Justine Saracen - The Sniper’s Kiss

Women in Soviet Military: Women began in the usual support roles: administration, industry, medicine, traffic control, communication, laundry, political education, partisans bands. Due more to the dire threat posed by the German invasion in 1941 than to the Communist policy of egalitarianism, women were gradually accepted into active combat. By the middle of the war, they were fighter pilots, tank commanders, machine gunners, artillery and anti-aircraft gunners, and snipers. Soviet policy remained ambivalent, however. Although some 800,000 women served actively in battle, women were not allowed to march in the Moscow Victory Parade, and after the war they were pressured to return to the roles of wife and mother.

Central Women’s School of Sniper Training: Between 1943 and 1945, the school at Vishniaki graduated seven classes totaling more than 1,000 female snipers and 407 sniper-instructors. The most conservative estimate is that female snipers eliminated more than 18,000 fascists, equivalent to an entire division.

Stalin (Joseph Vissarionovich Dzhughashvili) 1878–1953: Supreme ruler of the Soviet Union from the mid-1920s until 1953. Though he oversaw the Soviet victory over Nazi Germany, he did it at the cost of millions of his people, a ruthless “not one step backward” frontline policy, and the abandonment of Russian POWs. He deeply resented the delayed entry of the Western Allies into Europe while Russians were dying by the millions, but the advance of the Red Army to Germany without the aid of allies meant communist domination of virtually all of Eastern Europe after the war.

STAVKA (Russian Ставка): Soviet High Command, a term taken over from tsarist times. It consisted of Stalin, his defense minister, chief of staff, foreign minister, several marshals, a commissar, and an admiral. It also established “permanent counselors” of more marshals and heads of air force and police. Membership shifted throughout the war as people fell in and out of favor.

Vyacheslav Molotov (1890–1986): As Stalin’s “right-hand man” and foreign minister, he played a prominent role in all negotiations with the Western Allies during and after the war. Infamously, he was the chief negotiator of the Nazi-Soviet nonaggression pact until the Germans violated it by invading the Soviet Union in 1941. He also held the title of first deputy premier from 1942 to 1957, when he was dismissed by Khrushchev. While he apparently did visit the White House with a hidden loaf of bread and loaded pistol, he did NOT siphon off Lend-Lease supplies to the black market or kidnap an American investigator.

NKVD: The People’s Commissariat for Internal Affairs was the principal law-enforcement agency of the Soviet Union. It consisted of regular, traffic, and military police; firefighters; and border guards. As a state security force, the NKVD managed the Gulag system (see below) and conducted deportations, espionage operations, and political assassinations. Its responsibilities were later subdivided into specialized groups, of which the best known is the KGB.

Lyudmila Pavlichenko: Celebrated Soviet sniper, with a tally of 309 recorded Germans killed. She was invited to the White House by the Roosevelts in November 1942, then toured several American cities and Toronto to encourage American entry into the war. She made her “you have been hiding behind my back” speech in Chicago. She survived the war and worked as a researcher at the Soviet Navy headquarters. The film Battle for Sebastopol, released in February 2016, supposedly is based on her life, with a purely fictional romance interjected.

The Mosin Nagant: The sturdy workhorse of the riflemen, which could be dismantled with its bayonet as the only tool. A special scope was added to the Mosin for use by snipers.

Gulag: Acronym for “main administration of the camps.” A vast network of forced labor camps established in 1918 and greatly expanded during the Stalinist era. Camp inmates were criminals at all levels, political opponents, and anyone who fell afoul of somebody important. The camps, with their free labor, played a valuable role in production and also served as an important means of political repression. Sentences were arbitrary and severe, while conditions ranged from rigorous to deadly, particularly in the Siberian camps. (Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn made them famous in the West in 1973 with the publication of The Gulag Archipelago.)

Franklin Delano Roosevelt (January 1882 — April 1945): Arguably America’s most liberal twentieth-century president and the only one elected to a fourth term. After creating the New Deal programs to relieve the Depression of the 1930s, he led the USA in war in the 1940s. With US public opinion against fighting on foreign soil, he provided diplomatic and financial support first to China and Britain, then to the Soviets and dozens of other countries through his Lend-Lease program (see below). When the Pearl Harbor attack forced military engagement, he worked closely with Winston Churchill and Joseph Stalin, and depended greatly on Harry Hopkins to manage diplomacy with them in his absence. He died of a cerebral hemorrhage one month before the end of the war (and eighteen days before Adolf Hitler).

Harry Hopkins and Lend-Lease: Social worker and charity leader, Hopkins became a trusted advisor to FDR while the latter was governor of New York. In the 1930s, the new president then entrusted him with creating and directing various relief programs in the New Deal. When the war began, Hopkins was a key policy-maker for the Lend-Lease program that manufactured and shipped some fifty billion dollars in war material to Free France, Britain, China, the USSR, and other allies until 1945. From May 1940, he lived intermittently at the White House for some three and a half years, becoming Roosevelt’s de facto secretary of state in negotiations with Churchill and Stalin regarding the war and the formation of the United Nations. A suspected cancer caused the removal of most of his stomach, which, for the rest of his life, made him gaunt and sickly, and he died nine months after FDR of cirrhosis and malnutrition.

The Tehran Plot: Soviet Intelligence uncovered a plot (called Operation Longjump) by the Waffen-SS to capture or kill Stalin, Churchill, and Roosevelt at the Tehran Conference. The plot was subsequently aborted. Nonetheless, it caused Roosevelt to house his delegation in a part of the Soviet embassy in Tehran. While Western intelligence was skeptical of the story, Soviet intelligence—and later public opinion—was convinced of its authenticity. It has been the subject of several books and documentaries.

Eleanor Roosevelt and Lorena Hickok: Due to the increasing visibility and legitimacy of lesbian relationships, the friendship between Eleanor and Lorena is now accepted by most historians as romantic. Whether or not they actually slept together, Eleanor’s more than two thousand letters to Lorena were unmistakably love letters, revealing that their affection was constant and passionate. From January 1941 until January 1945, Hickok slept in a guest room on the uppermost floor of the White House, while she kept a nominal address at the Mayflower Hotel in DC. After FDR’s death, she lived in a cottage on the Roosevelt estate in Hyde Park until she died in 1968.

Dostoyevsky and the Grand Inquisitor: Characters and themes from the novel The Brothers Karamazov haunt the novel. While Dostoyevsky was obsessed with God, and the average Soviet soldier was certainly not, there are significant emotional parallels. The Bolsheviks rejected Orthodox Christianity only to replace it with the secular “religion” of obedience to the Communist State, and thus perpetuated the same tension—between obedience to oppressive authority and its overthrow. Dostoyevsky’s novel revolves around a patricide, an obvious symbol of throwing off authority, and one could argue that desertion and defection from the Soviet State amounted to political patricide. Joseph Stalin stands in well for Dostoyevsky’s Grand Inquisitor, who claims to be a realist and the savior of men from the agony of too much freedom. Both are tyrants. But Dostoyevsky’s antidote, the all-conquering kiss—in the context of a world war—rings childish and pathetic. However, as the novel suggests, there are kisses, and kisses. Some can kill you and some can make you free.

Retired university professor, opera manager, editor, Justine Saracen has written eleven historical thrillers that span the ages, from Ancient Egypt (The 100th Generation) through the Italian Renaissance (Sistine Heresy), to World War II; on opera (Mephisto Aria) religion (Sarah, Son of God, Beloved Gomorrah), and mountain gorillas (Dian’s Ghost).

Recently, she’s focused on World War II, starting with Tyger, Tyger, Burning Bright, which traces the lives of spies, terrorists, and queers in Nazi Germany; Waiting for the Violins, about the French and Belgian resistance; The Witch of Stalingrad, on the life of Soviet fighter pilot, Lilya Litviak; and The Sniper’s Kiss, about female Soviet snipers, with shades of Dostoyevsky lurking in the background.

While her novels have won numerous Golden Crown and Rainbow prizes through the years, in February 2016, she was awarded the high-profile Alice B Readers’ medal for her entire body of work.

Justine, who speaks German and French, lives in Brussels, from whence she travels widely for research and scuba diving.

The Sniper’s Kiss by Justine Saracen. The power of a kiss: it can swell your heart with splendor, declare abject submission, and sometimes blow your brains out. (978-1-62639-839-9)

Divided Nation, United Hearts by Yolanda Wallace. In a nation torn in two by a most uncivil war, can love conquer the divide? (978-1-62639-847-4)

Fury’s Bridge by Brey Willows. What if your life depended on someone who didn’t believe in your existence? (978-1-62639-841-2)

Lightning Strikes by Cass Sellars. When Parker Duncan and Sydney Hyatt’s one-night stand turns to more, both women must fight demons past and present to cling to the relationship neither of them thought she wanted. (978-1-62639-956-3)

Love in Disaster by Charlotte Greene. A professor and a celebrity chef are drawn together by chance, but can their attraction survive a natural disaster? (978-1-62639-885-6)

Secret Hearts by Radclyffe. Can two women from different worlds find common ground while fighting their secret desires? (978-1-62639-932-7)

Sins of Our Fathers by A. Rose Mathieu. Solving gruesome murder cases is only one of Elizabeth Campbell’s challenges; another is her growing attraction to the female detective who is hell-bent on keeping her client in prison. (978-1-62639-873-3)

Troop 18 by Jessica L. Webb. Charged with uncovering the destructive secret that a troop of RCMP cadets has been hiding, Andy must put aside her worries about Kate and uncover the conspiracy before it’s too late. (978-1-62639-934-1)

Worthy of Trust and Confidence by Kara A. McLeod. FBI Special Agent Ryan O’Connor is about to discover the hard way that when you can only handle one type of answer to a question, it really is better not to ask. (978-1-62639-889-4)

Amounting to Nothing by Karis Walsh. When mounted police officer Billie Mitchell steps in to save beautiful murder witness Merissa Karr, worlds collide on the rough city streets of Tacoma, Washington. (978-1-62639-728-6)

Becoming You by Michelle Grubb. Airlie Porter has a secret. A deep, dark, destructive secret that threatens to engulf her if she can’t find the courage to face who she really is and who she really wants to be with. (978-1-62639-811-5)

Birthright by Missouri Vaun. When spies bring news that a swordswoman imprisoned in a neighboring kingdom bears the Royal mark, Princess Kathryn sets out to rescue Aiden, true heir to the Belstaff throne. (978-1-62639-485-8)

Crescent City Confidential by Aurora Rey. When romance and danger are in the air, writer Sam Torres learns the Big Easy is anything but. (978-1-62639-764-4)