Try living in Russia

The Great Fatherland War

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Several times he personally removed interruptions to the signal line.

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

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

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

The Blockade

Dusya, sturdy, strong, full of vitality, with small eyes and clear traces of the Tartar-Mongol invasion in her face, was left to her own devices during the Blockade, with two girls of ten and twelve to look after. At first the girls had been in the evacuation. Then rumours appeared that the trains full of children were being bombed. Dusya threw herself at the feet of her boss, imploring «I won't ran away, let me go and get my kids!» She managed to get permission for a trip, located her daughters in Valdai and took them back to Leningrad. There they lived through the entire blockade together with their mother.

Dusya came from the town of Torzhok, from a prosperous peasant family. In the past they had been «middle peasants», not rich, but well-to-do. Dusya was sullen and silent. Muscular and strong. With large, unfeminine hands and feet. Her education consisted of four years of parish school. Her husband, Nikolai, was tall and very handsome. With large brown eyes. They had been introduced by Nikolai's mother, a smart peasant women with business sense, a former innkeeper who sometimes travelled from Petersburg to Torzhok. Dusya was 22, by the standards of the time an old maid already. She had had a groom once. A good-for-nothing, when he was drank he would ran through the streets with a rifle and fire at random. They had to get rid of such a groom. On top of that Dusya didn't love him. It would be good to marry her off to a man from the city. Their parents matched Nikolai and Dusya up and married them. They spent a lot of time apart. Nikolai in Petersburg and Dusya in Torzhok. They lived without love. But they managed to have two daughters who, naturally, lived with their mother. Only right before the war did the family manage to find housing in a suburb of Leningrad and started living together. At that time Nikolai had just finished technical college. He became a production engineer. They were very different, Nikolai and Dusya. Nikolai used to read books and wear eyeglasses. Even with his glasses his eyesight was zero. Dusya thought little of her husband. A man who was good for nothing. Incapable of lifting stuff. Of getting things done. Of taking a decision, hammering a nail into the wall. He kept forgetting everything. A bungler. Constantly thinking about something. Lazy and useless. He brought his food ration home, at least something. Well no, Nikolai wasn't quite as useless and clumsy. Before he graduated from technical college he had been a worker at the Putilov Factory, and he'd coped well with the workload. He hadn't been sent to the front because of his eyesight. Certificate of exemption from military service. And suddenly… In the changing room someone took his documents from his clothes. Stole them. Perhaps it didn't happen in the changing room; perhaps someone picked them from his back pocket in the street. Somebody was very keen to help himself to a passport with an exemption certificate inside in these war times. Just at that moment recruitment was underway for the emergency volunteer corps. For some reason recruitment was always underway for the volunteer corps. Come on, Nikolai. We must defend the city against the enemy. We need to get a company together. That's an order. What exemption certificate? Where is it, your exemption certificate? Oh, you don't have it? Where nothing is, nothing can be had. What do you mean, you don't see a thing? Can you see five meters ahead? Do you see the rifle in the corner over there? Take it, and into service with you. There. We'll put a tick there. Nikolai Oref'ev the fighter. What kind of a fighter was he when he couldn't see further than his own hand even when wearing his eyeglasses? So he left with the emergency volunteer corps, to fight in the Siniavinsk swamps. And he didn't send a single message to either Dusya-Evdokia or his girls. Not a single triangular envelope. Not a single message. And no «killed in action» notice either. He vanished just as he had left. What kind of a fighter was he? His eyesight was zero point zero. He disappeared without a trace. He vanished to rot in the icy cold slush of the swamp. And left Dusya to fight for herself with the two girls. No, there is no monument to the fighter Nikolai Sergeevich Oref'ev anywhere in the world. To him who was fashioned from different stuff. For a life in a different space and a different time. Who ended up in this incomprehensible, terrible world and lived here as best he could, preserving his immortal soul as best he could. He chose a woman, not the most beautiful woman, but one who was strong and stubborn and capable of saving and protecting two thoughtless, long-legged girls. What could he have done? He joined the emergency voluntary corps to shield the city against the enemy with his own body. In order to… «lie down in peace when the time comes». «The green leaf from the dead head will cover them all – the gentle and the violent alike.» He left two girls behind. He left fragments of his genes to his offspring. The pensive penchant for quiet reflection. Great sensitivity. And unusually beautiful, eastern, slightly slanted eyes. Those were passed right down to my youngest along the generations.

Dusya and Nikolai's daughters turned out very likeable. Both of them were strong and stocky, taking after their mother in build. Tamara, the older one, looked like a proper Tatar with her broad face and small, slanted eyes. She was always laughing, nimble and lively. And ruling the roost. The younger one, Vera, also had black hair, not black in fact, but blue-black. She took more after her father, that was visible in everything. Light skin. Large brown eyes, soft features – a foreign beauty out of an Italian film. She was pensive and shy, evidently. She loved books, just like her father. But both girls had inherited their mother's tough-as-leather character. Decisive. The knew what they wanted. They wouldn't miss out on what was theirs. But all this would become evident later. When the girls grew up. When their teeth had cut through.

For the time being they were simply two girls, two adolescents. Left in the care of their mother. How to survive, how to feed them? They were living on the Petrograd Side. The girls went to the 'Lightning' cinema. They were watching a film when suddenly the lights went out and the film stopped. Come back tomorrow. They came back the next day, but there was no electricity, and the day after there was none either. When will you show the film? Why do you keep coming, girls? Do you have electricity in the house where you live? No electricity. See, we don't have any either, how silly you are. This was the war. There would be no more electricity in Leningrad until the early winter of 1942.

Dusya was working at a factory for packing materials. Sometimes as a packer. Sometimes as a stock keeper. She received food rations for herself and the two girls. The first year of the blockade was very hard. During the second year her enterprise set up a farming co-operative. They were allocated a plot of land in Kuzmolovo and went there in the summer to farm. Dusya, who came from the countryside and had worked in agriculture before, was appointed head of the co-operative. They grew vegetables, herbs, pumpkins, marrows, sunflowers, and turnips. In their free time they would go into the woods and collect mushrooms and berries. They put away stock for the winter. Her girls Dusya had sent to children's summer camps, Tamara to Ozerki and Vera to Koltushi. For weeding the fields during June and July. What kind of weeding I don't know. But the children lived fairly well in the camps. Some food always came their way. Moreover, their mother would come and bring them food from the vegetable patch or from the woods. During the winter the girls went to school. At school they received food on ration cards, breakfast and lunch. The city was making an effort to look after the children. Lunch was two courses, sometimes there was even stewed fruit. But what kind of food were they given? Skilly.

During the winter life was very hard. Inside the houses the temperatures were below freezing. The heating was destroyed, everything was covered in blocks of ice. People were using small wood-fired stoves for heating. The storeroom at the factory where Dusya worked was warm. There were packing materials, so there was always something for firing the stove. That's where the family went to warm themselves up. Often they would stay there for the night. There wasn't enough food. The fear that there would not be enough food remained with the girls for life. As did the habit to buy too much, to stuff their children and grandchildren with food. The girls became emaciated. Dusya gave blood to receive additional food. But many didn't survive. It was mostly men who died, as they needed more food. In the family next door the father and a 14-year old boy died from hunger. The girls saw that nobody removed the dead bodies for a long time. Their relatives kept the deceased in the house until the end of the month to retain their ration cards and receive their food. Then they took the bodies of their loved ones on a sledge somewhere near the empty People's House in the Lenin Park. From there the city services would take them to different cemeteries.

This is how the sisters lived. School during winter, camp during summer. When the war was over they entered technical college. Tamara studied to become a cinema technician. Fidgety as she was, she wanted to be close to the film world. She was soon thrown out, as at college one needs to think and Tamara wasn't too good at that. Vera joined food college. Closer to sustenance, so to say. They lived comfortably, one might say. But all three of them were capable of yelling. Tamara and her mother would gang up against the younger sister, or Vera and Dusya would rally against Tamara. All three were sharp-tongued and slightly rude. Dusya received a large number of awards and recognitions. This didn't save her from trouble. In 1947 she started working in a bakery. The spiteful manager with the crooked teeth gave food to her young lover. And three bakery assistants were found with a deficit. In Dusya's case an entire 600 grams were missing. Prison, then got parole. But she was inside for ten months. She doesn't like talking about this now, and not about the blockade either. That's completely understandable: these memories are very painful.

My Nanny

Post-war life was coming together. My father got a comfortable job. He was still fairly influential then. My mother had a secondary technical education. She was working in the Hypronickel Institute and designing beneficiating equipment for Norilsk Nickel. At that time the Institute was situated in the house of Vasilii Engelgardt, adjacent to the Small Hall of the Philharmonic Society. My mother loved walking to work. What a wonderful route she had, from Liteiny Prospekt past the Circus and the Mikhailov Castle, along Nevsky Prospekt to the baroque Engelgardt House.

It was the first summer after the War. We all lived together at the dacha, my father, my mother and I. Of course the dacha was rented. A small wooden house at the shore of the Razliv with a small wooden jetty. In the morning I would ran outside to greet my father. He was fishing already, using a rod and a worm. Next to him a bucket of water full of perches and breams. In the evening my father, together with my uncles and some local men, would pull a drag net across the lake. A wonderful catch. After the war the Razliv was full of fish. My parents bought eels from the fishermen. The big slippery fish escaped from the basin and crawled across the entire allotment. These were my first impressions of a happy childhood.

Of course, not everything was easy. Something was going wrong at my mother's job. Sometimes she would cry because the management was so strict. They started taking me to kindergarten. The kindergarten was situated in a very beautiful building with a wonderful landscaped courtyard off Liteiny Prospekt. My mother used to bring the unattractive nursery teacher makhorka, rough tobacco. When the makhorka was late I would get punished. Evidently the relationship with the teacher wasn't too good. One «misdeed» I remember well. We children were playing hide-and-seek. And I «hid» under the short skirt of a girl. I couldn't understand why the teacher got so angry. I had to stand in the corner for the whole day; I wasn't even allowed to go to the toilet. I wet myself. And in the evening my mother, who came to pick me up on the way home from work, somehow managed to sort it all out. I can't remember that she told me off for the «story with the skirt». But anyway, how could all this have been even remotely serious in comparison with the war that was behind and the 1950s that were drawing near?

My parents were earning comfortably. They decided to hire a household help to do the shopping and cooking and to look after me. That was common at the time. The paradoxes of those days. A family with a child and a household help in one room. In a communal flat. In summer, when I was still very little, I climbed onto the wide sill of the window that opened onto Liteiny Prospekt. And I looked down from the third floor onto the street. Our household help, a jolly, fat girl from the countryside, held me tightly and said: «Alexander Yakovlevich, come down from the window, please. If you fall, your mummy will be angry.»

Later there was another busty girl past her prime. Lyuda, Lyudmila. Before she came to us she used to work for Shapiro, the cinema director. She lived at his place at the corner of Nevsky and Vladimirsky Prospekt. My father remembered that he met the future director of LenFilm when he himself was involved in amateur theatre. The girl would tell us with great abandon about the actors who came to see the director. She especially liked Vitsin, «he's just so funny, no matter what he says, everybody is rolling about laughing». She was very observant, our simpleton girl. Vitsin became famous a lot later, when the film «Barbos the Dog and the Unusual Race» came out. In the end, our Lyuda was after one thing only: to finally find a husband. She evidently disliked the boy she was supposed to look after, i. e. me. No matter what I did, everything irritated her – my escapades, my clumsiness, typical of a child used to being indoors. And the work in our house was not to her liking either. She stayed for a short time only, like the others before her. My mother had the rare ability to maintain good relationships with all of them. I heard that she managed to stay in touch with Lyuda, too, until the latter left for the virgin soil of Kazakhstan a few years later. Probably in the hope to sort out her private life. What happened next isn't very clear. At first something worked out, then it all went bad somehow. Upon returning from the virgin soil she came to see us once on Liteiny Prospekt.