Tank Rider: Into the Reich with the Red Army

When we, five to seven young men, walked into a metro train, passengers started to pay attention to us. We were dirty and ragged, in patched-up shirts and trousers, our hair grown long and dirty and tangled. However, women came up to us and started to ask us who we were where we were from. When they learnt that we were from the labour front, they, just like all mothers, started to ask us about their children, but we had not known or seen anyone that they were asking about. When I came home, there was already an official paper that said that I had been drafted into the Red Army and had to show up at the assembly point in school in Takmakov lane by 11 August. That was the assembly point for the Baumanski district military commissariat of Moscow. Some neighbours in the street and classmates also received similar call-up notes.

During the night of 12 August we were loaded on to a train, taking our places in freight wagons (for 40 men or 8 horses) and we rolled eastwards. On the way individual cars were taken away as the men were sent to different military academies. Alexander Fokin left our company this way. In the vicinity of Chelyabinsk we were quartered in tents at the Chebarkulski military camp, where army units of the Urals Military District stayed during the summer. Before the cold weather set in, we lived in that camp, mostly doing drill. We still had civilian clothes. With the arrival of cold weather we were transferred to the summer film theatre of the Chelyabinsk park of culture. Moscow also had similar summer film theatres before the war. The autumn in the Urals was cold: we were freezing in the film theatre, some were falling sick and the shoes of some men fell apart, plus the food was very bad, and some men turned to theft. After that some top brass decided to get rid of this large, unmanageable and motley crew (we were at least 500), the majority of whom went into the city in the morning searching for food. They started to send the men out to different places of service. My friends Turanov, Tvorogov and Silvanovich left. I met them only after the war in Moscow. They all went through the war and survived, although Silvanovich was crippled after being wounded. In October a strange Sergeant Major picked us, some twenty men, and together with him we went to a kolkhoz to harvest potatoes, which the locals had not managed to harvest before the first frosts. They put us in an unheated room, we were freezing at night, but we were getting so tired during the day that we did not notice the cold. That was in Urals region, and it was already mid- or late October. The villagers did not help us at all, did not give us either food or firewood, we did not even have a pot to boil potatoes in. We were constantly hungry, besides that, many of us, including me, caught cold. Our superior also did not take proper care of us; it was good that they made a decision to move us back to Chelyabinsk. I can to some extent understand the words of one woman from a village where we had been digging anti-tank trenches, who refused to give us food saying: ‘What am I going to feed the Germans with, when they come?’ But that was in Bryansk region, not in the Urals, which was far away from the Germans. Never again in my life did I meet such people – they really deserve their name choldons (a name for Russians living in Siberia; however, normally the name does not have any negative connotation – translator’s comment). We only encountered such attitudes in the Western Ukraine, but those were Bandera’s areas (Bandera was a famous Ukrainian anti-Soviet resistance leader – translator’s comment), which only became part of USSR in 1940.