By the beginning of the Second World War, Mirkasim became Secretary of the Raikom (Regional Committee of the Communist Party) and volunteered to go to the front. He was killed in the winter of 1943 near Don, not far from Novocherkassk. I remember that he dropped by our place late one night in the summer of 1942. My father was on the front then, and I listened to my uncle’s war stories with delight, pretending to be asleep. When he went to leave, he kissed me, but I was “sleeping”, so I couldn’t look at him openly, which was really very silly. Before that I had watched this strong and handsome man through a crack in the partition made of planks which separated children’s quarters from the grown-ups’ parts of the room. I still feel admiration when I think about him. He gave the impression of the invincible heroic commander, dressed in his splendid new uniform of the political officer, and he carried the aura of certain victory over the Fascists.
Despite his desperate struggle with his ancestral past, my father narrowly escaped jail at the end of the 1930s. He was simply expunged from the party, as an enemy who had penetrated the Bolshevik ranks by fraud. My father took this disgrace very hard. In 1941, on the front, he joined the party again. It seems that my father fanatically believed in Communism, as a lot of the rank and file did. When he was already well advanced in his years, he assured me that to a large extent, our troubles and our poverty have to do with the existence of the two world camps. So, when there is only one left (and it was clear as day to him, which one), all our problems would easily be resolved.
Lenin, Stalin, and the other “geniuses” of world Communism were like saints to him. Of course, his attitude was automatically passed on to us. Right after the war, my mother told my dad that she asked the secretary of the party organization, Khabel Kagarmanov, why Lenin had embarked on the path of Marxism and had decided to struggle against the Tsar. He told her that the leader of the proletariat had avenged the death of his brother, who was hanged for organizing the murder of the Tsar, and had decided to become the Tsar himself. My mother was horrified. Strange as it may seem, my father wasn’t shocked by this report, and he just advised my mother not to repeat Khabel’s words to anyone else. As far as I know, Khabel had a sharp peasant’s mind, but to this day I don’t know how such seditious thoughts appeared in his head. Rumor had it that he used to be a member of a faction of Trotskyites-Bukharinists, Stalin’s rivals. But what Trotskyites could there possibly be in the god-forsaken village of Stary Kangysh? Who knows? Maybe the deeply hidden hatred that progressive people felt toward the Bolshevik regime took root and grew from time to time. Perhaps this is the reason why some people in my village composed a list of those the German troops should kill, when they were moving towards the East at full speed in 1942. My mother told me this several times as a great secret, and stressed each time that she was on that list, too. Like my father, my mother was a teacher.
She taught me until the fourth grade. I studied without any difficulties, although there were problems with teachers from time to time. Even at a young age, I had already read a lot, mostly fiction, and that is why I constantly had questions that my teachers couldn’t always find answers to.
Generally, I had good relations with kids my own age. I was a child during the hungry war years and the post-war years, when each piece of bread and every potato was worth its weight in gold. We village children didn’t even know about sweets or ice cream. We had other joys, growing up surrounded by beautiful country. We spent whole summer days on the Belaya River. In the winter, we went sledding and skiing in the high hills. There were plenty of them near our village. I think the delightful natural environment of my childhood encouraged my love of sports, which I have retained to this day.
The war years left a profound impression on us. We felt the frosty breath of the war that was grinding on thousands of kilometers away from us. As children, we watched with horror as the tow-boats dragged bombed-out, half-burnt, and blackened hulks of barges and ships against the current up the Belaya River, on their way to Ufa. We understood that they came from the besieged city of Stalingrad. There was no radio in our village then, and we only received news about the war from people who traveled to the regional center of Djirtjuli, which was 15 kilometers away.
The boys always went to see off those young men and very young guys, almost boys, who were heading off to the front. They drove around in a cart in all four streets in the village, singing for the last time. Their songs accompanied by the harmonica were so sad that they brought tears to our eyes. The new recruits bid farewell and symbolically asked for our forgiveness, in case they had accidentally hurt someone.
I remember seeing off 17-year-olds who had never been farther than Djirtjuli in their lives. These boys had never seen a real city, a railway station, cars, or tractors. They sang and cried at the same time. None of them returned home – everyone perished.
When I went to visit Stary Kangysh, I always went to the village club, where there is a memorial plaque with names of more than 200 men who died in the war. This is the list of the victims of just one more world slaughter, from a village with hardly more than 150 households.
How could the number of victims have been less, since Stalin and his accomplices threw absolutely unprepared and unarmed children into battle? Now, in Russia, there are many newly hatched “patriots” who try to rewrite the history of the war and deny these facts. But, fortunately, they can’t rewrite the testimony of the people and their memories.
My late relative, Gabbas Nugumanov, who served in the railway troops during Whole War II, told me that he met his fellow-countrymen from Stary Kangysh in 1942, at Klin Station near Moscow. The special train (echelon), in which they were taken to the front, stopped there for technical problems. Klin was just a few hours drive from the front line. His fellow villagers told Gabbas that they had only two rifles for seven people. They were not sure that they would be given more weapons after they got off the train. Alas, their doubts were confirmed: it was clear from the very beginning that warehouses with weapons were not to be found anywhere near the trenches.
The war had the most dire consequences for these unarmed people – no sooner were they unloaded from the train than everybody perished.
I remember I couldn’t satisfy my curiosity. I wanted to know how many Fascists our soldiers had killed. The front-line soldiers laughed and told me they knew only one thing – that the Germans hadn’t killed them. But they hadn’t killed anyone. I was totally baffled by their answers, so I asked my father about it when he was a little tipsy and more talkative. Finally he explained to me that a soldier normally shoots when and where he is ordered to. If a German perished, it was impossible to say who had killed him, and nobody thought about it. My father said a soldier was like an automatic machine. You run when you get an order to run. You crawl when you get an order to crawl. The only relevant questions are those of survival – what to eat, where to sleep, and how to wash yourself.
Stories like these deeply disillusioned me, because I already knew all about the great feats of the heroes who had crushed hordes of German soldiers, from the books I read and the movies I had watched. But my father “comforted” me by saying that the people who had written those books and staged the movies simply lied, because none of them had actually taken part in the war. I protested – what about such famous writers as Konstantin Simonov, Aleksander Fadeev, and Michael Sholokhov – weren’t they war correspondents on the front line, who issued newspapers and wrote essays? “Yes, of course,” he said. “That’s true. But the point is that the editor’s office (even that of the military division newspaper) is 40-70 kilometers from the front-line. The editor’s offices of the bigger army or frontline newspapers are much further away.”