A Thousand Sisters: Part II

The Red Army correspondent Vasily Grossman’s notes give a vivid snapshot of a Belorussian city under attack: “A cow, howling bombs, fire, women… The strong smell of perfume—from a pharmacy hit in the bombardment—blocked out the stench of burning, just for a moment.”

As the Red Army mobilized its soldiers to fight for the USSR, civilians had to do all the defensive work they could.

There weren’t any air raid shelters in Moscow; when the Luftwaffe planes got close enough to bomb the capital, women and children would have to hide in dugouts that they’d built themselves, covered with dirt and wooden boards. People in Leningrad also worked frantically to build makeshift defenses.

Most young Soviet women found themselves struggling against the inconsistency of the Communist Party’s approach to gender equality.

They understood how dogged patience and persistence could pay off.

Marina Raskova was also persistently looking for war work.

Nina Ivakina, who became the Komsomol organizer for the 586th Fighter Aviation Regiment, told a journalist in 1975 that Marina took the bull by the horns and marched into the Defense Ministry armed with a briefcase full of the letters all those pilots were sending her.

The hour has come for harsh retribution!

Museum staff were frantically packing up valuable artworks to remove them from harm’s way—even Vladimir Lenin’s embalmed body was evacuated to the distant stretches of Siberia to keep it safe, leaving on a special refrigerated train reinforced with shock absorbers.

The women from Moscow who joined Marina’s group were all sent to an assembly point where they were fed and assigned to barracks in the old Petrovsky Palace.

She wasn’t pleased when she found that the young women she’d assigned as sentries had made a cozy bunker for themselves in a pile of mattresses!

“Is this some kind of a boudoir? Take the bed away. Exchange it for two ordinary cots. My chief of staff and I will share this room. Take the carpet and the flowers away, too. After all, the girls don’t have them either!”

At first, headstrong, talented Lilya Litvyak downright refused to get her hair cut. When all the other recruits had had their long hair shorn off, the air group’s Communist Party secretary, Klavdiya Terekhova, anxiously had to report Lilya’s disobedience to Marina Raskova.

Lilya did, but that wasn’t the end of her insurrection, or of her battle to maintain her femininity.

Marina gave these assignments to women who’d been to technical college or other higher education, such as Polina Gelman, the Moscow University history student who’d been digging trenches and putting out fires all summer, and Yevgeniya Zhigulenko, the aspiring actress who’d badgered the air force officer with telephone calls.

Reveille was at 6 a.m., and then we were marched off to breakfast; the trip to the canteen and back was utilized for drill training.

The Red Army had held the invasion back from the Soviet capital, but it was the wretched Russian winter that really turned the tables. On December 6, Soviet soldiers began to push the frozen and exhausted German troops away from the city.

By the time you added in navigators, gunners, mechanics, armorers, communications technicians, Komsomol organizers, and cooks, a full regiment was likely to have at least 250 people in it—all living together, and often dying together, in improvised dugout shelters or abandoned bunkhouses or hosted in local homes.

Hitler was long since fed up with the Americans undermining his battle against the Allied nations while claiming to be neutral, and on December 11, 1941, Germany declared war on the United States, which declared war right back.

While the United States was still reeling from the surprise attack on Pearl Harbor, on December 9, 1941, under an order of Stalin, the first of Marina Raskova’s aviation regiments was created.

It is cold. The wind penetrates to the bone marrow, and hands freeze to the metal.

At the end of the day’s training and briefings, Marina would suggest, “Let’s sing!” Years later, when war veterans who’d been under her command gathered together, they’d inevitably end up singing a favorite of Marina’s—“The Dugout”...

Irina Favorskaya was a student at the Moscow Institute of Geology when the war started, and like many other young women her age, she’d spent the summer of 1941 digging fortification trenches.

“We had to fix instruments on the aircraft with our bare hands, our skin stuck to the metal, and our hands bled,” Irina said. “I wrote to my mother saying that it was unbearable to work with bare hands, and she sent a parcel...with a pair of pink silk ladies’ gloves! I wore them, and all the girls laughed and made fun of me.”

When you look at the faces in the photographs of Marina Raskova’s regiments, the first impression is that most of these young women share a wholesome, rosy-cheeked appeal—their grins are brave and eager as they ham it up for the camera, like the resourceful heroines of Russian folktales.

When you look at the faces in the photographs of Marina Raskova’s regiments, the first impression is that most of these young women share a wholesome, rosy-cheeked appeal—their grins are brave and eager as they ham it up for the camera, like the resourceful heroines of Russian folktales.

Most of the women in the 122nd Air Group were from Russia, even though the USSR was made up of fifteen different states sprawled across Europe and Asia, all with unique cultural traditions and even their own separate languages.

No matter how noble the ideal, some people had better jobs or nicer apartments whether or not they had earned them.

All these differences contributed to a distinct class awareness, and even snobbery, in some of the young women who joined Marina Raskova’s regiments.

Zoya Malkova, the aircraft mechanic who described the bone-chilling training routine at Engels, called the students from universities and aviation institutions “elitist”—including herself.

After jumping, when the students touched down on the icy airfield, the wind in their billowing parachutes would take them sliding across the ice—“and only the instructors in the bushes could stop us!” said Valentina.

It took three or four flights before you could pick out the subtle shapes of the land when you were high in the sky in the middle of the night.

They couldn’t see the horizon, so they couldn’t even tell which way was up—without a visible horizon in the air, speed and centrifugal force make your brain believe that the bottom of the plane is always down.

This was a tedious assignment, as they ended up waiting around for days and days with nothing much to do.

Bored and frustrated, Katya Budanova led the others in a constructive project—they scrounged some planks to build themselves a private wooden hut around the hole in the ground they had to use for a toilet, and decorated it with leaves and twigs!

She wasn’t as flashy as Lilya, but she was every bit as confident.

“We are training a great deal now and this fills us with enthusiasm, since it brings us nearer to...[our] goal—to fight at the front. Virtually no one amongst us wants to live in wartime as peacefully as we do now.... All of us are thirsting for battle, especially me.”

But beyond the grubby clay-and-straw houses and the concrete official buildings that surrounded them in Engels, beyond the daily flights and mechanical drills, what was going on in the world?

Back home in the United Kingdom, food, clothes, coal, gas, and electricity were in such short supply they had to be rationed.

Throughout Europe, Hitler was beginning his murderous holocaust of Jewish people and other ethnic groups—he wanted to wipe out the entire population of Poland to clear the land for German citizens.