Likewise, I’ve decided not to include military rank titles throughout the text, in an attempt to keep a complex story as uncluttered as possible. I feel obliged to point this out. The absence of these formal ranks is in no way intended to reduce their importance, and readers should remember that the women of Raskova’s regiments all served as soldiers, not as civilians.
Enough excuses. The gratitude is more important to me. To everyone who made A Thousand Sisters come together: spasibo, as they say in Russia—thank you.
Though I’m the one with my name on the cover of this book and have been given the responsibility for researching and writing it, its true creator is my editor Kristin Rens. It was her idea in the first place. I’m the artisan who willingly joined forces with her to bring it to life. My agent, Ginger Clark—to whom this book is dedicated, I should point out!—was the matchmaker who brought us together. I don’t think any one of us had any inkling of what an enormous undertaking it would turn out to be. Backed by an amazing team at HarperCollins, Kristin has been patient, tolerant, wildly enthusiastic, and focused, guiding this project with a light touch on the control column as I navigated it hither and thither against the wind.
I’m awed by the amount of background reading the whole editorial team had to do just to keep pace with the manuscript. (Shout-out to Kelsey Murphy, Renée Cafiero, and Megan Gendell, among others!) I am so very, very grateful to Kristin and her coworkers for their support and unflagging interest in this project.
There are a number of other people who encouraged and assisted me, none more so than fellow young adult author Amber Lough. A former US Air Force intelligence officer and a veteran of Iraq, Amber wanted to go to Russia in 2016 to research her own project about Russian women in combat—she was writing a novel, Summer of War, about the Women’s Death Battalion and the Russian Revolution (see Chapter 1, “The Early Life and Times of Marina Raskova, Navigator and Pilot”). We cooked up a very sudden plan to become traveling companions, which is how I ended up going to Russia with someone I met on the internet. No lie—Amber and I met In Real Life for the first time in a hotel in Saint Petersburg. We became fast friends and had an amazing and whirlwind couple of weeks knee-deep in snow in temperatures well below freezing, visiting museums and historic sites, meeting people, and discussing literature.
I’m also grateful to Kim Green, who helped translate Anna Timofeyeva-Yegorova’s autobiography Red Sky, Black Death into English, and who encouraged my Russian adventure and introduced me to pilots Irina Bubynina and Inna Frolova. Inna is a board member of the Russian women pilots’ organization Aviatrisa. Like me, both she and Irina are members of the Ninety-Nines, the International Organization of Women Pilots—a wonderful icebreaker we weren’t aware of until we’d already met. Inna is the governor of the Russian Section of the Ninety-Nines. She and Irina were both generous and patient as tour guides, ensuring that Amber and I participated in a moving memorial ceremony in Red Square to commemorate the breakthrough at the battle of Stalingrad in 1943. Irina joined us in a visit to Marina Raskova’s grave in the Kremlin wall. It would be my great pleasure to be able to return their hospitality someday should our paths cross again.
Thanks are also due to Alexander from Angel Tours. He too spent an entire day with us as guide and translator, working in conjunction with retired Russian Air Force officer Colonel Vladimir Ivanovich, who was acting as a docent at the Central Air Force Museum in Monino in the Moscow Oblast. We were the first foreign women touring the museum who weren’t traveling with a male companion, and our visit inspired Alexander to add a segment about women aviators on his future tours.
Reina Pennington’s exhaustive scholarly work on Raskova’s regiments is one of the backbones for my own work. I am honored that she agreed to read and critique A Thousand Sisters in manuscript form. And no doubt the entire staff of HarperCollins is eternally grateful to Anatoly Plyac, the son of Raisa Aronova, a navigator and pilot with the 588th. Anatoly graciously and generously provided many of the photographs reproduced in this book.
I was lucky enough to spend a couple of informal afternoons with Steve Sheinkin during the creation of A Thousand Sisters, and in addition to being wholly encouraging, he was most patient in responding to my naive and endless questions about source notes, photographs, citations, and permissions. And although they may not know it, M. T. Anderson and Candace Fleming have served as inspirations—partly because they’ve both written excellent young adult nonfiction (notably—and respectively—Symphony for the City of the Dead and The Family Romanov), which actually provided me with very relevant background information for A Thousand Sisters, but also because their books are so well organized that they gave me excellent templates for this one.
Of course the people close to me are the ones who had to cope with this project on a daily basis—thanks are due to my aunts Susan Whitaker and Kate Adams for accepting mail for me at US addresses when I couldn’t get books shipped directly to the UK; my husband, Tim Gatland, who supported every step of this endeavor, including my disappearance to Russia for two weeks at short notice; and my children, Mark and Sara, who willingly shared their references as they worked on their own, not unrelated, essays about Shostakovich and the Romanovs.
And finally, I am grateful to William Faulkner. I am grateful to him for writing Battle Cry. I am grateful to him for being a pilot, and for his role in attempting to bring a version of this story to the silver screen. Apparently he considered Battle Cry his war work, his contribution to the war effort; I cannot imagine how frustrated and heartbroken he must have been when he learned it would never be filmed.
But if it had been, maybe we would already know about Raskova’s regiments and there would be no need for this book. If Battle Cry was William Faulkner’s war work, this is mine. It is an honor and a privilege to have been able to write A Thousand Sisters.
Elizabeth Wein
Salisbury, England, May 2018
About the Author
Photo by David Ho
ELIZABETH WEIN is the holder of a private pilot’s license and the owner of about a thousand maps. She is best known for her historical fiction about young women flying in World War II, including the New York Times bestselling Code Name Verity and Rose Under Fire. Elizabeth is also the author of Cobalt Squadron, a middle grade novel set in the Star Wars universe and connected to the 2017 release The Last Jedi, and Black Dove, White Raven, winner of the Children’s Africana Book Award. Elizabeth lives in Scotland and holds both British and American citizenship. Visit her online at www.elizabethwein.com.
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Photo Credits
here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here: from the collection of Anatoly Plyac
here, here, here, here: Sputnik / Alamy Stock Photo
here: ITAR-TASS News Agency / Alamy Stock Photo
here, here: TASS / Getty Images
here: Everett Collection Inc / Alamy Stock Photo
here, here: Komsomol section of the Russian State Archive of Socio-Political History, refs. 7/2/1050/88 and 7/1/511/69
here: ©Topfoto / SCRSS / The Image Works
here, here, here, here, here, here: ©Sputnik / The Image Works
here: Elizabeth Gatland, Central Air Force Museum, Monino
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here: ©SZ Photo / Scherl / The Image Works
here: ©Royal Aeronautical Society / Mary Evans / The Image Works
here, here: Krasnogorsk
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� Mary Evans / Meledin Collection / The Image Works
here: Pictorial Press Ltd / Alamy Stock Photo
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Balzer + Bray is an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers.
A THOUSAND SISTERS: THE HEROIC AIRWOMEN OF THE SOVIET UNION IN WORLD WAR II. Copyright © 2019 by Elizabeth Gatland. Map copyright © 2019 by Leo Nickolls. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.
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Cover art © 2019 by Leo Nickolls Design Ltd
Cover design by Jessie Gang
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Digital Edition JANUARY 2019 ISBN: 9780062453044
Print ISBN: 978-0-06-245301-3
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1819202122PC/LSCH10987654321
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1. “Soviet” is derived from a Russian word for “assembly” or “council.”
2. Komsomol is a shortened form of “Komunistichesky Soyuz Molodyozhi,” the Russian for “Communist League of Youth.” The full name of the organization was the All-Union Leninist Communist League of Youth. The word Osoaviakhim comes from the Russian name for the Society for the Defense, Aviation, and Chemical Industries.
3. “Blind flying” is what early aviators called air navigation using instruments in poor visibility.
4. NKVD stands for Narodnyi Komissariat Vnutrennikh Del in Russian.
5. The Russian for “Great Terror” is “Bolshoi Terror.”
6. The modern town was mostly built by young Komsomol members in 1932 and named in their honor.
7. They flew 5,908 kilometers (3,663 miles) in a straight line and 6,450 kilometers (3,999 miles) in total, in twenty-six hours and twenty-nine minutes.
8. Pravda, or “truth” in English, was the name of the main Soviet newspaper. It’s commonly used as a name for Russian news sources even today. Komsomolskaya Pravda means “Komsomol Truth” (the skaya ending turns a noun into an adjective).
9. “Nazi” is the shortened name for the German Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei (NSDAP), or National Socialist German Workers’ Party.
10. The German-Soviet Nonaggression Pact was also called the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, after the men who signed it.
11. Portyanki foot wraps were still used in the Russian military right up until 2013.
12. Hawaii would not become a state until 1959.
13. All fifteen Soviet states, including Russia, are today individual independent nations.
14. The Polikarpov Po-2 biplane training aircraft was called the Uchebnyy-2 or U-2 until 1943; uchebnyy simply means “training.” To avoid confusion it’s called the Po-2 throughout this book.
15. Stalingrad’s modern name is Volgograd.
16. In the language of aviation in English, there is no feminine form of the word “wingman” yet. Because it’s used in the Soviet pilots’ translated memoirs, it’s being used in this book.
17. Tracer bullets are bullets that are on fire so that they are visible to the person doing the shooting. They are visible in daylight as well as at night.
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