I was instructed to go to the Oblast voencomat, and from there I was commandeered to the Stalingrad tank school. I was provided with dry rations for three days (half a brick of bread, a piece of sausage and a tin of stewed meat), clothes and food coupons, and – changing modes of transport many times – headed to Stalingrad. I arrived in June 1942, and met Kolya Babin and Volodya Dratchev at the school. There we were joined by Pyotr Akatiev, Nikolay Polovinkin and a chap called Brazhkin. Altogether there were eleven guys from our town of Osa in that school. All the others were to die in combat.
The Germans were already at the approaches to the city. During the school parade line-up, in the thick of the bombing raids, the head of the school Major-General Serkov announced a Supreme Command decision: ‘The school is to be evacuated to Kurgan, where a training and matériel base is to be established, without any interruption of the process of training, to prepare speedily the officer personnel that are urgently needed at the front.’ The general – a smart, laconic and exacting but very fair man of medium build – enjoyed respect from all the cadets and teaching staff of the school. He had first encountered the enemy at the border and had been badly wounded, losing his arm in one of these early battles.
The school personnel departed, and a group of cadets, headed by Captain Guzhva – a mighty, youthful officer aged about 30 – stayed behind to pack up and send off the school matériel. We left the burning city in the middle of the night on a ferry that had been miraculously acquired for the school evacuation. We boarded a train on the opposite bank of the Volga and headed to Kurgan under the enemy bombs. We arrived after five days’ travelling and unloaded our matériel not far away from the town, setting up a drilling square for the school on the same spot. We lived in a school building, sleeping in the classrooms. I remember the schoolmistress, a 40- or 45-year-old woman (which seemed to be very old to us back then), treated us as if she was our mother. She regaled us with slightly frozen sweetish potatoes which we baked in a school oven; we shared our dry rations with her. When we were leaving for Kurgan to do our training, she gave us a very touching farewell, wishing us success and to live through to the day of victory.
There was a church on the bank of the Tobol River that was fitted out as our dry mess. Several nearby buildings were arranged as barracks and classrooms. By the time I arrived, my company had been training for about a month and a half. I had to catch up with them, but it wasn’t that hard for me – my ten years of school helped me master the training programme. We studied twelve hours a day: eight hours of class work and four hours of homework, under the charge of the platoon commander, Lieutenant Pashkevich. He was close to 40 – a medium-sized, strong, clever, sober-minded and cordial man. Better than anyone he knew how to ‘talk to us silently’ – and we would understand him. There was also our company starshina Toloshnyi – a pedantic and meticulous serviceman whom we feared greatly. One typical example of his behaviour is his treatment of a cadet in our group called Umanskiy. Once, shortly before New Year’s Eve, Umanskiy came down with a cold. He went to the sick bay, where he got a certificate that he was exempted from drilling in the open air. He put on his trench coat and came out of the barracks. Toloshnyi came up to him:
‘Umanskiy, why aren’t you in the line?’
‘Comrade starshina, I’ve been exempted.’
‘Where is the exemption notice?’
Umanskiy handed it over.
‘Exempted from drilling and work in the open air,’ Toloshnyi read out. ‘But “morning exercises” not mentioned! Take your trench coat off and join the file!’
This was how life was for us. In the movies sometimes you may see cadets going AWOL, going to dancing parties in the evenings and chasing girls – what girls? Dancing? – we could barely lift our feet!
The food was simply miserable! Soup in the morning, millet gruel for lunch and soup again for dinner. What kind of soup was it? They would chuck some cereals into the water – nothing to eat, you could simply drink it. Nowadays jail rations must be better than those. We began to take turns to eat our dinners – today I have dinner, tomorrow you do. We would pour off some of the fluid from the soup mug and eat the remaining bit with a piece of bread. Bread was a 250-gram brick, hard as a cracker, and it could be called ‘bread’ only in name, for it was a mixture of very odd things.
We became badly emaciated. If we climbed a flight of stairs, we were exhausted. As I said before, there were eleven guys from Osa, scattered across different companies; one of them was Kolya Babin, who had been in the acrobatic group with me in secondary school. But now, when I did a handstand, I saw stars and almost passed out. Some men complained, and a special commission from the Urals military district visited us. A general, accompanied by several officers, entered the classroom in which our company was. Having glanced over us, he fixed his stare on me: ‘So, you say the food is poor? Look at this chap – seeing him, one wouldn’t say that he’s underfed.’ I was very offended! The commission left, and nothing much changed in our lives.
All everyone talked about was food. One such chat was interrupted by Petrakovskiy – the eldest of all of the cadets:
‘Guys, why do we only talk about food? Let me tell you the story about my marriage.’
Everyone yelled out, ‘Come on’, ‘Go for it!’, ‘Tell us!’
‘Well, then you listen up. I was a year-one student at a geology institute and got acquainted with a girl from the same year. She was gorgeous, slender with long blonde-brown hair. She was always dressed up and stood out from the rest of the students. Her parents were engineers – well-paid people. Many of the guys liked her, but for some reason she had chosen me. Can’t say why, but she accepted my very first invitation to go to the movies. I remember that the film The Great Life with Aleinikov and Andreyev9 was on. That’s how our courtship started. I did my best and got tickets for the film. We would go to the movies, to the opera house, we had a good time. Then I was introduced to her parents, and we decided to get married. Her parents gave their consent.’
Everyone was listening to him very attentively, only rarely interrupting the story with ribald questions, but Petrakovskiy wouldn’t dignify the hecklers with any reply.
‘Our wedding was celebrated in a restaurant. There was live music. On the table there were . . .’ – there followed a detailed description of the courses present on the tables and served by the waiters. Each of us felt as if we’d been there and breathed in the aromas of the food. We were so hungry, but Petrakovskiy, as if having forgotten about us, kept on describing the wedding table in great detail:
‘And then they brought out on large silver trays two suckling piglets, roasted with crispy crackling and surrounded with apples and greens . . .’
At this moment someone abruptly stood up. Petrakovskiy saw a cadet called Kvitchuk, his eyes wide and staring, and barked: ‘Comrade Kvitchuk, what would you have done with these piglets?’
Kvitchuk wildly bellowed out: ‘I’d have eaten it! I would have!’ He collapsed on the table, shivering, but he kept yelling: ‘I’d have eaten it! I would have!’ Then he fell silent. A medical nurse, called to the spot, wafted smelling salts under his nose and gave him an injection. He calmed down, we carried him to the bunk, and he fell asleep. Everyone was scared. On the next day Kvitchuk was sent to the sick bay, where he stayed for about a week. We declared a boycott against Petrakovskiy and stopped talking to him at all.
The cadets’ allowance was forty roubles a month. It was issued on Sundays, and I would go straight to the market and spend it on a kilo of carrots, and ate them immediately. If I took them back to the barracks I would have to share them with the other guys. Of course, I could have written to my family, asking them to send me a food parcel, but I was aware that my family back home was large enough to support anyway, and they wouldn’t be able to help. That was why, when I wrote to them, I told them that I was fed well and wasn’t short of anything. Many of the guys couldn’t endure it, however, and asked for food parcels. When they received one, they would eat it under their blanket so that they did not have to share it with anybody. This was not good, but how can you punish a starving man for his desire to feel full? In spite of the hunger there was no stealing from each other.
After the Stalingrad victory a directive arrived to form propaganda ski brigades and travel around the nearby villages and promote the work of the army. General Serkov charged Lieutenant Fedorov (the school’s head of physical education) and the head of the political department to raise such a brigade. We received an announcement that a cross-country ski race between Kurgan and Sverdlovsk was being prepared. Its participants were to receive better food rations – this phrase had an amazing reaction. Everyone suddenly became a skier and an inveterate traveller: when selection commenced, a crowd of volunteers gathered before the office. When my turn came, I entered, looking pathetic: 163 cm tall, jackboots four sizes too big and a hat two sizes too large – intentionally worn to hide my ears, which had been frostbitten during ski competitions. The lieutenant glanced at me pityingly:
‘Listen, sonny, you are just a kid! What kind of skier are you?’
‘I was a district champion. I have top grades in skiing,’ I said imploringly.
‘What kind of champion are you?’
‘I have a certificate.’ I showed my skier’s card, issued to competition participants.
‘Well, that may be,’ the lieutenant said, sceptically examining the paper, apparently unconvinced. ‘Come around tomorrow. We’ll see what sort of skier you are.’
Thus I found myself among twenty candidates, of which ten would be picked. The lieutenant started the selection without further ado. His girlfriend lived about 10 kilometres from the school, hence the route was laid via her house. We set off; the group stretched out along the road immediately, but I stuck right behind him. I was running out of strength, but kept thinking: ‘I may fall over but I won’t give up and will hold my own.’ The lieutenant and I approached the house together – only then did he realize that there was no one but me with him. He walked me into his girlfriend’s hut, ‘You sit here for a while, and I will go to pick up the rest. If I don’t return, go back.’ His girlfriend gave me food, and I fell into a slumber straight away.
I slept for about three hours, woke up and asked, ‘Has the lieutenant come back?’
‘No, he hasn’t.’
‘If he hasn’t been here for three hours, it means something has happened.’ I hobbled back to the school, battling muscle pain. The other guys were picked up from the nearby villages throughout the night; luckily the kolkhoz helped and provided a horse and a sleigh. It was morning by the time all of them had been transported back to the school, though only a few of them could move by themselves – their legs hurt so much.
The incident was reported to the head of the school. He summoned the PE leader and reprimanded him. The guy tried to justify himself, but there was no excuse. The brigade was supposed to take off in five days, and many of its members were now in bed, unable to stand upright. Of course he was in the wrong: he shouldn’t have sent poorly trained and emaciated training cadets on that trial run.
Having vented his anger at him, General Serkov asked, ‘What shall we do now?’
Everyone was silent.
‘Comrade general,’ I said, standing up. ‘Last year I took part in ski trips between Osa and Kungur, and Perm and Osa. Both were just over 100 kilometres. I know the intricacies of preparation for such trips. Although we have only five days to get ready, and yesterday’s run exhausted the cadets, I can prepare a team which will handle the propaganda trip.’ I then expounded a detailed plan of the preparation procedures.
‘I will lead the column and adjust the pace accordingly. If everyone is running steadily, I will speed up; if they become too spread out, I will slow the pace down. Lieutenant Fedorov will be following the column and pushing it forward. Apart from that, comrade general, I request that we be provided with a horse and sleigh from the auxiliary service, in which the zampolit10 and a medic will be seated. We will also load our backpacks with food rations into it. The horse will return from Chashi with the medic, and we will find some transport for the zampolit. I also request that all the trip participants be fed properly.’
‘Well, Bryukhov,’ the general stood up, ‘you’ve drawn a full picture for us. I guess we have no choice but to accept your proposal. I entrust the trip preparation and implementation to Lieutenant Fedorov, you and
Politruk11 Vorov.’
We broke up satisfied – even the PE leader was happier. General Serkov called me over, ‘Good lad, you will become a strategist and a sensible officer.’ I blushed and didn’t know what to say in reply.
After five days of training, the propaganda brigade headed out of the school gates under an overcast sky. General Serkov saw us off, with the brass band playing in the background. We marched most of the planned 40 kilometres over the first day, and were close to our destination – the district centre of Chashi. The zampolit rode ahead in the sleigh to organize a welcome for us, and I was tasked with leading the rest into town. We were on the approach to Chashi, and we could already see lights in the windows of the houses when the guys ran out of strength. Everyone stopped, unable to move any further. I said, ‘Untie your backpacks, let’s have some food and we’ll find the strength for the last spurt. There’s no more than a kilometre left, maybe two.’ In fact there were about 5 kilometres to go, but each of us had a sandwich and cheered up. We arrived two hours late, but people were still waiting for us, and there was another brass band. The secretary of the local Komsomol youth organization gave a speech and congratulated us. Then our zampolit spoke in response, although all we wanted to do was go to sleep.
As mentioned before, the training was very intense. A great deal of time was given to the theoretical aspects – the technical features of BT-5 and T-34 tanks as well as tank tactics. There was only one practical session: I fired three shells and one machine-gun magazine. We also had a little bit of practice driving a BT-5 tank, covering the fundamentals: how to start off and how to drive in a straight line. There were also tactical studies, though mostly on foot, pretending to be tanks! Only at the end was there a showcase training session – a ‘tank platoon in attack’. That was all!
After the war I examined a German training complex in Austria. It was definitely much better. For example, we had immobile targets for gun shooting and moving ones for machine-gun shooting. This entailed a telephone line to a trench, where a soldier would receive orders to raise or lower the target. It was prearranged that a target was to emerge for five or six seconds, although the actual time it was visible depended on the operator involved. The Germans, however, had a system of blocks on their training ground. It was operated by one large wheel running both gun and machine-gun targets. The wheel was spun by hand, and the duration of time that the target was in sight depended on the speed of the rotation. The German tank crews were better trained than us, and it was dangerous to encounter them in combat.
At our graduation the head of the school said, ‘Well, lads, we are aware that you’ve run through the programme quickly. You have limited knowledge, but you will complete your training in action.’ The most memorable lesson, which had an impact on all my subsequent service, was given to me by Major Drozdov, who was our trainer in tactics. He was an ex-officer of the Tzarist army called up from reserve, and he was about 60. He used to say the following: ‘Lads, remember the sacred rule. It was considered the main one by Suvorov!12 The most important rule is that you have to take care of a soldier before and during combat: he needs to be fed, clad and shod, and needs a rest. If you do this, you will succeed in battle. If you don’t, there will be no success. If he is hungry and cold, then, when you lead him into an attack, he won’t be cheering – he will be barely crawling. You may call up a lecturer from Moscow, from the Central Committee [of the Communist Party], who will be able to deliver him a lecture on how to defend the Motherland, and you will try to rouse him into an attack, but he won’t be cheering. But if an illiterate cook comes around, maybe with two or three years of primary-school education, but with a ladle of good bortsch and gruel, you can rouse him into an attack, and he will follow you, cheering, and he will do the job.’ This was the only thing I remembered out of the whole course, but I always followed this rule. I always took care not only of my crewmen, but also of the crews from the platoon. And the soldiers responded in kind.
In February 1943 an order came to select twenty-eight of the best cadets, give them two months of accelerated training and turn them out. I had joined the school a month and a half later than the rest, but was turned out a month and a half earlier: hence I only studied for three months. One of the selected men failed, even though he was an engineer with a degree. We thought at the time, ‘How unlucky this man is!’ How naive we were! He was 33 or 34 years old, a family man with two children, and he had no desire whatsoever to go into combat.
Straight after the graduation I received a summons to General Serkov’s office. I started to worry, but Captain Guzhva calmed me down: ‘Go, the general is asking for you as he’s got a sensible suggestion for you. Accept it.’ I couldn’t imagine what kind of suggestion it was going to be, and entered the general’s office meekly, holding my breath. He came out from behind the desk to greet me, seated me on a chair, sat himself in front of me and began to tell me about the situation at the front. He said that the backbone of the German war machine had been broken, and that victory would be ours. Well, I had had no doubts about it myself.
‘Listen, Bryukhov,’ he continued, ‘you are still a greenhorn, what kind of a commander would you be? Stay here in the school to drill the cadets. Your platoon and company commanders praise you. You’re a good athlete. Stay here!’
I was gobsmacked.
‘Comrade general, I want to be at the front line; I want to fight. You see, the war will end soon, and I won’t have my time in it. How can I then look people in the eye?’ I felt a lump in my throat, and tears appeared in my eyes.
‘Sonny, there is no “soon” yet. The war will last for more than a year from now – you’ll have your share of it for sure.’
‘No, I want it now.’
The general looked thoughtful, staying silent for some time, and then spoke: ‘Who’s going to do the drilling? I want to go to the front line as well.’
‘You’ve seen combat, you’ve lost your arm, but I’ve done nothing so far. I implore you, send me off. There are two sergeants in our section – Kochnev and Lobanov – who were at the front line in the early days of the war and came here after injuries. Leave them here,’ I begged.
Seeing me look so crushed, he took pity. I rejoiced enormously, beaming with delight, and barked in my immature commanding voice, ‘Yes, sir! Permission to go?’
‘Why are you in so much of a hurry, lieutenant?’ asked General Serkov, then looked at me once again, shook his head and said, ‘Dismissed!’
I saluted, replied with an emphatic ‘Yes, sir!’, neatly turned about and left the office. It happened that the aforementioned sergeants were at the parade ground. I ran all 12 kilometres of the way there without stopping, to tell them: ‘You are urgently summoned by the school head!’ We hitched a ride back to the school in a passing vehicle; the general summoned Kochnev and he agreed without hesitation (he didn’t call up Lobanov at all).
With two pips on my collar, I headed off to Chelyabinsk to the 7th Reserve Training Tank Regiment. The officers’ boarding house was situated in the school hall, which held about thirty beds. Food was provided based on a coupon system; those who didn’t want the meals could get dry rations at a supply depot. We were left to our own devices most of the time, apart from short study periods. The older guys tended to spend their free time with women. Lieutenant Vasya Estafiev was usually the instigator of this. He was a man of medium height, with broad shoulders; he had been born in 1920, a tractor driver who had been conscripted into the army before the war and had completed an accelerated course in a tank school.
I remember lying on my bed, frustrated: they’d told me in the personnel department that recruitment for the Special Urals Volunteer Tank Corps had finished, which was why my application to join the Perm Brigade had been rejected, and I had wanted so much to fight side by side with my fellow townsmen. At that moment, someone entered the room. Dressed in a smart lieutenant’s uniform, he was roughly the same size as me, with curly light brown hair, a forelock stuck out under from his cocked field-cap. I noticed the expression in his eyes and his smile at once. I sat up and he came over and stretched out his hand:
‘Nikolay Maximov.’
‘Vasiliy Bryukhov,’ I stood up.
‘Where is everyone?’ Nikolay asked, looking over the empty, unmade beds.
‘They’ve gone out somewhere. Chelyabinsk is a large place, there’s a lot of space for walkabouts,’ I replied.
‘And why are you languishing here?’ he asked with interest.
‘Well, don’t feel like doing that. I’d rather read books – there’s an excellent library here. I am sick of idling in this place. I wanted to fight together with my townsmen, but it didn’t happen that way. You see, the war may end soon, while we just sit around.’
‘You’re a crank,’ Kolya laughed. ‘The war is at its height. Don’t worry, there will be enough action for us. I’ve heard in headquarters that it’s going to be hot near Kursk. That is where we need to get to.’
Next day, during studies, the regimental Chief-of-Staff came to the classroom, together with a representative of the Kirov tank works. We stood up. The Chief-of-Staff allowed everyone to sit down and then asked the representative to speak. The man, having taken off his peak cap, began to speak in a quiet voice: ‘Comrade officers, you are aware of the situation at the front and in the rear. We have to be smashing and driving the Fascists out of our land as fast as possible, but we need weapons to do it. Our plant does its best to give you more tanks, but we are short of people. We need extra hands for at least a month or even just a week. We decided to ask you for help.’
For a minute there was silence. I was thinking about what I could do at the works – I had no special skills at all. Then Vasya Estafiev took the floor: ‘Nooo! It’s not for us! Any day now we will get our tanks and leave for the front. Let us have fun for a few days. Maybe these are the last days of our lives!’ He forced a smile, looking round and seeking support.
Kolya Maximov raised his head. Standing up and turning to face us, he said firmly, ‘Brothers, don’t listen to this loudmouth. When the plant asks, we have to help. I used to be a metalworker before the army and I’m going to work again.’ Turning to the plant’s representative, he announced, ‘Add me to the list.’
I and some of the other guys followed him, though others didn’t succumb to his persuasions. The representative warned us that our labour would only be paid with free lunch coupons. There were no objections from our side.
We started work the next morning. Nikolay and I were assigned to drilling apertures in engine cylinder blocks. Nikolay had completed a training course and was a qualified fourth-grade metalworker. Our semiautomatic machine tools stood next to each other, and he quickly helped me to master the simple operation. It didn’t take a lot of effort – several days later I was already fulfilling my quota and was even ahead of schedule. We were pretty well fed at the plant: for lunch there was always a starter, soup or bortsch, and good gruel with a fair amount of meat. On top of that we also had our officer’s rations.
We became good friends through working together. I liked Nikolay as he had grown up in Moscow and I liked his ‘city bloke’ charm. I accentuated my rural way of speaking, and he spoke beautifully, with a Moscow accent. I tried to imitate his manners, which he appreciated. Muscovites were different from us country chaps, with their mental outlook, way of thinking, knowledge and intellectual development; they were freer in their communication with other people. We spent all our leisure time together. He told me that he used to live in the Arbat area (in the very centre of Moscow), and his mother and sister – to whom he often wrote letters – were still there. Nikolay had learned to ride in a manège when he was a little boy, and was fond of horses.
Our work at the plant didn’t last for long – we received our orders and reported to a reserve tank regiment, where we were issued with brand new tanks, still smelling of fresh paint. I took command of a tank platoon, with Kolya in charge of one of the tanks in the platoon. The third tank was under the charge of Lieutenant Bykov. I familiarized myself with the crews. My driver-mechanic, surname Roy, was born in 1904 and used to be a tractor driver. Gunloader Leonenko was born in 1918, and radiooperator – a young chap like me, born in 1924, a country boy. I don’t remember his surname, but I do remember that we laughed when he told us a story about his pre-war marriage. He had had no parents and lived with his grandmother. Their neighbour had a daughter several years older than him. His granny kept urging him: ‘You marry her, she’s rich, she will feed you, and you will help them and work.’ She convinced him, and the neighbours didn’t mind – they needed a worker for their homestead. This is what he told us about the wedding:
‘I’m sitting next to the bride, the guys run about outside, but they kept me indoors. I’m longing to get out, but she catches hold of me and doesn’t let me go. Then they pour me a glass of wine, I drink it and get tipsy. She drags me into bed, fumbles around a bit but nothing happens. She woke up in the morning, but I had run away with the other guys. I played games with them, but they snatched me again. This way she would hassle me for a while, then spit on it and leave me alone.’
Such were the guys in my crew. I believe that I was a good commander: during my childhood I used to be a good leader among my friends, and now I found common ground with my subordinates very quickly. Kolya Maximov recognized my leadership: although we were friends, discipline was observed, and I wouldn’t allow any familiarities, even from him.
After platoon and company training, we set off on the 50-kilometre march to catch a train to the front. Unlike on the train in which I had travelled two years earlier, the atmosphere was very high-spirited and confident. After the victory near Moscow and then near Stalingrad people had regained faith that we would be able not just to hold out against the enemy, but to defeat them.
They rode us along the ‘green street’,13 with practically no stopovers. In Kuibyshev the train stopped in the station itself, where the stationmaster warned us that the train would only stop for about thirty minutes. Lunch had not been dispatched to the train, however, and so the train commander ordered us to line up and head to a nearby dry mess. The tables had not been set, and there were only cauldrons with gruel and bortsch and sliced bread. I ordered the men to chuck gruel into their mess tins, take the bread and run back to the train. We rushed back, swallowing boiled pearl barley on the run, but arrived on the platform to find that there was no train. I ran up to the station-master and found out that the train had gone to Syzran. While I was searching for a way to meet up with our train again, an empty one arrived at the station. The station-master helped us board two of the heated carriages, and we headed off to catch up with our tanks.
After the eventful lunch we fell asleep to the drumming of the wheels, worn out by the heat of the June day. I awoke to silence. Sliding the door open, I saw that the train stood in a railway yard in front of a bridge across the Volga. I hailed a passing workman and asked how we could get to the other side. He said that a passenger train, standing on a parallel track, was about to move across. I shook the guys out of their slumber, explained the situation, and we tried to sneak across the tracks and into the carriages of the passenger train, but no conductor would open a door for us. The train started off, with us hanging on the steps; although it was June, a cold wind struck us, and we were on the verge of falling off – but we caught up with our train! Our comrades welcomed us with open arms. During roll-call three men were found to be missing, so the station-master was informed about the route we were going to take, and we were on the road again.
After Malyi Yaroslavets there was an air-raid, but no bombs hit the train. The train turned south. Later we stopped in a railway yard, and an order to disembark and unload was given. There were no unloading platforms. The drivers began to unload the tanks, crumpling the flat wagons, and were practically jumping down to the ground. Two tanks rolled upside down, but were quickly set on their tracks again. A representative of the 2nd Tank Corps was waiting for us and the battalion marched to the deployment area, where it joined the corps’ 99th Brigade.