A Thousand Sisters

by Elizabeth Wein

  Finally, in 1988, the report filed with the chief directorate of personnel on September 16, 1943, was officially changed to say that Lilya Litvyak had been “killed in action.”

  On May 5, 1990, nearly fifty years after Lilya’s disappearance, Soviet Chairman Mikhail Gorbachev signed a decree honoring her as a Hero of the Soviet Union.

  The award was presented to Lilya’s brother, Yuri, who’d been waiting so long for his charismatic older sister’s name, and his own, to be cleared.

  Now it was official: the woman who was born on Aviation Day, born to be in the air, had died in the air.

  In the harsh political winds of conflict that stormed across the globe in World War II, the USSR suffered the loss of more lives than the rest of the world combined. Cautious estimates begin at eighteen million casualties, but the number may even be as high as forty-five million. That’s roughly equivalent to today’s total population of New England, New York, and New Jersey all put together. About four million of those deaths were caused by starvation.

  Just as it’s difficult to count the Motherland’s complete death toll, it’s difficult to verify exactly how many Soviet airwomen were killed during the Great Patriotic War. The statistics vary wildly, from thirty to three hundred. Yevgeniya Zhigulenko, a 46th Guards pilot, said that one-third of her regiment was killed—did she mean just pilots? Or pilots, navigators, and ground crew? Reina Pennington, counting staff and ground crew as well as pilots and navigators (both male and female), estimates that twenty-nine women of the 46th Guards were killed, twenty-eight women of the 125th Guards, and ten of the 586th Regiment, including those sent to other regiments in 1942.

  Whatever the final numbers may be, they are just numbers. Who can measure the loss to the world of a person as complex and energetic as Zhenya Rudneva at the age of twenty-two? Or as driven and charismatic as twenty-one-year-old Lilya Litvyak? Both were natural leaders, earning the respect of their companions and their superiors. Both died as followers, doing the work they were commanded to do. Neither had the chance at achievement that she deserved. They were caught in a wind too strong for them.

  “Life is life.” It isn’t always fair.

  Marina Raskova died young too, and probably through her own error. But throughout her life, she didn’t just work with the wind: in a small way, she learned how to change it.

  The women who survived their service in Raskova’s regiments would eventually begin to change the wind themselves.

  38

  “Do Not Talk about the Services You Have Rendered”

  Article 122 of the 1936 Constitution of the Soviet Union guaranteed that “Women in the USSR are accorded equal rights with men in all spheres of economic, state, cultural, social and political life.”

  The women who joined Marina Raskova’s regiments knew this. The regimental engineer of the 46th Guards, Klavdiya Ilushina, insisted that they had “absolute equal opportunity with men.” But the 1936 Constitution of the Soviet Union “guaranteed” a multitude of rights it didn’t always deliver on, and a line on paper didn’t suddenly make everyone’s ideas shift from their old tracks.

  A girl growing up in the USSR in the 1920s and 1930s could learn to fly, but she wasn’t always encouraged to, and she wasn’t expected to make a military career out of aviation. The women who did were persistent and exceptional. Soviet women “were frustrated by contradictory messages: become aviators, but not in the highest levels of the military,” said Adrienne Marie Harris in her PhD thesis about women soldiers in the Soviet Union. Posters printed in the 1930s, encouraging young people to fly, were directed at both boys and girls. But after the war, posters from the 1950s showed only boys dreaming of flight.

  The Soviet Union’s head of state and a close colleague of Stalin’s, Chairman Mikhail Kalinin, gave a speech in July 1945 addressed to the “Glorious Daughters of the Soviet People.” These “glorious daughters” were a group of women who’d recently fought in the Red Army and Navy. It was only a few months after the end of the war, and Kalinin started out by congratulating them on their victory. Then he said, “In this unusual war, women not only supported the army by their work in the rear, but also fought with arms in hand.”

  He was drawing attention to the fact that the USSR was the only nation in World War II whose women engaged in combat—who were expected to kill just the way men killed as soldiers.

  Kalinin pointed out right away that this isn’t normal. It was a view generally shared by the women soldiers themselves. He then acknowledged that they were mostly now between twenty and twenty-three years old, that they’d left their families or schools as unfinished teens when the war began, and that they had no careers nor households of their own to return to. He told them that their wartime experiences would make them stronger and wiser, and that they could now apply these virtues to their civilian lives; and he promised that the Komsomol would help them find work—which it did.

  But, Kalinin advised the young female veterans, “Do not give yourself airs in your future practical work. Do not talk about the services you have rendered, let others do it for you. That will be better.”

  When the enlisted women were demobilized, they had to sign a pledge promising they’d do just that—not say anything about what they’d done.

  Stalin’s government hadn’t ever encouraged outspokenness among its citizens.

  Now that the war was over, Stalin himself refused to allow women to continue in military service in the air force. His opinion was that women were “physiologically” unsuited for warfare. The Red Army closed down its women’s units, and women were discouraged from continuing or pursuing careers in the military.

  Many women who had flown during the war wanted to continue working in civil aviation but found that their years of combat had so shattered them in body and mind that they couldn’t pass the required physical exam.

  If anyone objected, they didn’t say so—or didn’t dare to say so.

  And it doesn’t look as though many people did object. The general Soviet sentiment, often shared by the women soldiers themselves, was that although women had done their part to drive out the invading enemy, their real role was to nurture, not to kill.

  Women of the Soviet Union who were involved in the Great Patriotic War felt that they had been defending the Motherland—that fighting a war was an unnatural thing for a woman to do, but that defending her home for her children made complete and total sense. And if fighting a war is what she had to do to save her home and her children, then she’d do all it took to make that happen—including dropping bombs from an airplane or shooting other pilots out of the sky.

  “Life is life,” said Ludmila Popova, a navigator in the 125th Guards. “War is not a normal thing for any country, for any state, for any man, and especially for a woman.”

  Antonina Bondareva, the young widowed pilot in the 125th Guards who’d left her toddler with her husband’s family, had to struggle after the war to get her sister-in-law to give back her now seven-year-old daughter.

  “You can’t have a daughter, since you abandoned her when she was little and went to war,” the sister-in-law argued. She called Antonina cruel and said she had “no woman’s soul.”

  But Antonina had suffered too, of course she’d suffered! She’d dreamed of her little girl, sometimes crying because she missed her so much. “Many of us left our children at home, I wasn’t the only one,” she argued. “We stayed women.”

  “The very nature of a woman rejects the idea of fighting,” said Alexandra Akimova, a squadron navigator with the 46th Guards. “A woman is born to give birth to children, to nurture. Flying combat missions is against our nature; only the tragedy of our country made us join the army, to help our country, to help our people.”

  The chief of staff for the 586th, Alexandra Makunina, felt no different. “I myself could not have acted in any other way. . . . The very notion, the very sense of defending the Motherland, was the duty of all the men and all the women too.”

  Masha Dol
ina, the 125th Guards Bomber Aviation Regiment pilot who’d more than once landed her flaming Pe-2 and saved her crew, was awarded the nation’s highest honor, becoming a Hero of the Soviet Union on August 18, 1945.

  But even she insisted, “I want you to underline in red that it was the cherished dream of the girls to liberate the land, but none of us wanted to fight—to kill.”

  Most of the heroic women who fought in and survived the Great Patriotic War did exactly what Kalinin told them: they returned to civilian life after the war and went unrecognized for what they’d done.

  46th Guards navigator Polina Gelman did have a daughter. She kept the promise she’d made and named her Galya.

  Larisa Rozanova married and worked as an engineer; Natasha Meklin worked as a translator. Galya Dzhunkovskaya married her regimental commander, Valentin Markov; Yevdokia Bershanskaya married Andrey Molotov, the commander of a men’s regiment who’d flown close to the 46th Guards during the war.

  And they did remain silent about their services for a decade or so. But as they grew older, the political climate of the USSR changed. With the onset of the Cold War, Stalin’s death in 1953, advances in space exploration, and the modern conveniences of the second half of the twentieth century, female veterans of World War II began to take pride in what they’d done.

  They wanted to mark their service, and they wanted it to be remembered. In particular, women who’d been aviators, and women who’d worked as ground crew for Marina Raskova’s regiments, began to preserve their history and to tell their own stories.

  In a bittersweet twist, the first to do so was the inspirational astronomer and poet Zhenya Rudneva, of the 46th Guards. She had died in flames in 1944, but she’d written so much in her short life that in 1955 a collection of her letters and diaries was published under the title For as Long as My Heart Is Beating. After that, over thirty more memoirs were published by female aviators between 1957 and 1989.

  Many of those who weren’t natural writers gave interviews instead, and allowed their memories to be collected and published. The first significant collection was called In the Sky above the Front and was put together in 1962 by Marina Raskova’s chief of staff from the 122nd Air Group, Militsa Kazarinova—the sister of Tamara Kazarinova, the first commander of the 586th. These memoirs were later added to and edited by other veterans. Raisa Aronova, of the 46th Guards, wrote an autobiographical book called Night Witches, published in 1980; in 1981, Yevgeniya Zhigulenko, who’d become a filmmaker, produced and directed a full-length feature film about the 46th Guards. “Night Witches” in the Sky paints a vivid and faithful portrait of the 46th Guards’ experiences at the height of the war—from flaming death in the air to bunches of wildflowers in the cockpit.

  But the young women who played the roles of the flight crew and ground crew of the 46th Guards were actresses, not pilots. In the years leading into World War II, and during the war, it was much more common for women to be involved in aviation than it is even now.

  By 1941, nearly one-third of all Soviet pilots were female. But after the war, with Soviet women officially deemed “physiologically unsuitable for becoming military or even civilian pilots,” the numbers dropped away drastically.

  It’s not as obvious why the numbers dropped throughout the rest of the world. Today, about 12 percent of all student pilots in the United States are women. Only 5 percent of commercial pilots worldwide are women.

  The women who flew for the Women Airforce Service Pilots (WASP) in the United States weren’t forced to sign a statement swearing they wouldn’t talk about their experiences. But in a sense, their fate was even more humiliating. Unbelievable as this may sound, after the Allied invasion of Normandy in June 1944—a whole year before the war ended—the American government decided that the women pilots flying for the WASP had successfully completed their work and were no longer needed. No more pilots were to go through the WASP training program, and the organization was officially disbanded on December 20, 1944.

  Because they’d never been connected to the military, the women who’d flown with the WASP got no pension or benefits of any kind. They weren’t even given national recognition for their wartime service until 1977.

  The British ATA continued ferrying aircraft until the spring of 1946, though they officially disbanded in November 1945. Like the WASP, they didn’t receive any real recognition for their service, but at least this can’t be blamed on gender discrimination—the men who flew for them didn’t get any recognition either.

  As for the British women, now that the war was over, the situation in the air was the same as it was in the United States and the Soviet Union. There were many more experienced pilots than there was air work to be done. Though a few ATA women managed to make careers in aviation, British flying jobs went almost exclusively to men. British Airways, the United Kingdom’s national commercial passenger airline, didn’t hire its first female pilot, Lynn Barton, until 1987. To put that in perspective—World War II ended eleven years before the first female pilot for British Airways was born.

  When World War II was finally over, with women being told to return to their homes and an overabundance of male pilots to take up the civil aviation jobs available, few of the airwomen from Marina Raskova’s regiments had the opportunity to continue careers in aviation.

  There were exceptions. Mariya Akilina, from the 46th Guards, flew in the medical services and as a crop duster in civil aviation for twenty years after the war; Nadya Popova and Klava Fomicheva worked as flight instructors. Alexandra Krivonogova, from the 125th Guards, flew passenger planes for twenty-five years and then became an air traffic controller.

  Several pilots from the 586th also became air traffic controllers. Galina Burdina flew as a civilian pilot for Aeroflot for fifteen years before joining air traffic control; her friend Tamara Pamyatnykh became an air traffic controller at a civilian airport.

  The 125th Guards weren’t officially disbanded until February 1947, nearly two years after the war ended. Though there was no longer any female air force unit for them to be part of, pilot Antonina Bondareva and two other women from the 125th continued to serve in a male regiment. But Antonina didn’t make a career of flying—she quit in 1950.

  Many years later, she said, “I often have dreams about aircraft—of flying. It is my favorite dream.”

  In today’s world, financial constraints, gender bias, and lack of state support now make it almost impossible for Russian women to learn to fly. In Russia in 1998, there were no women flying in either military or commercial aviation. It took Svetlana Protasova eleven years of persistent struggle to become the first (and only) woman to pilot a MiG-29 for the Russian Air Force in 1999; by 2004 she was struggling to find opportunity to fly. Few Russian women who became pilots in the Soviet Union’s state-sponsored clubs in the 1980s and early 1990s can afford to fly as private citizens now that the Soviet Union no longer exists. Without state sponsorship, aviation is available only to the wealthy.

  “Among pilots, there are no gender stereotypes,” said Anastasia Dagaeva in 2017, a Russian student pilot in civil aviation who writes for Forbes Russia. “But generally, aviation is still considered to be a man’s world. If a woman tries to do it, people think it’s strange, they think there’s something wrong with her, or with the industry.”

  The good news is that in October 2017, the Russian Air Force accepted sixteen women into pilot training for the first time since World War II.

  The wind is always changing.

  “I have more than one hundred sisters,” vowed Zoya Malkova, a mechanic for the 586th Fighter Aviation Regiment. “We regularly meet twice a year in front of the Bolshoi Theater on the second of May and the eighth of November.”

  Under Soviet rule, there was no formal annual commemoration for women veterans of the Great Patriotic War. So they designed their own.

  The members of Marina Raskova’s regiments would meet—and a dwindling few, now in their nineties, still do—in front of the Bolshoi Theater in Mosco
w, in May and in November. With no uniforms, they would dress formally in their finest and most feminine clothes, wearing makeup, hats, scarves, and jewelry. They would hold flowers. But also, with fierce and well-earned pride, they would display their medals.

  VETERANS OF THE 46TH GUARDS ON THEIR REUNION DAY: FROM LEFT, RAISA ARONOVA, NATASHA MEKLIN, YEVGENIYA ZHIGULENKO, IRINA SEBROVA, AND DINA NIKULINA

  Later, as they ate and drank together, and sang regimental songs, their reunion would also become a memorial service to their dead: an act of remembrance.

  Anna Kirilina, an armament mechanic for the 125th Guards, sums up the huge depth of emotion that the war created for Raskova’s regiments.

  “The war made us not friends but relatives,” she said. “It made us sisters—dear, dear creatures to each other. On the day of our reunion we say, I go to meet my sisters.”

  In every close-knit family group, there’s always someone who comes up with exciting projects and encourages her siblings to leap into action. There wouldn’t have been any women’s aviation organizations during World War II if not for the driving forces of individual people. Marina Raskova led the way for the three women’s flight regiments of the USSR. Jackie Cochran and Nancy Harkness Love built the units that merged to form the WASP. Pauline Gower fought to allow women to be admitted to the ATA. Each of these women, on her own, gauged the wind of her nation and used it to help her sister pilots get off the ground.

  The winds of war, and of change, come and go. But no one should ever underestimate the ability of one single person, man or woman, to change the world.

  The world still needs change. Yesterday’s Marina Raskova was never as alone in the sky as today’s Svetlana Protasova. But people like Marina show the rising generations that it is possible to make a difference—and that it is worth it.