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12 Trousseau By the end of July, we had all soloed. The command invited us to spend our vacation from the mine at the aerodrome camp. Our Metrostroy Komsomol "god" Zhenya - the Komsomol committee secretary-encouraged us in this. "We live in harsh and menacing times," he raged, appealing to the assembled youths to join Osoaviakhim and learn military specialties. "The clouds of war threaten us from the West. Imperialism, borne up by the gathering storm of Fascism, prepares to launch its aggression against our Soviet nation!" Many young men and women from the Metrostroy heeded that call. A smith named Alyosha Ryazanov flew gliders at the mine's aeroclub and went on to defend the skies of Moscow, Stalingrad, Kuban', and the Baltic region as a fighter pilot. An aeroclub cadet named Luka Muravitsky distinguished himself as a fighter pilot over Leningrad and was awarded the Hero of the Soviet Union in the first months of the war. He rammed his Yak into an enemy bomber, cutting off its tail with his propeller. Before each mission, he painted the words "For Anna" on his airplane's fuselage in memory of his beloved Anna Poleva, who had worked in his Metrostroy brigade. She perished before the war in a parachuting accident while training to become an airborne soldier. Yes, we women prepared to defend our motherland, too. In April of 1942, the State Defense Committee issued a decree on drafting women into the armed services- initially into the Liaison Corps, and later into the Air Force. That decree lagged behind the realities of war. By 1942, a young Metrostroy woman named Motya, who took Morse Code courses before the war, had already been severely wounded while transmitting radio reports deep behind enemy lines in Lithuania. She lay near death for ten days in a bomb crater, encircled by Fascists, with only a flask of water to keep her alive. Years later, the "Lily of the Valley," the call sign under which she transmitted, won the Hero of the Soviet Union award. 1 A region of the northern Caucasus, in southern Russia, surrounding the Kuban River-a 560-mile-long river that flows from the Caucasus Mountains into the Sea of Azov on the northern coast of the Taman Peninsula. TROUSSEAU 43 When asked how she had endured, Motya would always smile and say, "Why, I'm Russian, after all!" and recite Nekrasov's2 famous verses about the Russian woman: She would stop a gal/oping horse, She would walk into a burning hut. .. And so in the years before war came to the Soviet lands, we prepared ourselves: we worked, studied, and learned to defend our motherland. Our daily routine at the aeroclub camp echoed the structure of a military base: reveille, calisthenics, tidying up our tents, then breakfast, on days when our flights were in the afternoon. But when we flew first shift, we rose before daybreak and took off at dawn. Soon we moved through the box-pattern work and on to the most interesting part of training- aerobatic flight maneuvers. Again, we pored through the "Manual of Flight," which told us that the objective of aerobatic flight was to demonstrate to the pilot the full range of an aircraft's flight envelope. This would allow him to master to perfection any maneuver of which the plane is capable-a vital skill for combat flying. For our first aerobatic "flight," Instructor Miroyevsky demonstrated aerobatic flight maneuvers to us with a model airplane. He showed us the aircraft 's motion in all three axes and told us where to look, what we should see out the window, and how to position the controls. "Yegorova," he said. "Describe the "loop" maneuver." "A loop," I answered, "is a closed circle in the vertical plane." "Excellent. You may sit down," said Miroyevsky encouragingly. "Now, Petukhov, what is a spin?" Ivan Petukhov slowly rose to his full height, dropping his hands stiffly to the seams of his flight suit and said, "A spin is a rapid descent accompanied by a steep, spiraling rotation. It can arise when a plane loses speed, or 'stalls."1 Ivan was born to a peasant family near Volokolamsk and always did everything scrupulously, in a proud and dignified manner. He was a master of all things mechanical. He and a friend had assembled a working truck from spare parts so that our aerodrome would have a real fuel truck instead of hauling gasoline around on a cart. 2...

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