member did not fall for that. Next, a domestic cat suddenly walked along the path. This was unusual. An inexperienced marksman might have been distracted, started staring at the cat, and enabled the observer in the meantime to do his work. Needless to say, the Young Communist League member did not fall for the trick with the cat either. But the story was not yet over. There next appeared a funny dog that stood up on its hind legs. Not even that distracted the sniper. (This appears to be the only known instance of cats and dogs being used in this way against a sniper.) Finally, straight out of the ground there rose a cunningly made effigy of a fascist soldier in full uniform and with a rifle. That was informative: the effigy could not have popped up by itself, it could only have been raised by a human being. That told her there was a German here, and that meant he would shortly become visible. Finally there was the glint of binoculars and Pavlichenko smoothly pulled the trigger. The Germans nose pecked forward and he rolled downhill.45

Oleg Kaminsky, a Russian historian, undertook the first serious research into the veracity of the tales of the supersniper. He found some oddities in the stories of her earliest days at the front. Pavlichenkos account of the fighting in Odessa describes a completely different district from the one in which, according to the documents, her regiment was fighting. Lyudmila Pavlichenko claims that General Ivan Petrov personally ordered her to select and lead a platoon of snipers.46 In 1941 and 1942, however, the Red Army did not yet have any sniper platoons. Moreover, by the time Pavlichenkos front-line career was over she held the rank only of sergeant major, which would have precluded commanding anything larger than a squad. Pavlichenko also told the tale of how the Germans once sent in a whole platoon of their snipers to take on her platoon, and how a duel ensued between the Soviet and German snipers.47 This is implausible: the Germans at that time also had only lone snipers, and not many of those; there could be no question of whole platoons of them.

Determined to solve the riddle of Lyudmila Pavlichenko, Kaminsky turned to the awards list of her unit and made a surprising discovery. Pavlichenko, who had supposedly shot 187 fascists, had not even been decorated for the fighting at Odessa. How was that possible, given that, in order to raise morale, not only soldiers who had distinguished themselves in some way, but also cooks, clerks, and artists in front-line brigades were decorated? Snipers were awarded a medal for ten enemy soldiers killed or wounded, and an Order of the Red Star for twenty. Raising your tally to seventy-five was enough to secure you the title of Hero of the Soviet Union. Why did Pavlichenko get nothing? During the defence of Sevastopol, she was said to have raised her total to 260 in just six months. For this, she was finally only awarded a medal For Merit in Battle, and her first Order of Lenin only much later when, after the fall of Sevastopol, she was in hospital. In her memoirs Pavlichenko mentions the award to Nina Onilova and says she was not envious, because all that really mattered was that the enemy soldiers she and Nina had killed would never fight again. As regards Vladimir Pchelintsev, who was fighting on a different front but at the same time as Pavlichenko and whose tally was only half her own, Pavlichenko explains his success (rank of senior lieutenant and the star of a Hero of the Soviet Union) as being due to the fact that he was a man and, unlike her, was good at staying on the right side of the authorities.

Why did this woman, about whom, until the fall of Sevastopol, nobody knew anything, become famous so precipitately? Was it because the top brass, who until then had overlooked her spectacular successes in battle, suddenly came to their senses? A more likely explanation is that the defence of Sevastopol, during which there were many instances of genuinely outstanding heroism, had ended in disaster. The Independent Maritime Army, which Lyudmila Pavlichenko never mentioned in her interviews, ceased to exist after Sevastopol: it had been annihilated. Forced back by the Germans to the sea, people resisted desperately, expecting help to arrive at any moment and that they would be evacuated by ship. None came. A handful of people managed to fight their way through to the mountains. More than 100,000 were wounded, died, or were taken prisoner. That disaster, just one of many in the first year of the war, further undermined morale in the army and the Soviet population. Heroic role models were needed, including women, because at just this moment the U.S.S.R.s leaders, recognising the impossibility of fully replacing the huge losses incurred, adopted a policy of mass conscription of women into the army.48 In order to give the name of Pavlichenko more substance and lustre, she was finally, on 16 July 1942, awarded, not the gold star of a Hero of the Soviet Union, which was the highest Soviet decoration, but the second highest the Order of Lenin. She became a Hero of the Soviet Union only after the tour of the United States and Great Britain.

新用户注册返回首页
首页上一页下一页尾页页次1/1 转到第页