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Red Sky, Black Death: A Soviet Woman Pilot's Memoir of the Eastern Front. By Anna Timofeeva-Egorova. Translated by Margarita Ponomaryova and Kim Green. Edited by Kim Green. Bloomington, Ind.: Slavica PubUshers, 2009. ISBN 9780-89357-355-3. Photographs. Map. Bibliography and recommended reading. Pp. xxi, 213. $29.95.
A welcome trend in recent years is the appearance of English translations of Soviet memoirs and autobiographies. For too long, German accounts dominated Western understanding of the Eastern Front, simply because they were available in English whde Soviet memoirs were not. This translation of the memoirs of Anna Timofeeva-Egorova, a Hero of the Soviet Union who flew the 11-2 Shturmovik in the Second World War, marks the first time that a book-length memoir by a female Soviet pilot has appeared in English. Egorova's memoir appeared in Russian in 1983 and again in 2007. At last English-speaking readers can read this absorbing and often tragic story.
Red Sky, Black Death lacks much tactical detail, but gives insight into personal and cultural aspects of the war. Born in a rural village, Egorova worked in the early 1930s on the construction of the Moscow metro system. She learned to fly in a workers' air club and was accepted into a military flying school in 1937, but her brother's arrest as an "enemy of the people" caused her expulsion. She landed a job in a factory and became an instructor pilot for the factory gliding school. When the...