>Anybody have any thoughts on the Rodina-Mat girls? I'd like to try and
>get at least one piece for every school in the conference. (Plus
>Mozzie, 'cos damn. :)

Hmm...

Yak-9

When the average Westerner pictured a Russian airplane or a Russian woman in 1940, the first word that sprang to mind was probably "tractor". Yak-9 is... not like that. She's not glamorous - almost aggressively not so, with her black hair chopped short and slicked back, her ill-tailored Soviet Air Force uniform, and her complete lack of cosmetics - but she's got those great Slavic cheekbones and big grey eyes so intense they look like they could see through three feet of lead. She's also extremely sophisticated, with a taste for classical music and opera - but very guarded about it, as a child of the now-all-but-extinct Muscovite intelligentsia. Too many of her father's friends have gone to the gulag for no reason other than being more cultured than Stalin. Out of the cockpit, she carries a Nagant revolver and a certain readiness to use it on the nearest Hitlerite bandit. About the only people she hates more than them are the craven opportunists of the NKVD.

Il-2

Ilyusha looks as tough as she is, and she's tough enough to survive on the Eastern Front in a job that involves constant exposure to some of the world's heaviest and most accurate ground fire, so what does that tell you? Ilyusha is hard, in every sense of the word. There's no decorative padding on her anywhere, physically or psychologically - she seems to be made of little more than tanned skin stretched taut over 150 pounds or so of bone and muscle and quiet determination. She keeps her dark brown hair back in a French braid and takes the sleeves off her flightsuits because they just get in the way. She always dresses exactly the same way, come rain, shine, sleet, or general inspection. She is completely indifferent to heat, cold, pain, danger, and rank. "If you haven't destroyed a tank today, Comrade General, then I fail to see what you and I could possibly have to talk about." She does have a lighter side, but her aerial colleagues rarely see it, as she generally only unwinds in the company of the infantrymen and tankers whom she supports from the air. And their vodka. Those guys practically worship her, so she's never got an empty glass when she's hanging with them.

P-39

More Russian than the Russians, Kobrastochka looks so at home in her uniform it almost seems improbable. She's like the one person in the Soviet Air Force whose uniform fits properly. It's just fate. Even though she doesn't look particularly Slavic - she's distantly related to P-40 and there's a bit of a resemblance, and her red hair and unusual height both stand out like flags in your average crowd of Soviet citizens - she inhabits the role so well that people don't really think about it. She always wears a pair of aviator goggles, but rarely actually puts them on properly; they're almost always up on her forehead. Oddly for an aviator, she carries a Mosin-Nagant Model 1938 carbine. Some people used to joke it was so she'd have something to fight with when she got shot down and joined the infantry, until she demonstrated what a crack shot she is with it a few times and those people got tired of scrounging up replacement hats.

--G.
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Benjamin D. Hutchins, Co-Founder, Editor-in-Chief, & Forum Mod
Eyrie Productions, Unlimited http://www.eyrie-productions.com/
zgryphon at that email service Google has
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