Memories. Notes of a military engineer. From the memories of the war Exit from the encirclement stories of soldiers 1941

MEMORY FRAGMENT -1
From February 5, 1942 to February 17, the 510th GAP as part of the 29th Army was cut off from its rear from the north along the river. Volga. The supply was cut off. The planes dropped ammunition, not crackers. The trips of the foremen of the batteries to the collective farms near Olenino made it possible to supply the field kitchens with potatoes and hemp seeds. There was no salt.

February 6 in the morning, a reinforced Nazi battalion with light guns began to approach the defense line of the 4th division. But the battery commander, Lieutenant Kazantsev, had set up and carefully disguised the 152-millimeter gun of Semyon Mitrofanovich Kolesnichenko the night before in this sector in front of the position. His gunner was an experienced and courageous artilleryman from Krasnoyarsk P.S. Korsakov. When the Nazis approached, the battery commander gave the command:
- Load the gun! And then he fell down, struck by machine gun fire.
- Fire! - political instructor Shitov commanded, and after a few seconds the first powerful shell exploded in the enemy column, followed by the second, third ... The Nazis rushed about, rushed to the side of the road, and the gunner Pyotr Korsakov fired direct fire at the fleeing Nazis. But now the last sixth shell is fired. And then everyone who was in the firing position opened fire on the fleeing Nazis from rifles and carbines.
When the battle ended, about a hundred corpses of fascist soldiers and officers remained on the battlefield.
The unparalleled feat of seventeen artillery soldiers is forever inscribed in the combat chronicle of the regiment.

MEMORY FRAGMENT - 2
... The Germans bombed constantly. The deputy commander of the 1st division, Art. lieutenant Zamorov, battalion commanders Voskovoy, Ivanov, battery commanders Asians, Taskaev, corporals Goryuk, Natalushko, but the regiment suffered especially heavy losses during the German offensives when they tried to break through the defenses.
The headquarters of the regiment, which was in the cars of st. Monchalovo at the Rubezhnoye junction. Ushatsky Klavdy Avksentovich equipped his observation post of the regiment commander on a water tower. The guns of the 2nd, 1st and 4th divisions were located along the road to Rubizhnoye. Artillerymen, having combed the forest, dug in in the snow. On the left near the village of Stupino, the 3rd division of 152 mm dug in. howitzers. But there were only ten shells per division.
Communication with the headquarters of the Kalinin Front and ammunition dropped from the aircraft did not change the situation. Then a rifle battalion of 300 soldiers formed from artillerymen under the command of the commander of the 1st division, captain Fedorenko, and the commissar of art. political instructor Katushenko and the chief of staff, senior lieutenant Leontyev, departed for the territory of the 39th army, starting an offensive near Sortino.
A February 7, 1942 the Germans launched an offensive in the Monchalovo region. Our guns for the 2nd day with direct fire repulsed the attacks of the Nazis. The duel of the combat crew of Kolesnichenko with a whole battalion of Germans, the death of the battalion commander Lieutenant Kazantsev, complete encirclement (in the vicinity of the station of Chertolino, the Germans cut off the battalion from the 39th army) - these are the tragic results of one day of battles. The officers of the staff of S.D. are in charge of the defense. Turkov and I.A. Shchekotov. German chains from Rubezhnoye, Korytovo, Stupino decisively attacked the trenches of the regiment. The battle took the 2nd division. Corporal Karpenko and Red Army soldier Gavrilov destroy the leading officer. Three brave: com. Post offices S.I. Proshchaev, scout senior sergeant Loginov P.I., Komsomol organizer of the regiment, junior political instructor Fedorenko A.P. crawling towards the attackers and throwing grenades at the Germans. 17 people were killed in the battle, including Commissar Doroshenko. Gun commander Butko N.F., commissar Shitov A.A., commander of art. platoon captain Tretyak D.P., medical assistant lieutenant Murzin I.M. and others. The Germans retreated. The first trophies: floor - hats of Hitler's crosses.
3rd division of Lieutenant Lobytsyn V.S. with the last direct-fire shells, he stopped the Germans wedged into the defense. The regimental headquarters and the walking wounded from the rear completed the defeat of the infiltrated Germans along the railway embankment. During the fighting in the environment, with the fire of hand weapons, the personnel of the regiment destroyed over 700 German soldiers and officers. The order of the headquarters of the front "to hold out for 2 days" was carried out.
Exit to your own with fights February 18-23 The commander of the regiment, Captain Ushatsky Klavdy Avksentovich, led the breakthrough. This mass landing, without tanks, through deep snow towards the location of the 30th Army was risky. Enemy fire cut off the column of the 2nd division and the convoy of the wounded. I had to turn north to join the battle. Rescued 106 wounded. Again losses: the commander of the 2nd division, Captain Petrenko, intelligence agent Krasikov, doctor Yermolova, and others died.
And yet, in the direction of Bakhmutovo, they went to their own. The regiment was housed in the hospitals of the 39th Army. On the "big Earth" the wounded were assisted, a bathhouse and food for artillerymen were urgently organized. And by evening, the regiment had already taken up defenses east of the village of Medveditsa. The war continued...

Memoirs of Zylev.

IN THE ENVIRONMENT UNDER VYAZMA. 1941 October.

In the evening, the movement of cars almost completely stopped, no one understood why we were not moving at all. Various guesses were made, they said that there were very bad roads ahead, and cars were getting stuck in the mud. Others said that more and more vehicles and people were pouring into the highway ahead along the side roads, and that's why we were standing. But more and more clearly we began to understand that the reason lies in something! friend. Towards evening, terrible rumors spread through the columns, they said! that the road was closed by the Germans, that on October 6, in the Vyazma region, the Germans landed a large paratrooper, which blocked the path of the retreating army. Then they began to say that battles were being fought with the landing force, that it might soon be possible to break through towards Moscow. Thoughts began to appear in the columns to turn off the highway somewhere to the right or to the left, onto a country road and go around the obstacle. This plan was hampered by large, almost impassable dirt on country roads, but some cars began to try this method. But it soon became known that the cars that drove off 5-10 kilos were; ditch from the highway, were fired upon by the Germans, and they had to return back to the total mass of vehicles. That evening we got acquainted with a new word for us - "environment". Now all our thoughts were focused on breaking out of the encirclement. Everyone seized the slightest opportunity to move forward. Sometimes the cars started to move, drove a kilometer or even two. Then the mood of everyone rose, they said that, obviously, they managed to break through the encirclement, and that we would now break out of it.

All that night we were busy helping our car out of the mud. At night, we decided to move forward and overtook parked cars on the sides of the road. Because he was on the sidelines! incredible mud, we hardly got into the car. Straining all our strength, suffocating in the burning gasoline, we pushed our lorry, using every opportunity to move forward. What a night it was. We did not even notice how it ended, but it had neither beginning nor end. It was a terrible dirt road, petrol burnt, it was 5-6 kilometers that we managed to overcome. In the morning we almost did not recognize each other, stained with road mud and gasoline soot, overgrown, thin, we looked like people who had come out of the underworld, if only it existed. The morning of September 8 met us somewhere near the city of Vyazma. Finally exhausted, we joined the general stream and now moved at a common pace, or rather, did not move at all. This morning was frosty. The snow that fell during the night lightly fluffed the area. The crimson-pinkish sun rose from the east, illuminating with its rays the quiet corners of the Smolensk woods and Vodyanki, and a huge tape of cars, tractors, guns, fuel trucks, power plants, sanitary and passenger marinas. This ribbon extended both forward and backward as far as the eye could see. But besides cars, there were many foot and horsemen. Sometimes whole units moved along the road, but more solitary people and small groups of people wandered. But where did they go? Some went forward towards Vyazma, others crossed the highway from south to north or vice versa. There was no definite direction of movement, it was some kind of cycle. The cars stopped, but we could not fall asleep, hunger interfered, the consciousness of our position, and most importantly, the cold. Now our clothes were no longer enough, our feet were freezing without warm footcloths, our ears were freezing, which we tried to cover with our summer caps, our hands were freezing, on which there were no mittens. One car in front of us had a broken engine, there was a man in this car who asked to get into our car, we let him in, because he gave us half a bag of buckwheat for this. This cereal saved us. We got out of the car and immediately, near the road, began to cook buckwheat porridge for ourselves. And, although we did not have salt, we ate this unsalted buckwheat porridge with pleasure. This day was spent waiting. The cars hardly moved forward. For the whole day we drove no more than one or two kilometers. There were no special events during this day. The number of people who were in the surrounding area was increasing. This happened at the expense of those who moved on foot and on horseback. They are somewhat behind the flow of cars. German planes flew over us several times, but they did not bomb or fire machine guns.
The environment became a fact that everyone was aware of and felt. At the initiative of individual commanders, some positions began to be arranged. Artillery batteries or individual guns were located in places. Some of these guns fired from time to time, but the gunners themselves hardly knew where their shells fell. In one place we saw a group of anti-aircraft machine guns with four barrels connected to each other. These machine guns fired at flying German planes. Infantry and cavalry units moved somewhere, took up some kind of defense, and all this happened either spontaneously or at the initiative of individual commanders. There was no general order and command. They began to say that some armored formations were sent to the rescue of the encircled units, many had high hopes for this. These conversations were passed from mouth to mouth, from car to car, and it was impossible to verify their authenticity. We waited, waited, that our frozen columns, as if frozen to the ground, were about to move again! cars, but from the second half of the day the movement stopped altogether. The whole day we stood almost on the spot, we were tormented by the agonizing expectation, the hope of breaking out of the encirclement now disappeared, then returned again. We were tormented by the cold, from which there was absolutely nowhere to hide, we were tormented by fatigue, at times we were terribly sleepy. But the whole situation made me constantly wary. We discussed our position. Korshunov suggested, before it was too late, to abandon the car and get out of the encirclement on foot, his plan was discussed several times, but each time the majority was rejected. The car, although motionless, was our hope, we believed that the encirclement would be broken, and we using the car, along with everyone else, we can get out of this difficult situation that we are in. As time went on, and finally the night came, but it was not a night like ordinary nights of people.Despite the fact that we , like everyone around us, had not slept for three days, the night did not in the least increase our desire to sleep, on the contrary, the darkness exacerbated the feeling of anxiety.Ahead, a glow was visible, there, as we knew, Vyazma was burning, random shooting was heard from all sides.

Especially strongly the shooting was heard ahead. On the horizon, in many places, the glow of conflagrations could be seen. It burned settlements, villages and cities of the Smolensk region. Sometimes German planes flew over us. In this case, many people fled from the cars into the forest, fearing bombing, but the planes did not touch us, obviously, this was not part of the plans of the Nazi command. The more time passed, the harder our expectation became, the more meaningless it seemed.

At about eleven o'clock at night, Korshunov again turned to us with a proposal to leave the car and go on foot. “We will freeze here, the Germans will catch us like mice, that this car was given to you, you will die with it,” said Korshunov. But when the majority nevertheless spoke in favor of staying in the car, he said: "I'm leaving, whoever wants to go with me, let's go." Only I went with him. We went along the column of cars in the direction where we were supposed to We walked past a stream of stopped cars for about five or six kilometers. Everywhere people were sitting near the cars, some people began to make fires near the cars. Ahead of us, we came across several more battles, such as we saw on the road two days ago. shooting was heard, the contours of some big conflagration began to clearly emerge, and the cars ran out. We went along the road, but soon came to a place where mines were falling and bullets were whistling. Walking a little further, we began to understand that it was so easy from this place you can’t get out, that the Germans are watching the road, and that it’s impossible to go further without knowing the way. I managed to see them, they cooked buckwheat porridge for themselves, ate a little of it, warmed themselves around the fire. I had to wait again. It was freezing, a little snow fell, the mud on the road froze, sometimes the moon peeped out from behind the clouds, illuminating the gloomy, frozen river of cars, tractors, guns, the faces of dozing people, all this terrible, unusual picture. But now dawn broke in the east, it began to get light, the darkness dissipated more and more, our dirty swollen faces, sunken eyes, and beards that had grown over these days, became more and more clearly visible.
And suddenly there was some movement in the column. It, like an electric current, ran from car to car, from person to person. Everyone, not even knowing what the matter was, began to start the cars, the noise of engines was heard, a huge stream of seemingly already frozen cars came to life. Now almost all the engines were running, gasoline cinders filled the clean frosty air. The news, which we had been waiting for the whole day, spread quickly through the column, like the wind. It was said that some colonel said that the encirclement had been broken, that if you were driving along a country road to the left of the highway, you could break out of the encirclement. Soon these words became the property of all. Our car was parked on the highway quite close to the dirt road, which now rushed to the car. At first, the cars kept to the road, but then they began to overtake each other, and a line of cars stretched along a small country road, this line became wider, our car was also driving on virgin soil. It was possible to drive across the virgin lands without much difficulty, since the ground was frozen, and the field was fairly flat. Gradually, a whole avalanche of cars formed, but then a small river with relatively gentle banks blocked the cars, a whole sea of ​​\u200b\u200bcars formed near this river. At first, the cars waited in line near a small bridge, but soon they began to cross the river, regardless of where they had to do it. We also began to cross the barrier, choosing a place where the banks were more gentle, and the river seemed smaller to us. We got out of the car, and the driver, having accelerated, tried to take the barrier on the move. The car, bouncing on hillocks, drove off the shore, cutting through the water, crossed the river, but could not go to the opposite bank. What at other times would have been incredible was accomplished by us in a few minutes. We all piled on the back of the car and, drenched in sweat, literally carried it ashore. Hundreds of vehicles crossed the river with the same wide front, then the field somehow narrowed, and a terrible hustle formed here. At this time, I had to see a picture of human madness. A fuel truck stood in front, its tap was open, and gasoline was gushing out of it, something unusual was happening near the fuel truck: dozens of people with buckets were trying to pour themselves gasoline, and everyone wanted to be the first to do it. People pushed each other away, slipped their buckets under the jet and were satisfied if a few liters of gasoline were poured into the bucket. Then they ran to their cars. I saw how some commander, in order to collect gasoline, hit one of those standing in front of him in the temple with the handle of a revolver, he staggered and fell. But this episode was not something special in the atmosphere of wild striving forward that reigned all around. Soon the cars burst out onto a wide field and in a solid avalanche, perhaps a little less than a kilometer wide, rushed forward. It is difficult to imagine this picture, but it was absolutely extraordinary, it was a picture of some kind of madness, a rush forward, it seemed that this rushing avalanche could demolish everything in its path.

Our car was almost in the very front rows, almost the entire head of the stream was visible from it. Cars were driving in the middle, cavalry was rushing to the right near the edge of the forest, infantry was running behind it, infantry cavalry was also visible to the left of the column of cars, and the whole mass had only one movement - only forward, forward, as quickly as possible, forward, despite what obstacles, forward, sparing neither cars nor yourself. And in front lay a field, in some places covered with hummocks, a field covered with fresh snow, frostbitten by a slight frost, at the other end of which one could see a small village with a white bell tower. The sun, with pinkish morning rays, illuminated the frozen earth, and the quiet bell tower, and the forest covered with the first snow, and an avalanche of cars, horses and people rushing forward.

And suddenly, from the side of the village, machine-gun and machine-gun bursts rumbled at once, in front of the column they whistled and exploded, throwing clods of dirt and mines into the air. As if by an invisible wave of some magician's wand, the head of the column froze for a moment, as if it stopped in a pose of rapid movement forward, as in a picture of some great battle painter, and then turned and rushed back. There was a terrible commotion, some cars still continued to move forward. The cars collided, overturned, piled on top of each other, people jumped out of the cars and ran deep into the column and towards the forest, which we had before on the right hand, but now it has become on the left. A mine exploded under the radiator of our car, and the car stopped, now it was no longer needed, we jumped off it and joined the general stream of running people. When I ran up to the forest, I saw among those around me only one person I knew, that was Alexander Volkov.
Having passed in the direction to the south, we crossed the woods, went out into the field, along which, like us, quite a lot of people were walking. We were just walking, we didn't know where we were going. Maybe we thought that we would accidentally find a way out of the encirclement there, but we soon saw that this was impossible. As soon as we moved 500 meters across the field from the edge of the forest, mines whistled, and several explosions were heard next to us. All the people who were here ran back to the forest, and we along with them. At the edge of the woods, we found several wrecked cars, the corpses of dead people lay nearby. These cars belonged, obviously, to some department of clothing supply, because they had warm boots and caps. We didn’t need warm caps, we took them and gladly put them on our heads. I had a star on my cap, which I kept from the time when, as a student, I trained as a platoon commander, leaving the old cap, I split the star into a new warm cap. Those fighters and commanders who had boots began to change them for boots. I still remember this picture in the forest: near the cars with uniforms, people were trying on boots, caps, throwing their old things, talking among themselves. The main question was how to get out of the environment. There were people who already knew how they got out of the encirclement. They went out in detachments of one hundred and two hundred people.

This method was the most ineffective. Such a group was immediately noticed by the Germans and, being relatively small in number, almost all of them perished or were taken prisoner. It was better to try your luck by trying to slip past the surrounding Germans in a small group. Such a group could count on being overlooked, in which case it was a complete success.

After sitting for a while and having a rest, we went to wander through the forest. It was full of people, usually they were either singles, or groups of two or three people who knew each other from the service in one unit. In the middle of the day we met a friend, it was the deputy head of the first department of our division, Major Minyaev from the reserve, and he and we were very happy to meet, now there were three of us, but none of us had a crumb to eat. The hunger reminded us that there was buckwheat left in our lorry, and we began to make a plan how we would get to our car. We approached the place from where the field was seen, which was a witness to the events of today. There were abandoned cars on it. It was impossible to go to the field in the light - the Germans could notice, and we began to wait for dusk. Minyaev remained at the edge of the forest, while Volkov and I went to our car to get the groats we were interested in. Fearing shelling from the Germans, we carefully made our way to the place where our car was parked. The field bore traces of the tragedy that had played out in the morning, the corpses of dead people lay on the ground, we noticed that most of them were lying face down to the ground, as if wrapping their arms around it. Finally, we approached our car: without people, in the midst of this silent field, it seemed to us some kind of need. I climbed onto the body of the car and then I was finally convinced that we had found what we were looking for, several handfuls of buckwheat were scattered over the body, but there was no bag. Obviously, someone beat us to it. Empty-handed, we returned to Minyaev. This night was colder than other nights, the frost reached 5-6 degrees, at least it seemed to us. Tired and exhausted from the desire to fall asleep, we tried to get warmer in some pile of flax, but nothing came of it. We lay down side by side, covered ourselves with bundles of linen, but the cold penetrated to the bones, our legs stiffened, our bones ached. We soon realized that we would not be able to sleep. Then we got up and began to wander through the forest. Then they decided to get out of the encirclement. Selecting a certain! direction, we began to move in that direction through the forest. We walked about five kilometers and came to a place where some part was located on the borders of the surrounded area. Having gone forward behind the line of defense, we were soon fired from a machine gun and, seeing that we had been noticed, returned back and again began to wander through the forest. There were people all around, in some places bonfires were kindled, they warmed themselves around them, and those who had something to eat cooked food in pots. We approached one of these fires and tried to warm ourselves.

Suddenly, one of those sitting near the fire screamed, clutched his chest and fell to the ground, then several bullets whistled over us, it was German snipers who fired. After that, everyone ran away from the fire. We didn't go near the fires anymore. That night we met and talked with many people. These conversations began with questions. "Which unit are you from? What city? A cadre or militiaman?" From these conversations we learned that headquarters and units of several armies were surrounded near Vyazma. There were representatives of all branches of the military, the majority were personnel, but there were also militias, there were people from different parts of the country: from the Urals, from Siberia, but most of all came across Muscovites. All conversations boiled down to one question: how to get out of the encirclement. Examples of successful and unsuccessful exits were given, and we came to the conclusion that it was easiest to leave in a small group, but for this it was necessary to study the area, find out where it was easier to get through the German encirclement.
Here, from the east, the sky became brighter, then the dawn turned red, and we again saw the picture to which we had become accustomed, if only we can get used to it, we saw many people like us, dirty, overgrown and emaciated people and, often, corpses lying around them. Now, in the morning, at the time when people usually get up after sleep, we felt even more tired, felt even more hungry, felt some kind of drowsiness, seemed to be even more cold and shivering. Of the three of us, Alexander Volkov was the strongest and most enduring, but he was pretty depressed by the whole situation. These days I understood what it means to constantly freeze, what it means not to sleep for several days in a row, what it means to be deadly tired. I remember well that cold, hunger and fatigue reduced the will to live, making life some kind of constant torture, and despite this, we found the strength to think how to get out of the environment, to find this way out. . The thought of the fate of our Motherland gave us strength: this thought disturbed us, and we talked and thought about what was happening now, where the Germans had gone, where the front was now. And we did not want to get out of the fight, to surround us - this does not mean to take us. We also thought about the fate of our loved ones, about what they are now experiencing, about what will happen to them if we never return to them. In general, a feeling of active resistance to the enemy around us woke up in us.
Having chosen a place higher, we examined the area and saw that there was a forest in the direction of the east. Deciding that it would be easier to pass through the forest, we went towards the east, thinking to find out in a day where we could get out of the encirclement according to the conditions of the terrain and the experience of those who had already tried to do this. We walked several kilometers and stopped in a small hollow, in which and near which several hundred people like us had gathered. We sat down to rest and talk about our fate. Soon a German aircraft appeared above us, before that I had not seen such aircraft: it was small, with strongly curved, sharply geometric wings. Someone called this plane "crooked leg". "Crooked leg" flew at a relatively low altitude over the hollow where people were sitting, and flew away. Literally a few minutes after her disappearance, mines began to fall in the area of ​​\u200b\u200bthe hollow - the Germans were shooting through the crowded place.

Not wanting to become a victim of a German mine, we, like others, ran through the forest. Every time a mine whistled over us, we lay down on the ground. A few minutes later we were already out of the shelling zone and continued our way to the east. Suddenly someone called out to Major Minyaev, he turned around and saw several people who turned out to be commanders and fighters from the artillery regiment of our division. I remember one of them, the captain, Minyaev knew, since he had been in the first department of our headquarters for the grandfathers of the service. We decided to unite, now there are eight of us. As it turned out from the conversations, they did not yet have a definite plan for getting out of the encirclement. After listening to our plan, they willingly joined in, and we all walked together through the forest towards the east. Just like us, the comrades from the artillery regiment did not have a crumb of food, and they, like us, had not slept for six days. Sleep took possession of us, we wandered, moving our legs with difficulty, hardly speaking to each other. For the fourth day now, we have been surrounded, several times in recent days we have been under automatic, machine-gun and mortar shelling, participated in battles, have seen terrible pictures of death and destruction.
For the fourth day, we felt ourselves in a huge trap, surrounded by an army of the enemy, who was waiting for us to completely lose strength, the will to fight and live, and begin to surrender. Heavy thoughts overcame us, we were offended that here, in our native land, many tens of thousands of people, a huge number of cars and all kinds of equipment were doomed to death and captivity. let's give ourselves to the Germans." In this resistance of ours, in this will of the people to fight, there was something positive that elevates the Vyazemsky encirclement above many encirclements from the history of the war. Despite the lack of a common command. The Vyazemsky encirclement resisted the German troops. In places this resistance was organized by individual commanders, near whom parts of their regiments, battalions, divisions and armies were preserved, in places this resistance arose spontaneously, as a protest of the Russian people against the actions of the enemy who had invaded the borders of our Motherland. Whoever was near Vyazma imagines the enormous scale of the events that took place there, he imagines the horror experienced by people who were among the surrounded units, he imagines the significance for the fate of Moscow, and perhaps the Motherland, of the resistance that the Vyazemsky encirclement of the German -fascist army. The Vyazemsky encirclement was one of the largest operations in the first months of the Great Patriotic War.

Despite the severity of the losses suffered by our army in October 1941 near Vyazma, the Vyazma encirclement played a big role in turning the military events in our favor at this difficult moment in the Great Patriotic War. The resistance that arose near Vyazma forced the German command to allocate a significant part of the army advancing towards Moscow to fight the encircled troops. The Vyazemsky encirclement shows hundreds and thousands of heroic deeds of both individual commanders and entire military groups, sometimes reaching up to ten thousand people in number. These feats are also remarkable in that the people who performed them were in incredibly difficult environmental conditions, conditions of which only a faint idea is given by the pictures described in this story. These feats are remarkable both in that they took place at the most difficult moment, when it seemed that the fate of the Motherland was in the greatest danger, and in the place where, it seems, all the misfortunes that haunted us in the summer and autumn of 1941 united.

Little has been written in our country about the encirclement near Vyazma, indiscriminately and entirely attributing this whole phenomenon to the number of the biggest failures of our army. This is a wrong view, the Vyazemsky environment deserves to be studied, described in literature, appreciated all its positive significance, raised to the proper height the exploits of thousands of people, those who fought, died and won near Vyazma. And I must say frankly that being surrounded near Vyazma was regarded as a negative moment in our biographies, and this had to be felt more than once during further service in the army, until the very end of the war, when this fact was generally ignored, as if due to the prescription of time . I'm not talking here about our comrades who later served in the army, they always listened with attention to the stories about the Vyazemsky encirclement and paid tribute to what we experienced in that harsh time (this happened to me, I think it was the same with thousands of other participants in the Vyazemsky environment). We must welcome the change in attitude that has recently taken place towards those who were captured in the Vyazma region, after their return from captivity, these people were treated very unfairly, and they had to go through a lot in connection with this. After all, not everyone was lucky enough to get out of the encirclement, not everyone had the strength to do it, and not everyone had favorable circumstances for this. It is impossible to judge people deprived of command, deprived of food, often without any ammunition, not well-dressed and freezing in the conditions of the early winter of 1941, people who were surrounded on all sides by the Nazi army armed to the teeth. In addition, it must be borne in mind that many of them offered armed resistance to the Germans and used all the means at their disposal before they were forced by the hopelessness of their situation to surrender, or rather, they did not surrender, but were taken prisoner against them. will of the German fascist troops.

However, I will continue to describe what happened to our small group. Trying to cover ourselves more tightly with our raincoats in order to keep our body warm, we slowly walked through the forest. Suddenly, not far away, we saw a large crowd of people that had gathered around two cars. We decided to find out what was going on there.

When our group approached the cars, we saw that people were snatching bags of sugar and boxes of concentrates. Squeezing our way to the cars, we managed to get ourselves a few kilograms of fine lump sugar, several dozen pieces of millet concentrates and a rather large piece of real meat. Moving away from the car, where we managed to get food and choosing a more comfortable hollow, we started preparing dinner. All the cauldrons were mobilized, in which meat, millet concentrate was cooked on a fire, but, without waiting for this wonderful dinner, we ate sugar. Soon the meat was cooked, each of us received a piece weighing at least half a kilogram and could satisfy our hunger. We managed to get salt once, having exchanged it with one of the neighbors for sugar.

At this time, a "crooked leg" flew over the forest where we were having lunch again, and soon mines began to whistle again. Fired five or six mortars. At first, the mines exploded about a hundred and fifty meters from us, then with each salvo a series of explosions approached us. I well remember the whistle of a flying mine: at first, this whistle is barely audible, then, as it grows, it ends in an explosion. We did not run away anywhere, but, clinging closer to the ground, eating our meat, we lay in the same place. One mine landed very close to us, three or four meters away, but for some reason it did not explode. Then the line of explosions moved somewhere deeper, and we could safely move on to our porridge. At this time, Sasha Volkov called out to some Red Army soldier who was passing by us, he called him by name. He turned around and called Volkov "Sasha". They approached and shook hands. The Red Army soldier Volkov greeted was from the same village as him. Although they had not seen each other for quite a few years, they got to know each other. He came up to our fire and ate with pleasure the millet porridge that we offered him, and we struck up a conversation.
First, Volkov told how we want to get out of the encirclement, and then his fellow villager spoke. He told us that they still had half of the personnel of the sapper battalion, I remember, about 400 fighters, said that that night they would leave the encirclement and invited us to join his unit. Having somewhat regretted our plan, we decided to take advantage of his invitation.
Having cleaned our kettles, dividing sugar and millet concentrates among ourselves, we set off after Comrade Sasha. Very close to the place where we cooked our own food, there was a small ravine, in which the battalion was located, in which Sasha's countryman served. They saw and lay on the ground, fires burned here and there, food was cooked on them. They still had some food supplies. The people were all tall, strong, of the same age; as they say, personnel officers.

I don’t remember with whom we negotiated our joining the battalion, but here a plan arose: our group was supposed to play the role of reconnaissance when leaving the encirclement, this also corresponded to our plans. They gave us a brisk, lively lad, who last night, reconnaissance of the road for the battalion, two or three times made his way unnoticed through the line of the German encirclement and returned back. He said that our group would be able to pass unnoticed in the forest, and a battalion would follow it, which, if we were lucky, would have to crawl to the positions of the Germans and, suddenly attacking them, break through the line of defense and break out of the encirclement.

This plan was more realistic than ours. Now the time was approaching when we had to turn this plan into reality.

Everyone was well aware that great difficulties might arise, that the matter would not go without casualties on our part, and that many would have to die that night in this unknown forest. We broke branches for ourselves, put raincoats on them and lay down, clinging to each other. After eating, we were seized by some kind of drowsiness: it was not a dream, it was some kind of half-forgetfulness. During the day, the cold was less, in the sun, which appeared from behind the clouds, the snow that had fallen these days began to melt. It was rather quiet, it was hard to think that here, almost nearby, there were about 400 people who would try their fate in an unequal battle that night. While resting, we tried to restore our strength, which, as we understood, we would need that night.

But an unexpected circumstance changed once again all our plans.

Larionov A. E.

Military everyday life is an unusually capacious and multifaceted phenomenon. This is all the more true in relation to the Great Patriotic War, which included tens of millions of human destinies in a vast geographical area in a variety of circumstances. The Red Army began the war in circumstances that seemed disastrous to many, with no alternative, and ended it in Berlin, when its all-conquering power seemed just as uncontested. When we talk about the daily life of soldiers and officers (for 1941-1942 - fighters and commanders) of the Red Army, we must take into account the radical changes in the historical situation that occurred during the four war years. Like any historical phenomenon, military everyday life is not static, but dynamic, changeable, subject to external circumstances and influencing them itself. This is also the dialectic of its existence and the laws of development.

Without knowledge of the antecedent, it is impossible to adequately understand the subsequent. The picture of the daily life of the Red Army in the second and third periods of the war will be largely incomprehensible and incomplete without the corresponding realities of the first, most difficult period of hostilities. One of the brightest and most tragic pages of the first period of the war was the encirclement or “cauldrons” of various scales, which became a real nightmare for privates and commanders of all ranks. For the period 1941 - 1942. The Red Army had to go through several large encirclements of the front and army scale.

Several million servicemen ended up in "cauldrons" of various sizes. Most of them died in the process of liquidating the encirclement by the German troops and their allies, or later - already in German captivity. Few managed to survive. Here is an eloquent figure: according to archival data, from 3.5 to 5 million people were in German captivity. (It should be pointed out that the different methods of counting prisoners of war in the USSR and in Germany during the war: while the German command included in the category of prisoners all men of military age who were captured in this territory, the Soviet command attributed to prisoners of war those who at the time of captivity was on active duty). Of this number, about 900 thousand people were released at the end of the war. Some of them, being again included in the active army, inevitably died, therefore, very few managed to survive and survive to this day.

The largest "cauldrons" of a front-line scale in 1941 were the following: the encirclement of the main forces of the Western Front on June 22-28, 1941 near Bialystok and Minsk; the encirclement of the forces of the 6th and 12th armies in the Uman region in August 1941; the encirclement of the main forces of the Southwestern Front in late August - the first half of September 1941 (the infamous Kiev cauldron); the encirclement of the troops of the Bryansk and Western fronts at the beginning of the German operation "Typhoon" on October 2-8, 1941. In 1942, there were no such number of catastrophes of a strategic scale. Nevertheless, as a result of a number of reasons, in the 2nd half of May 1942, formations of the Southwestern Front were surrounded near Kharkov; in addition, for several months in 1942 (from January) they fought surrounded by units of the 33rd Army, the 4th Airborne Corps and the 1st Guards. cavalry corps; The most tragic encirclement on an army scale was the encirclement of the 2nd Shock Army in the forests near Lyuban and Mga in the summer of 1942. when trying to unblock Leningrad.

Such a detailed enumeration of the environments was required in order to make the main idea of ​​this article clearer: life in environments of various sizes became one of the constants of the daily life of the Red Army in the first period of the war, which involved several million military personnel. Therefore, it is legitimate to analyze this page of military everyday life as an independent facet in the history of military everyday life during the Great Patriotic War. This analysis has a certain specificity. The number of survivors in the encirclement is small. Archival documents are fragmentary and cannot reflect the facts with the same completeness when it comes to a stable defense or a successful offensive. The main source of information about everyday life in the encirclement can be precisely the memoirs of the former "encirclement", partly journalistic works of military journalists, such as Evgeny Dolmatovsky, Sergei Smirnov, who, however, based their works also on the memoirs of direct eyewitnesses and participants in the events.

The very concept of “everyday life in the environment” is a certain euphemism, since the environment is, by definition, an extreme situation. The normal way of life of the army in it was inevitably violated. However, in their totality, these violations and extreme conditions formed a certain picture, steadily repeating from “boiler” to “boiler”. The most important milestone was, in this case, the realization of the very fact of being surrounded by soldiers and officers. This awareness determined the relationship of people, their behavioral reactions, morale and specific actions. The understanding that a military unit, subunit or formation was surrounded came in different ways, depending on specific conditions. For senior and senior commanders at the level from the divisional to the front level, inclusive, and by their position, who owns the completeness of information, knowledge of the environment came quickly enough, sometimes at the moment of its occurrence, and a premonition of it - sometimes even earlier, as soon as the situation came out on one or the other. another section of the front out of control.

For example, the headquarters and military council of the Southwestern Front in September 1941 received information about the emerging German encirclement two days before the connection in the Lokhvitsa area (about 100 km south of Konotop) of the 1st and 2nd German tank groups on September 12, 1941 (commander of the 1st Tgr - Colonel General Ewald von Kleist, 2nd Tgr - Colonel General Heinz Guderian).

Here is how the former head of the operational department of the headquarters of the South-Western Front, I. Kh. Bagramyan, talks about this in his memoirs: , during the battle for Kiev - the 38th Army] and asked me to urgently return to his command post. Here I heard bad news. While we were trying to clear the bridgehead at Durievka, General Kleist secretly moved his tank and motorized divisions to the Kremenchug area. On the morning of September 12, they ... cut through the 297sd front and rushed north ... It was easy to guess - Kleist rushed towards Guderian.

For ordinary and junior command personnel, whose operational outlook was limited by the dividing line with the nearest units, the information came with a more or less significant delay, when it was too late to change anything and the environment became a sad reality in which it was necessary to adapt and survive. Characteristic in this sense is the story of his getting into the environment of the Moscow militia Vadim Shimkevich, a veteran of the 2nd division of the people's militia: “On September 30, the battalion was raised to its feet under the thunder of guns and bombing. How could I suppose, and none of us knew, that a few hours ago, to the south and north of Yelnya, German tank corps broke through the Western Front and, crushing our army rear, were launching an offensive, passing tens of kilometers into the depths of our defense ... Finally, we waited (October 7-8), when the commanders announced the main thing to us: the battalion, concentrated in the Vyazma region, was surrounded. As you know, by October 7-8, 1941, German mobile formations, implementing the OKW (Oberkommandowermacht - High Command of the Ground Forces) Typhoon plan, firmly closed the encirclement ring east of Vyazma, into which units of 6 armies fell. Most of the Red Army soldiers were not destined to break out to their own. They were the “cogs” of a big war, so under the circumstances, their fate was sealed.

The most important feature of being surrounded, which determined the specifics of everyday life, was isolation from the main forces of one’s own troops and, as an inevitable consequence, the lack of a stable supply, communication with the high command, and reliable information about the operational situation. As can be seen from the memoirs of soldiers and officers who survived the encirclement, the very fact of its awareness was not immediately reflected in the daily life of the cut off units and subunits. The army is a very inertial system, many mechanisms of which are supported almost automatically. Relations between people are determined by hierarchy and subordination, which were also preserved in the environment. However, the longer people were in the environment, the greater the transformations that the relations between them, determined by military regulations, could undergo. And the very behavior of the encircled began to experience significant deviations from the seemingly unshakable army standards and stereotypes. In the conditions of the mass death of colleagues, including commanders and political workers, a sense of the hopelessness of their position or, at least, the senselessness of further resistance, signs of panic, cowardice, desertion, and even outright betrayal could appear. This was not the mainstream, but often became quite typical. War veteran S. G. Drobyazko cites a typical case of a latent decline in the morale of some of his colleagues in the difficult summer of 1942 in the Kuban steppes, where his battalion covered the retreat of the main forces and was surrounded: “At one of the stops, listening to ... conversations, I I realized that one of them (a soldier) had a notebook with a rewritten German leaflet-pass. There were leaflets that suggested throwing down weapons and going over to the side of the Germans. Those who presented the leaflet were promised life and food…”.

“Here comes a group of six people ... Seeing gaps ahead, one of them shouts with anguish:

"I can't, I can't take it!" - and feverishly tears off the buttonholes. The second calmly says to him:

Do you know what they shoot for?

“It’s the end anyway, the Germans are all around!” .

Thus, panic or defeatist moods in the conditions of encirclement could cover larger or smaller groups of military personnel, especially if there were no commanders and political workers nearby who could stop the spread of such sentiments. That is, sooner or later, the loss of command and communications contributed to the gradual drift of army units towards an uncontrollable crowd, seized by a panicky desire to survive. However, not everyone succumbed to this trend. There are many examples of impeccable performance of military duty, readiness to endure any difficulties, but go out to your own people or offer all possible resistance to the invaders.

In addition to the moral state, in the daily life of the Red Army soldiers who were surrounded, there were other specific aspects that also concerned material issues. The lack of a permanent supply brought to the fore the problem of providing food. The longer the stay in the environment, the sharper it became. Often, it was the lack of food that served as an incentive for voluntary surrender. At a certain point, contacts with local residents became the only source of food for the encircled, which inevitably increased the risk of running into German soldiers, threatened with capture or death.

Nikolai Inozemtsev in his front-line diary describes the food during the exit from the Kyiv Cauldron in the fall of 1941: “On the go we eat bread and tomatoes taken out by some old woman. It's been exactly a day since they last ate. We waved away 12-15 kilometers, there is no more strength to go. Some village. We go into the house. The hosts begin to warm up borscht and potatoes. We drink alcohol from antiperitone bags, have lunch. The eyes literally droop. We fall dead on the straw ... ".

“Soon, throwing back the tarpaulin replacing the door, a fighter entered the dugout.

- Hello! I brought you food, the company commander ordered. Here is your porridge. With difficulty, he removed the duffel bag from his shoulder, where there was stew in jars, bread and shag.

Bolshakov thanks the fighter for the food and attention.

“Why, it’s empty!” .

However, sometimes in the environment and in the retreat, which often merged together, there were cases that cannot be explained from the standpoint of common sense - before the arrival of the Germans, military property was destroyed, and even when it was possible to save at least part of it by distributing it to the fighting in the immediate vicinity to the Red Army: “Epifanov nods in the direction from which he came, asks:

Is everything burning and smoking there?

“It was the food warehouses that were set on fire. They burn them and guard some special units. The fighters asked them not to burn them, but to distribute them to us, the hungry.

- No, do not come close, we will shoot, they answered us. You would know how delicious it smells of fried sausage, and even baked stew, and toasted bread. You sniff, but you won’t be full.”

Similar episodes can be repeatedly found on the pages of "soldier's memoirs". As already mentioned, it is hardly possible to rationally explain the implementation of the scorched earth tactics order, brought to the point of absurdity - more than one soldier's life could be saved thanks to the distribution of property and food, which in any case was doomed to destruction.

At times, the food situation became catastrophic, when not only were supply lines cut, but there was also no way to get help from local residents. This is exactly how the circumstances developed during the encirclement of units of the 2nd Shock Army near Mga and Lyuban. Since the fighting was carried out in a swampy and wooded area, very sparsely populated, there was no need to hope for any serious help in providing food from the locals. After the German troops began to cut the corridor connecting parts of the army with the "mainland", this primarily affected the situation with food. Here is one of the characteristic and typical testimonies for that period: “Since April (1942), we have never received normal nutrition, and we spent half of March surrounded, starving. Here is the usual daily diet of our food - 150-200 g of millet porridge concentrate for 10 people, each tablespoon of crumbs and sometimes a teaspoon of granulated sugar, and there was no salt at all. If a horse was killed in a regiment, then it was divided into all batteries. No more than 100 g of meat was given to each, it was boiled, dipped in granulated sugar and eaten. There were many days without cracker crumbs, and without sugar. Similar stories abound in the memoirs of the encircled. Two points are noteworthy here: the preservation by people of combat readiness and readiness to fight to the end despite inhuman conditions, when it was impossible to eat enough or warm up in the conditions of continuous swamps for months; secondly, a high level of human solidarity, readiness to come to the rescue of a comrade. It is undeniable that it was the latter circumstance that served as the most important guarantee of maintaining combat capability by units of the 2nd UDA in completely hopeless conditions.

One can speculate about the reasons for such solidarity. It can be assumed that in this case we are dealing with a vivid example of the manifestation of the mechanisms of a traditional society to maintain collective viability, which is quite consistent with the basic code of Russian civilization, even if it underwent a significant transformation after 1917.

No less problematic than food was the organization of medical care for wounded soldiers and commanders in environments of various scales and durations. The main difficulty in all cases was the acute shortage of medicines, and often their complete absence, so that medical assistance was often provided purely symbolically, which led to an inevitable increase in mortality, including those wounded who, under more favorable circumstances, were saved. In this case, the concept of the military hierarchy also disappeared - assistance was provided to those who needed it first of all, regardless of rank and position. Such was the specificity of life in the environment.

As an example of medical care in the environment, one can cite a fragment of the story of one of those soldiers who, almost miraculously, survived in the Vyazemsky cauldron in the fall of 1941, subsequently managing to break through to the east: “A bullet hit me in the leg - in the right foot right through. Immediately half a boot of blood ... I came to the infirmary, I told the doctor:

- Do something to help.

- How can I help you? You see, there is nothing. No bandages, no medicines,” he replies.

“Cut off my fingers. Hanging out…

“I don’t have anything to cut your fingers with,” he says, “I don’t even have an ax.” Then he bent down and looked:

You don't need to cut anything. Will heal. Then I started dressing myself. And stayed in the infirmary."

A number of memoirs report that often all medical care was reduced to washing the wound with running water, bandaging it with improvised means, in case of a serious injury - non-anesthetic extraction of a bullet or fragment, or amputation of a limb - also without anesthesia, at best, a glass of vodka or alcohol served as anesthesia .

Analysis of the daily life of the units of the Red Army in the environments of 1941 - 1942. will be obviously incomplete if we do not dwell on such a moment as the ratio of life and death, as well as their perception by the participants in the battles themselves in the environment. Death in a war, especially on such a scale as the Great Patriotic War, was often a natural phenomenon. However, in the environment, its probability increased even more. This is explained by the fact that nowhere else, except in the environment, everyday life is not intertwined so closely with the actual combat operations, and life and death almost to the complete disappearance of the boundaries between them. The death of comrades-in-arms finally turned into an absolutely ordinary detail of reality, became, no matter how wild it sounds, a full-fledged element of everyday life. Surprise was often caused not by death, but by its accidental avoidance, expressed approximately by the thought: “Am I still alive ?!”

Death threatened fighters and commanders in battle and at rest, while eating or sleeping, when trying to escape from the encirclement or simply to hide from air raids and artillery fire. Descriptions of the death of comrades occupy a significant part of the memories of the former circled. The fighters gradually got used to the thoughts of the inevitability of their own death. A few excerpts from memoirs can be cited as typical examples:

“The situation is very difficult. The area - 2 by 2 km, occupied by our troops, was shot through. There were dead and wounded everywhere. Who was delirious, who lay in the water and asked to drink, who asked to be bandaged, and who asked to be shot, because he himself had no strength to do it ... The commissar of our division, senior political instructor Dolinsky, shot himself ... ".

“The wind pushed us in the back, we walked 5 meters apart. But we didn’t even pass a hundred meters, as a machine-gun burst slashed towards us ... Khomutov stopped, walked sideways from me and fell .., lay down and twitched in convulsions ... ".

There are many similar cases of single or mass deaths of Red Army soldiers who find themselves surrounded. Those who survived continued their difficult and often almost hopeless journey to the east. Hungry days, cold nights in the open air, in forests and swamps, with no hope of drying and warming up, the constant fear of running into the Germans or being captured by the police, almost complete uncertainty about the location of the front line, the next deaths of comrades or random fellow travelers - all this merged into a continuous the veil, where the time of day no longer differed, the feeling of hunger was dulled, reality interfered with hungry hallucinations - such were the many pictures of everyday life in the environments of 1941-1942. The outcome could be different: an unknown death, captivity and a concentration camp, finding shelter with local residents and the subsequent departure to partisan detachments, as the happiest option - a breakthrough to your own. However, those who were surrounded unanimously recalled it as the most difficult fact of their military biography, in which events were compressed so tightly that every day lived could be safely equated with a year of ordinary life.

Concluding this short article, I would like to say that it is impossible to present all the facts of the daily life of soldiers and officers of the Red Army in the environments of the initial period of the war. By necessity, I had to choose the most striking and characteristic examples to illustrate the most important trends and theses.

In conclusion, the following should also be noted. With all the dramatic intensity, even the tragedy of the pictures of the daily life of the Soviet encirclement, it should be remembered that with their heroism and sacrifice, suffering beyond the bounds of the possible and martyrdom, they contributed to stopping the German blitzkrieg machine that had not previously known failures, and therefore to the final victory over them, even though most of them were not destined to live to see her. All the more grateful and enduring should be our memory of them.

Literature

1. Bagramyan I. Kh. So we went to Victory. M., 1988.

2. Valley of death: the tragedy of the 2nd shock army / Compiled by Isolda Ivanova. M., 2009.

3.​ Dolmatovsky E. A. Green gate. M., 1989.

4. Drobyazko S. G. The way of a soldier. M., 2008.

5. Inozemtsev N. N. Front-line diary. M., 2005.

6. Isaev A. I. "Boilers" 1941: five circles of hell of the Red Army. M., 2005.

7. Isaev A.I. When there was no surprise. M., 2006.

8. Isaev A. I. A short course in the history of the Second World War: the offensive of Marshal Shaposhnikov. M., 2005.

9. Mikheenkov S. E. The reports did not report: the life and death of a soldier of the Great Patriotic War. M., 2009.

10. Soviet military encyclopedia. Vol. 1 - 8. M., 1976.

11. Shimkevich V.N. The fate of the Moscow militia. M., 2008.

12. Illustrations: http://pretich2005.narod.ru.

Izot Davidovich Adamsky:
– I was born in 1922 in the city of Yekaterinoslav. My father, David Kalmanovich Adamsky, a full Cavalier of St. George, a man of heroic build and almost two meters tall, was repressed in 1936. In the photo studio on the main street of the city, since 1916, there was a photograph from the Niva magazine - “Gymnasium students give gifts to the Knights of St. George”. In the middle of the picture was my father.

Someone reported that the picture allegedly shows the daughter of Emperor Nicholas.

So, “for connection with the royal family”, according to Article 58, my father was imprisoned for five years .... Mother went to Leningrad, found old files of the Niva magazine for the sixteenth year, and brought a copy of the magazine to the NKVD Directorate. And a rare event happened! According to the inscription under the photograph, the NKVD realized that there were no tsar's daughters there at all. Father was released from prison... but not rehabilitated! He had restrictions on his release, the so-called "disqualification", which forbade him to live within a radius of 100 kilometers from large cities and regional centers. The family temporarily moved to the city of Shuya.

I had to study and work at the same time.

In 1939 we returned to Dnepropetrovsk.

I grew up in an "army atmosphere". All three of my older sisters were married to regular commanders of the Red Army. Two sisters married two Hoffman brothers. One of them, Khariton Hoffman, commanded a battalion on the Estonian island of Dago and died there in 1941. The second brother, Mikhail Hoffman, was the deputy head of the frontier post near Przemysl and died in the first frontier battles. The husband of the third sister was a military doctor. He was killed in 1942 near Kharkov. But, despite the "Red Army family environment", I did not want to become a military man. I finished school in the forty-first year and studied at the director's department of the theater studio with well-known actors in the city, Vladimir Vladimirovich Kenigson and Vladimir Emelyanovich Makkoveisky, and was preparing to enter the theater studio of the Moscow Art Theater in Moscow. After 1939, we all knew that war was coming. I regularly attended military classes at school three times a week, we took the “young fighter course”.

And anyway, I seemed to be mentally and physically ready for war, but when on June 22, 1941 I heard a message about the beginning of the war, I was stunned and shocked.

On the same day, together with my cousin Sasha Somovsky and fellow student Grisha Shlonimsky, we came to the draft board to ask for volunteers in the army. They wrote down our data and said: “Wait for the summons.” A week later, I volunteered for the army.

Grigory Koifman:
- You ended up serving in the 1st Volunteer Regiment of Political Fighters, who almost completely died in battles surrounded by Zelena Brama. The fate of the regiment is tragic, but the heroism of the political fighters is noted in many memoirs telling about the catastrophe of the 6th and 12th Army of the South-Western Front encircled near Uman in August 1941. A participant in those events, a well-known poet, Yevgeny Dolmatovsky, devoted a chapter to the political fighters in his book "Green Gate". But none of the political fighters spoke personally about what the soldiers of the regiment had to experience in those terrible days. And now, except for you, there is no one to tell about what really happened there. The same Dolmatovsky, unfortunately, has a lot of inaccuracies in the book. He writes that there were only 49 political fighters, but this is just a group of students from one of the faculties of the DSU, who joined the volunteer regiment and formed the backbone of one of the companies. According to archival data, there were a little more than a thousand political fighters near Uman. And they, in fact, all died, but did not flinch in battle. Tell us about the political fighters.

I.D. A.:
- On June 29, 1941, we, several thousand volunteers, exclusively Komsomol members and communists, were gathered in the city party committee. Exactly one thousand people were selected. Approximately 80-85% were Komsomol members under the age of 22. The overwhelming majority of volunteers were students of Dnepropetrovsk universities and workers of the city's factories: the Kirov car repair plant, the Komintern plant, the Lenin plant, and the Karl Liebknecht plant.

70% of the fighters were Russians and Ukrainians, and 30% were Jews.

Four volunteers over the age of thirty were selected from our staff and sent to courses for political instructors, and all the rest were sent to Sumy.

Only 8 days we were trained on the territory of the Sumy Artillery School.

There were no more cadets at the school, they were all thrown to the front line, but the school warehouses were full of equipment and uniforms. We were dressed in military uniforms. They issued new tunics with "foreman's" buttonholes in black, but without "triangles". (as they said in the army, buttonholes with "four shekels", or "saw").

Everyone was shod in new boots (!), and not in windings.

When we were lined up, one of the commanders asked: "Who knows the Maxim machine gun?"

In the classroom in Osoviahim, I studied this machine gun quite well, and therefore immediately failed. Somovsky and Shlonimsky took two steps forward after me. From our "troika" they created a machine-gun crew in the "battalion of students."

On July 12, 1941, we approached the front line. Each political fighter was armed with a SVT rifle with a knife instead of a bayonet and one Molotov cocktail.

We received the name of the 1st Communist Regiment. The regiment was commanded by a career commander, Major Kopytin, who soon died in one of the first battles from a direct hit by a shell on an observation post.

G.K.:
- When did the regiment take its first baptism of fire?

IDA.:
- July 13, 1941 on the march, we ran into a German company. The regiment was walking along the road and was suddenly fired upon from the nearest village. We lay down, but could not dig in, we did not have sapper shovels. Fortunately for us, the Germans did not have artillery, and the experienced Kopytin quickly stopped the first signs of panic, deployed the companies in a chain, and we attacked the village. The Germans fled, there were many times more of us. There were first losses, the first dead of our comrades were lying on the battlefield, but most of the fighters were euphoric, we saw the backs of the fleeing Germans, and someone was lucky to kill the enemy.

On July 15, 1941, we arrived in the village of Podvysokoye. We were replenished with border guards and tankers who had lost their tanks in border battles. We took up defensive positions in the Podvysokoye area. Behind us is the Sinyukha River. Here the regiment died.

G.K.
- How were the political fighters distributed in parts? What were the tasks for the volunteers?

IDA.:
- It was near Moscow and Leningrad that volunteer political fighters were distributed among rifle units in order to rally people, raise military spirit, show by personal example how to fight, show courage in battle, lead people into an attack, and so on. And then, in mid-July 1941, the regiment was not divided into small units. But a week later, the surviving fighters were taken from us all the time to other areas of defense on the front line. So, my friends Somovsky and Shlonimsky were sent to neighboring companies to replace the failed Maxims crews.

And the task of the political fighters was extremely simple: to be the first to go on the attack and fight to the last bullet.

No one demanded or expected us to perform the functions of political instructors and agitators.

We owed our blood, our bodies, our weapons, our selfless courage to stop the Germans.

We, the political fighters, were rightfully considered the most devoted and staunch combat unit.

After all, if you say that the political fighters of the regiment were a thousand kamikaze fanatics, then this statement will be close to the truth. We really fanatically and sacredly loved the Soviet Motherland. Don't let these words seem too pompous or grandiloquent to you. So it was in fact.

Only a person who survived the forty-first year, a person who rose with a rifle in his hands in a bayonet attack, will be able to understand my words to the end ...

G.K.
- Two of our armies under the command of Generals Ponedelin and Muzychenko perished in the Uman “cauldron”. According to official figures, over 80,000 soldiers of the Red Army were captured there.

Only in recent years have military historians begun to write honestly about the events of August 1941 that took place in the region of Uman and Pervomaisk. And earlier it was possible to obtain only minimal information from the book of Bagramyan's memoirs, Dolmatovsky's memoirs and articles by Konstantin Simonov.

In contrast to the Vyazemsky, Kyiv and Belostok encirclement, relatively many fighters were able to break through from the Uman cauldron in battle. For example, General Zusmanovich withdrew the remnants of three divisions. It is believed that every twelfth fighter from those who fell into this environment broke through to his own. Is it really? ..

Nowhere, except for the book "Green Gate", there are no memoirs of ordinary soldiers, allowing you to imagine what was happening inside the encirclement. And no one remembers this book. Tell us as much as possible about those battles.

IDA.:
- As detailed as possible, chronologically, day after day, it will be difficult to tell. Memory no longer stores many moments. Let's try...

The perimeter of the environment was large, and I did not see what was happening in other areas with my own eyes. And with us ... The regiment's defense line at first was almost two kilometers. The generals write in their memoirs that a German tank corps was coming towards us, but this is not true. A simple German mountain rifle division, reinforced by a tank battalion, was advancing on our sector, rushing head-on towards Uman. Maybe there were German tanks on the flanks of the encirclement, which seems unlikely to me, but there were only eight wrecked German tanks on the regiment's defense sector.

We never saw our tanks or planes... There weren't any!..

Most of the soldiers from the personnel units that were with us at the junctions of the defense were demoralized, and they wanted to retreat ... Many were spiritually broken, no matter how bitter it is to admit ... The 18th Army generally draped without a fight ...

The war was like this - infantry against infantry. The Germans went on the attack, we let them up to 200 meters and shot them with precision. I remember that I even felt sick when I killed my "first Germans". It was unpleasant out of habit ... After each such attack, German artillery began to destroy us mercilessly and for a long time. Then an air raid, terrible and fighter ...

And everything repeated again. The Germans attack, we fight back, and then rise in a bayonet charge. The Germans, as a rule, did not accept hand-to-hand combat and rolled back.

A couple of times small groups of Germans “bashed” with us, and we showed them how to “hold the bayonet”! Even the platoon commander scolded me: “Why did you leave the machine gun and ran to the attack? What, the Germans won’t be killed without you ?! And then...

Again - an artillery attack, bombing, attack ... Our positions are in an open field, on the right - a forest. We were always afraid that the Germans would come to our rear through this forest.

And so it happened...

They say that the phrase "Not a step back!" appeared for the first time in the July battles near Uman.

Our forces were dwindling, many were killed, some were taken prisoner ... Moreover, all the time they took political fighters, in whole platoons, to close the gaps in neighboring areas and scattered them in parts. The Germans yelled at us at night: "Communists surrender!" Every day, hundreds of leaflets rained down on our heads with the text: “Jewish commissars, you will be exterminated,” and so on ... The Germans already knew from the prisoners which regiment was in front of them, they also knew that we were dressed in military tunics with “ foremen's buttonholes. Our guys, even if they were taken prisoner, had almost no chance of escaping. The Germans immediately determined belonging to the “commissar regiment” by their clothes and shot them upon arrival at the “Uman Pit” camp or killed them immediately on the battlefield. Comrades who miraculously survived in captivity told me about this after the war. At the end of July, when it became clear that the encirclement trap was hermetically slammed shut, we were given the order: “Cover the retreat!”.

It became clear to us that we could not escape from the ring, and our fate was to die, but to fulfill the order. All political fighters were gathered into one consolidated battalion. Two days later we were left with less than a company. Already on the first of August, our defense began to agonize.

The Germans plowed our positions with shells for two days in a row, day and night. In order to somehow survive, we crawled forward into the funnels in the neutral zone, hoping to survive "on the old shortfalls." The positions of the regiment were simply a field pitted with bombs and shells, littered with the corpses of soldiers ... We could not even send our wounded to at least some kind of sanitary battalion, the road to the rear was in German hands. The last time my company went on the attack on August 2, and after that there were not enough people to hold the line of defense with a sparse chain. From the side of Podvysoky, from the rear, we were also pounded by German artillery.

The Sinyukha River was red with blood...

The Germans, acting in assault groups, every night "cut" the sections of the regiment's defenses, and killed or captured our comrades, suppressing the last pockets of resistance.

We ran out of food already at the end of July, at night we crawled into apple orchards and vegetable gardens to find at least something to eat. There was no bread, no crackers...

On August 5, 1941, 18 of us remained alive, three of them were wounded. We're out of ammo. A couple of days before that, I shot the entire last supply of tapes for the “maxim”. For the whole group there were two German machine guns without ammunition, rifles with bayonets, and everyone already had a German Parabellum or Walther pistol, which he had taken from a dead enemy.

There were several grenades. We decided among ourselves that we would fight to the last, but we would not surrender.

We prepared to die... And so we wanted to live... But can you escape fate!..

At night, political instructor Melnikov crawled up to us and said that an order allowing a breakthrough had been dropped from the plane, and said that we had the right to leave positions and break through on our own, in any direction. Melnikov crawled back, he did not stay with us ...

I found it after the war. He was captured but survived...

We began to confer and decided to break through to the north. This was our only chance. At night they quietly slipped past the Germans, walked four kilometers and took refuge in the forest. Behind our backs there was a battlefield, which became a mass grave for many soldiers of the regiment ...

And then they still walked at night for several days, until the outer contour of the environment.

In front of us were German trenches, and then there was our territory. At dawn we approached the German trenches. When we started to cross the trench, the Germans noticed us and... hand-to-hand combat began... We shot fifteen people, strangled them, stabbed them, and rushed to run to our own people. But the sounds of the fight alarmed the entire German line. They were shooting at us, throwing grenades. I got grenade fragments in the neck and two in the leg. I fell, but the guys came back for me and pulled me out.

It's hard to believe now, but all (!), you know, all 18 people broke through alive! We went along the railroad tracks, the comrades carried me on a raincoat.

A locomotive with three wagons was moving towards us. The driver stopped, jumped off the locomotive and shouted to us: “Guys, where are you going?! There are Germans at the station! He opened one of the wagons for us, in which there were cookies in boxes. The machinist took out the property of the confectionery factory. We climbed into the car and ate something for the first time in recent days.
Our "echelon" went to Dnepropetrovsk.

And a few days later this city was also in German hands ...

We went out to our own... Several commanders approached us. Some captain said: “We went out, and thank God!” Then the commanders whispered among themselves, and the same captain said: "Don't tell anyone that there is no solid front!"

It turns out that there was an order that all political fighters leaving the encirclement should be sent to study at military schools. Even in that terrible confusion of 1941, at such a difficult moment at the front, we were not forgotten.

I ended up in the Krasnodar Artillery School - KAU.

G.K.
- I know that after the war, being the director of one of the best schools in the USSR, you created several search teams that were looking for the surviving political fighters of the 1st Communist Regiment. Fortunately, the lists of personnel are partially preserved in the archives.

How many living participants in the battles of the summer of forty-one, your fellow soldiers, were found in total?

IDA.:
- From our group, which left the encirclement, seven people survived. There was still a long war ahead, so the very fact that the seven “political fighters” went through the entire war and survived is unique in itself. Vishnevsky, for example, at the end of the war was a division commander, a major with five orders, including two BKZ.

Eleven more people were found, from those who escaped from captivity or made their way from the "Green Brama" as part of small groups of Red Army soldiers. We did not find anyone else from our regiment.

Yes, I hardly have anyone else survived.

G.K.
Can you name the survivors? Let people know the names of the heroes who fought to the last bullet in the terrible summer days of the forty-first year.

IDA.:
- Write down the names of the survivors:

Varchenko Ivan Alekseevich,

Yelin Vladimir Borukhovich,

Shlonimsky Grigory Yakovlevich,

Vishnevsky Mikhail Aronovich,

Artyushenko Victor Andreevich,

Melnikov Ivan Vasilievich

Cellar Mikhail Ilyich,

Water carrier Grigory Zakharovich,

Somovsky Alexander Lvovich,

Blier Mikhail Gershevich,

Shevlyakov Yuri Andreevich,

Rakov Anatoly Fomich,

Yaishnikov Demyan Klimentievich,

Pivovarov Vladimir Stepanovich

Berdichevsky Boris Markusovich,

Freidin Naum Yakovlevich,

Dotsenko Vasily Vladimirovich

I gathered all these guys in my house many years after the war. Only Melnikov did not come. It would be fair to publish a list of the dead soldiers of the regiment, but this list remained in Ukraine, I do not have it here.

The list of dead political fighters was kept by the deputy of the Dnepropetrovsk regional military commissar, Colonel Ivan Ivanovich Shapiro.

To my great regret, I don't even have a copy of the list...

G.K.
- As far as I can see from the list, all three soldiers of your machine gun crew survived . And Somovsky, and Shlonimsky, and you. Rare luck. How did they manage to survive?

IDA.:
– In captivity, they managed to hide that they were Jews. Their appearance was not typical. Sasha Somovsky fled shortly after his capture, in Dolmatovsky's group just a few hours before the total camp-wide selection in search of Jews and communists.

He wandered for a long time in German-occupied Ukraine, was again caught, and fled again. He went out to his people only in the winter, in the Rostov region. Sasha hid that he was in captivity for a short time, passed a special check as a “encirclement” and returned to the front.

He fought in regimental intelligence, was awarded the Order of Glory and two Orders of the Red Star. At the end of the war, Somovsky was seriously wounded and retired from the army.

And the history of Shlonimsky deserves to be written about in books.

Grisha escaped from captivity, was caught and taken to a prison camp in Germany, to work in the mines. He posed as a Ukrainian named Vologonenko. Soon, together with two lieutenants - Dotsenko and Lizogubenko (under this name the Zhitomir Jew Katsnelson was hiding in captivity) and three fighters, whose names I no longer remember, Grisha again fled from the camp. They reached the Arden, and joined the ranks of the Belgian partisans, in a detachment under the command of medical student Jacques Villard. The group initially consisted of 25 people. In the spring of 1943, Villar was killed, and Shlonimsky became commander. The detachment became a company, after - a battalion. And soon the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Belgium appointed Grisha commander of the 4th partisan regiment. Grisha knew French from school. His partisan alias is "Comrade Billy". Shlonimsky was awarded the highest orders of Belgium, including the Order of King Leopold and the Order of the Hero of the Resistance. In 1945, the partisans joined the American army. Grisha was summoned to the headquarters for the presentation of allied awards. A French general was there. Hearing Grisha's report in French, the general beamed: "I recognize the exquisite Parisian pronunciation!" Shlonimsky corrected the general: “Dnepropetrovsk pronunciation. School No. 58 on Mikhail Frunze Street ... ".

When the commander of the partisan regiment Shlonimsky returned to his homeland, he passed all the checks of the NKVD without any problems, and entered the university to study foreign language.

In Belgium, Shlonimsky-Vologonenko was considered a national hero, and, according to the laws of this country, gifts were sent to national heroes on behalf of the Belgian queen before every Christmas. The gift consisted of a Bible, new sashes, a bottle of cognac and some kind of prosvirka. There was also a greeting card written in French. So Grisha received such a parcel in 1948.

He was immediately arrested by the MGB. Shlonimsky was convicted "for connection with world imperialism", although he was "sewn" with espionage, but he did not sign anything during interrogations. He was given a “Godlike” term, only 6 years, perhaps because they did not want to aggravate relations with the Belgian Communist Party. Shlonimsky's wife, Lyusya Prilepskaya, was thrown out of the apartment with her baby, and they huddled in some kind of cold basement. Through our sailors who went on foreign voyages, Lucy was able to send a letter to Belgium and report her husband's arrest.

When they found out in Belgium that Vologonenko had been imprisoned, there were appeals from the CPB and from the Belgian government to the Soviet government with a demand to explain the situation.

Articles appeared in Belgian newspapers about the partisan hero "Comrade Billy", languishing in the Stalinist camps and photographs of Shlonimsky.

Grisha immediately added four years of imprisonment to the first term, so that "the bourgeoisie would not ask unnecessary questions." Grisha was released only at the end of 1953, after Stalin's death.

He was rehabilitated, reinstated in the party. Ours awarded him the medal "For Courage".

In Kyiv, in the mid-fifties, a representative of the French President Charles de Gaulle arrived and presented Shlonimsky with the Order of the Legion of Honor.

Such was the fate of my friend.

G.K.:
- The Krasnodar School - KAU - before the war, it seemed like an anti-aircraft gun?

IDA.:
- Yes. But at the beginning of the war, it was repurposed to train commanders for the PTA and for 120-mm mortars. The school was turned into an artillery-mortar school. There were no specialists in 120-mm mortars at the school.

The school was commanded by Major General Stepanov, probably the oldest combatant general of the Red Army. Stepanov was a participant in the Russo-Japanese War. Two meters tall, with a broad gray beard, he often gathered front-line cadets, and listened to the story of each of us about the sector of the front in which the cadet had to take the fight. Then he said: “Oh, lads, you don’t know how to fight! Who is holding the defense like that?!” and told military tricks from his combat experience.

G.K.:
- How strong was the training of cadets?

IDA.:
“For six months of study, we were well prepared for the war on 120-mm mortars.

There was also a general course of artillery firing, so I managed to shoot from 45 mm, from 76 mm, and even from a howitzer. We were prepared very intensively.

We did not starve, the school had several collective farms-chiefs who sent vegetables for the cadets.

This is how they were saved from hunger.

In early May 1942, the graduates were dressed in soldier's uniforms, given tarpaulin boots, and I, as part of a group of 30 commanders, was sent to the Volkhov Front.

I was awarded the rank of junior lieutenant, with certification for the position of deputy battery commander. Our group ended up in the 13th Cavalry Corps.

I was assigned to the 828th separate artillery and anti-tank battalion of the 87th KD.

76 mm horse-drawn guns. Battalion commander Zenkov, a week after my arrival at the front, was recalled from the front line. He was a former scientist, assistant professor at the university, and was requested to work in the rear. I had to take command of the battery.

G.K.
- Did you also experience the tragedy of the 2nd Shock Army?

IDA.:
- No, due to my great luck, I didn’t get into the “Luban cauldron” itself, although more than half of the corps disappeared there ... crossing, I had to... Death Valley... I can't find words to convey what was going on there. The pitch hell cannot be compared with the horror that we had to see with our own eyes.

We stood on direct fire and hit the Germans, who from the forest, from two sides, shot from machine guns and guns a “corridor”, three hundred meters wide, along which the fighters of the Second Shock were going to break through.

The forest is on fire, the swamp in front of us is on fire, the sky is not visible because of the smoke.

We are being shelled and bombed, all the crews have been knocked out of action for the third time.

And before us are many hundreds, and maybe thousands of our corpses. Those who were lucky enough to get out of the encirclement simply ran and crawled over the corpses of their comrades. Solid flooring in two rolls from the bodies of the dead and wounded.

Terrible carnage. Hell. There are corpses everywhere. Stench...

Even in the summer of forty-one, and after, near Sinyavin, near Voronovo, in the area of ​​​​the Kruglaya grove, surrounded on the Oder bridgehead, on the Zeelovsky heights - I have not seen anything like this in the most terrible battles.
It is very painful for me to remember those June days of 1942...

In fact, skeletons came out of the encirclement, distraught with hunger. They were not allowed to eat right away, only a piece of bread and a small scoop of porridge. They immediately ate this ration or hid it under the swamp moss ... and again stood in line for bread. Many then died in writhing from intestinal volvulus. A few days later, those who emerged from the encirclement unwounded and could stand on their feet were again driven forward under German bullets as part of a consolidated shock detachment. No one came out of this fight intact ...

I saw it all... And I can't forget to this day, even though I would like to...

Let's change the subject...

G.K.:
- According to memoirs, the 13th Cavalry Corps was disbanded in the summer of 1942. The reasons are called different: from the loss of the banner to the loss of personnel by 95%.

IDA.:
- I do not have information about the reasons for the disbandment of the corps.

I know for sure that the banner of the division was taken out on his body by Captain Borya Goldstein, and the banner of our regiment was preserved and taken out of the encirclement by Captain Nikolai Malakhov.

For this, Malakhov received the Order of the BKZ, and Goldstein was not given any reward for this feat. Borya's surname is probably too long and did not fit on the award list.

By winter, the 327th SD was created from the cavalrymen, which, after breaking the blockade, became the 64th Guards SD. General Polyakov commanded our division, and General Gusev commanded the corps.

We were taken to the rear to a new formation of the 8th Army (an analogue of the 2nd UA), which was also hastily created again. In December 1942, we were already part of the 2nd UA.

I was called to the division headquarters and ordered to create a battery of 120-mm mortars in our 1098th regiment. In cavalry units, mortars of this caliber were not previously in service.

G.K.:
- How was the battery formed?

IDA.:
- Instead of the usual four mortars per battery, I received six.
I demanded from the chief of artillery to give me educated people from all divisions of the regiment in order to have time in a few weeks to quickly train personnel in firing from 120-mm mortars. They sent eight Russians and five Jews. All are literate, with a certain pre-war educational qualification.

Took a few "oldies" out of my 76mm battery.

Arrived to replenish the battery and 25 prisoners from the camps of Northern Kazakhstan. Our division was then replenished by 70% with non-amnestied prisoners, who were obliged to “atone for their guilt with blood before the Soviet government” in battle ... My new battery was taken to the forest, and I began to train the fighters. Approximately 70 personnel, namely: six crews of five people each, the rest - a control platoon, signalmen, drivers, and so on.

G.K.:
- Were there any problems with the criminal replenishment?

IDA.:
- Only upon the arrival of the prisoners at the battery.

We had the entire weekly supply of food stored in the cook's dugout. Security was not posted. The next day, after the “knife and ax workers” and “pocket pull specialists” joined our ranks, in the morning, the battery cook came running and said: “Everything was stolen! All that was left was tea and some sugar!” I took the battery out for breakfast. We sat down at a long wooden table. I tell the guys: “We didn’t save the provisions, let’s drive teas. Sugar, thank God, is available, and in a week, maybe they will throw us cereals and crackers. We drank tea. In the afternoon - "ate" tea. In the evening - they "killed the worm" with tea.

In the morning, the cook comes up and whispers in my ear: "Almost all the products are in place."

In the ranks were several convicts from the replenishment with bruises on their faces. He asked them: “Did you go hand-to-hand, or something?” In response, all, as one, declared: “I fell in the dark in a dugout, hit a log” ... I tell them: “You are our pilots, not mortarmen. You fly in dugouts at night ... Bon appetit to everyone!

Yes, and I myself was, as they say, "my own on the board", treated the soldiers without swagger and arrogance.

There is one more aspect: there were almost no small punks among them. The leader of this group was the "godfather in law", the former commander of partisan formations and brigade commander during the Civil War, the Siberian Smirnov. He was convicted in the early thirties under the “household” article, and over time, in the camps, he rose steeply up in the criminal hierarchy, having unquestioned authority among the criminals. Smirnov was a decent man.

Among the prisoners who arrived there were eight people who were in camps under the “political” Article 58. People are decent and cultured.

I had the right to apply for amnesty to the prisoners for the courage shown in the battles, which I did already in September 1942.

G.K.:
- Were the "political" sent to the front?

I met repeatedly with the former commander of the penalty boxes, Yefim Golbreich. He claims in his interview that there have never been “enemies of the people” convicted under Article 58 among the prisoners who arrived in his penal company.

IDA.:
“We had a lot of them. True, with terms of imprisonment of no more than eight years. Among the prisoners who arrived at the battery were three Jews. Actually, I was a little surprised, the Jews are law-abiding people, and these people did not look like “typical Odessa bandits from Moldavanka”. Curiosity took over. The folders with the personal files of the prisoners lay in my dugout. Decided to read. And it turns out that a third of those who arrived were convicted under Article 58, but before they were sent to the front, they were given a gossip and the political article was reclassified into a domestic one. From the "enemies of the people" they made friends of the working people, a rifle in their hands and forward - "to defend the gains of Soviet power."
I will give examples of the same three guys that I just talked about.

One of them, a very young boy, arrived at the front without a word (!), sentenced to a "five-year plan", as ChSIR - "a member of the family of traitors to the Motherland."

Another, former lieutenant, commander of a fire platoon (or calculation) at a military airfield. Convicted under Article 58 for the fact that German bombers burned the airfield, and his platoon could not put out the fire.
According to gossip - an article "for negligence."

The third - in August of the forty-first he left the encirclement. During interrogation in the Special Department, he knocked down a particularly zealous and impudent investigator with a stool, but not to death. Article 58, paragraph "terror", was changed to "political hooliganism." His name was Boris Khenkin, we met by chance already here, about ten years ago.

There were several more people, as they said then, jokers - "for the language", initially convicted of "counter-revolutionary agitation and propaganda."

G.K.:
- Which of this "camp" replenishment do you still especially remember?

IDA.:
- Kombrig Smirnov. Unique personality. A non-commissioned officer in the First World War, a man without education, but gifted. During the Civil War, he was appointed commander-in-chief Trotsky to command a brigade. For his bravery, Smirnov was personally awarded the golden inscribed weapon by Trotsky.

The two of us often had frank conversations. He told me a lot about his life, he opened my eyes to many things. He idolized Trotsky, told me that if it were not for Lev Davidovich, there would be no Soviet power and the Red Army.

Trotsky knew how to organize troops and inspire them to fight.

This is not Voroshilov with a Mauser near Luga ...

Whether Smirnov survived the war, I still don't know for sure.

A peculiar person was Smolkevich, who became our radio operator. Courageous, smart, risk-averse. He was originally from the Smolensk region. He dropped out due to a wound at the beginning of forty-three, and we corresponded with him at one time. They helped him receive the Order of the Red Star, to which he was presented for breaking the blockade.

Sasha Shaikhutdinov, before the war, a swindler - a "freemason". There was one story that for the loss of a battery horse during the bombing, I could be put on trial. Then Shaikhutdinov stole a horse in the stable from the commander. And saved me, and the honor of the battery. It's a very interesting story, but I'll tell it some other time. Sasha survived. He found me after the war and wrote in a letter how my battery and my last “Volkhov old men” died at the beginning of 1945 near Koenigsberg.

G.K.:
- What was the command composition of the battery?

IDA.:
- My deputy, junior lieutenant Sergo Georgievich Melkadze, a Georgian, a very brave officer, started the war as a regular soldier, an ordinary cavalryman.

Killed in action in March 1943.

Platoon commander - Lev Libov. Jewish, former musician. A good, brave and sincere person. He was seriously wounded at the end of the war.

Whether he survived or not, I never found out.

The platoon commander is a Tatar Sasha Kamaleev, a nice guy. He was seriously wounded and, according to rumors, died in the hospital after being wounded.

I remember very well Lamzaki, a Greek from the Crimea, a talented poet, distinguished by sniper shooting. In August 1943 he was still alive. Then I was wounded, I did not return to my division, and what became of Lamzaki I do not know. Khenkin and Shaikhutdinov also did not know about his future fate.

The political commissar of the battery was a Buryat. But soon an order was issued "on the preservation of the small peoples of the North", and by mistake, under this order, he was transferred to the rear. After him, a simple soldier, an elderly Leningrad worker, Boris Nikolaevich Shchelkin, became a political instructor. Wonderful person.

He collected the personnel of the battery, brought a newspaper with another article by our beloved Ehrenburg and said: “We will find out what Ilyusha writes to us.” Read articles like a good actor. He didn’t bother the fighters with any other “commissar propaganda”, knowing full well that “the prisoners don’t need a political instructor!”.

After I was wounded, the battery was commanded by Vasily Ivanovich Sukhov, who died in the forty-fifth.

You can still remember a lot of guys...

G.K.:
- You said that the battery was multinational. Have there been conflicts on this basis?

IDA.:
– There was no such thing. Most of the soldiers on the battery were Russians.

But, for example, there were eight Jews: Grinberg, Goldstein, Wasserman, Libov, Khenkin, and others ... A fighter Grisha Orlov came to us, it seems, he has a Slavic appearance and a Russian surname, but it turns out that he is also a Jew. There was a Greek, a Georgian, a few Uzbeks.

There were three Ukrainians: Gorbenko, Ivanitsa, Kotsubinsky. Three Tatars: Sasha Kamaleev, Sasha Mukhametzhanov, Shaikhutdinov. There was a large group of Kazakhs - 10 people. So, our battery looked like a real international. We were one family. The battery in the regiment was called "Izina Battery". Even Mehlis, when he heard this, reacted adequately.

It was difficult for soldiers from distant Asian villages and auls to adapt to the Volkhov forests and swamps. Plus the language barrier...

We tried our best to make them happy. They cut down a gazebo, called it a tea house, and even got bowls for tea drinking! But Melkadze arranged a real holiday for them. In our division, in the DOP (divisional exchange office), his fellow countryman from Georgia was the head.

He gave Melkadze a small bag of rice and carrots. The cook cooked pilaf with horsemeat for the soldiers. You cannot understand now how happy our comrades in arms, the Kazakhs and Uzbeks, were at that moment.

G.K.:
- How difficult was it to use 120 mm mortars in swampy and wooded areas?

IDA.:
- The main role in the war in defense on the Volkhov front was assigned to artillery.

The tanks simply sank in the swamps. They were often buried in the ground along the line of defense, using them as pillboxes. Yes, and on our entire front, as I remember, there were only four tank brigades. Sappers cut down clearings in the forests in order to somehow ensure the delivery to the front line of everything necessary for the life of soldiers and for the war.

Around impenetrable swamps. There were no roads, they laid gati, and along these floors they carried ammunition and food to the front line. A little the car “left” from the flooring to the side, so it was immediately sucked into the quagmire. The shells were worth their weight in gold. I remember that when I was still a 76-mm battalion commander, how many nerves it cost me to knock out two full ammunition sets from the chief of artillery of the division, Major Pliev. The connection was often laid along the gati, too, and was disgusting. Linear cable communication was constantly torn.
We had a walkie-talkie, but there was no radio operator. It’s good that at least Libov understood radio communications, and then he taught two soldiers to work on the radio.

It was extremely difficult to use 120-mm mortars in swamps. The minimum firing range of these mortars is only 500 meters. But they could only shoot at close targets from hard, dry ground, otherwise, after the third shot, the “heel” of the mortar completely went into the ground due to strong recoil, even if we used “shields” from boards, placing them under the mortar. In the same place the earth, as "jelly". They always put us in open positions, on direct fire, on high-rises, or 100 meters behind infantry positions. After each shot, a smoky plume stretches behind the mine, completely unmasking the mortar crew. The mortar is heavy, it is unrealistic to change position instantly, and no one allowed us to do that then. So they immediately received hurricane fire on the battery from the Germans in response ...

And if the Germans are 300 meters from you, then there is no chance at all to survive.

You can’t put a mortar at a right angle, it will immediately tip over.

Several times, the batterymen had to engage in shooting combat, as ordinary infantry. Once, at dawn, a German reconnaissance group of twelve people came to our firing positions, and we quickly killed them. My convicts were not taken aback. We were lucky in that fight.

G.K.:
- What did you do to somehow save yourself in this situation?

IDA.:
- Forced to dig trenches to their full height, instead of cells.

I put mortars in funnels to somehow reduce losses. And many more "nuances".

Do you want examples? When they put 120-mm mortars on direct fire, demand a written order from the nachart.

Occasionally this worked, the chief of artillery or the regiment commander began to wonder whether it was worth ruining the battery, was it necessary to bring artillerymen into open space in front of the Germans?

It was in the infantry that they didn’t ask anyone for losses, but at the artillery headquarters they could ask how the materiel was lost? But human lives, the fate of calculations, they were not particularly interested. For them we were “personnel”, an inanimate concept. If the battery dies, nothing terrible has happened for the chiefs, the factories in the Urals are working - they will send new guns, and there are enough military registration and enlistment offices and people in Russia - they will “scrape” new people into the army.

G.K.:
- Do you remember the battles for Voronovo in August-September of 1942?

IDA.:
- Classic carnage. All the time I was in infantry formations, to adjust the fire. Again, crowds of soldiers were driven into frontal attacks, and again, having lost all the infantry, ours rolled back. When we took Voronovo, I looked back at the battlefield and could hardly comprehend what I saw. Again - corpses, corpses, corpses. On every square meter...

I had to repeatedly lead the infantry on the attack there. We run forward "with hostility", shout "Hurrah!", We choke in our own blood. And then the Germans, silently go on a counterattack, knock us out of the captured positions. It got to the point that I kept the gun in my hand all the time in order to have time to shoot myself and not be captured.

And my battery got there, on direct fire. Six people were killed and eight seriously injured. There was no point in capturing Voronovo!.. I had to leave it anyway...

They sat on the defensive until January. They were terribly hungry.

G.K.:
- For breaking the blockade, your division became a guard division. In the memoirs of one of the participants in the breakthrough near Sinyavin, I read one phrase - "... in the division, for a week of fighting, only 300 people remained in the ranks ...". What happened there? With the singing of the "Internationale" to machine guns, as on the Leningrad Front?

IDA.:
- On January 1, 1943, we, twenty artillerymen and infantry commanders from our division, arrived at the front line to prepare the transfer of the defense line. They put firing points, compared maps, marked places for covert deployment of artillery batteries.

On January 10, the division concentrated on positions. The division created an assault detachment of volunteers. 200 people, almost all of the prisoners. The detachment was commanded by my friend, deputy battalion commander, captain Boris Goldstein, a man of great stature and physical strength, nicknamed "Borya and a half bear."

The German defense in our area was created for 16 months, and it was incredibly difficult to ram it. On the morning of January 12, 1943, a long artillery preparation began, under the cover of which, following the barrage, the assault group crawled to the 1st line of German trenches and at 11-00 in a swift throw, in hand-to-hand combat, captured part of the trench. And then rifle battalions went in thick chains. I do not remember that the singing of the "Internationale" was heard from the loudspeakers along the front line ...

And the Germans, there is a continuous line of pillboxes that could not be suppressed during the artillery preparation. And every meter of ground was shot by German artillery and machine gunners. Mine fields. Again heaps of dead bodies...

And then our regimental commander Koryagin “distinguished himself” ... If we took the first line of German defense in our sector with relatively “little bloodshed”, then later ...

G.K.:
- What are we talking about?

IDA.:
- The commander of the regiment, Major Koryagin Sergei Mikhailovich, was a very experienced warrior, but absolutely illiterate in military affairs. He went with the Order of the BKZ on his chest, back in the Civil War. Always drunk, already several times demoted from lieutenant colonel to major for "exploits in the alcoholic field", Koryagin was a typical "throat", and could only swear at his subordinates and yell: "Forward, your mother!" His command ceiling was nothing more than a company command, but Koryagin was trusted by the regiments. Ruining his regiment in an hour or two was a trifling matter for him. Koryagin was personally a brave man, he himself always went ahead, but the interaction of units in battle or the use of artillery was a "dark forest" for him. You can’t even imagine how many of our losses are on the conscience of such “throats”!

Our chief of staff, the clever and cunning Kuznetsov, always led the battle instead of Koryagin. Yes, and our commissar to some extent kept the regimental commander from "drunken heroism." But Kuznetsov died in the first minutes of the offensive... The Commissar was also killed.

When ours broke into the first German trench, less than 15 people remained from Goldstein's group. Borya himself received a bullet wound in the face. He was taken to the sanitary battalion and there he was awarded the Order of the Red Banner.

The soldiers immediately settled down in luxuriously equipped warm German dugouts and dugouts, which impressed us with their well-being. Someone immediately began to celebrate success.

I repeat, every meter of ground was shot there. I understood what would happen next. I ordered immediately, the entire battery, to settle in fresh craters from our bombs. People looked at me with displeasure, but after twenty minutes they had the opportunity to assess the correctness of my decision. The Germans launched a powerful artillery strike on the former "own" first line. Each projectile landed accurately. For more than a year spent in one place, the Germans knew well every fold of the earth, and they did not need time to zero in ...

Here the hour of death came for many soldiers of the regiment ...

But the grove "Round" must be taken completely! The order to reach the workers' settlement No. 5 and No. 7 has not been canceled. And Koryagin led the people forward ...

We were accompanied by a tank brigade, in which by the evening there was not a single whole tank left.

Already on the third day of the continuous assault, all artillery officers in the regiment were killed and wounded, except for me. The chief of artillery, Major Duvanov, died along with his assistants. A direct hit by a shell in the dugout where the gunners were. On the very first day of the offensive, the commanders of the 76-mm Vashchugin battery and the 45-mm Vasin battery were wounded. All the commanders of the rifle battalions were killed.

I had to take command of the artillery of the regiment. But what to command!?

I somehow managed to save my battery, the losses in it were only 40%, and I didn’t give my batteries to the infantry ... Ten people remained on the 76-mm battery, but the guns survived.

Crawled under fire on a 45-mm battery. All are killed.

Only torn and burnt corpses at the firing position.

I see from the surviving gun there is one living fighter, I still remember his name.

Sergey Polikarpovich Ivanov.

Ivanov single-handedly loaded the cannon and fired from the forty-five. They started shooting along with him. After that, I recruited several volunteers in the 76-mm regimental battery to help Ivanov.

I introduced Ivanov to the Order of the BKZ, and he was given only a medal "For Military Merit".

All divisional rear services were sent to replenish the rifle units. Drivers, storekeepers, clerks, cooks, shoemakers, and even employees of the divisional post office and the editorial office of the newspaper. Everyone!.. Only the divisional bakery was not touched.

The rest of the companies were commanded by sergeants. The Germans were constantly counterattacking, hitting our flanks. January 18, 1943 in the regiment, not counting the gunners, remained in the ranks of sergeants and privates - 56 people! .. Five officers for the entire regiment. There was no one to connect with the Leningraders. We were replaced by skiers and the 80th SD. Only on skis it was impossible to go there. The whole earth was pitted with shells and bombs, snow was nowhere to be seen.

We paid a very high, terrible price for breaking the blockade...

On January 19, we were taken to the rear. I asked myself - how did I manage to survive in these battles? .. and did not find an answer ...

G.K.:
- How was your participation in these battles marked?

IDA.:
- Medal "For Courage".

All three battery commanders of the regiment were presented with the orders of Alexander Nevsky. Vashchugin and Vasin received these orders, and they reacted to my introduction at the division headquarters as follows: “This is the order of an Orthodox saint, and there is nothing to give to a Jew!” The details of this episode were told to me in full.

Then in January, I was awarded the rank of senior lieutenant.

G.K.:
- What happened to you next?

IDA.:
- Until mid-February, we were on reorganization. And then again on the offensive, but already unsuccessful. There was even an attempt to send our 191st Guards Rifle Regiment on a raid on the German rear, but ... nothing came of it. Together with the tankers, we broke through to the Mga-Kirishi railway, and we were cut off from our units. Nobody came to our aid... Again terrible battles, again terrible losses.

All to no avail...

Only the regiment was lost again. If I tell you the details of those battles... Better not... Believe me, better not... Once again we were thrown to the enemy to be devoured...

Then my close friend Melkadze died.

We were transferred to Sinyavino. Until August 1943, we again continuously attacked the German positions. And then I got hurt.

G.K.:
- Circumstances of injury?

IDA.:
- German cuckoo snipers raged along the entire front line. In one small area, they didn’t give us a place to live at all. We decided to put things in order there.

From the NP of the company commander, I did not see well the German positions and the section of the forest from which merciless sniper fire was fired. Crawled to the fighters in the trench of outposts. The Germans are 70 meters away. I carefully watch the forest through binoculars. The Germans keep throwing grenades in our direction, but they can't deliver them. Too far.

I was pulled back. Vision was lost...

I ended up in the Leningrad hospital No. 711 at the Academy of Medical Sciences, in a specialized ophthalmological department. They did several surgeries on my left eye. Two months later, vision on the left began to partially recover.

The atmosphere in the office was terrible. Dozens of blind young guys. There were many cases of suicide, people preferred death, but no one wanted to live as a blind cripple ... There I first lit a cigarette from terrible stress, so I still “tar” two packs a day ...

A few months later, I was sent to finish treatment at the Red Army sanatorium near Moscow in Ramenskoye. The head of the sanatorium was Andrey Sverdlov, son of Yakov Sverdlov.

There I met and became friends with a wonderful man. Kalmyk, wounded in the legs. Senior Lieutenant Pyurya Muchkaevich Erdniev, awarded the medal "For Courage". He had one leg amputated. Before the war, he managed to finish the Moscow State Pedagogical Institute, and after it, like me, he became the director of the school.

Upon discharge from the sanatorium, Erdniev received an order to also go to Yakutia.

He was somehow urgently called in the winter to Yakutsk, to the NKVD. We had to walk forty kilometers.

And Erdniev went on foot, on a prosthesis. Got caught in a blizzard, covered in snow. By a lucky chance, he was found in a snowdrift, pumped out. It turned out after the reason for the urgent call. Erdniev was to be awarded the Order of the Red Star, who was looking for him from the front. After Stalin's death, Erdniev returned to Kalmykia, became a doctor of pedagogical sciences. The most interesting thing is that at the end of the sixties our sons ended up serving in the army in one unit, and also became close friends. Thanks to this meeting, I found Erdniev again.

By the way, when I served in the 1st BF, I registered my two Kalmyks from the reconnaissance battery as Uzbeks by agreement with the PNSh on personnel records in order to prevent their deportation to Siberia.

G.K.:
- You were commissioned from the army due to injury?

IDA.:
- No. I was recognized by the medical board as "fit for service in the rear" and was sent to serve as the commander of a battery of naval guns in the Protection of the Water Region of the LVMB. But I didn't feel at ease. The command of heavy long-range naval guns requires special training, which I did not have. I applied with a report on command with a request to be transferred to another unit and was soon sent to the 46th Artillery Reserve Regiment stationed in Pargolovo. The regiment was still in the royal barracks. I was given a two-room apartment in the village. ZAP trained artillerymen and mortarmen from infantry discharged from hospitals. The mobilization resource of Leningrad was completely exhausted long ago, and we had almost no young conscripts. A month of preparation, a marching company - and to the front. People in ZAP were starving, although the blockade had been broken long ago. Most of the commanders in the ZAP spent the entire war in the rear, and the appearance of wounded front-line soldiers in the regiment to replace them was perceived by them with discontent. For the “rear front” this meant one thing: “take an overcoat ... and fight for the Motherland!” ... They didn’t really want to fight, they all had families, but here - “we fall on their heads” ... The atmosphere was unfriendly .

I got bored there. He filed several reports with a request to be sent to the front line.

In the summer of 1944, I was called to the general who was recruiting experienced gunners for the 1st BF to organize separate reconnaissance fire control batteries. Talked to me. We were selected by nine people from all over the Leningrad Front. In early September, I was already near Warsaw, in the 169th howitzer brigade, in the 14th artillery division of the RGK breakthrough under the command of Major General Bryukhanov.

G.K.:
- You honestly fought for a year and a half by that time, you were wounded several times, you lost an eye in battle. A soldier with such an injury was immediately "commissioned for a clean one." Officers with lost vision in one eye were used only in the rear. Examples of attack pilot Lieutenant Drachenko and infantryman Major Rapoport from the Red Army, Japanese fighter pilot Saburo Sakai or English special forces Moshe Dayan, who continued to fight after such a wound on the front, are most likely an exception to the rule. Why did you decide to return to the front?

IDA.:
- There are several reasons for that.
First, it's boring in the rear.

Secondly, when they saw that a Jew was in the rear, the anti-Semites immediately began to tear their throats: “The Jews are hiding in Tashkent!” And it doesn't matter that one hundred Ukrainians, two hundred and fifty Russians or thirty-seven Uzbeks will serve in the rear next to you.

Only a Jew will point a finger.

And they will accuse of insufficient patriotism or of wanting to evade only a Jew from the front line... According to the "old Russian tradition"... For some "comrades" it was easier to die or hang on the nearest forest bough than to admit the fact that Jews fight no worse others, and in the forty-first year and in the forty-second year they often fought better than many ...

In this ZAP, anti-Semitism was rampant.

When I heard how the commander of the ZAP, by the name of Gorokhov, said to his PNSh, a disabled Jew with a leg crippled at the front, the phrase: “What kind of orders did you spread for me here, like in a shtetl synagogue?”, I immediately understood - in this regiment I have nothing to do...

G.K.:
- And how often have you heard such statements addressed to you about “Jews in Tashkent”?

IDA.:
- Personally, I rarely. On the front lines, I never heard such nonsense.

When it comes to life and death, no one divides his comrades by nationality.

In all the units where I had to fight, there were many Jews. If someone there aloud allowed himself such speeches, we would soon “calm him down” for sure.

At the end of the war, I also had enough Jews in my reconnaissance battery: the commander of the reconnaissance platoon, Lieutenant Radzievsky, the reconnaissance officer Sasha Zaslavsky, and a couple of other people.

None of us hid our nationality. People saw how we were fighting and even the most ardent anti-Semites kept quiet.

And what about the phrase, adored by the "rear guards", self-seekers and market drunkards: "... Jews are hiding from the war in Tashkent ..."

Indeed, many evacuated Jews concentrated in Central Asia.

But it is difficult to explain to every redneck that three hundred thousand Polish and Romanian Jewish refugees were evacuated to Central Asia: women, children, old people who did not have Soviet citizenship and young male refugees were not subject to conscription into the Red Army ... Foreigners ...

They were rarely taken into Anders' army. More than twenty thousand Polish Jews volunteered for the Soviet army before 1943, the rest were drafted in 1943 into the Polish Army.

In 1946, former Polish citizens were allowed to return to Poland, and from there many immediately left for Palestine. So, during the Israeli War of Independence, the so-called "Russian battalions" appeared, made up of Polish and Lithuanian Jews, former experienced fighters of the Soviet Army, who passed from Stalingrad to Berlin.

Former subjects of "boyar Romania" began to be called up only in the forty-fourth year, but they were considered "unreliable" until the end of the war, and half of them were sent to serve in the Far East or in construction battalions.

But the cheap myth lives on: "All Jews fought in Tashkent!"

G.K.:
- What about the case with the Order of Alexander Nevsky? Or the story with your submission to the highest rank of the GSS, for the battles at the Oder bridgehead, when you twice called fire on yourself, repelling a German tank attack? Instead of the title of Hero of the Soviet Union, you were given only the Order of the Red Star. The answer from the central archive lies on the table in front of me.

The award sheet for the GSS is still probably intact, with the resolution of the front commander: “Replace!” gathering dust in the MO archive. Was it embarrassing?

IDA.:
- I am now 84 years old (interview was taken in 2006 - from the editors of "VO"). Do you really think that after so many years after the end of the war, I am now worried about the award topic and everything connected with it? And even then, only one thing was important to me: not what they gave, but for what they gave.

And I don’t even want to discuss the story of the presentation at the GSS. I don't think that if I had a Hero's Star on my jacket, I would be happier in life...

Let's have the next question.

G.K.:
- What was a separate reconnaissance fire control battery?

Which of the personnel of the reconnaissance battery do you especially remember?

IDA.:
- Such a battery was created in the singular for the entire division of the RGK.

We were part of the 169th GAB.

Four platoons: reconnaissance platoon (including instrumental reconnaissance squad), line communications platoon, radio communications platoon with three radios, topographic platoon. We didn't have a "sound reconnaissance" platoon. According to the list on the battery, there were about seventy people, but there were a little more than forty available. All three signalmen, who were in the radio platoon, had long ago become PZh with different authorities, and we never saw them on the battery. There were about twenty more "dead souls". According to all lists, the soldier is listed under my command, but in fact he serves as a servant at the headquarters of the division as some kind of supernumerary clerk, cook, or sheathes and shaves the authorities. I did not demand the return of the nets to the battery. It is easier to fight without such ballast. God be their judge...

We prepared twenty people on our battery capable of working on a walkie-talkie.

The reconnaissance platoon was commanded by Radzievsky, a native of Zaporozhye. The commander of the radio platoon was Vanya Sidorov. The battery had its own political officer named Sidorenko. We had another officer, a senior lieutenant, a bitter drunkard who lived before the war in the suburbs. He amazed me with his courage and categoricalness in his statements about the war and "our valiant command." He seemed to be a good person, but... later, it turned out that this senior lieutenant kept "knocking" on us at the political department and "special officers". When it turned out that we were dealing with a provocateur and a "snitch", when we uncovered the "spoiled Cossack", he was immediately transferred to another division ... The "special officers" managed to fuss.

Very brave scout guys served on the battery: Sergey Surkov, Vasily Vedeneev, Ivan Solovyov, Alexander Zaslavsky. I always took these guys with me to the front line in the thick of it, and they did not let me down.

G.K.:
- How powerful was your 169th Howitzer Artillery Brigade?

Who commanded the brigade?

IDA.:
- There were six divisions in the brigade. Divisions 122mm, 152mm, and four divisions PTA - 76mm, each division has three batteries. But if the 122-mm and 152-mm batteries had four guns each, then the 76-mm batteries had a six-gun composition. The brigade always had a Katyusha division under its operational control. During the conduct of the battle, the brigade was usually exposed to one kilometer of the front line.

So you can imagine what a huge power we are talking about.

The brigade was commanded by Colonel Pyotr Vasilyevich Pevnev for a long time. In 1937 Major Pevnev was repressed and arrested. He was not imprisoned or shot, but simply demoted, and then fired from the army. Lucky man. Pevnev began the war with the rank of captain. He was a skilled artilleryman. After the war, Colonel Glavinsky took command of the brigade.

G.K.:
- How do you assess the role of commissars in the war?

IDA.:
- I did not meet among them bright personalities after 1942.

In our 191st Guards. The joint venture, the commissars changed every month, Koryakin could not stand them.

I do not remember that after the summer of forty-two, before my eyes, some commissar with a "sleeper" in his buttonhole personally led the soldiers into the attack.

And all sorts of regimental agitators there were engaged only in lecture propaganda.

Before the introduction of unity of command, the situation in the army was generally unbearable. The commander and the commissar of the unit write a combat report together, but the commissar still writes a separate political report to his authorities. So the commander is spinning, like “fried crucian carp in a frying pan”, puzzling over what kind of compromising evidence the political instructor “dashed” on him. Either appease the commissar with an order, or beg for a new political worker.

In the artillery brigade, all political officers arrived at the front in 1944 from the Far East. They were called "children of Apanasenko". The commander of the DVKA, Apanasenko, demanded from all political workers who served in the East a thorough knowledge of military equipment and weapons of their kind of troops. For example, the commissar of an artillery regiment underwent a long special artillery training and could easily replace the regiment commander if he failed in battle.

At the front, they quickly occupied combat positions, replacing the dead commanders. So, for example, the former political instructor Major Mironov became the chief of staff of the 169th GAB. But regular professional artillerymen returned from hospitals or arrived at the front for combatant command positions, and former political workers were again returned "to distribute leaflets and party cards."

In my rifle regiment there was a young company commander Vasya Voroshilov, a Muscovite. He was appointed commander of the regiment. But, he was never able to change the stereotype of the behavior of an infantry commander, he always went first on the attack and was soon killed.

But, in general, like many soldiers who fought on the front line, my attitude towards the political staff remained very, very cool.

When I heard their calls: "For Stalin!", It was difficult for me to restrain the mat.

No one fought personally for Stalin! The people fought against Hitler!

People fought for their land!

G.K.:
- Did you have to deal with SMERSH employees closely?

IDA.:
- It didn't work without it. There was also an audience...

We have seen enough executions on the Volkhov front.

There, for any trifle, there was one measure of punishment - execution ... The village was not taken - execution. Left the position - execution ... And so on ...

Even for the loss of a sapper shovel, they could be put on trial by a tribunal.

And at the end of the war, the "specialists" did not differ in laziness ...

I remember one lieutenant from our brigade was arrested and tried in the tribunal for a joke. The content of the anecdote is as follows.

Moscow, railway station, the train is late for a day.

They ask the commandant of the station: "What's the matter, why such a big delay?"

In response: "What to do ... War" ...

Berlin, train station, the train arrives ten minutes ahead of schedule.

They ask the commandant of the station the same question. In response: "What to do ... War" ...

The question is, what is criminal and anti-Soviet in such an anecdote?

But this lieutenant got his three months in the penal battalion, at the suggestion of our "special officer" for "enemy propaganda" ...

On the Oder, a drunken "special officer" slept all the time in my dugout, afraid to climb out into the light of day alone, so as not to get a bullet in the back. The “special officers” even had an order “on self-protection”, which forbade movement without armed escort at any time of the day.

After all, they settled scores with the “specialists” at every opportunity. I remember such things...

And I remember very well.

There is so much more to be said on this topic, but why talk about it now ...

G.K.:
- You started the war in 1941, you were among those who took the first blow from the fascist enemy. What feelings did you experience while fighting on German soil?

IDA.:
- And what feelings should a soldier of the forty-first year experience, having come to accursed Berlin?

Of course, I was proud and happy that I had reached the fascist lair.

But until the very last minute of the war, I did not hope to survive, and waited for "my" bullet or shrapnel. Too many of my comrades died right before my eyes in the war, so I had no reason to suddenly believe in my invulnerability.

On the Kyustra bridgehead, I was lying with two scouts and a radio operator on the ground between German tanks, having caused the fire of the brigade on myself not for the first time, and I understood that now they would kill me. The infantry battalion I was in had already died almost completely. At that moment I did not feel any special fear of death, too often they had already tried to kill me in the war. Two and a half years at the forefront!..

Only one thought in my head: “How so! Quite a bit did not reach Berlin ... "

I was a witness and a direct participant in the breakthrough at the Seelow Heights. The whole earth in front of us was pitted with funnels of bombs and shells, from which the arms and legs of our dead soldiers protruded, shreds of torn human bodies at every meter ...

On April 20, we entered Berlin with a fight. The city was on fire. A huge poster hung: "Berlin remains German!" White flags hung from the windows.

We move inexorably forward, and nearby, from a burning house, someone shouts in German: “hilfe!” (help!), but none of us slowed down.

There was a fair retribution.

I looked at the faces of the Germans, at their rich houses, at the well-groomed beautiful streets, and could not understand: why did they start a war?!

What did they miss?! We went into some two-story mansion, set up an NP in it. The decor in the house, according to our concepts, was more than chic. The owner of the house worked as a simple machinist on the railway.

One of my scouts was also a railroad worker before the war. He was in a state of shock and told me: “All my life I hunched over on a piece of iron and never ate my fill. He made a small room for the whole family in a rotten barrack, and then ... "

On April 26, 1945, our brigade was withdrawn from the city and transferred in the direction of the Elbe. I remember how two days later we met with the American allies. The headquarters of the brigade sent me forward in a jeep to reconnoitre the situation and find out where our infantry was. There they met with those who fought on the Second Front. The cavalrymen, who were the first to meet the allies, had already managed to teach all Americans the phrase in Russian in just an hour: “Is there any vodka?” We drank heartily with Lieutenant Albert Kotzebue, whose platoon was the first to join the Red Army. Communicated with him in Yiddish and in Russian. Kotzebue was a descendant of our emigrants who left for America at the beginning of the century, and his grandfather taught Russian.

None of us spoke English.

The next day, our brigade was again deployed to Berlin to close the encirclement from the western direction.

On May 3, 1945, I signed on the wall of the Reichstag: “Captain Adamsky. Dnepropetrovsk. I signed for all my dead friends and relatives... I stood at the defeated symbol of Nazism and recalled the summer of 1941, my trench near Podvysoky, my fallen political comrades, our last bayonet attack... I remembered my soldiers who died in the Volkhov swamps, on Vistula bridgehead, and many others who did not see this great moment of our Victory ... These people always live in my heart, in my memory. They are right next to me...

Required Foreword

The further the events of the Patriotic War go from us, the fewer living witnesses remain, the less new generations imagine what kind of war it was and what it meant, and how it affected our subsequent life.
Yes, historians have written multi-volume works; yes, many outstanding military leaders - marshals, generals, admirals - left detailed memoirs that give a fairly reliable picture; but what level is that? These memoirists at one time commanded fronts, armies, in extreme cases, corps; worked at Headquarters, at the General Staff. They could see further and better. But at the same time, there are very few memories of those who acted directly on the battlefield, under enemy fire; of the same genre that one of the writers called "soldier's memoirs".

This work is not my work in the proper sense of the word. My relative Vladimir Ernestovich Knorre, who died in 2002, gave me his military notes as a memento shortly before. This was the last of my relatives - a participant in the Great Patriotic War and the only one who left written evidence.

These notes tell how, after graduating from the Moscow Road Institute in 1939, he was sent for military training as a reserve commander, and this training gradually grew into participation in the Great Patriotic War. He went through the war from start to finish, first to the east, then to the west. He was never wounded, only once received a concussion, which caught up with him almost sixty years later. He finished the war on the Oder with the rank of major (and started with the rank of junior lieutenant).

After the war, my hero worked for a long time and fruitfully in the field of reconstruction and construction of Moscow, and this side of his activity deserves special discussion, but this is not the subject now.

The memoirs of a participant in the Patriotic War offered to the reader were written in 1994 and, therefore, can be recognized as fairly objective and free from ideological dogmas. Despite the fact that this was written almost half a century after the end of the war, the memoirs are distinguished by the freshness of impressions and detailed descriptions. So, the exit from the encirclement in the fall of 1941 is scheduled literally by the day; this may indicate that our hero kept some records directly in the wake of events, which, among other things, was associated with a certain risk.

I, hereinafter referred to as the "compiler", offer the reader these notes in the form in which they were written by the author. Due to the technological features of our server, it was not possible to place a few maps transferred by our hero to the Museum of the Patriotic War, which is on Poklonnaya Hill. Moreover, the compiler eliminated obvious inaccuracies.

So - neither subtract nor add. Please read.

VLADIMIR KNORRE
retired major engineer

WAR MEMORIES

Whatever the year - the strength decreases,
The mind is lazier, the blood is colder ...
Fatherland mother! I will go to the grave
Waiting for your freedom!
But I wish I knew when I was dying
that you are on the right path,
What is your plowman, sowing the fields,
Sees a rainy day ahead...
N. Nekrasov

1. The beginning of the war. June 21 - October 6, 1941

After graduating from the Moscow Automobile and Road Institute in the spring of 1939, I was drafted into the ranks of the Red Army and after short courses at the Kuibyshev Engineering Academy with the rank of military technician of the 1st rank, I was sent to the western border of the USSR to build defensive structures.

Being since 1940 on the territory of Western Belarus in the Lomzha-Snyadovo-Chizhev region, which is west of the city of Bialystok, I was assigned to lead the design, construction and operation of narrow-gauge railways with a gauge of 750 mm. They were intended for the delivery of building materials and equipment to the fortifications under construction - reinforced concrete pillboxes and other objects of the Fortified Region (UR).

For me, a young inexperienced engineer, this was a difficult test and an excellent school for independent work. I was very lucky with the command of the Construction Superintendent's Office (ONS): they trusted us and did not engage in petty care, but due to the lack of specialists of our profile in the Office, we were forced to decide everything ourselves. I had to select specialists from among one-year-old soldiers (that is, those with higher education) and actively use technical literature. My father was a great help to me, who gave competent advice by correspondence and sent the necessary books.

With hard work, often without days off, from the spring of 1940 until the start of the war, we managed to build 30 km of railways with the necessary station equipment and depot facilities. The rolling stock consisted of two steam locomotives, five engine locomotives and forty cargo platforms.

When designing railway lines and carrying out work, we absolutely did not take into account the need to maintain rational land use, and this is in the conditions of private ownership of land that has been preserved on the territory of former Poland. Bypassed only settlements and farms. The headquarters and construction yard were unceremoniously placed on a farm, the owner of which also had a house in the town of Snyadovo. In short, we behaved like conquerors.

The construction took place with a very limited amount of equipment and vehicles, by the civilian population and Komsomol battalions numbering up to 500 people, although only the volume of earthwork was very large. So, in one of the forest areas, the route crossed a ridge of hills, where the depth of the excavation reached 10-15 meters over a length of 300 meters. With the help of the explosion, more than 100 thousand cubic meters of soil were thrown out.
In the spring of 1941, I received another rank - a military engineer of the 3rd rank.

On June 21, in the afternoon, the movement of freight trains was opened on a new ten-kilometer line to one of the fortified areas under construction. I was on the locomotive next to the driver. We drove at low speed along the still unfinished track, and ahead of us some people, quickly moving away, put sleepers on the rails, delaying our already slow movement. Knowing nothing about the impending formidable events, especially since everything was calm around, we did not attach much importance to this. Indeed, even in the previous year, similar things happened on our first line, and even sabotage was committed.
In the early morning of June 22, I woke up from the noise of engines and from the open window I saw planes flying deep into our territory. However, on the road, as usual, cars loaded with building materials were passing by. This calmed me down and I went back to sleep. It wasn't until about 9 am that I was awakened. Arriving at the construction headquarters, I clarified the situation and received instructions to wait for instructions.

On one of the vehicles, I sent all the civilian employees and their families to the rear. After the war, I learned that they had safely reached the city of Sebezh on the former Latvian border, where many of them had previously lived. By evening, a mechanized unit began to deploy at our location, and already at dusk, on the orders of the ONS, we boarded the remaining two vehicles and departed to the east.

In the morning we safely passed through Bialystok with burning oil storage facilities, and then the worst began: German aviation dominated the air with impunity over the forest section of the road, dammed with refugees, military units and convoys, firing at and bombing us at low level. People died, cars burned and traffic jams were created. I witnessed cases when people lost their minds during shelling and bombing and ran away from the road, hiding in the distance and not thinking about returning to the rescue vehicles. So we lost one of our commanders. With great difficulty, by the middle of the day we got out of this hell by using every short break to move forward.

During the second night of the war, Volkovysk and Slonim passed through and, having left the borders of Western Belarus, found themselves in the area of ​​the city of Slutsk. At the checkpoint, the entire staff was ordered to leave the car and go to the assembly point. A car with safes (money, documentation), accompanied by the chief accountant, drove further to the rear. Many years later, after the war, I received a letter from him from Ukraine. Unfortunately, the correspondence did not start.
There was no assembly point at the indicated place, confusion and panic reigned. Returning back, we met with a group of commanders of our UNS on two lorries, they took us to their place and we went to Minsk in the hope of finding a collection point for the engineering troops of the Belarusian Military District. Night Minsk appeared in ruins, deserted and without any trace of the headquarters.

We decided to go to Mogilev, where we arrived without incident the next day, June 26th. It was clear that the headquarters of the district was located here. Bringing order to the troops, the commanders resorted to cruelty, shooting deserters and alarmists on the spot. I saw corpses with notes on the body - a deserter.

On the same day, the Department of Military Field Construction No. 13 was formed, of which we became a part. I was appointed to the position of head of one of the senior foremen (a strange name that migrated to the active army from civil engineering).

In Mogilev, for the first time since the beginning of the war, I managed to send a telegram and a letter to my parents in Moscow.
After spending the night at the city cemetery, where I settled down well on a stone sarcophagus, a combat mission was received to set up barriers on the roads and erect small defensive lines in the strip between the Berezina and Dnieper rivers south of Mogilev.

Having crossed the Dnieper in the town of Staryi Bykhov, my unit headed along the road to Bobruisk. The complexity of the situation consisted in ignorance of the combat situation and the absence of a map of the area. The road passed through the forest and was completely deserted, the shooting was not heard. So we drove several tens of kilometers. The inhabitants of a few villages could not say anything about the enemy. Having not found parts of our army, we decided that it was pointless and risky to go further. On the road, several blockages were made with fallen trees, a bridge was destroyed across a small river and along its banks, with the involvement of the local population, they made escarps (obstacles for tanks), although they perfectly understood that without the defense of these barriers, overcoming them by the enemy would not require a significant investment of time.

From a distance it was clear how our heavy bombers, attacked by fascist fighters, were dying, and on the way back they picked up a pilot from a downed plane. He provided me with a map of the area of ​​operation of our aviation, which was very useful during the period of my stay later on the territory of Belarus. Similar events of those days on this road were described in the novel by K. Simonov and shown in the film "The Living and the Dead".
After moving to the left bank of the Dnieper, passing through the city of Rogachev, at the already closed dairy plant, they stocked up on a large amount of condensed coffee in cans. For more than a week after that, all of our part ate only black bread with this coffee, and if at first they consumed this food with pleasure, then disgust appeared. Many years after that, already in peacetime, I could not even look at these banks.

Due to the rapid advance of the advancing enemy on the Western Front, the defense lines were outlined further and further to the east, and in the strip of the Varshavskoe highway, where our unit provided them, by the end of July we approached the eastern border of Belarus. In most cases, the work started on the defensive lines did not have time to finish and was not used to organize the defense.
We lingered the longest in the area of ​​the city of Krichev, where, with the help of the local population, we managed to create obstacles, mainly for the advance of tank units on the outskirts of the city and on the flanks, making extensive use of favorable natural barriers (ravines, rivers). However, probably due to the unfortunate position of the defensive lines with a large water barrier in the immediate rear - the Sozh River, the command considered the defense conditions unsuitable and left this area without a fight, retreating to the left bank of the river.

By this time, it became clear to everyone that the war would be protracted, very bloody, and it was unlikely that we would survive. The mood was bleak. This environment had a depressing effect on me and I began to smoke, although I had not even tried before.

It was the middle of summer, the weather was excellent, and therefore the horrors of war seemed like a nightmare.
Time passed, and we all retreated and retreated. Finally, in August, bloodless in battle, the Nazi war machine ran out of steam for a while, and our army managed to detain the enemy on the Western Front along the Ostashkov-Yartsevo-Roslavl-Glukhov line.

Our unit created a section of the rear line of defense along the Mormozinka River, adjacent on the right flank to the village of Safonovo. We developed a defense system, a firing scheme, after which we placed and erected anti-tank obstacles, trenches for infantry, firing points for machine guns, including long-term structures - bunkers (wood-and-earth firing points). The local population was widely involved in the implementation of work to help.

This situation continued until the first days of October, when a new enemy offensive began. We heard the echoes of the battles to the north and south of our sector, but in front of us all was calm.
After 2 ... 3 days the rumble of artillery cannonade began to move to the east and it became clear that our defense had been broken through. Soon we received an order to withdraw to the rear.

2. How it was in the environment. October 7 - October 18, 1941

We are surrounded! This message startled me, and although outwardly I tried to be calm, fear crept into my soul.
The encirclement became known after a long but unsuccessful wait for the command of our unit - Military Field Construction No. 13 (VPS No. 13) at a pre-established assembly point near the village of Safonovo in the Smolensk region.

By this time, for me, the fighting had already lasted 3.5 months, starting from the early morning of June 22, when a 25-year-old military engineer of the 3rd rank (which corresponds to the rank of captain), employed in the construction of defensive lines on the border of the USSR in Western Belarus, woke up the rumble of German planes flying into the depths of our territory.

Over the past period of almost continuous retreat, we had to go through a lot: air raids, panic, uncertainty of the situation, loss of life, the installation of barriers under enemy fire, and much more. However, in spite of everything, I remained confident in the victorious end of the war for our country and its successful outcome for me personally. Now my belief that I would survive was seriously shaken.

Together with military commissar Galkin and a representative of the UPU, we decided to head to the area somewhat south of the city of Vyazma, where, as if only yesterday, there was a “gate” in the encirclement, and there try to slip through to join the Red Army. It was already getting dark when we left the village on twelve ZISs, on which there were 20 ... 30 people of personnel and military equipment, mainly anti-tank mines.

We spent the whole night in cars, spending most of the time looking for the right route. They often moved against their intentions in the mass of other cars that blocked the road. As a result, by the morning we covered less than 60 km. This forced us to act more decisively, and ignoring the rumors about German tanks allegedly controlling the roads on our route, we drove forward to the east and by 1 o'clock in the morning drove into a forest 12 ... 15 km southwest of Vyazma. Here we decided to find out the situation and act according to the circumstances.
It should be noted that by this time the condition of many, if not most of my companions was very deplorable - they were very cowardly and discouraged, took almost no part in resolving operational issues and did not help us - the commanders. Part of the explanation for this was that for the past 10 days everyone had been under a lot of stress, sleeping little and eating poorly.

Before we had time to outline a further plan of action, 20 ... 25 German bombers appeared and the leader went into a dive above us. The bombing lasted several hours with breaks of 20-30 minutes to resume the bomb load. The bombs fell quite close, there were many casualties, but no one from our group was injured.

By the middle of the day, the raids had stopped and we, taking advantage of this, moved deeper into the forest, where we established contact with the regiment of border guards, so far the only organized and combat-ready unit we encountered. Panic reigned all around: soldiers and commanders on foot and in vehicles, and even single tanks rushed in different directions, often returning back. Suddenly, our group, located on the edge of a small clearing, was attacked and fired upon at low level ground attack aircraft. True, everything ended happily, except for the broken boot and bruised leg of Captain Maslennikov, which may have become fatal for him (later he disappeared from the group, and we did not find him).

By the end of the day word had spread that the Germans were coming from the west. The panic reached its climax and everyone rushed to the east. The border guards also disappeared, and with them the military commissar Galkin. I gathered my group (with the exception of a few people) and we drove across the virgin lands after everyone. However, in the very first ravine, the vehicles got stuck, and without hesitation I gave the order to burn them.

It was getting dark, it was snowing. I led the dismounted group to the east. Having passed 6…8 kilometers, we came to the village of Staroye Stogovo. The collective farmer she met pointed out the direction where the Germans allegedly had not yet been. We continued on in complete darkness. A large group of soldiers gradually joined behind us. Ahead could be seen the glow from the fires and soared signal and flares.

We crossed the swamp and went deeper into the forest. According to all reports, the Germans were close, and we began to advance cautiously. On the forest road, they vaguely saw people walking towards them. He hid his people in the bushes and began to wait - they also turned out to be from among the surrounded. They reported the bad news - there was no gap in the encirclement, and the attempt to break through ended in failure with losses in personnel. Having collected meager information, he led the group on. Soon the forest began to thin out, and we went to the edge - the Germans were ahead!

We are located in a low spruce forest, and I single out two groups of two people for reconnaissance, and then with difficulty, since the majority are extremely passive. While I gave the task of reconnaissance, everyone else fell asleep. After an hour and a half, both groups returned and reported on the approximate location of several enemy firing points. There were no gaps in the line of defense. After consulting with the major of the First (he served with me on the border as the head of the section for the construction of defensive structures), I decide to move to the area surveyed by the first group. Her senior, energetic military technician of the 2nd rank (I forgot his last name) persuades her to try to slip through, and in extreme cases to break through the encirclement with a fight. However, weak weapons (4 ... 6 rifles and a dozen pistols), open terrain and the difficult condition of the majority force us to abandon this risky proposal. In addition, the idea that even with a slight wound a hopeless situation was created, since there was nowhere to expect help from. Remained either captivity or suicide.

Dawn is approaching, and we withdraw into the forest in order to stay secretly in it until the next night, which, as I thought, should be decisive in the fate of our detachment. In the dense spruce forest under the drizzling rain lay down to rest. The condition, aggravated by isolation from organized military units, is terrible; most consider themselves dead. I cannot fall asleep for a long time, thinking about getting out of this situation and losing my last hope.

Never before, and even after, in the difficult and dangerous moments of my life in the war, I had not had such a difficult state of mind, brought to the limit by a sense of responsibility for the life of the detachment. The vile autumn weather, as it were, emphasized the hopelessness of our situation.
The heavy sleep did not last long - it was damp and cold, and everyone was dressed in summer uniforms. They modestly fortified themselves with bread taken at the last moment from the destroyed vehicles.

In the morning there comes a certain enlightenment in our situation: here and there groups of fighters and commanders appear. Some captain forms a sapper battalion on the instructions of the general, and we join them. Confidence is pouring into us - we are not alone, and most importantly, there are signs of organization.
In the middle of the day, enemy mortars began to fire on the forest. We dispersed and just in time - aircraft flew in! Part of us melted away, and again everything became as in the morning.

Sudden luck! A whole division is moving east past us. We approach the temporarily stopped headquarters. Not far from the idea of ​​​​fight, bullets whistle. In this situation, we are given the task of escorting vehicles with preliminary reconnaissance of the path. The fight begins to shift to the right, and instead of moving east, we are heading south and even southwest. Having hesitated with the choice of the road, we missed the cars, which, succumbing to the prevailing panic, rushed forward and got stuck in the swamp. For this, one of the commanders attacked me and threatened to shoot me. I gathered the rest of the group, as the rest, including Major of the First, had gone ahead, and began to pull out the cars stuck in the swamp. The Germans must have spotted us and opened fire with mortars. While pulling out one of the vehicles, the already familiar whistle began to grow rapidly, and as soon as we fell to the ground, a mine crashed into the ground a few meters from me and ... did not explode! The last car, after a complete loss of strength (starvation and sleepless nights had an effect), had to be abandoned and, trying to no longer catch the eye of the authorities, we moved forward to the south after those who had left. After walking and driving about two kilometers, we got into a forest, which served as a collection point.

It was evening, it started to snow. The command staff was assembled for a meeting, which was held by the brigade commissar. He outlined the situation for us and set the task: to form combat units and break through the enemy ring. There were several generals in the surrounded units, whose behavior left much to be desired - they practically did not lead the operation being prepared. The brigade commissar, which surprised me very much, subjected me to sharp criticism in front of us, not only behind our backs, but also spoke directly to the face of one tipsy general who approached us. Apparently, this criticism brought them all to their senses, and they set to work. The preparation of battle groups began, which immediately went to the front line.

My group and I ended up in a detachment for the protection of the rear, commanded by the military commissar Galkin. An agonizing wait began at the tail of our large convoy, while a cannonade approached from the west, tracer bullets and flares appeared - we were pressed from behind.

By midnight, the weather cleared up, the moon rose, and it began to freeze. Since the evening there was hope, based on the statement of one of the generals, that the offensive would go quickly. In fact, during the whole night the advanced units hardly advanced, and our rear moved only one kilometer from the place of its formation. I spent the whole night with Galkin. No one was interested in us, the partially abandoned convoy promised to incur a good bombardment at dawn. Taking into account the weak discipline in the surrounded units, it seemed unlikely that the infantry would fight after the breakthrough to withdraw the wagon train, and we were threatened with the possibility of remaining surrounded. In this regard, the head of the logistics commissar Galkin decided to go ahead. A good half of our detachment nevertheless wanted to stay with the convoy, and we allowed them to do so. We approached the place of formation of units going on the attack. Our indecision was suddenly dispelled by the approaching general who was in charge of the entire operation (I think it was Major General Pronin). "What kind of people are these?" he asked, and when I reported, the order came to attack, despite our poor armament. I rushed to look for all my personnel, but on the way I met a colonel, who, instead of the order received earlier, ordered me to gather all those hiding in the forest in an attack. Apparently, I coped well with this task, having recruited and sent many fighters and commanders to the assembly point. Later, recalling this event, it became clear that my almost unquestioning obedience was due to my resolute appearance and threatening behavior with weapons in my hands. It was already dawn when, having completed the task, I returned to the assembly point, where I soon met Galkin, the First, and several other people from my group.

We spent the whole day in the undergrowth in front of the village of Troshkino, waiting for the success of the attackers. But the attacks on it were unsuccessful due to the lack of artillery and other military equipment and the weak weapons of the fighters, with the almost complete absence of such effective weapons as machine guns, as in the entire army by that time. The monotonous tactics of frontal attacks without the use of flanking maneuvers also did not contribute to success.
It was not sweet for us in the forest - bullets were whistling all around. Mines were often torn, which incapacitated those surrounded. Disguised enemy saboteurs increased our losses by their actions.

By mid-afternoon, the weather turned bad again, and it began to snow and rain. It was cold and I started looking for clothes. Soon he found clean linen in the knapsack of the killed soldier and immediately put it on. Thus, I ended up wearing three pairs of underwear, summer uniforms and an inferior overcoat.

At dusk, we met with a group of commanders from the neighboring STARPO of our military field construction department, headed by Captain Geril, and decided to stick together. They had some porridge concentrate and we started to prepare dinner. Suddenly, they opened fire on us from machine guns with tracer bullets, we lay down in a funnel formed by a shell explosion, and prepared for defense in an obviously bad position, since the enemy spotted us on a fire that was thoughtlessly lit without shelter. Then we noticed that there was no one around us, and hurried to quickly move back.

The unsuccessful daytime offensive did its job - again chaos reigned, there was no leadership from the command, there were no previously formed units.

Everyone lay down close to each other and, finally, fell asleep under the whistle of bullets and explosions of shells and mines. Woke up three hours later, it was about 23 hours. Some unit lined up not far from us, and its commander set the task of breaking through the encirclement in small groups, since the breakthrough of the encirclement failed. I don’t know if this was the decision of the senior command, or only the commander of this unit, but since that moment we have not observed any attempts to unite the actions of all small groups. After consulting, we decided to try to sneak through the bushes to the south of the German stronghold in the village of Troshino unnoticed.

At this time, I was taken aside by Major First. In the environment, his very poor physical condition, sickly appearance was noticeable. Obviously, age (he was something like 50 years old) made itself felt.
“I probably won’t be able to get out of the encirclement with you, I feel bad. Here, take a map of the area to Mozhaisk - it will help you bring the group to yours, ”he said.
What a selfless decision!
My refusals did not lead to anything, he insisted, and I took the card, trying to assure him that we would all go out together.

Again we move at night through the undergrowth, where we were the day before, at first at full height, but soon we began to crawl - the Germans were firing intensely from machine guns and mortars. The forest is replaced by groups of shrubs. The closer to the field, the less people around, even from our group there are already some people. Here is the edge and, to our chagrin, the village is opposite us. The fire does not weaken, you can not raise your head. We organize the shelling of enemy firing points with personal weapons (pistols), but, of course, to no avail because of the considerable distance (about 200 m). We crawl deep into the forest and move to the flank of the stronghold, but here it is the same - the enemy has created a continuous line of defense. Again we move back and, under the cover of an abandoned tractor, we arrange a council. We now have 5 people left, all without a single scratch, but three are missing, including military commissar Galkin and Major Pervy. We decide to stock up on food, as we haven't eaten almost anything for four days. We are searching in the dark in cars that are still stuck in the same ill-fated place from which our group pulled them out, but now there are much more cars.

We soon managed to stock up on breadcrumbs and even a small amount of concentrates. They did not find any warm clothes, but I applied “rationalization”: on my hands, which are quite sensitive to frost, I put on paper socks, which I did not part with even after leaving the encirclement, until I received gloves. Our search ended with great luck - we found two pork hams and went to the nearest bushes with the intention of having a good meal.

Dawn broke.
Before we had time to cut off the first piece of ham, our attention was attracted by the noise in the wagon train that had just been left - separate cars that were not stuck in the swamp, and all living things were moving towards the village of Troshino. There, against the background of the fire, human figures flashed, moving in one direction - to the east. It became clear that the village had been recaptured from the Germans and the way to the Germans was open. We had to hurry, the passage could close very soon, without waiting for onlookers like us.

They rushed to run, I with a ham in one hand and a pistol in the other. Here is the village, which remains to our left. The shelling from the flanks intensified and we had to move across the arable land in dashes. Terrible shortness of breath, no strength. I throw a ham. The Germans have spotted us and are conducting aimed fire. Obviously, they noticed me in a commander's uniform - with insignia and belts. After one of the dashes, 1.5 meters from me, burrowing, fortunately for me, into loose earth, a mine explodes. I am covered in earth. He was stunned, severely shell-shocked in the head, and the duffel bag was pierced in several places by shrapnel. With difficulty I crawl on. The shelling began to decrease, as we obviously disappeared from the field of view of the enemy. With four companions, I somehow got to the saving forest. We crossed the Vyazma-Bryansk railway near the Losmino station and settled down to rest until the evening, as the Vyazma-Yukhnov highway was ahead, along which German units, including tanks, moved. I engaged in a long but fruitless search for Major First and other members of our group. Gradually, our small detachment increased due to the joined fighters. I was presented with a compass and we developed a route using the map, and I insisted on following without approaching the Minsk and Warsaw highways, along which, as I assumed, and this was fully confirmed, the main forces of the Nazi troops rushing to Moscow would attack.

As darkness fell, we moved forward. As we approached the highway, enemy flares shot up in front of us. They quickly stepped back and attacked me with threats of reprisal, accusing me of treason, based on my last name. I still remember this incident with horror. Saved my extreme indignation and anger, expressed in strong, well-known expressions. A few minutes later, at the command of Captain Geril, the whole group moved away from the intended route - to the Warsaw highway. I did not meet any of them later, although there was only one assembly point for commanders leaving the encirclement on the Western Front, where I ended up - in the Barvikha area.

I was left, as it seemed to me, alone, but Captain Belyaev from the militia rose from the ground, and he went with me the rest of the way from the encirclement. After consulting, we decided to covertly go around the place on the highway where the enemy’s outposts were located and move further along the developed route. We approached the highway, lay down in a ditch and began to listen. Soon strange sounds arose, and several German submachine gunners on bicycles rode past us.

After crossing the highway, we went through small copses. To the left was a dense forest. It was a clear moonlit night. Approaching a small grove, we suddenly found ourselves a few steps away from the plane camouflaged on its edge. What is it, a separate machine or a field enemy airfield?

This thought instantly flashed through my head. Quietly retreated back and rushed to run across the field to the forest, every second expecting shelling. We prepared to sell our lives dearly, but with one pistol and one grenade for two, it was difficult to count on "success". Fortunately, everything was quiet. Then I remembered that in the afternoon, when we were preparing to cross the highway, a reconnaissance aircraft flew over us for a long time. Obviously it was him.
We went deeper into the forest, collected spruce branches, climbed into it and fell into a sound sleep.

In the morning, moving through the forest, we met a group of fighters, and went together. All around was calm. It was possible for the first time in many days to build a fire and eat hot. In the evening, after a short rest, we continued on our way again. Already in the dark we ran into an enemy detachment, we were fired from machine guns, a panic began, and everyone fled. We were left alone again.
After a while, we carefully approached the last hut of some remote village. There were no Germans. A friendly old man arranged for us to spend the night in the hayloft, he himself undertook to guard us, and we were finally able to rest under the roof.

In the morning the old man woke us up, gave us some meat for the road, wished us success and we said goodbye. The memory of this meeting has remained with me for the rest of my life.
Every day, with deep gratitude, he remembered Major First. His map has already helped us out more than once, and in this section on the map I developed a route around the large bend of the Ugra River. Otherwise, we would have to overcome it twice in the late autumn and, possibly, have a meeting with the enemy.
During the day we carefully moved to the north-east and late in the evening we approached the Mamonovskaya mill on the left tributary of the Ugra - the Zhizhala River.

We traveled more at night, especially since the days were short. We were joined by a group of fighters and junior commanders, among whom were lightly wounded. My responsibility, as a commander, for the further, if possible, safe route has increased. I demanded strict discipline on the march and on halts, and organized reconnaissance of the route. I noted with satisfaction the steady fulfillment of my orders by all the personnel of the detachment, numbering 25 people.
During the period of encirclement, the ability to navigate well on the ground and on the map, including in the forest, was very useful to me. This quality developed in me for many trips and hunting trips in my youth.

Moving further east, we passed through the large village of Makeevskoye, and under the cover of night in snowfall crossed the Gzhatsk-Yukhnov road at a half-burnt village, which the Germans had visited shortly before our arrival. Naturally, we were extremely pleased with this happy coincidence.

We entered the village of Tyurmino. The Germans have not yet appeared here and throughout our journey to Mozhaisk. We moved during the day and partly at night through the Gzhatsk forests.

We hear the echoes of the battle from Borodino.
In the village of Samodurovka, the chairman of the collective farm organized a lunch for our group. We made a day trip Bortenyevo - Kobyakovo. In this village we met our small military unit, numbering up to a battalion, which occupied the defense. Unfortunately, the command of the unit did not know the combat situation.

We got up early, planning for ourselves to make the transition to the Minsk highway before dark. There was only no clarity with the situation on it, because it was the direction of the main attack of the Nazi troops and therefore they could advance along it further to the east and even create a continuous front line near Moscow. Then we would have to act in the rear of the Germans in the familiar forests near Moscow
We passed Vaulino, Troparevo ... here is the Minsk highway, and oh joy! Our units are on the defensive on its 110th kilometer from Moscow.

Finally, the whole group safely, without loss, was brought to their own. In total, about 180 km were covered during the encirclement period.

All healthy fighters are taken to the line of defense, and me, Belyaev and the wounded are allowed further to the rear. We ate a little and hit the road along the empty highway.

We walked all night, as there were no passing cars. Once we had a dry snack in an abandoned hut and took a nap for an hour. In the morning they came to Dorohovo, where many rear units were located, and literally collapsed from exhaustion. After all, we covered almost 50 km in a day!

3. Defense of Moscow. 19.10 - 30.12.1941.

After a short rest in Dorohovo, Belyaev and I decided to go to Moscow. We got into a passing car and hit the road along the Minsk highway. In the Odintsovo area, we were dropped off at a checkpoint and sent on foot to a collection point located in the village of Zhukovka near Barvikha. There were a lot of command staff. It was checked, and the main attention was paid to persons who did not save documents. Everything was in order with me, I also had all the signs of a military engineer of the 3rd rank, and already on October 22 I was sent to the newly formed department of the VPS 13, stationed in the village of Kubinka, to my former position as a senior worker.

By this time, near Moscow, as a result of the first general offensive of the Germans, the front line had stabilized at the turn of the Nara River, east of the village of Tuchkovo and further north (25 - 30.10.41). In mid-November, the fascist army launched a second general offensive in the central sector with the main attack directed along the Volokolamsk highway. The right flank of the attackers was located on the left bank of the Moscow River. During the period from November 19 to December 4, the enemy advanced to the village of Snegiri, occupying the village of Ershovo to the north of Zvenigorod.

Upon arrival at the headquarters, as a specialist, he was immediately sent to reconnoiter the line of defense, since most of the command staff had no experience in this matter. In the first days it was quite hard after all the hardships and starvation in the environment. Fortunately for me, in our unit turned out to be the commander of a small unit, a colleague from the pre-war UNS, Ivanov II, who fed me.

In connection with the stabilization of the front line in the Narofominsk-Tuchkovo sector and the beginning of the enemy offensive on Zvenigorod, VPS 13 was urgently transferred to this area with the task of creating defensive lines and mining tank-dangerous areas. At first, our headquarters was located in the village of Ustye on the Karinskoye - Zvenigorod road, and then we retreated to the city and settled in the signalmen's rest house. The last operation in this direction was the construction of barriers and the installation of mines along the eastern bank of the Storozhka River from the Moskva River to the village of Dyutkovo (including the approaches to the former Savino-Storozhevoy Monastery) and preparations for the explosion of a number of important objects in the city. The offensive of the fascist troops at this line was stopped.

We moved from Zvenigorod to the village of Sharapovka, and then to the holiday village of Golitsyno. Places familiar from my youth, and how could I then assume that I would have to fight here!

On one of the nights in early December, we were alerted - artillery fire and shots from small arms were heard not far to the south. Later it turned out that after a month-long break, on December 1, the enemy broke through our defenses on the Nara River north and south of Narofominsk and advanced 20 kilometers to the Alabino platform on the Kyiv railway. and further towards Golitsyno to the village of Kobyakovo.

We were entrusted with the task of delaying the further advance of the Nazis towards Moscow, as well as preventing the capture of the village of Golitsino in order to encircle the 5th and part of the 33rd armies, occupying defenses from Zvenigorod to Narofominsk. By morning, the mining of roads and the construction of forest blockages was stopped, as a tank brigade quickly deployed to the breakthrough area destroyed the enemy grouping.
Alabino and Petrovskoe turned out to be the points closest to Moscow reached by the enemy to the west of the capital. It should be noted that few people know about this operation and there are no memorial signs about this successful battle.

In the second half of December, the reorganization of our VPS 13 department into one of the engineer-sapper brigades created at that time, subordinate to the command of the fronts, began.

On December 31, in the evening, to the great chagrin of the Muscovite soldiers, including me, the formed brigade No. 40 drove by car to the place of deployment in the city of Tula. Late in the evening we reached the city of Serpukhov, where we spent the night, somehow marking the onset of the new, 1942.
During the time after leaving the encirclement, with the assistance of our commander, Major Savostyanov, I managed to visit my parents in Moscow two or three times. These were exciting and touching events for me and for them. During the past period of the war, they had a very hard time, and not only because of poor supplies and frequent bombing, but mainly because of me, my only son. Even at the beginning of the war, one of my classmates, Sadoev, when meeting with his father, could not think of anything smarter than to say that no one got out of the border from the area of ​​​​the city of Lomzha and I, obviously, died or was captured. All these months of the war, I, too, worried about my parents and was unspeakably glad to see them in a more or less satisfactory condition. Unfortunately, I was able to help very little with food, but on the other hand, I significantly raised their morale.

4. In Kozelsk. January–August 1942

On January 1, they arrived in Tula and settled in empty capital buildings.
A few days later, the formation of the 4th engineer-sapper brigade of the Western Front was completed. I was appointed head of the production department of the brigade headquarters.
Following the advancing troops, we moved through the city of Odoev to Kozelsk. On the way we stopped at the newly liberated Kaluga.

It was a severe blizzard winter with heavy drifts on the roads. Under these conditions, the advance was difficult, most of the time it was necessary to clear roads from snow and pull cars out of it. The entire personnel suffered greatly from frost and blizzards, there were many frostbite - after all, in the first winter we did not have boots.
Finally, in mid-January, we reached the city of Kozelsk - the place of deployment in connection with the transition of our troops to the defense on the line Yukhnov - Kirov - Sukhinichi - Belev.

One of the main tasks of our brigade at the first stage was the construction of roads in the army zone, preparing them for the spring thaw and the construction of river crossings during the flood. In the conditions of the forest-steppe, the flood was expected, as always, very stormy. Suffice it to say that the water level in the Oka River near Kaluga usually rises from the summer (low-water) horizon to 10 meters. An original decision was made to arrange a crossing in Kozelsk across the Zhizdra River (a tributary of the Oka) - powerful ferries were built on tanks taken from railway platforms.

With the advent of spring, almost complete impassability came, since the vast majority of roads did not have a hard surface. Due to the lack of forests, the roadway had to be strengthened with brushwood, which poorly provided the passage of machinery and vehicles. The situation on the roads was aggravated by systematic raids in the daytime by enemy aircraft.

One day in early April, the commissar of the brigade Akopov ordered me to do the impossible: to urgently restore travel on the Kozelsk-Sukhinichi road. I went on foot to one of the sapper battalions, located 20 km from Kozelsk, knowing full well the impossibility of completing the task and the dire consequences. But I was lucky again: the next day the weather was fine, the roads dried out and became passable.

Summer came, on our sector of the front only local battles took place. The brigade was mainly engaged in the construction of roads and bridges, including across the Oka River near Kaluga. Some of our sappers erected rear defense lines and mined tank-dangerous areas.
The brigade headquarters, having left the city, was located in the forest not far from the former Optina Pustyn. Most of the staff commanders spent the whole summer in the forest, not even getting out to the edge, which had a depressing effect on many.

In the Kozelsky period of a relatively calm life in the defense, mutual love arose with the civilian headquarters of M.D. We spent a lot of time in the evenings and at night together, because of which we had troubles, because I was late or did not appear at all for training alerts conducted by the authorities (the meetings took place outside the headquarters). We made plans for a joint life after the war.
At the end of the war, I was informed of her unseemly behavior, in fact, treason. I worried for a long time, but having overcome myself, I broke off all relations with her.

In the last days of August 1942, our brigade was disbanded. Most of the headquarters commanders and all battalions were transferred to the 32nd engineer-sapper brigade, and several people, including the chief of staff Proshchenko G.M. and I was seconded to the 11th engineer brigade on the same Western Front. M.D. transferred to 32 HMB, and we broke up, as it turned out, forever.