On May, 25^th 1945 Joseph Stalin made a cel­e­bra­tory speech devoted to the end of the Russ­ian Great Patri­otic War. The Sec­ond World War was com­ing to an end, but the Soviet Union was done fight­ing. The Russ­ian troops had exited Ger­many and ahead lied a long road of rebuild­ing and reha­bil­i­ta­tion. So in Krem­lin, at the V-day Meet­ing, Stalin had said the following:

Do not expect me to say any­thing extra­or­di­nary today. I have a very sim­ple, very ordi­nary toast to make. I would like to raise a glass to health of those peo­ple who are low in rank and invis­i­ble in the hier­ar­chy. Of those who we con­sider to be the “small screws” of our huge state mech­a­nism — they might be small but with­out them us gen­er­als, mar­shals and other top army lead­ers wouldn’t have made it. They are plen­ti­ful, they are a legion, it is tens of mil­lions of peo­ple who have not been heard of — yet they hold us together, as the base holds the top. To their health!

Today we have brought to your atten­tion a frag­ment of the inter­view with Yelena Bon­ner, a human rights activist, a dis­si­dent, a writer, and a widow of the late Andrei Sakharov — dur­ing the war she was a teen and now, cour­tesy to the Internet-magazine Snob.ru, she tells us about her expe­ri­ence dur­ing the war.

So — We did not fight for Stalin or the Soviet Union. We fought because we had no other choice.

Do you remem­ber the war motto: “To Stalin! To Soviet Union!”

I was 18 when I was sum­moned  — at the begin­ning of war, and till very late 1945 I spent with the troops — yet I never heard that motto. Every time there was a fire on the front­line we never shouted “To Stalin””, it was more like “You sons of fuck­ing bitches!”.

So at the begin­ning of the war we have been told that many — lots! — of young peo­ple vol­un­teered to be sent to the front line..

That was another huge lie about that war. Only a tiny per­cent of peo­ple who ended up in the front line vol­un­teered to be there. The rest were mobilised, hands down. Every sin­gle man of the appro­pri­ate age, be him a farmer or a fac­tory worker — all of them were sum­moned and sent to the war.

I was also mobilised, as thou­sands of other girls. I was a stu­dent at Hert­sen Insti­tute, and they had a huge ban­ner on the wall: “Girls of our coun­try, get your sec­ond, mil­i­tary pro­fes­sion now”. So we had to take a com­pul­sory course in mil­i­tary edu­ca­tion. The choices we had were about becom­ing a nurse, a com­mu­ni­ca­tions tech­ni­cian or a sniper.  I chose to be a nurse, and by the end of it I was listed as “suit­able for summon”.

So on June 22^nd, 1941 you heard about the Ger­man inva­sion –you know you are listed as “suit­able”, so did you know you’d be part of the war very shortly? Did you have a feel­ing of upcom­ing rad­i­cal change?

You know, it was a very odd feel­ing. I am eighty seven years old now, and now I am try­ing to com­pre­hend what was hap­pen­ing and I am fail­ing at it, how my gen­er­a­tion lived antic­i­pat­ing the war. Not just the peo­ple of Leningrad — at least we expe­ri­enced the war with Fin­land of 1939 — 1940 (the so-called Win­ter War), and it was a real war, with food short­ages and no heat­ing. So start­ing from 1937 I just couldn’t help but antic­i­pate a war com­ing — and it was a solid, gut feel­ing. My Moscow friends felt the same.

So in 1942 you were sum­moned as a nurse — what did it feel like?

I was a nurse on the train, which was trav­el­ling in the Leningrad dis­trict, pick­ing up the wounded and deliv­er­ing them to Vologda or other safe des­ti­na­tions. There they were dropped off, cared for, nur­tured a bit and then either returned back to the front line, or sent some­where else, I am unsure… The train was con­stantly bombed, or derailed, or lost in the snow. And then I was wounded myself — I had a bro­ken clav­i­cle, a dam­aged left shoul­der, injured nerve and a blood eye — I was bad and I was sent by the same train to Vologda and later to the Urals.

I guess I was very lucky through­out the war. There was no rea­son for me to be on the train — I could have been right on the front line. It was 1942, the tough­est year by some account  — nobody sum­moned dur­ing that year came back.

How long did you spend on that train?

Till 1945 — till the very end. We were sent to Ger­many to evac­u­ate the wounded from their ter­ri­to­ries in 1945. So on May 8, the VE Day, we were some­where around Inns­bruck, Aus­tria, and this was our last jour­ney bound for Leningrad. We arrived home, the train crew was restruc­tured, I was made the Head of some med­ical depart­ment to care for the wounded bomb dis­posal sol­diers. The war was tech­ni­cally over, yet these guys — work­ing with the explo­sives — kept com­ing our way.I was one of the last ones to be demo­bilised, too — in August 1945.

Can you tell us some more myths about the war?

As I have said, nobody vol­un­teered. Another one was that the Jew­ish did not fight — it is not true, they did. And prob­a­bly the biggest one is post war — the exploita­tion of that war. And all these mil­i­tary parades show offs — they are no longer car­ried out to remem­ber those who did not come back — now they have a mis­sion of pub­lic rela­tions, and TV rat­ings, and flex­ing the mil­i­tary mus­cle — both on the domes­tic and inter­na­tional levels.

Did you feel that right after the war things would change to the better?

We did — we felt that our coun­try had just sur­vived the incred­i­ble! We felt pow­er­ful, we felt like we were able to change things around, we hoped for the better.

So why do these war vet­er­ans who came back from the war never argue these myths about the war?

Why do you think when we came back and thought ah, we are so pow­er­ful — why do you think we all shut up?

Related posts:

1. The Great Patri­otic War: the Vil­lain­ous Hitler’s Plan or the Provoсation?
2. Cold Clone War
3. The Wall: the Unac­counted Tragedies.
4. Queues
5. The case of The Krem­lin Doc­tors and its Con­se­quences: the State of Anti-Semitism