Something that cannot be forgotten. About the fact that we must not forget About the fact that we must not forget the name

In 2018, it will be 32 years since the accident at the nuclear power plant in Chernobyl. The most enormous man-made disaster occurred on April 26, 1986 in a small town called Pripyat. Many feature films and documentaries have been shot about this place, hundreds of articles have been written, where the events of that day are restored to the smallest detail. And here is a well-known fact: in some places the level of radiation pollution was thousands of times higher than the standard background radiation. It became clear that after the explosion the city would become different: a land where it was impossible to sow, a river where it was impossible to fish, a forest where it was impossible to pick mushrooms and berries, and most importantly, houses where it was impossible to live...

Due to the fact that the accident occurred not so long ago, all adults know the circumstances of the Chernobyl disaster. But I wonder if they told their children about this tragedy? Did the kids hear the details of the accident from their teachers at school? I, as a future journalist, conducted a survey among children and youth about this incident, and here are the answers I received.

— Mom told me that when the station exploded, she was 2 years old. She learned about the accident from the stories of her grandparents. It is known that many people died: station workers, firefighters who put out the fire, and civilians who received a huge dose of radiation. And the next day the entire city was evacuated to nearby settlements. Today Pripyat is considered a ghost town.

Ksenia DVORAK, 16 years old

“I think quite a lot of people know in detail the causes and consequences of the accident. I have seen many films, both fiction and documentaries, that gave me goosebumps. All the residents had to flee their homes after the explosion, and I cannot imagine the shock they felt then. A distance of several kilometers from the city is considered an exclusion zone, as a huge release of radioactive substances has been recorded. The scale of this tragedy is enormous, because radiation has shrouded virtually the entire globe.

— When I was in 9th grade, during one of the lessons we were shown a documentary about the Chernobyl disaster. Before that, I knew what happened. But the film amazed me. It described the first minutes after the explosion, possible causes, and the fact that the radiation reached Asia and the United States. They showed footage of the terrible consequences of radiation sickness. I realized that not only Chernobyl suffered, but the whole world.

— On April 26, 1986, an accident occurred in Chernobyl, which resulted in a number of casualties and destruction. Many had to leave their home, flee without documents or money. Due to radiation, people developed radiation sickness and many died. Also in 1986, a sarcophagus was built to reduce the amount of radioactive emissions into the atmosphere.

— On April 26, 1986, at 1:24 a.m. local time, two explosions occurred. According to many experts, only a few seconds were needed to turn on the security system. The cause of the disaster was that the reactor was not shut down before carrying out the next scheduled maintenance. Its shutdown was delayed 9 hours later. It is known that the stop was assigned to another shift, not the one that was prepared for this. After the explosion, a huge amount of radioactive elements were released. At 6 o'clock in the morning, a group of firefighters managed to completely extinguish the fire, but they did not know what exactly they had to extinguish. Firefighters flooded everything with water, which caused several more small explosions. Two weeks later, it was decided to cover the destroyed power unit with a concrete structure: a sarcophagus. There was no place on earth where the radioactive cloud could reach.

— This is the largest man-made disaster of the 20th century. A significant amount of radioactive particles were released into the atmosphere. Vast areas turned out to be unsuitable for habitation. The once thriving city of Pripyat is now abandoned. The former BSSR suffered the most, on whose territory about 70% of radioactive particles fell. The damage caused by the Chernobyl disaster was enormous. Hundreds of people died from radioactive radiation, especially the rescuers who were the first to eliminate the consequences of the explosion. At the moment, the Republic of Belarus, so to speak, is rehabilitating contaminated lands, and the Polesie radioactive reserve has also been created. Our country is successfully coping with the consequences of this terrible man-made disaster.

This is a letter from M.A. Sholokhova I.V. Stalin lay in the archives of the Politburo of the Central Committee for 60 years. It tells about the tragic events of 1932-1933 - about grain procurements carried out using terrible repression methods, about what caused the terrible famine of 1933, which led to the death of millions of peasants.

Sholokhov, in a letter dated April 4, 1933, telling about these events, asked Stalin for help for the Veshensky and Verkhne-Donsky regions of the North Caucasus region. The “Leader of the Nations” responded with a telegram on April 16: “Inform us about the amount of assistance needed.” On the same day, Sholokhov writes a second letter. On April 22, Stalin sent the writer another “lightning bolt”: “In addition to the recently released forty thousand poods of rye, we are releasing an additional eighty thousand poods for the Veshenians, a total of one hundred and twenty thousand poods. We are releasing forty thousand poods to the Verkhne-Don region...”

Stalin kept silent about the remaining starving regions, territories, regions. About repression and bullying too. True, in the Resolution of the Politburo of the Central Committee of the All-Union Communist Party of Bolsheviks dated July 4, 1933, the regional committee was told “insufficient control over the actions of its representatives and authorized representatives.” Zimin and Ovchinnikov, mentioned in the letter, were removed from their posts, Plotkin and Pashinsky were severely reprimanded, and “all other penalties” imposed on them were decided to be “considered annulled.” The fact is that in May of the same year, Pashinsky was sentenced to death by a visiting session of the regional court, and seven of his “propaganda column” received prison sentences. But the Politburo canceled these punishments, “annulled them.”

T. Stalin!

The Veshensky district, along with many other districts of the North Caucasus region, did not fulfill the grain procurement plan and did not supply seeds. In this region, as in other regions, collective farmers and individual farmers are now dying of hunger; adults and children plump up and feed on everything that a person should not eat, starting with carrion and ending with oak bark and all sorts of swamp roots. In a word, the area seems to be no different from other areas of our region. But the reasons why 99% of the working population suffers such a terrible disaster are somewhat different than, say, in Kuban.

In recent years, the Veshensky district was among the leading ones in the region. In the most difficult conditions of 1930 - 31. successfully coped with both sowing and grain procurement. The figures for the growth of sown areas eloquently demonstrate how the party organization fought for bread.

Cultivated area in the collective farm-individual sector:

1930 -87,571 hectares
1931 -136,947 hectares
1932 -163,603 hectares

As you can see, since complete collectivization, the sown area has almost doubled. How they worked on half-dead cattle, how they broke the tails of oxen falling from exhaustion and fatigue, how much work both communists and collective farmers put in, increasing sowing, fighting to strengthen the collective farm system, I will try - to the best of my strength and abilities - to display in the second book of “Virgin Soil Upturned.” " A lot has been done, but now everything has gone down the drain, and the area is rapidly approaching a catastrophe, which is impossible to prevent without your help.

The Veshensky district did not fulfill the grain procurement plan and did not fill up the seeds, not because kulak sabotage prevailed and the party organization was unable to cope with it, but because the regional leadership was poorly led. Using the example of the Veshensky district, I will try to prove this.

In 1931, the collective farms of the Veshensky district fully fulfilled the grain procurement plan of 21,000 tons and prepared seeds for 163,603 hectares. winter and spring wedges, gave collective farmers 7,323 tons for workdays (81/2 poods on average per consumer) and raised 73,000 hectares in the fall. plowing snow

In the spring of 1932 we started sowing. Decision of the Central Committee and the Council of People's Commissars "On the grain procurement plan from the 1932 harvest" caught the collective farms of our region even at the time of sowing grain crops. It was worked on in all brigades and distributed widely. And it played a significant role in increasing labor productivity! The collective farmer was guided as follows: “Last year, your collective farm handed over one thousand tons for grain procurement, and this year, with a reduced plan, it will hand over less. The rest is yours! Distribute it among workdays and dispose of it as you wish.”

The sowing plan by May 26 was completed for the entire region, including an additional 13,000 hectares. But it must be said that on a considerable area that was not taken into account by anyone, grain was sown at a much lower rate than it should have been, because Collective farmers stole grain from seeders during sowing. In this case, one thing is indisputable: they stole not “out of love for art” and not for the sake of acquisitions, but in most cases because in 1931 they received, essentially, a half-starved quota (8 1/2 poods per eater), and even from of this norm, in the spring of 1932, when the region sent an additional plan for wheat, they took part of the bread issued in the fall for seeding.

What was the harvest on the upper Don in 1932? I traveled and walked through many fields, and not only on the collective farms of Veshensky, but also in neighboring areas. The harvest can be safely called “patchwork”. It was colorful, like a patchwork quilt. A hundred-hectare cell of wheat sown in early April looked to yield 30 - 35 pounds, while next to it the same cell of wheat sown in late April or early May looked immeasurably worse. On the same collective farm, the harvest ranged from 4 poods per hectare to 40. A large number of crops - mostly late ones - were completely lost. So for the collective farms of the Veshensky district, out of a total sown area of ​​163,603 hectares. 14,017 hectares died. one wheat, yes 6866 hectares. row crops.

At the end of June, Secretary of the Republic of Kazakhstan Lugovoi received two months of sick leave. This time coincided with the departure of the old chairman of the RIC (district executive committee). Zavorg RK Limarev and the new chairman of the RIC Karbovsky began compiling a grain and fodder balance, using data from the district commission for determining yields.

The district commission that determined the yield mostly consisted of people new to the region, who had absolutely no knowledge of either the conditions of the region or how spring sowing was carried out. The commission did not take into account the fact that 20,883 hectares. the dead crops did not exhaust the disadvantages of the district economy; in addition, on collective farms there was a huge unaccounted area of ​​late grain, clogged with weeds, which would give a significantly reduced yield. That is why the yield was overestimated. On average, it was established for wheat at 5 centners per hectare and for rye at 7 centners, and on average for all crops, including all cereals and row crops, at 5 centners per hectare.

Based on the findings of the commission, the district leadership, which compiled the grain and fodder balance, came to the conclusion that the gross output for the district would be 82,000 tons. The absurdity of such an assumption is obvious from just one comparison of the following figures: it is known that the harvest of 1932 was no better than the harvest of 1931, therefore, if we take the same yields of these years as a starting point, then the increase in gross output in 1932 should be only account of the increase in sown area. Gross production in the region in 1931 was 43,165 tons, sown in 1932 compared to 1931 by 26,656 hectares. more, by multiplying 26656 by 5 centners, we get, of course, a rough, but still approaching reality calculation of the increase in gross output for 1932. In total, gross output in 1932 hardly exceeded 56,000 - 57,000 tons. It was “determined” at 82,000 tons. We miscalculated... a million and a half poods. But they not only miscalculated, hastily concocting a “determination of yield”, in addition, the district leaders also compiled the grain and fodder balance as follows: for grain procurements - 22,000 tons, for issuing workdays - 18,696 tons, for feeding livestock - 17,000, the rest - for seeds and various funds.

On July 8, the head of the Republic of Kazakhstan, Limarev, and the chairman of the RIC, Karbovsky, were summoned to Kraykom to consider the grain and fodder balance. The balance was considered in the presence of Comrade Sheboldaev, who accused the Veshensky district leadership of maliciously understating the yield, and called the balance “kulak.” He immediately proposed Limarev was removed from work, and an authoritative commission was sent to the Veshensky district, whose duties were to establish the true yield and, if the underestimation of the yield was confirmed, to remove the district leadership and judge instead of the planned 22,000 tons of grain procurements, he proposed handing over 53,000 tons and. , accordingly, re-compile the remaining expense items for the grain and fodder balance.

Comrade Sheboldaev forbade Limarev from traveling to the region, leaving him as a kind of “hostage”, and in the meantime, the regional commission went to Veshenskaya to establish the “real” yield. This commission included two: head. the grain sector of the Regional Committee, Comrade Fedorov, and the secretary of the Selmash party committee, Comrade Ovchinnikov.

I don’t know what served Comrade Sheboldaev as the basis for accusing the Veshensky Republic of Kazakhstan of underestimating the yield, but I think that Comrade Sheboldaev did not have any solid data on this matter and that in this matter the decisive role was played by Comrade Pivovarov, who at the end of June The car crossed the Veshensky district obliquely and on the way back from Veshenskaya, in the fields of the Varvarinsky collective farm, I saw an early Melionopus above the road. This Melionopus was truly excellent! 50 pounds per hectare. After the unenviable bread, the Varvara Melionopus delighted Comrade Pivovarov’s master’s eye, but at the Pivovarov meeting he probably forgot that not all of the Veshensky district had such standard good bread, and when the question arose in the Regional Committee about the yield in the Veshensky district, Pivovarov said: “In In the Veshensky district, wheat will produce at least 10 centners per hectare. It’s a shame for the people of Veshen to cry about a bad harvest!”

The random and untrue statement of Comrade Pivovarov undeniably confirmed Comrade Sheboldaev in the idea that the Veshenians are being disingenuous with their productivity.

I turn to a sequential presentation of events. On July 14, Ovchinnikov and Fedorov arrived in Veshenskaya and, accompanied by zavraizo [head of the regional land department] of the Veshensky District Executive Committee Koreshkov, went to the right side of the Don, where the yield was the worst, to determine by eye “how much a hectare will yield?”

We drove 10 kilometers from Veshenskaya. Fedorov, pointing to a wheat plot, asks Koreshkov:

In your opinion, how much will a hectare of this wheat produce?

KORESHKOV. - No more than three centners.

FYODOROV. - And in my opinion, at least ten centners!

KORESHKOV.- Where does ten centners come from?! Look: the bread is late, filled with sow thistle and oatmeal, the ear is sparse. Such a harvest on these lands was only in 1909. This is not Kuban for you.

We drove about 5 kilometers and began to determine again. And again we disagreed on the assessment... Several times. We reached the crops of the Grachevsky collective farm. It was then that a fierce skirmish arose between Koreshkov and Fedorov.

How much will this hectare yield? - asks Fedorov.

Five centners,” Koreshkov answers.

Not five, but nine or ten!

One ear after another - you can’t hear a girl’s voice, and ten?

Fedorov responded to this literally as follows:

If you look from the car, the ear really seems sparse, but you get off the car, bend over and look: there are continuous ears of grain!

Koreshkov is the son of a Ukrainian farm laborer from the Krivoy Rog region. His father was killed by the Cossacks at the end of 1918. Koreshkov himself in March 1918 joined the red partisan detachment named after. Gavriloven was in the Red Army from 1918 to 1923, first as a private and finally as a deputy. regiment commander He fought on all fronts, was wounded and shell-shocked twice (the last time seriously), has the Order of the Red Banner. After demobilization, he worked at the Kadievsky mine as a miner, and then in his homeland as chairman of the village council. In 1930, he completed courses on Soviet construction at the All-Russian Central Executive Committee, was sent to the North Caucasus and sent to the Veshensky district to manage Raizo.

Koreshkov is a rude man by nature, untrained in polite manners, and on top of that he also suffers from nervous attacks (consequences of shell shock) - enraged by the manager’s advice. grain sector of the Regional Committee, Comrade Fedorov, “get off the car, bend down and see the solid ears of corn,” replied:

I’ll take off my pants and become a doggy style, and you bend over and look. This is not what you will see!..

We had a big fight again. Koreshkov, seeing the helplessness of the commission members regarding agricultural issues, decided to make sure of their knowledge once and for all: they drove up to a grassy plot.

What is being sown here, do you think? - asks Koreshkov.

The commission members came to the general conclusion that millet had been sown. In fact, it was a plot of May fallow, on which here and there millet and sparse sunflowers sprouted, mixed with all sorts of weeds...

All this, dear Comrade Stalin, would be funny if, of course, it weren’t so sad. So here's what happened next: the commission accompanied by Koreshkov traveled through the grain crops of a number of collective farms, and once again they tried to jointly determine the yield, but even here they were unsuccessful. This time the object of determination was the millet of the Napolovsky collective farm. Koreshkov argued that millet would yield no more than 6 centners, and the commission members believed that it would yield no less than 14-15 centners. Suspecting that the commission members were mocking him, Koreshkov got out of the car and said:

You go and decide for yourself, and I’ll go on foot to Veshenskaya! You can’t define it that way!

Having somehow reconciled, they returned to Veshenskaya together. Meanwhile, in Veshenskaya the grain and fodder balance was urgently re-done. They re-composed it, but nothing worked, because... with the new grain procurement plan of 53,000 tons, the collective farmer did not get 2 kilos per workday. of bread. And Kraikom focused precisely on this norm. In order to “balance”, Ovchinnikov proposed to the RK bureau to increase the yield by an average of 1 centner. The Bureau voted on this issue and, despite Ovchinnikov’s insistent demand, refused to raise it. They “balanced it” by reducing the rate of distribution in kind and by mercilessly cutting back on fodder and funds from which it was supposed to be distributed to rural specialists: doctors, agronomists, teachers, etc.

Ovchinnikov went to Rostov and assured Kraiko that the plan of more than fifty thousand tons was quite realistic for the Veshensky district. The plan was finally approved in the amount of 51,700 tons and on July 21, they began to roll out the plan for the collective farms of the Veshensky district.

This is where the mass theft of bread began. The collective farmer reasoned like this: “In 1931, we carried out the plan with effort and in the spring we borrowed from us for seeds. And now, instead of the reduction promised in May, you will have to pay two and a half times more. This means that they will take all the bread, down to the grain. We need to stock up!”

And they began to stock up, despite the decree “On the Protection of Public Property.” They stole from the hayfields, from the threshing floors, everywhere! And not only did they steal, but they also worked poorly. It rained for three weeks in August. They destroyed tens of thousands of centners of grain. On one of these days, I was riding horseback through the fields of the Chukarinsky collective farm. It rained in the morning. The sun was warm. The haystacks that had stained the entire steppe had to be scattered and dried, but the brigades were not all in the field, but in the camps. I approached one camp. About 50 men and women are lying under the carts, sleeping, singing in a low voice, looking for women, in a word, celebrating. Angry, I ask:

“Why don’t you shake your hair? Did you come to the field to look and lie under the carts?” And amid the sympathetic silence of the others, one of the women explained to me: “The plan this year is really crazy. Our bread, apparently, will all float abroad. That’s why we work with laziness, we’re not in a hurry to dry the haystacks... Let the arable farmer scoop up some corn. They don’t need it when it’s good abroad, but we’ll eat one like that too!”

By mid-November, most of the grain had been threshed and taken to dump stations. The Regional Committee lowered the target for the second time by 11,130 tons. Secondary threshing has begun on collective farms. The Extraordinary Commissioner of the Regional Committee, Comrade Golman, began to export the grain that was left for seeds. An intensive search for the stolen grain began. By November 14, about 1,500 farms were searched out of a total of 13,813 farms in the region. The grain procurement plan was 82% fulfilled by mid-November. About 31,000 tons were delivered.

But because the falling curve of grain receipts did not ensure the fulfillment of the plan on time, the Regional Committee sent a special commissioner, Comrade Ovchinnikov, to the Veshensky district (the same one who once came to establish the “true” yield). On the day of his arrival, Ovchinnikov held a meeting with Golman and the secretary of Veshensky RK Dobrinsky. To his question “will the plan be fulfilled?” - Golman answered negatively. Secretary of the Republic of Kazakhstan Dobrinsky also expressed doubts. Ovchinnikov told them that “they will not fulfill the plan, no matter how much they have no faith in its reality,” and warned that he would inform Comrade Sheboldaev about this.

December 16 Ovchinnikov, Golman and Dobrinsky arrive in Kraikom. According to Ovchinnikov, Golman, a party member since 17 or 18, is expelled from the party, and Dobrinsky is removed from work with a ban on holding responsible party positions for three years.

20 [December] Ovchinnikov returns to Veshenskaya. At an extended meeting of the bureau of the Republic of Kazakhstan, in the presence of representatives of the Republic of Kazakhstan and secretaries of the cells, the decision of the Regional Committee on Golman and Dobrinsky is being worked out. Ovchinnikov trashes the district leadership and, tapping the holster of his revolver, gives the following instructions: “We must take bread at any cost! We will press so hard that blood will spray! Break the wood, but take the bread!”

This is where the “breaking wood” begins. Ovchinnikov knew that the collective farms had an insignificant amount of grain available, and that re-threshing, clearing out the backlogs and confiscating stolen grain would not ensure the fulfillment of the plan. He was faced with a very delicate alternative: either to tell Comrade Sheboldaev that he had deceived him, assuring him that 53,000 tons was a completely realistic plan for the Veshensky district, or to fulfill the plan or get closer to fulfilling it. But because it was impossible to carry out in the usual ways, using repressions that do not contradict the law and party conscience - and Ovchinnikov knew this wonderfully - he gave the official directive to the party organization: “Take bread at any cost! Break the wood, but take the bread!” This attitude was reinforced by the exclusion from the party at the same bureau of the Republic of Kazakhstan of 20 communists - secretaries of cells, authorized representatives of the Republic of Kazakhstan and chairmen of collective farms who fell behind in fulfilling the grain procurement plan.

Next, Ovchinnikov carried out the following measures, the reasonableness and legality of which you can judge for yourself: 1) ordered the confiscation of all grain from all farms in the region, including that given as a 15% advance on workdays; 2) he ordered the debt of each collective farm for grain procurements to be distributed among the brigades so that they would be distributed among the yards. Thus, the target figure for the delivery of bread was communicated to each collective farmer. The last event was sanctioned by the Regional Committee.

What results did these activities produce? 1) When mass searches began (usually carried out at night) with the seizure of not only stolen, but also all discovered bread, the bread received as a 15% advance began to be hidden and buried so that it would not be taken away. The search for pits and the seizure of hidden and unhidden bread were accompanied by arrests and trials; This circumstance forced the collective farmers to mass destruction of grain. To prevent bread from being found in the yard, they began to throw it into ravines, take it out to the steppe and bury it in the snow, drown it in wells and rivers, etc. 2) Bringing the target figure for the delivery of bread to each farm negated all the previously done work on organizational economic strengthening of collective farms. The district lacked up to 100% fulfillment of the grain procurement plan of more than 10,700 tons. On average, each yard received a control task of 45 - 50 poods (essentially a harvest from 2 - 3 hectares...). A monstrous and incomparable confusion has occurred: class stratification has gone down the drain (whether a poor peasant or a middle peasant pays 30-40 - 50 poods, but if not, he is expelled from the collective farm, kicked out of his hut into the snow, his cow, potatoes, salted vegetables are confiscated, or even all the property, as they say, to the bone). The concept of “drummer” has disappeared: the collective farmer’s book shows 50 workdays, or 300, or 700 - the control figure is the same for everyone. Not only was the previously given 15% advance taken away from the drummer, but upon delivery of the bread he was compared to a real thief and quitter.

Collect 10,000 tons of stolen bread, i.e. such a quantity that did not exist is not an easy matter. It was possible to get closer to fulfilling the plan, according to Ovchinnikov, only by using all means. And he, by mutual agreement with the representative of the Krai Committee, Sharapov (director of the Rostov plant “Red Aksai”), who came to Golman’s place, gave a direct instruction to excesses, gave the “leftists” a free hand and mass expulsion from the party of cell secretaries authorized by the Republic of Kazakhstan, chairmen of collective farms and rural Soviets, immediately after the expulsion, arrests forced the entire 1,500-strong party organization of the Veshensky district to take a “left” position.

Ovchinnikov’s attitude: “Wreck the wood, but take the bread!” picked up by the regional newspaper Bolshevik Don. In one of the issues, the newspaper gives a “header”: “At any cost, by any means, fulfill the grain procurement plan and fill up the seeds!” And they began to “break wood” around the area with great zeal and take bread “at any cost.”

By the arrival of the newly appointed Secretary of the Republic of Kazakhstan Kuznetsov and the Chairman of the Regional Executive Committee Korolev, the region already had the fruits of Ovchinnikov’s suggestion:

1) In the Pleshakovsky collective farm, two representatives of the Republic of Kazakhstan Belov and another comrade, whose last name is unknown to me, asking the collective farmers where the grain was buried, for the first time used the method of “interrogation with bias” that was later widely spread throughout the region. At midnight, they called the collective farmers to the Komsod [committee for promoting grain procurements]), one by one, first interrogated them, threatening them with torture, and then used torture: they put a pencil between their fingers and broke the joints, and then they put a rope loop around their necks and led them to an ice hole in the Don to drown .

2) In the Grachevsky collective farm, during the interrogation, the representative of the Republic of Kazakhstan hung collective farmers by the neck from the ceiling, continued to interrogate the half-strangled ones, then led them to the river with a belt, kicking them along the way, forced them to kneel on the ice and continued the interrogation.

3) In the Likhovidovsky collective farm, the representative of the Republic of Kazakhstan at a brigade meeting ordered the collective farmers to stand up, placed an armed villager at the door, who was charged with the duty of making sure that no one sat down, and he himself went to lunch. Had lunch, slept, came back 4 hours later. The meeting stood under village guard... And the commissioner continued the meeting.

At the very first bureau of the Republic of Kazakhstan, the new secretary of the Republic of Kazakhstan raised the question of these excesses. It was written in the bureau's decision that such “methods” of grain procurement distorted the party line. Ovchinnikov, who came from the Verkhne-Donskoy district, learned about this the next day (he worked as a special representative for two districts: Veshensky and Verkhne-Donskoy) and immediately suggested to the secretary of the Republic of Kazakhstan: “Don’t write down about excesses in the decision! We need bread, not talk about excesses. But from the very first days of your arrival in the region, you start talking about excesses and thereby weaken the intensity of the struggle for bread, dampen the party organization, demobilize it!” Kuznetsov insisted on writing it down, then Ovchinnikov wrote a telegram addressed to Comrade Sheboldaev with approximately the following content: “The new leadership of the Veshensky district is wavering, talking about excesses, not about bread, and thereby demobilizing local workers. It is necessary to assign responsibility for the progress of grain procurements personally to Comrade Comrade. Kuznetsova and Queen”, etc.

The telegram was signed by Ovchinnikov and Sharapov, who was under Ovchinnikov’s ideological protectorate. Ovchinnikov acquainted the Secretary of the Republic of Kazakhstan Kuznetsov with the contents of the telegram; when asked to leave a copy of the telegram in the Republic of Kazakhstan, he refused. Then he went to the telegraph office and suggested that the telegram be transmitted not by telegraph, but by telephone. The telegram was sent in front of him. Ovchinnikov put the text in his pocket, and the manager. telegraph, to the communist, to his words “Leave the text” he replied: “None of your business!” In a word, he sent a telegram and left no “traces”... After that, he returned to the Republic of Kazakhstan and told Kuznetsov: “Do you think that Krakom does not know about the excesses? He knows, but is silent. Do you need bread? Should the plan be carried out? And he told an extremely interesting case from his own practice; a case, in my opinion, that sheds bright light on the figure of Ovchinnikov. I am reporting from the words of the Secretary of the Republic of Kazakhstan Kuznetsov and a number of other members of the Bureau of the Republic of Kazakhstan, to whom Ovchinnikov told the same incident at another time. “In 1928, I was the secretary of the Volsky OK of the Lower Volga region. During grain procurements, when emergency measures were used, we did not hesitate to use the most severe repressions and did not talk about excesses! The rumor that we had gone too far reached Moscow... But we completely fulfilled the plan, and we are not in bad standing in the region! At the 16th All-Union Party Conference, during a break, Comrade Sheboldaev and I were standing, Krylenko came up to us and asked Sheboldaev: “Who is your secretary of the Volsky OK?” During grain procurements, he did such art that he will apparently have to be put on trial.” “But he is the secretary of the Volsky OK,” Sheboldaev answers, pointing at me. “Oh, that’s how it is!” - says Krylenko. “In that case, comrade, come see me after the conference.” I thought that there would be trouble, I sent a telegram to Volsk to prepare rehabilitative materials, but after the conference, at a meeting with the secretaries of the Regional Committees, Molotov said: “We will not offend those who are now accused of excesses. The question was: either take it even after quarreling with the peasant, or leave the worker hungry. It is clear that we preferred the first.” After that, Krylenko saw me, but didn’t even say a word about me coming to him!”

As you can see, in addition to direct instructions for grassroots party workers, Ovchinnikov also used methods of subtle psychological processing for regional party activists, not disdaining to increase his authority with such things as advertising his closeness to Comrade Sheboldaev.

Naturally, after the story with the decision about the excesses of the Republic of Kazakhstan, it turned a blind eye to all the outrages that were happening in the area, and if in particularly exceptional cases it spoke about the excesses, it was as mute as if out of the water. Decisions were made more to clear the conscience, not for working through them in cells, but for a special folder, just in case.

After Ovchinnikov left for the Verkhne-Donskoy region, Sharapov began to lead the work. Here are the instructions that he gave to the authorized representatives of the Republic of Kazakhstan, the commanders of propaganda columns, and everyone who procured grain: “Don’t open the pits - fine 10-15 farms, take away all their property, potatoes, salt, throw them out of their houses so that the bastards die in the street! And in two hours, if there is no turning point, convene a meeting again and throw ten farms out into the cold again!” At his suggestion, methods of provocation began to be widely practiced. It was done like this: collective farmer Ivanov was called and said: “Your neighbor Petrov told us that you have a pit. Confess, where is the bread buried? And Petrov is called in and told him the opposite. Then, at a meeting, brigades of collective farmers are hunted down like dogs and bloody massacres are encouraged.

“Take them off so that they tear out each other’s hair one on one, so that they beat each other’s faces until they bleed, and then go to another brigade. Start a fight there and go to the third one. Stay away yourself,” Sharapov lectured the representatives of the Republic of Kazakhstan and party secretaries.

Sharapov judged the work of the commissioner or secretary of the cell not only by the amount of bread found, but also by the number of families thrown out of their houses, by the number of roofs and collapsed stoves uncovered during searches. “He felt sorry for throwing the kids out into the cold! Slobbered! Kulak pity overcame him! Let them squeak and die like puppies, but we will break sabotage!” - Sharapov scolded the secretary of the Malakhovsky collective farm cell at the bureau of the Republic of Kazakhstan because he showed some hesitation in the mass eviction of collective farmer families onto the streets. At the bureau of the Republic of Kazakhstan, in the cell, on the board of the collective farm, smashing those working on grain procurements, Shaparapov did not know any other treatment other than “bastard”, “scoundrel”, “piece of slobber”, “traitor”, “son of a bitch”. Here is the vocabulary with which the regional committee commissioner communicated with district and rural communists.

Before the purge of the party, in a month and a half (from December 20 to January 1), out of 1,500 communists, more than 300 people were expelled. They excluded, immediately arrested and removed from supply both the arrested person and his family. Not receiving bread, the wives and children of the arrested communists began to swell from hunger and walk around the farmsteads in search of “alms”...

Expulsion from the party, arrest and hunger threatened any communist who did not show sufficient “activity” in the application of repression, because in the understanding of Ovchinnikov and Sharapov, only these methods should have yielded bread. And most of the terrorized communists lost their sense of proportion in the use of repression. Excesses rolled across the collective farms in a wide wave. Actually, what was used during interrogations and searches cannot be called excesses; people were tortured, as in the Middle Ages, and not only were they tortured in commodities, which were literally turned into dungeons, but they also mocked those who were tortured. Below I will give a short list of the “methods” by which the propaganda columns and representatives of the Republic of Kazakhstan worked, and now, in the figures I received in the Republic of Kazakhstan, I will show the number of people subjected to repression and the amount of bread taken from the moment the repression was applied (see table).

This total must include the selected 15% advance payment and the grain (the largest of the pits found) that was buried while still being an individual farmer. They found pits with bread buried back in... 1919. And then according to the harvest years: in 1924, 1926,1928.

Now about the methods that were used in all collective farms in the region according to Ovchinnikov’s instructions and under the direct supervision of Sharapov. Eviction from home and sale of property was carried out in the simplest way: the collective farmer received a target figure for the delivery of grain, say, 10 centners. For failure to submit, he was expelled from the collective farm, all his debt was taken into account, including arbitrarily determined losses incurred by the collective farm in previous years, and all payments were presented as to an individual owner.

In Veshensky district

These figures are as of January 24, i.e. almost at the end of grain procurements. Now about the results obtained after applying the entire amount of these repressions. On January 24, bread was found:

2. In other places

Moreover, the collective farmer’s property was valued according to the amount of payments; it was assessed that it was exactly enough to pay off the debt. A house, for example, could be bought for 60 - 80 rubles, and such a small thing as a fur coat or felt boots could be bought for literally pennies...

It was officially and strictly forbidden for other collective farmers to allow those evicted into their homes to spend the night or warm themselves. They had to live in barns, in cellars, on the streets, in gardens. The population was warned: whoever lets the evicted family in will be evicted himself and his family. And they were evicted only because some collective farmer, touched by the roar of freezing children, allowed his evicted neighbor to warm up. 1090 families lived on the street day after day, around the clock, in 20 degree frost. During the day, like shadows, they wandered around their closed houses, and at night they sought refuge from the cold in barns and chaff. But according to the law established by Kraykom, they were not allowed to spend the night there either! The chairmen of village councils and secretaries of the cells sent patrols through the streets, which rummaged through the barns and drove the families of collective farmers thrown out of their houses onto the streets.

I saw something that cannot be forgotten to death: in the Volokhovsky farm of the Lebyazhensky collective farm, at night, in the fierce wind, in the cold, when even dogs were hiding from the cold, families thrown out of their houses burned fires in the alleys and sat near the fire. The children were wrapped in rags and laid on the ground thawed by the fire. A continuous cry of children stood over the alleys. Is it really possible to mock people like that? It seemed to me that this was one of Ovchinnikov’s excesses, but at the end of January or early February, the secretary of the Regional Committee, ZIMIN, came to Veshenskaya.

On the way to Veshenskaya, he spent two hours at the Chukarinsky collective farm and spoke at the RK bureau about the progress of grain procurements in this collective farm. The first question he asked the secretary of the Chukara cell, who was present at the bureau, was “How many people have been evicted from their houses? "Forty-eight farms." “Where do they sleep?” The secretary of the cell hesitated, then replied that they would spend the night wherever they had to. Zimin told him: “We should spend the night not with relatives, not indoors, but on the street!”

After that, we took an even steeper line through the area. And those evicted began to freeze. A woman with an infant was evicted from the Bazkovsky collective farm.

She walked around the farm all night and asked to be allowed to warm up with her child. They didn’t let us in, fearing that they themselves would be evicted. In the morning the child froze in his mother's arms.

The mother herself was frostbitten. This woman was evicted by a party candidate, an employee of the Bazkovsky collective farm. After the child froze to death, he was quietly put in prison. They imprisoned me for "excess". Why were you imprisoned? And if they were imprisoned correctly, then why does Comrade ZIMIN remain at large?

The number of people who froze has not been established, because... No one was and is not interested in this statistics; just as no one is interested in the number of people who died of hunger. One thing is indisputable: a huge number of adults and “flowers of life”, after a two-month winter on the street, after spending the night in the snow, will leave this life along with the last snow. And those who survive will be half-crippled.

But eviction is not the most important thing. Here is a list of the methods by which 593 tons of bread were produced:

1. Mass beatings of collective farmers and individual farmers.

2. Planting “in the cold”. "Is there a hole?" "No". “Go, sit in the barn!”

The collective farmer is stripped down to his underwear and placed barefoot in a barn or shed. Validity period: January, February. Entire teams were often put into barns.

3. On the Vashchaevo collective farm, collective farmers doused their legs and skirts with kerosene, lit it, and then extinguished it: “Tell me, where is the pit? I’ll set it on fire again!”, on the same collective farm they put the interrogated person in a hole, buried her halfway and continued the interrogation.

4. In the Napolovsky collective farm, the authorized candidate of the Republic of Kazakhstan, a candidate member of the Bureau of the Republic of Kazakhstan, Plotkin, during interrogation, forced him to sit on a hot bench. The prisoner shouted that he could not sit, it was hot, then water was poured from a mug under him, and then he was taken out into the cold to “cool off” and locked in a barn. From the barn back to the stove and interrogated again. He (PLOTKIN) forced one individual farmer to shoot himself. He put a revolver in his hands and ordered: “Shoot, but if not, I’ll shoot you myself!” He began to pull the trigger (not knowing that the revolver was unloaded) and when the firing pin clicked, he fainted.

5. In the Varvarinsky collective farm, the secretary of the Anikeev cell at a brigade meeting forced the entire brigade (men and women, smokers and non-smokers) to smoke shag, and then threw a pod of red pepper (mustard) onto the hot stove and did not order them to leave the room. This same Anikeev and a number of workers of the propaganda column, the commander of which was candidate member of the bureau of the Republic of Kazakhstan Pashinsky, during interrogations at the column headquarters, forced collective farmers to drink huge quantities of water mixed with lard, wheat and kerosene.

6. At the Lebyazhensky collective farm they stood him against the wall and shot past the interrogated person’s head with shotguns.

7. In the same place: they rolled me up in a row and trampled underfoot.

8. In the Arkhipovsky collective farm, two collective farmers, Fomina and Krasnova, after a night interrogation, were taken three kilometers into the steppe, stripped naked in the snow and released, ordered to run to the farm at a trot.

9. In the Chukarinsky collective farm, the secretary of the cell, Bogomolov, picked up 8 demobilized Red Army soldiers, with whom they came to the collective farmer suspected of theft - into the yard (at night), after a short questioning, they took him to the threshing floor or to the levada, built his brigade and commanded “fire” on the tied up collective farmer . If someone frightened by the mock execution did not confess, then they beat him, threw him into a sleigh, took him out to the steppe, beat him along the road with rifle butts, and, having taken him out to the steppe, put him back and again went through the procedure preceding the execution.

9. In the Kruzhilinsky collective farm, the authorized representative of the Republic of Kazakhstan KOVTUN at a meeting of the 6th brigade asks the collective farmer: “Where did you bury the grain?” “I didn’t bury it, comrade!” “Didn’t bury it? Come on, stick out your tongue! Stay like that!” Sixty adult people, Soviet citizens, on the orders of the Commissioner, take turns sticking out their tongues and stand there, drooling, while the Commissioner makes an incriminating speech for an hour. Kovtun did the same thing in both the 7th and 8th brigades; the only difference is that in those brigades, in addition to sticking out their tongues, he also forced them to kneel.

10. In the Zatonsky collective farm, a propaganda column worker beat those interrogated with a saber. In the same collective farm, they mocked the families of Red Army soldiers, opening the roofs of houses, destroying stoves, forcing women to cohabitate.

11. In the Solontsovsky collective farm, a human corpse was brought into the commissar’s room, placed on a table, and in the same room the collective farmers were interrogated, threatening to be shot.

12. In the Verkhne-Chirsky collective farm, Komsomol officers put those interrogated with their bare feet on a hot stove, and then beat them and took them out, barefoot, into the cold.

13. At the Kolundaevsky collective farm, barefoot collective farmers were forced to run in the snow for three hours. The frostbitten victims were taken to the Bazkovo hospital.

14. Ibid: the interrogated collective farmer was put on a stool on his head, covered with a fur coat on top, beaten and interrogated.

15. At the Bazkovsky collective farm, during interrogation, they stripped people, sent them home half naked, returned them halfway, and so on several times.

16. The authorized representative of the RO OGPU Yakovlev and the operational group held a meeting at the Verkhne-Chirsky collective farm. The school was heated to the point of stupor. They were not ordered to undress. There was a “cool” room nearby where they were taken out of the meeting for “individual processing.” Those who held the meeting took turns, there were 5 of them, but the collective farmers were the same... The meeting lasted without a break for more than a day.

These examples can be multiplied endlessly. These are not isolated cases of bending, this is a “method” of grain procurements legalized on a regional scale. I either heard about these facts from the communists, or from the collective farmers themselves, who experienced all these “methods” on themselves and then came to me with requests to “write about this in the newspaper.”

Do you remember, Joseph Vissarionovich, Korolenko’s essay “In a Calm Village”? So this “disappearance” was carried out not on three peasants suspected of stealing from a kulak, but on tens of thousands of collective farmers. And, as you can see, with a richer use of technical means and with greater sophistication.

A similar story took place in the Verkhne-Donsk region, where the special authorized representative was the same Ovchinnikov, who was the ideological inspirer of these terrible abuses that took place in our country in 1933.

Confirmation of the facts that I cited, illustrating the work on grain procurements, you can get from the Krai Committee and KraiKK [regional control commission]). At the end of March, the answer, instructor of the regional committee, Comrade Davydov, and the answer, instructor of the KraiKK, Comrade Minin, came to the Veshensky district. They have verified material on most of the cases I cited.

I am writing to you with this letter for this reason: when rumors about the distortion of the party line reached the Regional Committee, a member of the Regional Committee bureau, the editor of the regional newspaper “Molot”, Comrade Filov, was sent to the Veshensky district. He interviewed some of the district party activists and, faced with statements from a number of comrades that they received instructions for excesses from the lips of the specially authorized Regional Committee Ovchinnikov and authorized Sharapov, he took a rather strange position... The fact is that Ovchinnikov At the last plenum of the Regional Committee, he was elected as a candidate member of the Regional Committee bureau and nominated as secretary of the Rostov City Committee. Filov, being in Veshenskaya and learning that Ovchinnikov had once prohibited writing about excesses in the decision of the Veshensky RK bureau, advised the RK secretary Kuznetsov: “YOU BETTER DO NOT TOUCH OVCHINNIKOV...” Meanwhile, even before Filov’s arrival, there was a member of the bureau in the area Regional Committee of the Komsomol Comrade Kavtaradze, who examined the work of the propaganda column operating under the command of Nashinsky. At the insistence of Kavtaradze, Nashinsky and a number of propaganda column workers were expelled from the party and the Komsomol, and are currently arrested, are in custody and are waiting for the Regional Committee to make a decision on their case, because The investigation is completed and all the material has been sent to Kraikoy.

I must say frankly: Krakom is still pursuing the policy of bringing the “switchmen” to justice. There has not been, and probably never will be, a deep, comprehensive investigation into the events that took place in the Veshensky district, no matter how authoritative people like Filov, a member of the regional committee bureau, directly advise: “It’s better not to touch Ovchinnikov.” But we need to take a closer look at what is happening in the regions. It is necessary to investigate not only the affairs of those who mocked the collective farmers and the Soviet regime, but also the affairs of those whose hand directed them. What is it worth, for example, the activities of such a communist as the authorized representative of the Regional Committee Sharapov. Before going to the plenum of the Regional Committee, he went to the Republic of Kazakhstan and, in my presence, had the following conversation with the secretary of the Republic of Kazakhstan Kuznetsov: “What kind of goat would we drive up to the Regional Committee, so that we would not be allowed to transfer all the grain from the outback... So that seed insurance would be left for collective farms on the left bank " At this time, the supply of seeds throughout the region did not exceed 5 - 6 quintals per day. It was clear that not only would the district collective farms not collect 10% of the seed funds, but they would not even harvest 2%. Based on this, I advised Sharapov: with all the Bolshevik courage, declare to Comrade Sheboldaev that the Veshensky district will not be provided with seeds and that the transfer from the outback must be stopped immediately. Sharapov just smiled, probably considering my speeches unusually naive. And Kuznetsov said: “If you announce this now, then not only will they get beaten up, but they will also take away your party card!”

Being well aware that the collective farms of the region would not prepare seeds, Sharapov and Kuznetsov did not declare this to the Regional Committee, thereby misleading the Regional Committee, as a result of which more than 6,000 tons of grain in February were transferred from the collective farms to the village points, and in In March they began to transport the same bread back. The tax was, as they say, put in place, but now this tax refuses to work. The sowing will fail this year mainly due to this. To characterize Sharapov’s physiognomy, it would not be out of place to add that this communist, who enjoyed the high trust of the Regional Committee, when leaving the Veshensky district, did not hesitate to stock up on lard confiscated from the evicted collective farmer, and also to purchase a sheepskin coat. The sheepskin coat was priced at 80 rubles. and was bought for the grain farm workers, but Comrade Sharapov liked the sheepskin coat. They gave him a sheepskin coat for the same price, but Sharapov said that he was not able to pay that kind of money... They urgently made a “correction” in the price - instead of 80 rubles. They put in 40, and Sharapov drove off to Rostov in a sheepskin coat he bought on the cheap and with a supply of lard...

In conclusion, about “prospects for the future”: if in 1931 there were 73,000 hectares in the region. plowed winter, then in 1932 only 25,000; and the plan for sowing spring crops in 1933 was increased by 9,000 hectares compared to last year.

Food assistance provided by the state is clearly insufficient. Out of a population of 50,000, no less than 49,000 are starving. For these 49,000, 22,000 poods were received. This is for three months. The exhausted, swollen collective farmers, who gave the country 2,300,000 pounds of grain, and who are currently eating God knows what, will probably not produce what they produced last year.

If everything I described deserves the attention of the Central Committee, send genuine communists to the Veshensky district who would have the courage, regardless of their faces, to expose everyone through whose fault the collective farm economy of the region was fatally undermined, who would truly investigate and discover not only all those who used disgusting “methods” of torture, beatings and abuse against collective farmers, but also those who inspired this.

It is impossible to pass over in silence what was happening in the Veshensky and Verkhne-Don regions for three months. There is only hope for you.

Sorry for the verbosity of the letter. I decided that it was better to write to you than to use such material to create the latest book of “Virgin Soil Upturned.”

Greetings
M. Sholokhov
Art. Veshenskaya SKK [North Caucasus region])
April 4, 1933 Original

Publication by YURI MURIN

Homeland. 1992. No. 11 - 12. P. 51-57. The author's style and spelling have been preserved. - Ed. magazine "Rodina".

NOTES

1 In the decree of the Central Committee of the All-Union Communist Party of Bolsheviks and the Council of People's Commissars of the USSR dated May 6, 1932, “On the grain procurement plan from the 1932 harvest and the development of collective farm grain trade,” the grain procurement plan for collective farms and individual farms of the North Caucasus was reduced from 154 million poods in 1931 up to 136 million poods in 1932

2 P.K. Lugovoi - Secretary of the Veshensky Republic Committee of the All-Union Communist Party of Bolsheviks, P.T. Limarev - head. organizational department of the Veshensky Republic Committee of the All-Union Communist Party (Bolsheviks).

3 G.F. Ovchinnikov (1893-1937) - party member since 1918, in 1928-1930. Secretary of the Volsky District Party Committee of the Lower Volga Region, delegate of the XVI Conference of the All-Union Communist Party of Bolsheviks; in 1930 - 1931 studied courses in Marxism-Leninism, in February 1932 he was seconded to the North Caucasus Regional Committee, where he worked as secretary of the party committee of the Selmash plant, and then as secretary of the Rostov city party committee. By resolution of the Politburo of the Central Committee of the All-Union Communist Party of Bolsheviks of July 4, 1933, he was removed from the post of secretary of the Rostov City Committee with a severe reprimand. In 1937 he was repressed. Rehabilitated in 1956

4 I.N. Pivovarov - in 1932, chairman of the North Caucasus Regional Executive Committee.

5 Melionopus is a type of durum wheat.

6 This refers to the resolution of the Central Executive Committee and the Council of People's Commissars of the USSR dated August 7, 1932. “On the protection of the property of state enterprises of collective farms and cooperation and the strengthening of public (socialist) property.”

7 Residues - light, weedy grain remaining during winnowing.

8 V.I. Sharapov (1895-1937) - director of the Rostov plant "Red Aksai", authorized representative for grain procurement in the Veshensky and Verkhne-Donsky regions of the region. In 1937 he was repressed. Rehabilitated in 1956

9 In a speech at the XVI All-Union Party Conference on April 27, 1929, B.P. Sheboldaev, polemicizing with Lominadze, tried to justify the need for emergency measures taken during the grain procurement campaign. B.P. Sheboldaev (1895-1937) - party member since 1914, since 1930 member of the Central Committee of the All-Union Communist Party of Bolsheviks; in 1931 - 1934 Secretary of the North Caucasus Regional Committee.

10 N.V. Krylenko (1885-1938) - party member since 1904, in 1922-1931. Chairman of the Supreme Tribunal under the All-Russian Central Executive Committee; in 1927 - 1934 member of the Central Committee of the All-Union Communist Party of Bolsheviks.

11 There is no information about this meeting.

12 N.P. Zimin (1895-1938) - party member since 1915, from December 1932 to July 1933, second secretary of the North Caucasus Regional Committee of the All-Union Communist Party of Bolsheviks. By resolution of the Politburo of the Central Committee, he was removed from the post of second secretary of the regional committee and placed at the disposal of the Central Committee of the All-Union Communist Party of Bolsheviks. In 1938 he was repressed. Rehabilitated in 1956

13 A. A. Plotkin - party member since 1926, in 1932-1933. Chairman of the Veshensky District Collective Farm Union.

14 A.A. Pashinsky was a party member since 1930, from 1930 to 1934 he worked as deputy director and director of the Red Spike state farm in Kashary.

Sholokhov M.A. “I saw something that cannot be forgotten until death” // The fate of the Russian peasantry. - M.: Russian. state humanist univ. 1995. - pp. 535-559.

09.05.2016

There are fewer and fewer of us who could talk about the Great Patriotic War - about what they themselves saw and experienced. Last year, the cleric of the Barnaul diocese, priest Georgy Barkov, asked his parishioner Ivan Vasilyevich Kuleshov, who walked the roads of the war from the beginning to the Victory, about those times. They have the floor.

After graduating from school, in 1972, with the blessing of my father, I entered the Irkutsk Military Aviation Technical School. Now I remember my years of study, moments of amazing communication with veterans and participants of the Great Patriotic War come to mind. This was the time when they were still in military service. This was at lectures, when they recalled incidents from their front-line life, it was long evenings of special meetings with them, when we asked our many questions regarding various aspects of front-line everyday life.

I remember being amazed by the story of the tactics teacher. He was drafted at the age of eighteen in 1941 into the infantry, and after a short training - the first battle in which his company was raised in a hand-to-hand attack. He told how he felt, what thoughts flashed through his head, how he still remembers the face of that German warrior with whom he fought at bayonet point, and how then, until the end of the battle, everything else seemed to be erased from his memory. When he seemed to wake up, the battle was already over, and he was on the battlefield without a rifle. He found the rifle in the body of a fascist killed with a bayonet.

After graduating from college, I arrived in the Long-Range Aviation Guards Regiment for further service. And for the first five or six years I had the opportunity to serve with veterans and participants of the Great Patriotic War, who, as in the school, remained in military service. The joint service and communication with them will forever remain in my memory. During all these meetings, communications, and joint service, the caring, fatherly attitude of the veterans towards us, young officers, was always especially felt. In their stories there was always a reference that we are Russian, “Russian in spirit”, in faith, in our history we are wonderful warriors, commanders, saints, and they could not fight differently.

I remember during my school years, veterans always performed in front of us on the days of remembrance of the Great Victory. I would like to tell you about one of them. This is the father of my classmate Ivan Vasilyevich Kuleshov. Ivan Vasilyevich is a deeply religious man; on January 14, 2015, he turned 95 years old. Ivan Vasilyevich’s elder brother was captured in the first months of the war and died in a concentration camp in March 1942. Ivan Vasilyevich agreed to answer several questions. Ivan Vasilyevich’s daughter Olga took part in the conversation.

Do you meet your friends from the war?

– On the 25th anniversary of the Victory, the squad commander, foreman Alexey Ivanovich Timofeev, came to visit us. He told us that dad saved him, we didn’t know about it before. On the Neman River while cleaning the fairway. To do this, anti-tank mines were tied to the piles with wire and the fuse was set on fire. You had to sail there and back on a rubber boat. Dad has already blown up about five or six. Sergeant Major Timofeev decided to go himself, leaving dad to rest. He attached the mine, lit the fuse and, apparently, was in a hurry and fell out of the boat into the water, but swam poorly and began to sink. That’s when dad saved him and managed to do it before the explosion.

What is the worst episode in the war?

- The whole war is terrible.

How old were you at the beginning of the war?

- Twenty one year.

Was it difficult to fight the Nazis? Why?

- Not easy. The Nazis had more equipment and were better armed. When Katyushas appeared, it became much easier.

What was your daily routine during the war, and did you have one at all?

- No routine. We slept wherever we had to, including in the snow. The political instructor provided political information every day. But there was no routine.

Where were you when the war ended?

– I finished the war and celebrated Victory Day near Koenigsberg. The unit was informed by phone, the command announced to us. They fired guns and shouted “hurray.” Everyone was happy.

What is your most valuable medal?

– “For courage” and the Order of the Red Star.

Did you have a comrade during the war with whom you fought shoulder to shoulder? Did he go through the war? Is he alive?

- Timofeev is a foreman, he is no longer there.

Please describe your most memorable moments in that war.

– In Crimea, near Alushta, I was walking along a path covered with gravel and stepped on a mine - only a characteristic click. Nearby is the same Timofeev: “Vanya, calm down, quietly, quietly, go quietly.” Thank God, everything worked out.

There was another case. With the replenishment from the Kursk region in 1941, seventeen-eighteen-year-old boys arrived near Moscow, one of them - Karachevsky - was either sick or weak, but he always wanted to sleep. He fell asleep as soon as he sat down, and during political classes too. They put him on guard at night. The commander and the political instructor went to check the posts, but he was sleeping. They sorted it out at a meeting and punished me. And the next time he fell asleep again at his post. All. Shoot! And they sent to shoot those boys with whom he arrived for replenishment. “Get ready! Fire!” - that’s all. The next day a post was set up nearby. The boy comes running and says: “Karachevsky is alive, groaning.” The political instructor grabbed the pistol, ran and finished him off. Some time later, during the transfer to another place, shelling began. Not far away there was a building, apparently for horses, like a barn with compartments. The soldiers scattered around it, and the political instructor and commander stood at the gate to observe. So two of them were covered with one explosion. Dad always says: “It was their Lord who punished this boy for this.”

It also happened... They retreated. The Nazis are bombing - no white light is visible. Behind is the Kerch Strait. The narrowest place is the Chushka spit, four kilometers. Swimming is risky. Here the men have a camera attached to the board and are about to swim. And one says that he doesn’t know how to swim, and he won’t swim - all his relatives are under the German, and he is destined to stay here. They invited dad, he agreed. They float, shells are exploding all around. There is someone moving around on what. Many were killed, but they were lucky. Somewhere in the middle, a shell exploded right next to their camera, stunning a large fish about five kilograms. Dad grabbed her with a belt. And so they floated out. A boat picked them up not far from the shore and dropped them off at the pier. There they went to see the woman - it turned out that before she had a headquarters and there were commanders on duty, but they were not there now. They asked the woman to cook the fish. The officers also arrived. So there was enough fish for everyone. And when the hostess made a bed on the bed, the officers abandoned this bed in favor of ordinary soldiers. Dad remembers this with gratitude and warmth: “We slept on it like dead people, whichever side we lay on, that’s where we got up.”

Another case. Dad was in a reconnaissance company, and he was the only one in his squad who had a machine gun—a captured one, apparently. We went on reconnaissance and came across a broken cart. We looked at what was lying there - some took chocolate, some took canned food, and dad took binoculars. We went further and came to the church. And the Nazis turned out there and started mowing down with machine guns. Dad hid behind an oak tree. They noticed him, apparently, they thought, the commander, with a machine gun and binoculars. Poor oak got it, and they didn’t even let dad come out: they shot both arms and legs. When they knocked out the entrenched fascists, dad was carried on a stretcher, and the men told dad that he was happy that he was alive. He himself says that if it weren’t for this enormous oak, he would not have existed a long time ago. If I could, I would go and bow to this oak tree.

What did you do before the Great Patriotic War?

– He worked as a shoemaker in Zaton.

Tell us how and where you were drafted?

– In 1940, he was drafted into the army from Bobrovsky Zaton.

How was your “baptism of fire”? Do you remember the first battle?

– We were in a tent camp near Ust-Kamenogorsk. They took us to the summer cinema "Rider", there was a concert on Sunday. In the middle of the concert, they took us out into the street, and the political instructor announced that the war had begun. We went back to Semipalatinsk, then stood ten kilometers from Ashgabat for three days. Then in Cherdzhou for half a month. From there - to Tula, and by car - to Moscow, to combat positions.

Was there a bathhouse at the front?

-What kind of bath is there? A tarpaulin tent, we will heat water in it. They washed there, and even then rarely. What kind of bathhouse is there on the front line?

Did you often write letters home? What did they write about and to whom? Who did you receive letters from?

– I often wrote home that I was alive and well, I couldn’t write too much - censorship. He wrote to his mother, father, nieces, sister and brothers, until Evstafiy died near Rzhev, and his other brother, Dmitry, was wounded and captured and died there. I also received letters from them.

Was there a radio at the front? When was it possible to listen to him? What did they convey?

- There was no radio. The connection was only wired. The signalmen pulled the coils. That's all.

What did they read at the front?

- Letters, and the political instructor provided political information.

How did song help during the war? What songs were sung?

“When they got into the dugouts, they sang there. All sorts of songs. Whose houses sing, they sang. There were people from all fifteen republics in one family. They ate and sang from the same cauldron. And, of course, Katyusha. The Ukrainians sang very well.

Did artists come to the front line?

- We came once.

What do you wish for the youth?

– To protect peace and prevent war.

Tell us about the most remarkable facts of your front-line biography, the most memorable battles or other moments from your combat life and the lives of your fellow soldiers. For what feats were you awarded?

– On the night of April 11, 1944, while carrying out a mission to make passages in minefields and wire obstacles under rifle and machine-gun fire, crawled through the minefields to the enemy’s wire obstacles and removed 62 anti-tank mines. When demining the city of Feodosia, he removed 210 anti-personnel mines (from the presentation to the Order of the Red Star dated April 24, 1944). As of November 20, 1944, he had 1,653 neutralized explosive barriers on his personal account. In the zone of the 28th Army, under enemy mortar fire, he laid 170 anti-tank mines.

What helped you survive in extreme war conditions?

- Faith in God.

What did you do after the war?

– After the war, I was demobilized in 1946. He worked as a shoemaker, then served in the paramilitary guards at Tekstilshveiobuvtorg for 20 years. From there he retired.

How do you celebrate Victory Day?

– Children come with grandchildren and great-grandchildren, nieces with children and grandchildren, neighbors come. We celebrate, sing songs, remember loved ones, the war and our Victory.

Student publicationmagazine
Barnaul Seminary "Pokrov"
abbreviated

For a relationship to be successful, you need to work on it and make a lot of effort. Relationships cannot move forward automatically. You must always be prepared for difficulties, responsibility, and sometimes pain. If you have had a sad experience in a relationship in your life, then be prepared that in a new relationship it will be more difficult to open up to your partner, share your secrets with him, and not compare the new relationship with the previous ones. Forgiving offenses does not mean taking pain for granted. By forgiving the offender, you block old wounds from accessing your relationship.

Each relationship had its own meaning.

People don't fall from the sky on us. Everyone who met us on our life's path, and everyone with whom we had a love relationship, had a mission in our lives. Some partners are teachers, others use us. However, the important thing is that with each new person we get to know ourselves more deeply and discover qualities in ourselves that we sometimes don’t even suspect exist. Therefore, draw conclusions and appreciate the experience gained.

We all change with time.

There is no need to blame a person for growing up. You can grow from any relationship. If partners do not move in the same direction, such an end is inevitable. Just move forward without imposing your point of view or blaming.

A person cannot be changed.

Don't try to make the changes you want in a person's character and behavior. After all, if a person is satisfied with everything, then he will not change. Plus, when you are open with your partner, you can have a conversation and tell him what you would like to change. At a minimum, this information will be taken into account.

Most often, we receive in return what we ourselves give.

If you want to be loved, love yourself. If you want understanding, try to understand. If you want to be seen as a friend, be friends yourself.

You yourself are responsible for your own happiness.

No one can make you happy if your relationship with yourself is not the best. Live in harmony with yourself. Remember that without harmony and balance in your soul, you will not be able to create a harmonious relationship with your partner. And expecting that you will be made happy with a wave of a magic wand is very unreasonable.

Disputes and eternal explanations have no future.

The less time you spend with a person with whom you are always fighting, arguing and trying to explain something, the more time you will have to meet a person who will love you without explanation.

Show your love.

Even small signs of attention can deepen your relationship. Be attentive to your partner's wishes. Surprise, amaze, indulge and don’t be afraid to overdo it.

Don't fight for a place in someone's life.

You don't have to go out of your way to get someone to make more space in their life for you. You will receive as much attention and warmth as your mutual feelings are strong.

If you are uncomfortable in a relationship, why are you in it?

If a person tries to teach you, instruct you, or feel not mature enough, ask yourself about the reasons for your union. Respect yourself and believe that you deserve to be treated differently. Yes, it will hurt at first, but the patch needs to be removed immediately.

Don't fight the fact.

None of us will stay on this earth longer than certain periods. We all know that everything in the world has its beginning and its end. But that doesn't mean relationships aren't worth our time. Don't be afraid to feel and express your feelings. Cherish every minute. Immerse yourself in emotions and enjoy every relationship in your life!