Tank Rider: Into the Reich with the Red Army

When our 341st school joined the trade school in December 1940 we were transferred to the 350th school on Bolshaya Pochtovaya street, the Komsomol organization elected me the chairman of voluntary Osoviakhim society (renamed DOSAAF after the war) (this was the Society for the Promotion of Aviation and Defence against Chemicals. It was an educational organization in the USSR in the 1930s, providing a basic military education along with training in defence against chemicals – translator’s comment). I would not say that this organization did a lot of activities in the school, but there were sometimes shooting competitions, which were especially important; we arranged hiking trips in gas-masks; sometimes even classes and other activities were done in gas-masks. My best friends in the street at that time were Vladimir Dolmatov, Petr Hromyshev, Lev Kolyhalov (killed in 1942) and Yevgeni Bogolyubski (missing in action). Later my best friends in my class were Alexander Fokin (killed in 1943) and Andrey Otryganiev (became a Lieutenant Colonel and died in 1957 at the age of 35). We all lived close to our school, we had common views and areas of interest, we were all tall and athletic guys and attained similar results in our studies.

Unfortunately, in the last quarter of the 1941 school year we stopped all sports activities – we had to prepare for graduation exams. After a long discussion, several guys from my class, including me, decided to apply for the Sevastopol Navy Academy, but I did not pass the medical commission – they said I had colour-blindness, rather insignificant, though. Nevertheless, the commission found me unfit for service in the Navy and Air Force (I also tried to enter a pilot club). We schoolmates did not think of war, believing that war would take place on the enemy’s territory, and we were light-hearted then. I passed all my graduation exams with distinction, except for Russian literature composition. The graduation party took place on 17 June and we received our ‘Maturity certificates’. The war started five days later.

THE WAR BEGINS

I first heard that the war had broken out while I was in the city, where I had gone with Vladimir Grivnin, my classmate – we had plans to go to a retro film theatre, which was at Nikitski Gate. We young boys took the news quite calmly, we thought that the Nazi invaders were about to be thrown back from the country’s borders. But exactly the opposite happened. This conflict, the harshest of all wars, would last 1,418 days for us, or 3 years, 10 months and 17 days.

On 25 or 26 June, 1941, I, along with other Komsomol members, was invited to the Baumanski district committee of Komsomol. There they suggested that we go to the Bryansk region to build fortifications. On the evening of the same day we were loaded on to a train with some personal belongings and food; we travelled westwards to build fortifications. We started to work at Kirov city in the Bryansk region. We worked twelve hours a day, and as we were not used to physical labour, we were really exhausted. We fell asleep as soon as our heads touched our ‘beds’ of hay or straw, which were made mostly in barns. We dug anti-tank ditches, dug around the riverbanks, dug trenches and set barbed-wire obstacles. In some cases we had to repair the railways destroyed during air raids and clear them from the debris of destroyed goods trains. However, our main job was to dig anti-tank ditches. The food was poor, it was not enough for us and the village population was not very kind to us. Our foreman, who arrived with us from Moscow, had to talk to the locals, mostly to leaders of the kolkhos (collective farm) or village, if they had not been drafted into the army, and persuade them to give us some food, at least potatoes. Such talks helped, but quite rarely. The German air force bombed us several times: scared, we ran in all directions like rabbits. We were young and healthy and could run fast. We did not suffer any losses, especially as the bombs exploded far away from us, but as we had not seen fire, we were quaking in our boots. We worked there for 45 days, until 8 August, 1941, and then were urgently loaded on a train and in the morning of 9 August we were back in Moscow, at Kiev station. College students were drafted in the army on the spot and were sent to different units.