9. Episodes

1
 
When I was four or five years old and my memories began to settle into a coherent past, the war had been over for only ten years, and everything around us was still speaking of it. Most of the adults in our orbit had served and fought; those who hadn't were suffering in their own equally heroic fashion.

In Panfilov Park, visual propaganda signboards jutted out from the snowbanks along the cleared paths, portraying Red Army soldiers charging into battle. There must also have been the obligatory board featuring a sailor wrapped in crisscrossing machine-gun belts alongside a soldier in a fur hat crossed with a red stripe—the heroes of the Civil War. Joining them to form a triad was usually a soldier wearing a steel helmet and holding an AK-47.

On one occasion, as I was walking home from the cinema with my parents, my imagination was struck by a soldier on a poster who had raised his arm to hurl a grenade. Others stood beside and behind him, but I forgot them; him, I remember to this day.

Upon arriving home, I molded a small cylinder out of Plasticine, stuck a pencil into it, posed in front of the mirror like that soldier with his grenade, and froze. Oh, how I admired myself! I would have stood there forever, like a monument. I remember my mother and father exchanging silent, touched glances, admiring me.

The local cinema was showing the latest releases: Secret Agent and Girl Is Looking for Father. It was the main movie theater in town because the second one—the Children’s Theater—lacked a proper foyer and wasn't heated in the winter. All the other places showing films were factory clubs. Soon after, that main cinema burned down.

Anyone could guess that my father had fought in the war by the round crater right in the center of his forehead. The skin covering this crater pulsated and breathed. My mother never allowed us to touch it.

All the boys played war back then. There were two teams: the "Russians" and the "Germans." Nobody wanted to be a "German," so that team took a long time to assemble. I agreed to be a "German" more easily than the others. When my mother found out—probably from my sister—they teased me and made me feel ashamed. Someone in the neighborhood had a real German helmet, which I still remember. Damaged medals passed from hand to hand, as did silver two- and five-mark German coins featuring Hindenburg and the swastika, which sometimes still shone like mirrors. No one knew who Hindenburg was; people occasionally called him Hitler, but the name didn't stick. Silver held little value back then, so those coins—much like old fifty-kopeck pieces—were punched through with nails to make lyanga, a weighted shuttlecock toy that you had to keep kicking up with your foot without letting it touch the ground.

My father spoke little and reluctantly about the war. I remember he would never answer my questions. And what could those questions have been anyway? How many Germans did you kill?

We had guests over often at our house on Dachnaya Street. Everyone usually sat out on the veranda. Occasionally, they would recall the war, and sitting at the table, my father might share a story. Once, after the guests had left, he lay down to rest. He was probably a little tipsy and tired. My sister and I climbed onto him and demanded that he tell us about the war, too. Father asked us to let him rest, but we were unyielding: tell us a story first, then rest.

-Alright, I'll tell you one episode.

He told it, and from then on, we nagged him regularly:

-Now give us an episode!

And he would tell one. He was a methodical man and arranged his episodes chronologically, just as they had happened. It seems to me that he possessed a unique gift as a storyteller. His vocabulary was ordinary, his speech not particularly literary and somewhat marred by bureaucratic jargon. He supplied a mass of details that seemed useless to the plot: the structure of his unit, the number of men in a crew, the weight of individual machine-gun parts, the soldier's field kit, the composition of rations, the price of a bottle of vodka at the market, pay rates at various levels, and exact dates. Yet in my mind's eye, I could see everything he described—where everyone was, where they stood, the landscape surrounding them. When others told stories, I saw nothing and remembered nothing.

Of course, he spoke with me on other occasions as well. For a long time, we walked the same road together: I to school, he to work. Or our trips to the bathhouse every Saturday. After the bath, he would order a mug of beer, sometimes letting me take a sip. After I turned sixteen, he started buying a mug for me, too. We did a lot of yard work together, talking as we worked.

Even so, I have forgotten nearly all of my father's episodes and their details. Only feelings and images remain, along with names: Starya Russa, the Lovat and Velikaya rivers, Dno station, Lake Ilmen.

The winter of '42. Father is traveling to the front in command of a machine-gun company. In it, as prescribed by the official table of organization, are 98 men: five men to each Maxim machine-gun crew. On the approach to the station, the troop train comes under bombardment. Along with bombs, the dive-bombers drop empty gasoline drums. They howl horribly as they fall, and that is the most terrifying part of the raid. Everything is ablaze; ammunition is exploding. Black snow, human entrails thrown into the trees. Only about twenty men from his company survive. Two men remain per crew. He said that never again under his command did his unit reach its official full strength.

Upon reaching their positions, he is immediately sent out on reconnaissance. In his memory, a recon mission never once went undetected, without a fight and without losses. The Germans went out on reconnaissance in the exact same way as our men. Father always referred to the German as "he"—part adversary, part enemy.

Near Staraya Russa, heavy, continuous fighting raged. Both our forces and the Germans advanced without success. Back then, it always puzzled him why nothing was written in history books about these battles. There was Moscow, Stalingrad, Kursk, Berlin—but no Staraya Russa.

He first began telling us those episodes in 1957–1959, fifteen years after the war. I have lived in America for fifteen years now, yet it feels as though I arrived yesterday; I remember everything from before my departure and after. And back then, he remembered everything.

That was likely the first time he had ever spoken about the war at all. Later, in the 1970s, he would be invited to speak to schoolchildren; he made it into generals' memoirs and participated in veterans' organizations.

But back then, his memories sounded like an apocrypha. The impression they left was nothing like the movies or the posters—though, to be fair, I saw few of those at the time.

When I was about thirteen, the school principal—who also taught history—asked me to draw a picture for a display dedicated to the war. I drew it as I imagined war to be from my father’s stories. The principal examined it closely and said nothing to me. He was a veteran himself: he limped, was missing his right arm, had a severe squint, and had suffered a head wound as well. My picture did not make it onto the board; it was replaced by a cutout from a magazine.

My picture depicted a soldier in a tunic with a turn-down collar, boots with leg wraps, and a long rifle, crouching as he scrambled over a parapet to go on the attack. In short, the bleak year of 1942. I had a vague feeling that this drawing didn't fit the established canons of representing the war. But in my father's stories, there was nothing of those canons—only the details I had drawn.

The boots with leg wraps, for instance. Father had worn them and told me everything about them: the length of the wraps, the number of turns, and how betrayingly they would slip down at the most inconvenient moment. Or the tunic with the turn-down collar—there was Father wearing it in a photograph, with rank collar-tabs. It even had a slightly different cut. In another photograph, shoulder boards had been attached to it, but the collar remained the same. And they had no submachine guns for a long time; instead, they had self-loading rifles, which the soldiers disliked.

On canonical posters, the war was portrayed through a dashing victor—cinched at the waist by a belt, wearing a neat tunic with shoulder boards and medals, holding a submachine gun with a drum magazine, set against a backdrop of banners, St. George ribbons, laurel leaves, and acorns.

When I was nearly an adult, my father said to me:

-If you only knew the brutal methods by which this war was fought... Today it's impossible to imagine... and you shouldn't have to imagine it..." He repeated this several times, and after a moment's thought, added: "And yet, there was no other way we could have won.

2

I won’t recount every stage of his combat path—this isn't the place for that. I simply want to convey my childhood impressions of his stories.


-Gentlemen, I’m wounded! Don’t shoot, gentlemen, I surrender!

Father recognizes the voice—it’s one of his own recon soldiers.

-How could he? Just yesterday I wrote his party recommendation...

With the next flare burst, Father spots two Germans creeping toward the crater. For a moment, total darkness falls again, and he hurls his grenades one after the other toward the crater, then continues crawling.

-But you could have killed your own man, - I say to Father hesitatingly. Hesitatingly, because I’m afraid of provoking his irritation with questions that seem obvious to him but remain unclear to me. My slow understanding annoys him; he hides it from me, but I can feel it.

-And what of it? If they’d taken him prisoner, he’d have been speaking over a German loudspeaker tomorrow, calling on the others to surrender. Addressing me by name, calling out to the other soldiers by name!

-Did that really happen?

-All the time. Almost every night they spoke. Prisoners, deserters...

Or take spring, for example. Active fighting had nearly ceased. Oh, they exchanged fire, of course, but both our troops and the Germans were perched on high ground, while the lowlands between them had turned to such deep, churned mud that you couldn't cross them. No supply lines could get through. Hunger set in.

-The hardest, hungriest time was '43, - Father says, - There was nothing.

To me, this barely aligns with the official history of the turning point of the war in 1943.

-You'd put a pinch of salt in your mouth and suck on it—it felt like it made things a little easier. Planes would occasionally drop sacks of hardtack, or barrels of herring. If they landed in the marsh, just try to find them and haul them out. We didn't even have enough ammunition.

Once, a roe deer or a goat wandered into no-man's-land. Everyone opened fire on it, and someone brought it down. They sent a soldier out to fetch it—he was killed. Hungry eyes remained glued to the dead animal. They sent a second soldier—he was killed, too. They sent a third, and he managed to drag the deer back, though I believe he was wounded in the process.

I heard this story one other time. A general who had commanded that division during the war came to visit us at home. At the time, he was preparing a revised edition of his memoirs. The first edition had already come out; Father had read it, found inaccuracies in the description of events he had participated in with his battalion, and written to the general about it. The general responded, and while visiting our city on a lecture tour, stopped by to see my father. They sat at the kitchen table with a bottle of vodka between them. The general’s grey tunic with its gold shoulder boards and Hero of the Soviet Union star hung over the back of a chair.

I had already left the table, but I could hear everything from the adjacent room. They were sharing memories of those days.

The general described how he and his men had broken out of an encirclement:

-...The sentry called out to us, and I said to him: 'Call your commander.' The commander comes up, and you see what happens when someone isn't career military—he didn't even have his weapon at the ready! I could have cut him down in a split second... How was he to know who had come up to him from that side?

Father recounted the story of the deer.

-Now, I wouldn't have acted like that," the general said. "I tried to spare my men.

The implication—something that had previously remained unsaid—was clear: if Father was the commander, then even if the soldiers had volunteered, it was ultimately he who was sending them to their deaths.

My mother was standing beside me then and took the general's side.

-What is your father bragging about? - she whispered under her breath.

I, however, was on my father's side. That general, incidentally, later commanded the assault on the Reichstag; it was his soldiers who raised the victory banner over it. Quite a few battalions fell in that assault.

Once, Father was ordered to report to the rear and bring along several soldiers from various units. It turned out they were required to witness a execution for show. The soldiers from the different units were lined up in a U-shape; at the open end stood a freshly dug grave, a soldier accused of desertion sitting on the ground, and a table set up for the military tribunal.

The accused deserter sat moving constantly. He bit incessantly at his own arms, gnawing them from elbow to wrist as if stripping meat from a bone. Father showed me how he did it. Then the tribunal members arrived and, without deliberating long, read the verdict. The deserter was led to the brink.

-I’m not guilty! I’m not guilty! - he screamed, but the firing squad had already delivered its volley.

The deserter dropped to his knees, then fell backward and lay still, his legs folded underneath him. One of the soldiers—a signalman, as I recall—asked Father softly (Father mimicked his tone):

-Comrade Captain, may I take his boots off?

They walked over to the body and asked the tribunal officers for permission. They granted it. Then the tribunal major drew his pistol and shot the corpse in the head.

Regulations require it, he explained to Father. The execution of the sentence must be personally confirmed with a coup de gr;ce by the person responsible for carrying it out. At the time, I wondered idly: how many soldiers' skulls had that major shattered over the course of the war? For him, it must have been routine.

-Could it have been that the soldier wasn't actually guilty? - I asked my father then.

Father looked at me.

-He was detained in the rear, twenty kilometers from his unit. What was he doing there? They probably called his unit, and his commanders said no one had sent him there.

Another memory, seemingly from the earlier period: several days of unsuccessful battles, and another attack is being prepared. Suddenly, tanks arrive to support them. It’s an enormous relief; tanks didn't appear often there. Father stands on the sandy bank of a river with the tankers, sheltered beneath a steep embankment. Father is probably smoking with them (he smoked back then) and chatting. There are six tanks—British models. Though they aren't very good tanks—weak ones, Father notes. High-profile, prone to tipping over on slopes, with narrow tracks (Father demonstrates the width with his hands) and poor cross-country mobility. (The tankers had likely told him all this.) Even so, everyone is grateful for any support. I felt happy for them, too, back then.

Then came the attack. It failed again. And what about the tanks? The tanks? They were all burning.

They were all killed. Everyone he ever spoke about. A young fellow from the Far East, from Birobidzhan, was the Komsomol organizer. He fought well, but not for long—cut down by a machine-gun burst across his lower back (Father points to where).

A lieutenant colonel was appointed as his chief of staff (even though Father himself was only a captain), also arriving from the Far East. On his chest hung the rare "20 Years of the Red Army" medal. On their very first day, they go out to conduct a reconnaissance of the front lines. Father steps aside for a moment. The whistle of a mortar shell, an explosion. Father returns to the spot and sees only what could be identified by the gleaming "20 Years of the Red Army" medal.

Or the time he was summoned to the command post—likely back when he commanded a company. Everything around them is under target fire. The commander's tent sits in a hollow, but even there it isn't safe. The officers lie on the sand, waiting for the commander. He emerges from the tent crawling on his knees—standing upright is too risky. Still on his knees, he relieves himself, then buttons up and turns to address the men. Father's tone when telling this is mildly disapproving; he felt one shouldn't do such a thing right in front of everyone. Shortly after, Father leaves. A mortar shell lands square in the center of that circle of officers. Everyone is killed.

One winter, during a night march, Father was supposed to reach an assembly point—perhaps an attack was being organized there. But he ended up somewhere else entirely and arrived late. It turned out the maps were outdated. In the woods, they were supposed to turn into the second forest clearing along their route. Someone—most likely the Germans—had cut an extra clearing between the first and second. Father had turned into that one. He never spoke of what happened at the place they had failed to reach on time. The Secret Police (Osobist) put him in their sights; they were ready to court-martial him. His commanders saved him. Father spoke of the osobists with a poorly concealed distaste.


-You’re sleeping and look at what your men are doing out there! Vigilante justice!

Father couldn't snap out of his sleep right away; large rank shoulder boards flashed before his eyes. When he finally came to, he learned that after the battle, the soldiers had gone looking for the medic and found him lying face-down in a gully, hands covering his head, the dog sledge idling beside him. He had laid there through the entire fight. With shoves and rifle butts, the soldiers drove him into the village toward the hut. There, a newly arrived lieutenant lined him up against a wall and, shouting, "In the name of the Soviet Union...", emptied an entire submachine-gun magazine into him.

Father was threatened with severe trouble over the incident, and the lieutenant faced a penal battalion, but somehow the matter was swept under the rug. Most likely, everyone involved was killed in subsequent battles.

Opposing their division were Latvian Waffen-SS units. Our men treated captured Latvians calmly, without equating them to the Russian collaborators fighting on the other side. Father once spoke with a prisoner from Riga who spoke decent Russian.

During his final battle, Father was positioned near an artillery battery setting up to open fire. They were coming under enemy fire as well. A shell struck a nearby tree, and a flying wooden splinter struck Father squarely in the forehead, fracturing the bone. They transported Father from one field hospital to another for weeks until he reached a facility with surgeons equipped to handle cranial trauma. That hospital was all the way in Gorky.

Father said:

-I looked up, and an old man in a priest's cassock was operating on me. I couldn't tell if it was delirium or reality.

Later in life, he tried to locate the surgeon who had saved his life when so many field hospitals had turned him away, leaving him alongside other hopeless cases who were dying all around. He never found him. My sister typed the letters my father sent out across the country. Now, by process of elimination, it has become clear that he was almost certainly operated on by Archbishop Luke (Voino-Yasenetsky). In the Soviet era, his name was suppressed, which is why no one ever replied to Father's inquiries.

They opened Father's skull, removed "foreign objects" from his brain—presumably splinters and dirt—and excised a portion of brain tissue.

Father, of course, had a regimental commander toward whom he held a complex attitude. It seemed Father respected him, but the commander took a dislike to Father and refused to recommend him for medals. Once, after a setback, the commander was berating my father and, working himself into a fury, shouted:

-I’ll grind you into the shit!"

This took place out in an open field on the march; everything around them was thundering, and they were alone. Father replied:

-It’s impossible to grind me into the shit, Comrade Lieutenant Colonel."

The commander flew into an even greater rage:

-I’ll shoot you right now! — and he reached for his holster.

-You won't have time to shoot me, - Father said, - because I’ll shoot first, — and he placed his hand on the grip of his pistol.

The regimental commander fell silent. He stood there for a moment, looking into Father’s eyes, then turned around and walked away. There were no consequences, though there easily could have been.

That lieutenant colonel had been an officer before the revolution and had fought in the Civil War. Father was surprised he had never earned a higher rank. He fought capably, and Father couldn't help but appreciate that. As it turned out later, he kept a diary—which was strictly forbidden. When he was killed shortly after that incident, his diary fell into the hands of the high command. Father learned this from the general under whose command they had both served. The general used the diary when writing his memoirs. It detailed the regiment’s actions, and the 2nd Battalion—commanded by my father—figured prominently in it. But my father was never once mentioned by name—simply as "Commander of the 2nd Battalion." Yet the battalion's actions were commended. Father could never understand why the commander had disliked him so much.

Perhaps that commander was entirely a product of the old regime. Why would he care for these brash, aggressive newcomers? Wasn't it resourceful fellows just like them who had destroyed the world he was built for, and lined his friends up against the wall?

As for my father's decorations, things went like this: after a year of fighting and heavy losses in the very same location, the front line finally broke, and our forces poured westward.

They stormed the Dno railway station and took village after village. Somewhere on the march, Army Commander General Yeryomenko encountered my father. Despite having only one leg, the general was on horseback. He rode up and began questioning Father about the battles he had fought in. Father named the recaptured villages—of which I remember only Seredkiny Slepni. Anyone who had been there knew what those victories had cost. Yeryomenko looked at Father’s bare chest:

-Why haven't you been decorated yet?

-The command hasn't submitted a recommendation, Comrade General.

Yeryomenko summoned his aide. Right then and there, an Order of the Red Banner was produced from a small box, and the documents were filled out. So, the medal was presented to him right in the field by the front commander himself. Apart from that, his only other combat medal was the Victory Medal.

When the division’s veterans began organizing in the 1970s, not a single man who had fought on the front lines in the infantry at the same time as my father was left alive. There were artillerymen, signalmen, staff officers, and osobists. The only infantrymen present were those who had been drafted at the very end of the war.

Recently, I discovered that my father is mentioned in Marshal Yeryomenko's memoirs. Father himself never knew this. In one paragraph, Yeryomenko writes that Father's battalion—referring to Father by name—executed a brilliant operation to capture German positions. Father sent two units around the flanks and staged a feint frontal attack. While the Germans were busy repelling it, our troops struck them from the rear and captured the positions with minimal casualties.

In another paragraph, Yeryomenko describes Father’s death a few days later. Yeryomenko did not know that Father had survived.

The circumstances of that final battle, according to Yeryomenko, were as follows: the regiment was marching along a forest road, pursuing the retreating enemy. Another regiment veered off course and merged onto the same road. The combat formations of the two regiments became mixed, causing confusion. The Germans reacted instantly, regrouped, and counterattacked. A group of officers, including my father, moved to the edge of the woods to assess the situation. A shell was fired directly at them.

The Germans then battered our troops severely. Father knew nothing of this; critically wounded, he was already being evacuated to the rear. Father’s regiment fought honorably, unlike the other regiment that had lost its way.

There it is—the difference between my father’s version and that of the high command. Father couldn't have known that the regiments had accidentally mixed. How would he have known? Besides, he wasn't supposed to know everything. He was carrying out his task—leading the vanguard, detecting the enemy, maneuvering to engage—and at that moment, the war ended for him. Had he not been wounded at the very start, he would have repelled the counterattack, just as he had done many times before. We pursue, he counterattacks—routine wartime work.

For the commander, it was an unfortunate blunder that should never have happened, with the terrible consequence of lost lives.

...

Father also painted pictures of daily life at the front.

Once, they were pulled back to the rear for reorganization somewhere in the Yaroslavl region. Sent to lodge in a village hut, he enters the yard and sees a neighbor. She tells him the landlady is home, "on the bridge." He enters the house, sees no one, and calls out just in case:

-Is anyone home?

-I’m right here, I’ll be right out, - he hears a woman’s voice say. Where it’s coming from is impossible to tell.

-Where are you? - Father asks.

-Right here, on the bridge!

What kind of "bridge" could there be inside a peasant hut, Father wonders. Just then, the iron door of the large Russian brick stove opens by itself, and from its opening emerge a pair of woman's legs and a bare backside. A naked woman crawls backward out of the stove, turns to Father, covering herself with a bath broom. It turned out that's how they bathed inside the stove—laying wooden poles covered in evergreen boughs across the hearth, splashing water onto the hot brick floor. That spot inside the stove was called the "bridge." For some reason, I always pictured that woman as old and sagging, though she could just as well have been young.

They were moved to the second line of defense, where things were quieter. The soldiers began washing their clothes and mending gear. Someone had the idea to go fishing. To do this, they lowered two anti-tank mines into Lake Ilmen from a boat and detonated them. They quickly gathered the stunned fish, telling the officers who arrived to investigate the explosion that they had no idea what had happened.

-Why did you have to hide it? - I asked. Father explained that at the front, you don't make unnecessary noise, let alone waste ammunition on personal matters.

An older man with many children was assigned to them. Father took him on as an orderly, but later, feeling sorry for him, transferred him to driver duties—farther from the front lines. "Farther" was relative, of course, but the man's chances of survival improved slightly. Suddenly, the man shoots himself in the hand—a self-inflicted wound with all the dire consequences that entailed.

During a relative lull, the mailman arrived. The soldiers were animated, reading their letters. Suddenly, a gunshot echoes in the woods. A search party is organized immediately. They find the Red Army mailman, dead of a self-inflicted rifle shot. He is slumped over a fallen tree, one boot removed. Why he shot himself remained a mystery.

Or this: people were talking about the medicinal benefits of formic alcohol, and Father declares authoritatively:

- A naked man placed on an anthill can't survive longer than five minutes.

-???

-Once, two Germans deserted to our side. The soldiers sat them down naked on an anthill. They only lived five minutes.

-But they were deserters! - my mind rebels, - What if they were communists? They were coming to join our side! What if they wanted to report something important? Were they even interrogated? Why didn't you stop the soldiers?

Father shrugs: What happened, happened. No one asked the Germans anything; the soldiers had no interest in them in any capacity. Here, I begin to vaguely realize for the first time that a commander's authority in war is limited by his subordinates' willingness to obey.

Father remembered wistfully that during one winter, he had a covered horse-drawn sleigh—a cozy little kibitka with a stove inside. I pictured the night, blue snow-covered hills, and the smoking chimney of the sleigh dipping into snowdrifts. One might think that a grand, noble part of his life had unfolded on the front. Yet my father's war lasted three years in total, including military school, the Vystrel officer courses in Moscow, and commanding a training company. How long did he actually ride in that sleigh? A couple of weeks? A month?

-My military record lists 179 days of active combat duty.

-Is that a lot or a little?

-For infantry on the front lines, it's a great deal. Very few stayed alive that long. Usually it was a day or two, maybe a week. Then you were either killed or wounded.

3

I hesitated to write this chapter, but I must. Nothing should be hidden; the only question is how to paint the entire picture as accurately as possible, precisely as I came to know it.

I heard this story twice. The first time, my father told it at the table to guests—relatives of his. They sat on the veranda while I played nearby and listened. The second time, it became one of his "episodes." I may have heard it once more later on, but its core details never shifted, so it wasn't altered by time.

A new soldier arrived with a batch of replacements. My father took a liking to him. He was intelligent, well-versed in mathematics, and appeared to have been a university student before the war. Father knew that educated men like him were usually pulled away soon for officer training. He kept him close as an assistant of sorts, viewing him as a future officer and peer. It seemed Father even wanted to groom him for something greater and transfer him to another service branch. To start, he assigned him as the senior soldier at a flank stronghold. It was a crucial position; Father knew things would be tough there and needed his help and oversight.

In the heat of battle, the soldier suddenly appeared at the command post.

-What are you doing here? Why aren't you at your post?

-I'm wounded! - the soldier screamed hysterically, thrusting out a bloody finger, - I need medicine help!"

Father repeated the gesture, holding out his palm. Like that! He was wounded in the finger!

-And your comrades are dying out there right now!

Father likely ordered him to return to his position (I don't recall this part with certainty), but the soldier couldn't bring himself to do it.

-So, I shot him, - Father said.

The right to execute a soldier in a combat situation was granted to any commander under the well-known order.

This story never left me indifferent. I thought about it often, and to this day, I have not fully settled on where I stand.

Let me say right away: I did not question my father's action in principle. In those "fateful moments of life," fate placed my father in the ranks of those who make decisions—strictly within the framework of carrying out orders, of course. He was placed in key sectors. Invested with the power to decide right then and there who lived and who died, he was as much expendable material to the machine of war as his privates. Their sole reason for existence at that moment was to hold those positions. At any second, the line could be breached, and the battalion turned into a leaderless mass of fleeing men. And what "mass"? There might have been only a few dozen of them left by that point in the battle. Was I, who had never experienced the slightest real discomfort in my life, to judge my father?

For me, the real question was what happened next. The battle ended, and then... That soldier surely had a mother, sisters.

Father could have recorded the death as a battle casualty, in which case the family would have received an official death notice and certain benefits. But that would have been a serious violation of regulations. He was required to report it. There were certainly witnesses at the command post—otherwise, what would have been the point of the execution? And those witnesses could have reported it to the Secret Police (Osobist). Then they would have turned their sights on Father: Who are you covering for? The family of a coward and Panicker? And who are you? Or maybe you bumped him off for personal reasons, out of malice? And then my father would have been sent to a penal battalion.

If he had reported the case properly, NKVD officers would have shown up at the family's home, confiscated their ration cards, and perhaps evicted them from their apartment.

The safest course for my father—rather than getting tangled up in it—would have been to hand the soldier over to the Secret Police after the battle. They would have tried him by court-martial, and most likely shot him anyway—with the same consequences for his family—or sent him to a penal company. That would have left him only a slim chance of survival, but his family would have received a standard death notice like everyone else. Father would have remained uninvolved.

Imagining that scene, I felt more like that soldier than like my father.

And I would so like to think that my father ultimately didn't report it. He simply had no time for it then. They had suffered heavy losses; all the commanders and the entire Secret Police detachment had been killed.

That execution was, in essence, a ritual sacrifice. It was meant to demonstrate to all the future victims standing around that for the sake of our victory, no one would escape the sacrificial altar—that even personal ties with the priest would save no one. And that this priest was destined, at the appointed hour, to become a victim himself. Everyone had to know this; it was part of the process.

This story resurfaced once more years later. My son was seven years old. An abscess had formed on his gum. His mother—evidently knowing what might happen—asked me to take him to the dentist. There, my son behaved terribly. He showed cowardice but acted out wildly. He refused to sit in the chair, pushed away the dentist's hand holding the mirror, and pelted us with a stream of verbal abuse. I could guess where he had picked up that knack for a coherent, murky, insolent stream of reproaches. I felt pained and ashamed for both of us. In the end, I pinned him in a vice-like grip; they forced his mouth open and, using forceps, snapped out the baby tooth that was refusing to fall out and causing the inflammation.

When we stepped out of the clinic, I began lecturing him. I told him that one must learn to endure all kinds of pain and hardship. That in life, it is crucial to be able to force oneself to do the impossible. I told him about that incident at the front. This is what happens to a man who could not bring himself to do his duty.

-Why did Grandfather kill him? - my son asked.

-Because without that, we would not have won.

-What good is such a victory if you have to kill your own soldiers to achieve it?

I could not find a dignified way to respond to such a new and unusual angle of looking at things. At the time, I probably liked my little son’s answer precisely because it was so independent. Just think—he had arrived at this conclusion all by himself.

It would be wrong to say that this was completely unexpected at the time. It had been preceded by the era of Cheburashka in the upbringing of children. Drafts of change were already blowing through the air, currents that a couple of years later would lead to perestroika. The fundamental dogmas were already beginning to totter, being subjected to doubt and ridicule.

I myself, unlike my father, did not have a coherent position. But I felt that my son was not entirely right about something, although I did not pursue the matter.

If I myself had been consistent then, I would have said to him:

-Son! Your ancestors—not merely your grandfather or great-grandfather, but those who lived thousands of years ago, when the names ‘Russian,’ ‘German,’ and others did not yet exist—settled in a certain territory at the very edge of the lands suitable for human habitation. They had been pushed there by stronger tribes that had destroyed their brothers; or those tribes, in turn, had refused to let themselves be driven out of the warm lands where grapes grow. And they themselves had to drive out those who had inhabited those lands before them, sending them into places that were even more inhospitable: the tundra, the taiga, the snows. Their entire existence unfolded under the threat of total annihilation by other tribes. Killing a person under such circumstances is simply an act dictated by the situation. It has no moral dimension.

-A warrior who falters in battle is like a grain of sand in the mechanism of a machine gun. It must be removed immediately, so as not to lose the battle. For the price of defeat is the destruction of your entire tribe. You yourself have been doomed to die ever since you were called to war. Unless you are exceptionally lucky, you will not survive.

-Your ancestors, son—from your distant great-grandfathers all the way down to your grandfather—all of them guarded and defended the community to which they belonged. They were hereditary men of service, Cossacks.

-This total war of extermination among tribes has always existed, and it will continue to be waged in the future. And the fact that you and I exist, and can now speak freely about all this, is evidence that our ancestors behaved appropriately in that war and did everything right. Otherwise, we would not be here and now.

-There is a point of view according to which wars should be waged exclusively by humane means. But that is the point of view of the victors in a worldwide war for resources that lasted thousands of years and was fought by the most barbaric methods. Those victors have now settled in the best places in the world: in the valleys of mighty rivers, along ice-free seas, in flowering foothills where winters are mild. They have already divided everything among themselves, settled all their disputes, intermarried, and decided that from now on they would live by rules they had established for everyone. The main rule: the world has been permanently divided; everyone must remain where they live and not encroach upon anyone else. One person is in Nice or Tuscany, another in the Pamirs, a third in the Sahara Desert. We are supposedly expected to accept this. And from us, their distant relatives, they demand that we observe these humanistic rules of warfare. It was easy for them to demand such things…

But I said none of this to my son then, because by that time I myself had already been split into fragments. Our world, the world of my people, corroded through and through, was already doomed and beginning to crumble.