A Thousand Sisters: "Battle Cry: A Prologue"–Part I

And in the fiery skies above Russia, women drop bombs and fly fighter planes in aerial combat against German pilots.

For six weeks in Los Angeles during that turbulent summer, the American writer William Faulkner worked frantically to turn Battle Cry into a screenplay.

On July 28, forty actors spent twelve grueling hours filming scenes in a burning wheat field.

Lilya was an eccentric beauty, a petite blonde who regularly sent her aircraft mechanic to pick up peroxide from a nearby hospital so she could bleach her hair.

Russians at home grew angry and unhappy, resentful of having to pour their lives and resources into this war.

Between 1915 and 1917, at least four Russian women—two of them princesses!—served as reconnaissance pilots (scouts who gathered information).

Women of other countries served in World War I as nurses, ambulance drivers, and communications personnel.

A Provisional Government took the place of imperial rule in Petrograd and granted equality in law to Russian women, giving women the right to vote and to hold office.

In October 1917 the radical Bolshevik Party took advantage of people’s anger over World War I and overthrew the Provisional Government.

“Soviet” is derived from a Russian word for “assembly” or “council.”

Now Stalin and the Communist Party nailed together a haphazard structure for a country that, in principle at least, treated men and women with equal rights.

They were also encouraged not to settle for old-fashioned and “bourgeois” gender roles—“bourgeois” being a catchall term for the upper middle classes of Imperial Russia who’d aspired to wealth and luxury.

Dedicated, absorbed, and conscientious, she was soon promoted and began part-time studies at the Aviation Institute in Leningrad.

Stalin and the Communist Party encouraged ambitious designers, daring pilots, and mechanical experts to create an industry that was exemplary throughout the world.

After the revolution, they’d claimed land and formed small shared farms. The first Five-Year Plan seized this land for the state under a program called “collectivization.” The peasants still had to work on the same land, but instead of growing their own crops, they got paid in wages—they weren't allowed to sell or eat their own produce.

Unlike American officials, who hold that women fliers aren’t suited to arduous air duty, the Soviet gives women equality in aviation.

This horrific nationwide cleanup, which went on for two years, is now known as the “Great Terror” or the “Great Purge.” Hundreds of thousands of people—no one will ever be sure how many—were arrested, tortured, and forced to make confessions. Then they were thrown into jail, executed, or sent to prison camps in the frozen wastes of Siberia.

Anna, looking back on this terrifying time in her school years, commented bitterly that “the vigilant hawks of the Stalin regime...converted the whole great country into a big concentration camp of life-term inmates.”

But in October 1937, Andrey Tupolev and another leading aircraft designer, Vladimir Petlyakov, were arrested by the NKVD on typically flimsy charges of treason and sabotage.

Two months after the flight that earned her the Order of Lenin, the fateful wind behind her would make her an international celebrity.

In July 1938, Premier Vyacheslav Molotov, another important Soviet dignitary, hosted a special reception for Valentina and her crew at his own summer house.

Radar, which has so many uses in modern navigation, didn’t exist in a practical form in the 1930s. It hadn't even been given that name yet. The early radio system used by aviators to find their way when they couldn’t see the ground was called “radio direction finding.”

Now Marina had to hold her sextant out of the hatch of her cabin into the icy wind so she could calculate which direction they should fly.

They were still flying over subarctic taiga, a seemingly endless landscape of conifer forest—in English this is sometimes called “snow forest.”

Apparently Stalin himself greeted them with kisses when they reached the Kremlin, the palatial seat of Soviet government, and Marina and Valentina had a joyful reunion with their children.

Valentina held her two-year-old son, Sokolik, while she gave a speech; at a reception at the Kremlin, Marina’s daughter, Tanya, sat with Stalin and the premier, Vyacheslav Molotov, who’d hosted the Rodina’s crew at his summer house in July.

When Polina died in 
a crash in May 1939, only seven months after the record-breaking flight, Stalin was a pallbearer at her funeral.

If you were a young person in the Soviet Union in the 1930s, you were unable to separate your fear of Stalin and his henchmen from your genuine patriotic fervor for your Motherland.

It may be impossible for us to understand how the Great Terror could have prepared these youthful, idealistic minds for the incredible hard work and the enormous sacrifices that lay ahead of them in World War II.

But though we can’t relate to it or understand it, this mix of fear and patriotism helps to explain why the youth of the Soviet Union fought so ferociously and relentlessly against Hitler’s Germany and Nazi fascism.

During World War II, the people of the USSR referred to the Germans as “fascists” more than they used the term “Nazis.” Soviet citizens felt that they themselves were real patriots, fighting a war against the false patriotism of fascism.

Stalin often managed to shrug off the blame for his actions onto his subordinates or the Communist Party itself.

People revered him as much as they feared him; they were just as anxious to prove themselves worthy party members as they were to avoid arrest.

Tonya was the coxswain for a young men’s rowing crew, and they all went to enlist as soldiers together when the war started—“eight boys and myself,” Tonya said.

All over the USSR, young women were taking to the skies and trying to join the Red Army so they could be like their modest and hardworking hero, Marina Raskova.

Meanwhile, Adolf Hitler was steering Europe headlong into World War II.

As soon as the United Kingdom had rallied its military and told civilians to prepare for war, the British government set up a new aviation service called the Air Transport Auxiliary (ATA). The ATA allowed nonmilitary pilots to ferry aircraft from factories and maintenance units during wartime.

At first, these women were restricted to flying obsolete training aircraft.

But the thunder-rumble of war was ominous.

But the Soviet government was suspicious. It came up with all kinds of conditions that Germany didn’t want to let it have. Months went by, and the waffling was still going on, and then in April 1941 the USSR signed a nonaggression treaty with Japan without consulting Germany.