The Great Fatherland War

I know little about my father's involvement in the Finnish war. Perhaps he fought only for a short time or not at the main stretch of the front. My father didn't talk about it much. He told something about Finnish snipers at the top of the fir trees and about how dexterous the Fins were at throwing knives. All the rest is muddled. By contrast, WWII, the Great Fatherland War, affected us to the full extent. Just before the war my parents received their own living space. As a fairly highly positioned leader, my father was assigned a flat with two rooms on Liteiny Prospekt. My mother was already pregnant with me. My father decided that a certain colleague of his, who already had a child, needed a separate flat more urgently and ceded the flat. For his own family he took a room in a communal flat, also on Liteiny Prospekt. True, there weren't many other people in that communal flat, which also consisted of two rooms. Our room was large, more than thirty square meters. On the third floor, without a lift. With a stove for heating. My parents only spent a very short time there at first. The war had broken out. My father was preparing his factory's evacuation to the Urals. He sent my grandmother's entire extended family (my aunts, their husbands and children, my uncle) to Sverdlovsk – that was the name of Ekaterinburg in Soviet Russia – and then he sent my mother with her baby bump there, too. She delivered me en route. Well, not on the train, naturally. When she went into labour she was swiftly made to disembark in the town of Galich, Kostroma region, where I came into this world in August 1941. Thus I saw the ancient town of Galich only once. In the following my mother made her own way to Sverdlovsk, with a nursing infant. The food was terrible. She would travel in a heated goods carriage. There was no opportunity to wash. The baby – that is, me – was covered in scabs. Instead of a crib I slept in a wooden trough. She was surrounded by men, soldiers, who had been sent down from the front for various reasons. The soldiers, who were occupying the upper levels of the bunks, picked out lice from under their armpits and dropped them. My mother cried. A wounded officer with heart disease, on his way to a home visit, lowered his head from the second bunk and said, «Don't cry, dear mother, when you son grows up he'll be a Hercules.» As if he'd looked into the future. He was almost right – I grew up to become a big, strong man. With time. Back then what was there was there.

When my mother rejoined my grandmother everyday life became easier, it seems. Although the issue of food remained, of course. It was the same for everyone at that time. Soon afterwards my father moved to the Urals with his family. My mother proudly presented him her cachetic, malnourished baby boy, evidently. Women always show their newborn babies to their beloved husbands in this way. And of course my parents' family joy was once again short-lived. My father, who would always give in to my mother in all matters and consider her opinion in literally all matters, became a very decisive man in those critical moments in life. He was vice director of a huge factory of defensive significance, exempt from military service due to his obligations at the factory and, at 38, was entering middle age. And he enlisted as a volunteer. As a rank-and-file soldier. He told my mother only when he was about to leave.

What do I remember from that time? Almost nothing. A dark stairwell. Some logs that had been stacked on the landing for some reason. A white cat playing among them. Looking at me. My future life, the bright bits and the troubled ones all together, were looking at me through that cat's child-like feral eyes. I remember stories. How my mother took up smoking. Makhorka, rough-cut tobacco. There was nothing else. How my grandmother died. How we waited for the rare letters from the front. How we listened to the song «Wait for Me and I Will Return», how we hoped and cried in silence. How the children greedily snapped up food when there was any in the house. How they swallowed quickly and growled, unable to wait for the next spoonful of porridge. The entire country lived like that. Some faded photographs from that time have survived. My mother, haggard and almost unrecognisable. Huge eyes, a prematurely aged face with a tortured expression. And a terrible puny creature, all skin and bones. That is me. In my eyes, the same suffering as in my mother's.

In 1944 we returned to our flat on Liteiny Prospekt. All our things and furniture had been taken away. By our neighbours from upstairs. My mother didn't argue with anyone. She started again, from scratch. Her sisters and brother came to her aid. Then the war was over. The men returned from the front. In the streets there were flowers, songs, accordion tunes. No news of my father. One joyful soldier in a shirt turned to me in the street, smiled at me and waved. I ran towards him, screaming 'Uncle Daddy!' I didn't know my own father after all. Then the news came that the units of the Second Ukrainian Regiment were still in Prague. That's where my father was. There, the war was still going on; people were dying. While here, peaceful life was beginning. Shops opened. One event that has stayed with me is the opening of a bakery on Liteiny Prospekt. I can still remember it. For some reason my strongest childhood impression was a loaf of white bread on the table. Bulka, as they call white bread in Leningrad.

My father's commander was travelling through Leningrad. «Wait for your husband, Lyubochka, he'll come soon. Your Yasha will return as a Hero of the Soviet Union. All documents are prepared already.» If only it had happened that way. Perhaps many of the subsequent problems in my family would never have arisen. But it turned out differently. Somewhere in the headquarters they had changed the nomination for the Gold Star of the Hero and my father was awarded the Order of the Red Banner instead. My father never pleaded on his own behalf and did not appeal to his front commander.

Who thought of those things back then? The war was over. My father was safe and sound. Almost everyone was safe. The only person in my father's huge family who had died was his older brother. His beloved younger brother Borya returned from captivity. He had pretended to be Tartar and thus saved his own life. What joy that was! My grandmother's entire family, all together. The only one missing was my grandmother herself. My father was jolly and strong. He would sing arias, everybody would start dancing. He would hug my mother and her two sisters to himself, lift them up and waltz around with them. Everybody idolised my father. He was a real hero, his chest covered in orders. Twelve military honours. He would drink a whole bottle of vodka in one go, to the Victory.

So many things remained in the past. He had suffered concussion when a mine exploded next to him. The left side of his body was left paralysed. He'd only just recovered a bit in hospital when he left in a hurry to catch up with his unit. The left side of his face remained immobile for a long time. On one of the photographs from the front his face looks contorted. My father was older than the other front soldiers; they used to call him 'batya', father. Fate saved him from the bullets. But his life could have come to an end for a different reason. My father was a signalman. Once, near Kursk, he and a group of fighters were given the task to set up communication links between our sub-units. With spools of wire on their backs and submachine-guns they had to fight their way through this layer cake of Russian and German positions and return to the position of their unit. Several groups had already been sent on this mission; all had perished. The fighting lasted several days. They completed the task. My father returned and went to the staff quarters to report. An officer he didn't know held forth: «We are risking our lives here while the yids are taking cover behind the front line.» My father threw himself at the officer and hit him in the odious face with a brick. So he came to face trial. According to martial law he should have been shot. What his commander did in order to save him I don't know. They hushed up the story somehow. How they managed to get past the «smershevtsy» – Soviet counterintelligence – I don't know either. God averted them. And the commander. A courageous, noble man. Moreover, he took the risk upon himself. My father received the next award. And in winter 1945 he was nominated for the Star of the Hero for the forced crossing of the river Oder. The Red Army had captured a bridgehead on the other bank. My father's men had to establish a signal connection. They were crawling across the ice with their spools. A mine exploded next to my father, the ice broke, and the massively heavy spool dragged him down, underwater. A very young boy, a signalman from his section, held a pole into the water, which my father managed to grab. Lucky him. He clambered out of the icy water. The section moved on. They established the connection. That's what my father told me. For this action he was nominated for the Hero.

Recently my son found a copy of the original documents nominating my father for his awards on the website «Openaccess database of documents 'The People's Victory in the Great Fatherland War 1941-45'». Look, he said, grandfather was a «terminator». This is what's written, in black and white, in careful handwriting, in the official document on the grounds of which my father received the Order of the Red Banner:

«Sergeant major – surname, name, patronymic – displayed extraordinary courage, self-control, bravery and heroism during the forced crossing of the river Oder and the storming of a heavily fortified defence position on German territory.

In command of a telegraph unit, he inspired his subordinates to military feats by personal example.

Several times he personally removed interruptions to the signal line.

On 26 January 1945 he shot five Nazis at point blank while on his military mission and the signal connection was established in time.

For the forced crossing of the river Oder and the storming of a heavily fortified enemy defence position sergeant major – surname, name, patronymic – is deserving of the Highest Government Award, i. e. the title of Hero of the Soviet Union, the Order of Lenin and the token of particular excellence, the Gold Star Medal».

Let us return to those post-war years. It's all in the past now. The only thing that matters now is to live. Perhaps these were our family's best years. But they were also very difficult years.