Tank Rider: Into the Reich with the Red Army

I was born in Moscow on 20 July, 1923, in no. 77 Friedrich Engels street, formerly known as Irininskaya. My father, Ivan Vasilievich Bessonov, moved to Moscow from a village in 1908 at the age of fifteen. Although he had almost no education, he managed to get a job in a small store and after a while become a prikazchik (salesman) and later senior salesman. In 1915 he married my mother, Olga Pavlovna, a native of Moscow. They had a daughter Elena (we called her Lelya) in 1916 and that same year my father was drafted into the army. He served in the army until the February revolution and retired in 1917. After the Great October Revolution my father worked in trade before retiring in 1960. My mother studied at a school for tailors in Moscow but didn’t like to recall that period of her life. As she put it, it was pure drudgery. They had to get up at 5 or 6 o’clock in the morning, start the oven, cook tea for the foremen, wash dishes after their meal and clean the rooms and the workshop. Such apprentices would only start their professional training several years later, as it was profitable for the master to have several minor servants almost free of charge. After she completed her professional training and became a tailor, my mother got a job in a more prestigious tailor’s shop at Kuznetski bridge and had a decent salary for that time – 37–40 roubles in 1913. After she married my father she had four children and became a housewife.

In early 1917 my parents were renting an apartment in the building where I was to be born. It was a typical Moscow yard, surrounded by a high fence. There were many small yards like this in the street, and they were named after the landlords: Krushinski, Reshetkin, Maslov, Petrusinski and so on.

There were three wooden buildings in our yard, two of them were available for a rather high rent, and the landlady with her family occupied the third one. A carriage shed with stables was adjacent to the landlady’s building. All the buildings were one storey high, heated by stoves, without running water or plumbing, so we had to get water in the street from a water pump. The landlady had a fruit garden in the yard with apple and cherry trees, raspberry and gooseberry bushes.

After the October Revolution they took all three houses from the landlady and father started to pay significantly less for the two twelvesquare-metre rooms that we occupied. We had to share our kitchen with neighbours, who also had two rooms. A Russian stove heated our two rooms and one of the neighbour’s rooms. In wintertime the temperature would drop to 13–15 degrees Celsius by morning.

Dinner, or food in general, was heated on kerosene heaters and Primus stoves; we also used these devices to boil water for tea, as the main stove and the oven were only stoked once a day. They only installed gas in the building after the Great Patriotic War and the wood oven was only then replaced by a gas oven. Other conveniences, or rather inconveniences, remained the same.

I should say that they only installed electric lights in our street in 1935 or 1936 and that the street had been illuminated by gas lamps until then. Every evening a special worker would walk around the street and light the lamps and put them out in the morning. He carried a special ladder with him for this purpose, and the lamp-posts had a special crossbar to rest it on.

Until the mid-1930s our neighbourhood was a haunt for thieves and hooligans and we even had famous thieves living in our yard. Between 1936 and 1938 measures were taken, they all went to jail and our neighbourhood became quiet.

Recalling our life before 1941, I think that our family had a modest life. We had a Singer sewing machine, and our mother made all our clothes for us with the help of this machine. Clothes were passed on from one sister to another, and even I received some things adapted from my sisters’ clothes. Our furniture was quite simple, for besides the sewing machine we had a wall clock, a chest of drawers, an old wardrobe, two metallic beds, two chests that we children used as beds, chairs and a bookshelf with some books.

It was cramped: sometimes I had a hard time finding somewhere to do my homework. For some time my sister Lelya even had to sleep on the table, which was, fortunately quite large.

In every room in the place of honour there were three icons with lampstands; grandmother lit them up quite frequently. After Lelya and Galya entered Komsomol (the common name for VLKSM, the All-Union Lenin’s Communistic Union of Youth) in 1933, my father took the icons down and hid them, leaving just one icon in the kitchen for our grandmother.