The Sniper's Kiss

Chapter Eleven

January 8, 1944

Alexia leaned against the wall of the oven that heated her barracks room, pressing as much of her back as possible against the tiles. The tall ceramic ovens were fueled only in the evenings, when most of the guard came off duty, and now, just before supper, she savored the first firing. She let her mind drift into pleasurable thoughts, the sound of chanting in Old Slavonic, the smell of incense, and the kiss of an American woman.

“What are you smiling about?” her comrade Olga asked.

Alexia was startled out of her reverie. “Oh, just enjoying the warmth. If only I could get it to spread down to my feet.”

“Take off your boots and heat your footcloths,” Olga advised. “You’ll have warm feet at dinner.”

“Even better with clean ones.” Alexia strode to her locker, took her last clean footcloths, and marched back to the oven. Draping them over her back, she flattened herself once again against the oven wall. The fresh fire warmed deliciously, and after only a few minutes, she was able to wrap her feet in the heated cloths. Sliding her boots back on, she sighed with pleasure.

She stood up to join the other women hurrying toward the mess hall when a young private stopped her. “Major Vlasik orders you to report to him. Right now.”

Frowning in a mix of anxiety and annoyance at missing dinner, she followed him back down the corridor to the commander’s office.

Vlasik sat relaxed, his arms crossed, but she saluted and stood at attention until his “At ease” order.

“Two things,” he began, as if to prepare her for a list. “Your escorting of the American diplomats was satisfactory. I have already commended Lieutenant Yegorov. However…”

Alexia’s lips tightened. She hated the word “however.”

“I understand that you accompanied Miss Kramer to church services.”

“Yes, sir. It was Christmas morning, sir. She explained she was raised Orthodox and requested to see such a service.”

“Do you not appreciate how inappropriate that was for a member of the Kremlin regiment?”

“Yes, sir. But I assumed I was obliged to grant her request, since she was Marshal Stalin’s personal guest.”

“‘Personal guest’ is an exaggeration. She was the secretary to a White House emissary. If she attended a dinner with Comrade Stalin, it was as an interpreter.”

“Yes, sir. But Metropolitan Sergei has expressly allied the Church with the nation in defense of the motherland, so I thought it would not be offensive on this one occasion—”

“It is not your place to make such judgments. But I will let it pass this once.”

Alexia was too much of a soldier to reveal her feelings and remained neutral. “Thank you, sir. But you said ‘two things,’ sir. What was the other one?”

“Your dissatisfaction. I understand you feel your role as Kremlin guard is a way to avoid active service. Perhaps you think we are a regiment of cowards.”

Alexia was momentarily speechless. How could he have known her thoughts? She had not fully resolved the issue in her head, so how could she explain it to him?

“Not at all, sir. I am very satisfied, in fact, deeply honored, to serve in this way. At the same time, I think of my brothers and sisters at the front who offer their bodies in the defense of the motherland and wonder sometimes if I don’t have a moral obligation to do the same.”

He closed his eyes for a moment, as if in paternal concern. “Alexia,” he said, and it was the first time he’d ever called her by her first name.

“Am I in trouble, sir?”

“You should be. If anyone else were sitting here, you would be. But I know you’re a patriot and a good party member. If you don’t want to continue in the Kremlin regiment, we have hundreds of qualified recruits who will happily take your spot. You must think seriously about this.”

His reaction was unexpected. She had not yet decided, but now a decision was thrust upon her. If she stayed, she would be guarding and ceremonially marching until her retirement from the service. Father Zosima would certainly approve, but her conscience would not.

She took a breath. “I would like to serve at the front, sir.” There, she’d crossed the line.

He drummed his fingers on his desk. Was it in impatience at her naïveté? “In what capacity? Medical? Communications? If you do not request specific training, the army will assign you to cooking or laundry. I don’t think that’s what you had in mind.”

“I… um… well, during training, I was superior in marksmanship.”

“I see. Well, the army always needs marksmen, it’s true.” He sat up, terminating the interview. “All right. I will recommend you for sniper school. You are dismissed.”

Stunned at how quickly it all went, she snapped to attention and saluted. “Yes, sir, Comrade Major!”

Duties at the Central Woman’s School of Sniper Training in Podolsk were decidedly less glamorous than those of a Kremlin guard.

The barracks, built only months before by the women themselves, were basic and, in the January weather, even colder than her quarters in the Kremlin. And the call to duty was even more rigid. Each morning, she had five minutes to wash, dress, and fall into line before the mess hall.

Breakfast—of black bread, sausage, and tea—had to be collected, consumed, and cleaned up within twenty minutes. The recruits were still strangers, all afraid to speak, so the main sound in the mess hall was the clank of the metal mess kits.

At seven o’clock, the recruits fast-marched to the quartermaster, where they lined up to receive their uniforms. Alosha’s gymnasterka was simpler than her guard’s tunic and had collar tabs with an enamel and brass insignia of crossed rifles over a target. Her breeches hung on her, but their bagginess was useful for kneeling and squatting, which she’d never done as a guard. The bottoms tucked into boots of imitation leather, though for winter training on icy ground, she was also issued the dense felt valenki.

At eight o’clock they filed into a small auditorium for political instruction, ensuring they were all motivated by the highest communist principles. Alexia glanced discreetly at the other women, wondering if they were as bored as she was listening to the principles that she’d heard reiterated endless times since joining the Komsomol.

Nine o’clock brought them to the gymnasium, where they were lined up in two squads, each with four rows of five women abreast. “You will memorize your place in the lineup,” the sergeant ordered, and Alexia noted that she was the second woman in the second row in the second squad. That was convenient.

“The rules for discipline and for service of the garrison are posted in each barracks, and you will learn them by heart tonight.”

The next order was to drop to the floor for calisthenics, which proved more rigorous than she expected. At the end of the hour, she stood in place once again, dry-mouthed and panting. But if that was the worst they had to throw at her, she’d do fine.

The women stood in formation for several minutes, watching the platform at the front. Finally, a door opened and the major emerged, a large robust man with a Cossack mustache.

The fifty recruits came to attention. This, they all knew, was Major Kulikov, who had fought alongside the famous Vassily Zaitsev at Stalingrad. The two associations, Zaitsev and Stalingrad, gave him an aura of greatness.

Two men came directly behind him wheeling a long cart. “At ease,” Kulikov said, and at his signal, one of the men opened the cart lid and lifted out a rifle. An unmistakable murmur of approval rippled through the ranks.

The men handed rifles in armloads of five to the woman at the end of each row, and she passed them along until each recruit held one. Alexia hefted hers. It was longer but a bit lighter than the ceremonial rifle she’d held at the Kremlin. She was used to rifles, but obviously most of her classmates were not.

Major Kulikov laid his fists on his hips and shook his head. “Look at you,” he snorted. “You’re cradling those things like babies. They are deadly weapons, which you are going to use to kill people. When in tight formation, hold them upright and vertical, at your right shoulder. When in the field, grasp them like this.” He held one diagonally in front of him, one hand midway up the barrel and the other around the stock with the index finger flat against, though not around, the trigger.

“This is the Mosin Model 1891 / 30, your friend and savior. You will always know how many rounds are in the clip and how many clips are left on your bandolier. You will know every part of your rifle and keep it spotlessly clean and oiled. To do so, you will disassemble it in this manner, using the bayonet as a screwdriver.”

He lowered the lid of the cart, making a tabletop of it, and recited a stream of instructions as, with a few deft movements, he broke the rifle down to its component parts. Within a minute, it lay in pieces in front of him.

The young recruits watched, and Alexia’s sideward glance saw their expressions of both anxiety and determination. She knew those emotions, for she’d had them the day she learned to assemble her guardsman’s rifle. If she could learn one, she could learn another, and so could they.

“You will learn the disassembly, and by tomorrow, you will be able to do it blindfolded. In the meantime, first squadron will march to the firing range with Sergeant Gryaznov, and second squadron will follow me to the slope. Dismissed.”

In the corridor outside the gymnasium, they received the next items of their kit: cartridge pouches holding forty rounds of ammunition and a canvas bandolier with fourteen five-round clips. Over it all, each wore a thick padded jacket that fell to her hips.

Most interesting, Alexia found, were the sniper gloves divided into thumbs, index finger, and mitten for the last three fingers. Logical, of course.

The outdoor air was frigid, but by the standards of the Russian winter, which they all knew, was tolerable. So they marched cheerfully along the path that took them to a wooded slope.

As they came near, they passed a bin from which each of them took a white camouflage outfit, and Alexia drew hers on, snickering to herself. They called it a suit, presumably because it had sleeves, trousers, and a hood, but it would have fitted no one less than a giant. Drawstrings held it closed around the face and waist, but otherwise it billowed in the wind as she jogged.

Major Kulikov paced in front of them as they lined up near the training woods. “You will learn two lessons today: concealment and endurance,” he said. “We’ll start with endurance. If you’re impatient, angry, hungry, cold, or have to piss, you’re useless. Then you’re just another rifle in the infantry. So, how do we avoid those things?” He paused for a moment, then answered his own questions.

“Carry food, wear extra layers, pee before you take position. But sometimes you’re stuck in place for four hours. Or six. Or eight. And the enemy is waiting at the other end of the field for you to lift your head just a few centimeters. And your bladder is full.”

No one spoke.

“You use this.” He tapped the tiny spade strapped to his upper arm. “When you arrive to set up your ‘hide,’ you dig a slight cavity in the ground below where your hips are going to be. When the time comes, you have to develop the skill to open your clothing and let go without wetting yourself. Now, I know that’s a little harder for girls to do, but you’d better find a way, because that can save your life.”

“So will you show us how to build a hide?”

“That’s what we’re here for.” He led them over to one of the larger trees. “You see how the snow wafts up on one side of the tree? That’s what your hide should look like. You just move the top layer aside, dig a pit with that extra hole in the bottom, then lay a support over the cavity—a few branches and a cloth—and cover the whole thing with a snow roof. You scatter branches and dead leaves over the top as camouflage, and you’re done.”

At his instruction, they set up little igloos, and if they passed muster, he nodded. If not, he kicked the faulty structure apart and they had to start again.

“All right. Now that you can make a nest, you have to shoot from it, so you’ve got to move the rifle nozzle from side to side without being seen. You do that by covering the tip with a white cloth.”

“Don’t we also work in twos?” Alexia asked.

“Only if you’re working from a trench instead of a single nest. If conditions allow, your spotter can use binoculars to locate the target, but the target may also be looking for you, so now you have two people to hide.”

“What about when there’s no snow?”

“Same principles. Different strategies. You’ll need rag capes, face covers, other equipment. I’ll show you those tomorrow. Any questions before we do target practice from your nests?”

One of the braver women raised a hand. “Just one, Comrade Major.”

“What is it?”

“That thing about digging an extra cavity for urinating. What about taking care of the other thing?”

He snorted derisively. “You better pray you don’t have to. You still have to do it lying down and staying almost motionless in your hiding place. Then you either have to stay with it or find a way to dump it without revealing your position. And of course you’ll stink when you get back to base.”

“Can’t you just toss it behind you or over the top?”

“A big motion like that will give you away. I once spotted a German sniper who’d relieved himself in his mess kit and then tried to lob it away from him. To do that, he had to lift his head just a little bit.”

“Did you shoot him?”

“I did. It was the last shit of his life.”

The day was long, very long, but at eighteen hours the shivering recruits were ordered to the mess hall for supper. When Alexia had her mess tin full of steaming soup, she spotted her squad mates at one of the tables. She sat down and nodded a greeting to all of them.

“Well, that was fun,” a dark-haired woman with pixie-like eyes said, holding her hands over her hot soup. “I can’t bend my fingers and I can’t feel my toes.”

“Is that all? Just your toes?” A muscular woman with a very short haircut sneered. “Imagine having to lie in the snow for four hours on these.” She glanced down at her enormous breasts.

Both giggled, and the first one glanced toward Alexia. “What about you? Anything frozen off you?”

Alexia mimicked superiority. “The Russian patriot does not freeze, and nothing must ever fall off.”

“Oh, yes. I forgot.” Pixie-eyes held out her hand. “Aleksandra ‘Sasha’ Yekimova.”

Short hair and large bosom held out hers. “Kaleriya Petrova. Call me Kalya.”

A short, swarthy woman with heavy eyebrows leaned toward them. “Fatima Mironova, from Kazakhstan and Leningrad.”

Alexia added a fourth hand to the group clasp. “Alexia Mazarova. Alyosha to my friends. I feel lucky to be here, don’t you?”

The swarthy one shook her head. “I don’t feel so lucky. I was at the aviation academy, but they wouldn’t let me fly and sent me to manufacture planes instead. So I applied for sniper school. Anything was better than a factory.”

“I definitely do,” the one called Kalya answered with vehemence. She spooned up a portion of soup and sucked it in noisily. “I joined up with a friend from the kolkhoz, and they put her in laundry service. I was afraid I’d get that, too, but fortunately, my eyesight was better than hers. Poor kid. All she does all day is wash mud, blood, and lice out of soldiers’ underwear.”

Sasha wrinkled her nose in disgust. “I wanted to be in the Red Army chorus, but it’s all men.” She also spooned up her soup, though with delicacy.

Kalya looked surprised. “Chorus? What made you want to do that?”

“I was studying to be an opera singer when the war started. My father sang in the Bolshoi chorus, and we always had music in our house. I really miss it.” She looked glum for a moment, then turned her attention to Alexia. “What about you? What did you do before?”

Alexia wiped her mouth. “Well, there’s ‘before’ and ‘before-before.’ Before-before, I was a schoolteacher in Arkhangelsk. But after I enlisted, I was posted to the Kremlin guard. I guess because I’m tall.”

“And good-looking,” Kalya added admiringly. “Did you guard anyone interesting, like Stalin?”

“All soldiers in the garrison end up guarding Stalin one time or another. That’s part of the duty. But I also guarded the delegation that went to Tehran. That was exciting. Then in Moscow, I had to guard some Americans.”

“Wow. You met Americans,” Sasha exclaimed. “Who were they?”

“Assistants to President Roosevelt. A man, very quiet, odd looking, and a woman.”

“A woman, too? What was she like?” Fatima asked.

Alexia stared into the distance for a moment. “Probably the most interesting woman I ever met. She spoke Russian, so we could talk.”

“Gosh. What does one talk about with an American?”

“Oh, this and that,” Alexia replied vaguely, and was saved from more interrogation by the bell terminating the mess. “But now I have to memorize all the rules posted on my barracks wall.”

By the second week of training Alexia knew her Mozin-Nagant rifle better than the fancy automatic she’d carried at the Kremlin. She could dismantle and reassemble it in minutes, with her eyes closed. She also knew to carry a cloth to conceal the muzzle—white in the snow, gray otherwise.

And now, gazing out over the target range, she felt the comfort of its wooden stock against her cheek. Heavy boots crunched through the snow, behind her.

The gunnery sergeant’s voice was bright in the cold air. “It is critical to be able to judge distance in order to set the range-finder on your scope. Account for wind, rain, or snowfall. Look for smoke for wind strength and direction.”

The snow crunched again as he trod to the next recruit. “If you just want to take out an ordinary soldier, aim for the body. It’s a larger target and will tie up the enemy with wounded. But if it’s a high-value target—officers, machine gunners, radio operators—shoot for the head.”

More crunching, farther away. “And remember to cover your muzzle flash whenever possible. If you don’t get your man, you’ll give your position away and the next shot will be for you.”

He stepped away from the line of women lying on the snow. “All right. Commence firing.”

She waited for the moving silhouettes to come into sight, various German helmets and caps drawn on a string at the other end of the range. The simple soldiers were obvious and easy, but the high-value targets worth double points appeared for only an instant. She focused her attention on the area enclosed in her scope and moved the muzzle in a slight arc.

There was one. Bang. Another. Bang. She held back as the flat infantryman helmets passed, letting the other women dispatch them. Again, a high-peaked cap. Bang.

By the end of the session, she’d scored half a dozen officers, three machine gunners, and four ordinary Wehrmacht. Her high score won her a small bar of chocolate with her supper.

The next day they worked in teams, and Fatima was her spotter. Fatima swept the horizon with her binoculars. “Officer approaching from right. About two o’clock.”

“I see him.”

The cardboard figure stopped, then backed away to be replaced by two bucket helmets. “Crap, lost him. No, wait. I see the tip of a machine gun. It’s a nest. Take them out.”

Alexia fired twice and the cardboard figures fell over.

In the three hours, a long series of figures danced along the rim of the target trench, some slowly, some rapidly, their hats or guns or postures identifying them. When the instructor blew his whistle to end the exercise, Alexia’s team scored the highest.

“I wonder why officers wear tall, pointy caps,” Fatima mused. “If I was one, I’d want a nice flat one.”

“Swagger surpasses safety, I suppose,” Alexia murmured.

Nikolai Kulikov waited for them in the mess hall, his arms folded. His status as a survivor of Stalingrad and a student of the great marksman Vassily Zaitsev himself had earned him deference and respect, and some of the women were in awe of him. Alexia was more curious about Zaitsev, who was all but the patron saint of snipers, and after their ration of vodka had been passed around, she approached him.

“Comrade Sergeant. If I may. We want to be ready on that day when the first shots are real. What was it like for you?”

He poured himself a second vodka, to which, as an instructor, he was entitled, and stared at it as he swirled it around in the glass.

“My dear comrade. I hope you do not have the same experience. My first great battle was Stalingrad, and I can recall that first day, in September 1942, as if it were yesterday. We marched overland to the Volga, and already from afar we could see the city had a crimson sky over it, like an erupting volcano. Tiny black things swarmed in circles over it, and those were German planes dropping bombs, stoking the fire.”

He ran his finger around the rim of his vodka glass. “It was like we were marching toward hell. In an hour or so, when we actually were crossing the Volga, the burnt-out buildings were glowing inside, like monsters eating up our men. This time the little black figures running back and forth across the glow were soldiers, but we couldn’t tell if they were ours or theirs.” He stared into space for a moment.

“When we reached the shore, we dashed forward screaming ‘uh rah!’ to give ourselves courage, but a petrol storage tank nearby took a hit, exploded, and drenched us in fuel as we ran. We caught fire but kept running while we tore off our flaming hats and coats. The fact that we were already at full speed and reacted instantly saved us from burning to death. That’s your answer. My first hour in battle was running with screaming naked men into the inferno of Stalingrad.” He swallowed the rest of his vodka.

The women sat speechless at the tale, but Kulikov was obviously warmed up and had another one to tell.

“Every day, if we weren’t killed, we got better at our job. Once Zaitsev and I and two others were on Mamayev Hill. It was covered with corpses. Our job was to keep the Fritzes pinned down away from a spring, so they’d run out of water. But they beat us back so we couldn’t reach the spring either. Anytime someone, Soviet or German, crawled down to the spring with a bucket, he’d get shot. For three days we lay there parched, and it was unbearable.”

He paused for dramatic effect.

“Then Zaitsev remembered that the corpses all around us had canteens. We crawled out under cover and brought back a dozen of them. The water was old and not great, but it kept us going. The Germans never thought of it and kept trying to get to the spring, where we knocked them off one by one.”

“A good lesson, Comrade Major,” someone said. “To use our brains and not just our eyes.”

“Yeah, and to start out with a full canteen.” He snorted and strode from the mess hall.

Kalya watched him leave. “They keep telling us about Zaitsev, but my hero is Comrade Pavlichenko. She’s one of us.”

“Do you suppose the British and Americans have women snipers?” Sasha asked. “Or are they softer than we are?”

Alexia gave a faint shrug. “Could be. I only met that one American. Kind of soft, but with a spirit tough as any man’s.”

“Really? How do you know?”

“She partied all night with Stalin, and then she kissed me.”

On April 1, 1944, the Central Women’s School of Sniper Training graduated its second class of snipers, and fifty women carrying their Mozin-Nagant rifles fitted with PU scopes of 3.5 magnification marched past the reviewing stand.

Their instructors and senior government officials sat in a row before a huge red banner that the Supreme Council of the Soviet Union had presented to the school.

The parading women halted and the speeches began. Alexia barely listened and was already thinking of the next morning when she would be deployed to the 1st Belorussian Front Army under the command of General Rokossovsky. She would pack her small kit and march with the others with the same orders to the station to board a train to Novgorod.

There, at some point, she would be called upon to use her newly acquired skills, not to shoot holes through a painted cardboard cap, but to kill a living German point-blank. Father Zosima would be appalled.