As Americans, it’s easy sometimes to forget that the place we’re born, like so many whims of fortune, can so utterly determine the course of our lives and even our chances for happiness. We live in a country that’s, frankly, pretty easy to love. But consider the hand dealt a baby born in Somalia today, or an Afghan girl, or a Rwandan child born to a Tutsi mother in the early 1990s. What does it mean to feel patriotic love for your home, when your only national birthright is war, poverty, or even genocide?
For an example of patriotism in one such difficult homeland, consider the life of Anna Timofeyeva-Yegorova, born in 1918 to a peasant family in a small, Russian village amid the chaos of revolution and civil war.
Despite the terrible injustices she witnessed, such as forced collectivization of village farms and the exile of her favorite brother as an “enemy of the people,” the young woman’s innate optimism led her to see hope in the Soviet Union’s ideology and to take advantage of the opportunities the new nation provided her. She joined the Komsomol (Communist Youth League) and proudly volunteered to help build the Moscow Metro as a “shock-worker.” And when her Metro builders’ brigade created a flight-training club, she took to the skies, eventually becoming a pilot and flight instructor.
When the Germans invaded, she volunteered to fly and fight at the front, like millions of her young countrymen. In the dark, early months of the war, she flew the unarmed, wood-and-fabric Polikarpov-2 biplane in a liaison regiment, making daring forays across enemy lines to deliver messages and locate missing, encircled units. Constantly at the mercy of faster, armed Messerschmitt fighters, she hungered to shoot back. She insisted on transferring to a combat assignment and eventually joined the 805th Attack Aviation Regiment in winter of 1942–43, as the Battle of Stalingrad raged on the Volga.
Yegorova mastered the powerful Ilyushin-2 “Shturmovik” and joined the Northern Caucasus Front in the great air battles of the Kuban. She eventually became a flight leader and fought westward into Poland with her regiment, which had joined the 1st Belorussian Front. While leading a series of dive-bombing raids over the Vistula in August 1944, Yegorova was shot down, grievously burned and injured, captured, and interned in the Nazi POW camp at Küstrin.
After being liberated by the Red Army, Yegorova fell into the hands of the “SMERSh” Red Army counterintelligence organ, which treated her as a traitor, interrogated her, and confiscated her Party card and combat medals. Yegorova suffered these humiliations for years, but was finally “rehabilitated” and received her “Hero of the Soviet Union” award in 1965.
Yegorova turned 90 last September, and has never stopped loving her Rodina, her Mother Russia.
Kim Green is a Nashville flight instructor and writer, and the co-translator and editor of Anna Timofeyeva-Yegorova’s memoir, “Red Sky, Black Death: A Soviet Woman Pilot’s Memoir of the Eastern Front.” For more information about the book, please visit the Red Sky, Black Death Website.
Click here to read a discussion of the book on the forums of ArmchairGeneral.com.
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Recent press: essays on Great History.com and in “Aviation for Women” magazine – May/June « Red Sky, Black Death said:
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July 5th, 2009 at 2:08 pm