Tank Rider: Into the Reich with the Red Army

We never returned to the summer film theatre in Chelyabinsk. We were moved from one barracks to another, but the good thing was that they were at least warm. They fed us really badly: boiled root beets in hot water, and that was it. Instead of dishes we had a clean small wash-tub. It is hard to explain such poverty, it was only the fourth month of the war. We saw plenty of soldiers drafted from the reserve. They were gloomy, untidy, a set of doomed 40-year-old men, who looked much older. I never met such backward men at the front. It was amazing that they were Siberian! In early November 1941 some 400 of us were loaded on to a train in Chelyabinsk. We were all sent to Kamyshlov military infantry academy. We suffered a lot from hunger on the way to Kamyshlov. As usual, they appointed a crook as the senior man of our team; he received the food for the whole group, gave out a ration for one day and disappeared with the rest of the food – we never saw him again. Stealing was widespread in the early days of the war, while thieves were hard to catch. Hungry boys literally turned over food kiosks at railway stations, taking everything they could find. After several similar attacks they started to make stops only in open fields and not at railway stations or villages. I received some food from the guys that I knew, mostly bread.

They unloaded us in the town of Kamyshlov in the Sverdlovsk region, some 180 km to the east of Sverdlovsk (now Yekaterinburg). The ones that arrived on that train were distributed among four companies – the 13th, 14th, 15th and 16th, which formed the fourth battalion. I ended up in the 15th company. Those who stubbornly and consistently refused to study, as well as some former criminals, were sent into army units that were in process of formation for the front in the Urals region.

We were sworn in at the academy on 16 November, 1941, and we were all officially accepted as cadets. First we received boots with puttees instead of jack-boots. We had a hard time with them – you try to wrap it around your leg and all of a sudden it slips out of your hand, and you have to start all over again. During that period almost all soldiers of the Red Army had boots with puttees, especially the infantry. They issued winter uniforms to us in the academy (that was when puttees were replaced by jack-boots): cotton foot-cloths, woollen tunics and padded trousers, a padded jacket to be worn under the greatcoat and mittens. We did not have winter hats, though, and we had to walk around in garrison caps. Some put a towel under a garrison cap when the temperatures dropped to minus 20–25 degrees Celsius. That winter frosts in the Urals region were sharp, we saw sparrows freezing to death in mid-flight – I am not making this up. We received winter hats as late as January 1942. We lived on the first floor of a huge two-storey barrack. We slept on two-level metallic beds. We ourselves stuffed mattresses and pillows with hay in the administration platoon of the academy. We were issued two sheets and a cotton blanket. There were two large Ural-style wood stoves in the opposite corners of the barrack. Every floor housed two companies of 120 men each. Companies were separated by a wide corridor, where we would all fall in for a morning inspection (form no. 20 – the code for a lice check) and an evening inspection. In the ends of the barrack building there were a storage room, officers’ room, a rifle park (or, more accurately, a rifle pyramid), bathroom and toilets. Classes lasted from 10 to 12 hours, including individual study time. The reveille was at 6:00 or 6:30, I do not remember exactly, taps were at 23:00. We would get very tired during the day, as we only had classes outdoors, so we were always hungry and sleepy. They fed us quite well. They gave us some 750 grams of bread a day, sugar at breakfast and dinner for our tea. Breakfast as a rule included porridge, a piece of butter (20 grams), tea and bread. For lunch we had soup or schi based on meat bouillon, mashed potatoes or porridge with meat for the second course, stewed fruit and bread. Dinner was quite poor – beetroot salad or a piece of boiled fish (sometimes herring) with potatoes, tea, bread and sugar. Cadets had even better food than commanders (in 1941 and 1942 officers in Red Army were still officially referred to as commanders – translator’s comment) in their own canteen. However, we were using a lot of energy and spending all the daytime in the frost outside, so our young bodies required more food and sleep. The sleeping time was insufficient for us, although we had a rest time after lunch. Some cadets could not take such physical stress and grew noticeably weaker and thinner, the others, not used to such strong frosts, had their feet frost-bitten.