Tank Rider: Into the Reich with the Red Army

We were forbidden to leave the military area and go to town, but there was nothing to do there anyway. We had a post office, a store with all kinds of small things that a soldier might need, such as threads and needles. There was also a club with a cinema and a library. On Sundays (we cadets had a day off as well) I went to the library and read newspapers there, usually Pravda; I borrowed fiction, took it to the barracks and managed to find time to read it there. We marched in formation to see movies; normally that was during the morning before lunch. I only remember one film – The Destruction of German forces at Moscow. During the other films I would fall asleep, just like so many other cadets, even though the heating of the hall was very poor. When we were on duty in the company – a cadet on duty and three orderlies – we ran to the station cafe at the time of arrival of a train from Moscow to get some wheat porridge – it was not millet, but wheat porridge. There was nothing else in the cafe. We normally had it poured into the fire bucket. Several pieces of bread were also given with the porridge. We would finish the bucket of porridge during the night, and if we had porridge left, we woke up a couple of our friends. By morning the bucket was to be cleaned and hung on the fire-fighting stand again. There were different cadets in the academy – honest, responsive, helping each other, sharing food parcels with close friends according to the cadets’ rule of thumb. Others were dishonest and did not respect even the elementary requirements of discipline. The cadets themselves dealt with thieves. In any case, the older cadets did not abuse the younger ones, or if they did, we did not know anything about it. It was easy for me to overcome the difficulties of military service, the same with the frosts. I was the third tallest cadet in the company. The tallest was Anatoly Pavlovich Zlobin – an outstanding writer after the war; he died in 2000. We were drafted from Moscow together. He was a mortar-battery commander at the front. I had good relations with all the men in the company, while in the platoon we were all good friends – we were all Muscovites from the same neighbourhood and graduated from neighbouring schools, we even had common acquaintances. We had nothing to fight about. Physically I was no worse than the other cadets in the platoon and the company. I was not outstanding, but I stood up for myself. I did not flatter anyone and didn’t tell tales. The company commander was somehow distant from us, we did not see him every day. In the evenings we had classes with assistant platoon leaders; as a rule these were older cadets, not the former schoolboys, but cadets that had entered the academy earlier than ourselves. Some men had a hard time with the studies, and two cadets could not take it. One local man, Lisitsyn, shot himself in a dugout during his company guard duty. The second guy, Vischnevski, a native of Moscow, escaped. They looked for him for a long time, but never found him. Both incidents were emergency cases for the company. Later there was a rumour that a letter came from Vishnevski, in which he wrote that he was at the front and asked not to be considered a deserter. However, the letter was not officially read to us – probably so that other cadets would not follow his example.