The memory of the Great Patriotic War lives in each one of us
By Kirill Privalov
According to scientific journals, the human brain can store 2.5 petabytes (2,500 terabytes or 2.5 million gigabytes) of information. I don’t really believe in these statistics, but I understand that it is very, very much. Even the largest libraries in the world do not contain such an enormous amount of information. The only problem is that almost everything is recorded by our minds, but only partially reproduced. However, psychologists maintain that we digest a huge amount of information. We remember everything we have ever experienced in our lives: smells, sounds, situations, numbers and other people with their names, surnames, addresses and phone numbers… So, it appears that we know much more than we even suspect. Scientists state that under hypnosis a person is able to reproduce all this. Is it so?
«The past no longer is, and the future is not yet,» Blessed Augustine asserted. A bishop and theologian of early Christianity, he was only partially right: the past is indeed gone, but it does not disappear without a trace – it leaves an imprint on both the present and the future. Such is the property of our memory… no matter what – personal, collective or family.
Some nations remember with their every cell the long-ago tragic exodus from their faraway native lands, which became deadly by the will of invading enemies. Other peoples remember the imperial grandeur of their mighty forefathers, which periodically appears like a fairy-tale mirage. And others – caricatural ambitious and disproportionately important ones –have no intelligible ancestral past, except for swamps, fog, and flimsy huts among scattered stones on a sparse shore, but still claim to be something in the contradictory modern world. Does the nation’s genetic code work in this way? Maybe. But, despite the calls of the ancient Eastern sages, no one can «exist in this world without belonging to it.» Time in the memory space has no units of measurement. Paradoxically (I’ve learned it for myself lately), we have much more vivid memories of the distant past than of more recent events. Both are now out of reach anyway.
Over the past century we Russians have walked a long path from the Gulag to Google and, admittedly, for various reasons we have not learned much. However, we have realised the most important thing: we must remember our past at least so that it should not repeat itself. This is why the memory of the Great Patriotic War lives – without exaggeration – in each one of us.
«History is a lie that everyone agrees with,» argued Voltaire. That narcissistic French sage was mistaken. He understood the hardest thing in life is telling the truth, as well as telling lies. But he didn’t realise that there are some things that don’t fit into any evaluation categories. For these events were too terrible and long-lasting for posterity to take them light-heartedly. We, who live in the post-Soviet space, know perfectly well what we are talking about. About the most terrible of the wars: it has lived in our memory for eight decades since its end. We judge by our common pain, to which nothing can be compared to this day.
The price for our Great Victory speaks for itself and suppresses the consumer mind. Judge for yourselves! If we were to honour each of the 27 million USSR citizens killed in the Great Patriotic War with a minute’s silence (just one minute!), the world would be silent for over half a century… If the portraits of all those who fell at the front and in the rear were to be carried in the “Immortal Regiment” procession, the column would march for nineteen days! And there is not a single family in Russia and Belarus, Armenia, and Kazakhstan (the list of post-Soviet republics can go on!) who did not lose a close one in the most terrible of the wars in human history. How can we forget this!
To this day, faded photographs of people in military uniform, letters from the front written by an indelible pencil on rough and yellowed paper, military orders and medals received by our grandfathers and fathers for bravery are lovingly kept in every home. Those whose relatives returned from the war were incredibly lucky, but alas, they are a minority. And we remember the fallen soldiers too and we honour them. «Life is given for brave deeds,» as a popular saying goes. And another says: «Victory over death gives birth to a hero.» All those who returned and did not return, who defended our freedom in the struggle against fascism, are heroes. I am proud to say that there is such a wonderful person in my family too.
The “Fiery Captain”
I had already written about this man in the Russian Mind magazine. But now a diary from the war years has come into my hands. An unkempt, raw and unfinished, but incredibly powerful document! And our entire country was the arena of events that unfolded in the first horrible years of the Great Patriotic War. My simple narrative is based on the facts from these notes.
Olga Petrovna Solovykh (an old Siberian surname; married name: Khigrina) was born in the Ryazan province and by the beginning of the most devastating of the wars at the age of thirty-five was a mother of three young boys. The youngest, Oleg, was just over a year old. The German invasion caught the family in Bobruisk (in Belarus), where the head of the family, Artillery Captain Boris Lvovich Khigrin, served as head of a regimental school and commander of the Second Division (122-mm cannons of the 1931-1937 model and 152-mm howitzers of the 1937 model). He, a native of Orsha, had to face the most important and final test of his life there, in his native Belarus.
On 5 July 1941 forty armoured vehicles from General Heinz Guderian’s 2nd Panzer Group broke through to the banks of the quiet Kleva River. To stop them at a bridge next to the Mogilev–Minsk Road, which opened the way to Moscow, our troops placed a 122-mm cannon from the 2nd Division in a favourable firing position. Just one cannon! There were no more resources left – the task was to cover the withdrawal of the 1st and 2nd Red Army Divisions at all costs; they had to organise a defence near the Orlik River, on its elevated eastern bank.
After the main units had begun to fortify their position successfully on the new line, Captain Khigrin went by car to remove the cannon left by the Kleva. In addition to the driver, he took Ivan Tsupikov, who had been conscripted from Ukraine. As if the captain had sensed that he would need a reliable helper: very soon Tsupikov became a loader. Later he would tell everybody about the last battle of the one whom today’s war historians from Belarus to Russia call the “Fiery Captain”.
Evening was falling. When Captain Khigrin drove up to the Kleva bank, he saw ten Fascist tanks firing at the cannon left in the barrier by Soviet gunners from guns, machine guns and from everything they could… Hurricane fire! And behind several dozen more armoured vehicles with spider crosses on their towers were huddled at the bridge, waiting for their turn to rush into battle. The forces were unequal, and the situation seemed to be hopeless. The gun-commander Lanchava and the gunlayer Bakharov were dead, and the platoon commander, Lieutenant Kozyr, seriously wounded…
Then Boris Khigrin himself stood up to the panoramic sight of the cannon: it was not in vain that two years earlier he had been one of the first to master the new guns designed by Fyodor Petrov, so loved by battery fighters. Confident and calculating movements, precise judgement of distance, and masterful shooting experience – and four Fascist tanks, shot at by the captain, were ablaze! Of course, having seen the artillery crew defeated in an unequal battle, he could have returned to his troops: «What can we do? You can’t go against force! We must defend ourselves with the resources we still have…» How could he, a Red commander, have surrendered to the enemy?
The captain continued firing. The Germans couldn’t stand it, moved back and began to retreat. Then Boris Khigrin’s chest was fatally pierced by a shell fragment. You can’t survive with a wound like this.
The fighting was drowned out… Silence reigned for a moment, broken only by the clanking of German caterpillar tracks. The enemy took heart and moved forward again. Next the main forces of the 2nd division began to be heard from high firing positions by the Orlik River. Lieutenant Pavlovsky’s howitzers completed the rout of a German tank column from Army Group Centre. The tanks of the famous Hitler’s general, nicknamed «Heinz Hurricane», armoured monsters that had recently ruined the whole of Western Europe in a triumphal march, were turned into burning pieces of metal in a matter of minutes on the banks of a previously unknown river with the funny name of Kleva. At a nameless bridge in Belarus the Nazis lost over twenty tanks (almost a whole regiment). And they didn’t cross!
The rest is in the funeral annals. The Red Army soldier Prokofy Anisimov carried the dying commander off the battlefield under heavy German fire. The chief of Staff of the 462nd Corps Artillery Regiment, Captain Grigory Khudoleev, buried Boris Khigrin by order of the regiment commander, Major Ivan Sobkalov, just outside the village of Belinichi, near the Minsk–Mogilev Road. The Korytnitsa village residents collected the bodies of all the killed Soviet soldiers and buried them in a mass grave near the same village on the edge of a pine grove. A peasant named Shepelevsky collected medallions with the names of all the fallen soldiers in order to inform their relatives about their burial place after the war. Alas, during the occupation he was blown up by a mine, adding to the number of soldiers who remained unknown forever.…
However, you can find monuments to the “Fiery Captain” in Belarus. There are three of them: on the site of his death near the village of Oslevka where an artillery piece was frozen on a pedestal forever, and two monuments in Belinichi, namely a stele and a tombstone monument.
On 1 September 1941 the Pravda newspaper published a decree of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet of the USSR «On Awarding the Title of Hero of the Soviet Union to the Commanding Officers and Enlisted Red Army Personnel.» And point no. 4 read: “To Captain Boris Lvovich Khigrin.” However, his family did not receive any awards either then or after the Victory: according to the laws of that time, orders and medals were not given posthumously to the heroes’ relatives. It was not until two years after her husband’s death that Olga Petrovna Khigrina received a document conferring the title of Hero on the “Fiery Captain”, signed by the Head of State of the USSR Mikhail Kalinin and Secretary of the Presidium Alexander Gorkin. Now its original is kept at the Central Armed Forces Museum, to which it was donated by the family.
Meanwhile, the hero’s widow didn’t care about any beautiful awards at that moment. Having miraculously escaped from the front line with her three young children (the oldest of them, Igor, turned nine on 23 June 1941), Olga Petrovna Khigrina first reached her native Skopin near Ryazan, and then Astrakhan, where her elder sister Nadezhda was living. But the Fascists broke through to the Volga and were deployed a few kilometres away from Astrakhan, so during the days of fighting for Stalingrad another evacuation began: to Kazakhstan.
An excerpt from Olga Petrovna Khigrina’s reminiscences: «We lived on the shore of the Aral Sea for a whole year till August 1943… On the way to Aralsk we passed by the Baskunchak station and saw it had been bombed out. But the Germans did not bomb our train. The five of us lived in Aralsk: the four of us and Aunt Nadezhda. We were given a small house on the beach: with all kinds of insects and the sound of surf. Then we were given a room in the centre of Aralsk where Igor went to school together with Kazakh children. There were no exercise books to write in, so he used pamphlets, writing between the lines…»
The Kazakhs came to the aid of refugees from Belarus, Ukraine and Russia. Hundreds of thousands of evacuees survived the war thanks to the hospitality and support of Kazakhstan. We can never forget it… By the end of 1943 the Germans were being driven from our land completely and decisively, and it became clear to the Khigrins that they could go to Moscow where most of their relatives lived at that time. However, people were not allowed to enter the capital without special passes. It was then that the Hero’s star, received by the “Fiery Captain” posthumously, helped.
They temporarily moved to Koptino on the outskirts of the capital and lived with Olga’s elder sister, while Olga sought a room in barracks for the family of a hero who had died at the front. There, in barrack no. 3 in the village of Karamyshevo (now the pretty Moscow neighbourhood of Khoroshevo-Mnevniki), built by prisoners who had dug the Moscow Canal in the 1930s, the Higrins lived for seventeen years without any basic amenities, next to the «cemetery» of captured aircraft till 1960… But it’s already another and very different story.
Only the people know…
My grandfather Konstantin Petrovich Solovykh, Olga Petrovna Khigrina’s elder brother, did not fight in the Great Patriotic War due to his advanced age. But he did labour for the Army in the rear, producing gas-masks near Moscow. One day, when I was a boy, I asked him, a very disabled veteran of the First World War (once called the “German War”), why he had never told me anything about his feats of arms. He only smiled sadly in response and inhaled his cigarette: «You don’t talk about war for no particular reason… And there’s nothing to say here.»
Many years later, having already become a journalist, I would ask the same question to representatives of my father’s generation who had fought in the Great Patriotic War (my father was not conscripted because of his myopia, but wrote about the war and travelled to the war zone, contributing to the then popular Sovetsky Patriot newspaper). So what? All of them: writers and journalists, doctors and professional military men, unanimously confirmed what Mikhail Maximovich Vershinin, a poet and front-line soldier who took part in the liberation of Prague, once admitted to me: «War is not a thing you talk about for no apparent reason…»
Yes, the veterans and their close ones (and these are all of us) rarely spoke about fallen soldiers, save when they commemorated them. But they were always remembered. In the late 1970s, during a business trip I ended up in a peasant house near Yaroslavl. Instead of an iconostasis, there were photographs of sons and uncles who had been killed in the war. The hostess, Aunt Masha, noticing my curious gaze, began to explain: «This is my brother Yasha who fell near Rzhev… And this is Nikolai, my youngest, who was killed after the war in the Carpathians where we fought against the Banderites… And here is Vasya, my middle son, who fell during the liberation of Warsaw… And here is Sergei Ivanovich, my husband: we got married in 1920, and he was killed in Belarus…» The old woman enumerated her family members who had not returned from the Great Patriotic War in an even and quiet voice, with amazing calm, without anguish and tears, which would have been quite logical.
In the same way (in a low voice filled with dignity) a few years ago I told about the siege of Leningrad to a lovely elderly lady at a French bar counter. I said that in the first three months of the siege the bread rations for Leningraders were reduced three times. Bread was almost the only food of the besieged inhabitants. Between 20 November and 25 December 1941, the bread rations reached critical levels: 375 grammes each for those who worked in hot workshops, 250 grammes for engineering and other workers, and 125 for the other categories. This amount was given for a day. And what bread! It was very raw, heavy, with oilcake, unrefined grain and other additives. Nevertheless, it was a daily ration: as a rule, it was impossible to get other food. Some ate their bread straightaway, often right at the shop counter. Those who did it usually starved to death faster than others. Some bit off small pieces of bread and sucked them the whole day. However, physicians recommended dividing a portion into exactly several meals…
The French woman, who was standing next to me with a glass of champagne, looked at me sympathetically: «It was a hard time in Paris during the German occupation too. Imagine: even croissants were sold stale at that time!» I don’t think it was mockery on her part. These are just two different worlds. Our Victory is like a genetic code, it is our national obviousness… What can you explain to a foreigner? What else can you say?
Nevertheless, I am positive that we should talk about the war and the Great Victory, and as often as possible. After all, memory is our common heritage. The new, Victory issue of the Russian Mind magazine is dedicated to this. As I was told, shortly before his demise the wonderful poet Konstantin Simonov (a former front-line soldier), made his own the phrase that he had heard from the victorious soldiers: «Only the people know the whole truth.» Let them talk!
