The Best of Times, the Worst of Times
Dedicated to Anna Yegorova and my beloved авиатриссы, on the 70th anniversary of Russia’s Victory Day
Back in the (Former) USSR
I never thought I’d see Moscow again, although I dreamed of it for fourteen years. I boarded a teeming Aeroflot flight in late summer 2005, as Katrina’s receding waters revealed, inch by inch, the erasure of New Orleans as I once knew it. Mourning for that blighted, intoxicating city, I rushed towards another place I…
Diary of a Soviet Airwoman at War: The Battle Draws Near
A young Soviet combat airwoman’s diary of WWII
“The Atlantic” WWII Retrospective, and a Young Airwoman’s Recollections of Barbarossa, 70y Ago
This summer, The Atlantic began running a weekly retrospective of World War Two—a series of photographs from different eras and theatres of that great war. The photographs are riveting, calamitous, heartrending. Seventy years ago this summer, the German army invaded the Soviet Union, breaking a non-aggression pact between Stalin and Hitler and raining unimaginable destruction upon Ukraine, Belarus,…
