Owing to constraints of space, the following second-lead report on the front page of the Soviet Weekly for January 17 1946 was deficient of certain testimonies from demobilised soldiers returning from the Manchzhurskaya Strategicheskaya Nastupatelnaya Operaciya (Manchurian Strategic Offensive Operation) of August of the previous year. You’ll note that, in the report, the demobbed soldiers from the front were asked ‘to explain when and how they won their decorations.’
Regrettably, though, the report of Comrade Belikov, far from recording the Soviet warriors’ colourful bellicosities, confines his account to valiantly immodest declarations from a number of Stakhanovist Workers — Heroes and Heroines of the Soviet Home Front – while his editor omits the Red Army squaddies’ eyewitness statements altogether.
We are pleased, therefore – albeit some seven decades later – to redress this deficiency and the words of Soviet soldiery, once unaccountably editorially spiked, are now faithfully recorded as an addendum to the original press story. See Addendum : the Testimony of Sergeant Leonid Volkovich, below:
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ЗА ПОБЕДУ НАД ЯПОНИЕИ
FOR VICTORY OVER JAPAN |
During my recent stay in the Siberian town of Barnaul, I attended an interesting meeting. A train arrived bringing demobilised soldiers from Manchuria, and the municipal authorities arranged a meeting between the soldiers and the local workers and collective farmers.
The ex-servicemen were showered with questions about their life at the front. They had to explain when and how they won their decorations. The soldiers in turn were interested in the changes that had taken place in the area since they were called up.
One local worker after another got up and reported to the soldiers on what has been achieved.
Here is a short summary of what I heard. The first speaker was Elena Bogacheva, a weaver of the Barnaul Textile Mills, decorated for war work. She alone had produced 1,500,000 yards of cloth, enough for nearly 500,000 army uniforms.
Semyon Piatnitsa, a well-known combine operator of the Budyonny Machine and Tractor Station, reported that he had harvested an area of 37,600 acres during the war years. The station agronomist added to this that it would take 4,712 people using 930 horses, 112 simple harvesters, 112 threshers, 112 winnowing machines and 115 sorting machines to do the job accomplished by Piatnitsa with his one combine-harvester. If no machinery were used, 9,424 people would be needed to do this work. The combine operator also saved 15 tons of fuel during the war.
Felt boots for 1,563,890 soldiers were produced by a team of six women at the Gorky Factory at Barnaul. This information was revealed by Matrena Trimaskina, head of the team.
Ivan Balyuk, shepherd of the Siberian Merino Collective Farm since 1928, who also wore a Government decoration, had this to report : about 9,000 merino sheep raised since 1928, and 2,402 during the war (without a single loss, or case of sickness); the 30,000 lb. of wool shorn from his flock was sufficient for over 20,000 yards of fabrics, and, consequently, for 7,000 suits. This, too, was the result of the labour of one man.
The ‘Exchange of Information’ continued, and Alexandra Moshchinskaya of the Tomsk Railway asked for the floor. She had transported more than 50,000 tons of freight (about 2,510 carloads) during the war, loading or unloading an average of two cars daily. In her one year of work at the Barnaul Sheepskin Coat Factory, Yekaterina Yushchenko, a young worker, dressed 273,000 skins, or 102,000 in excess of her quota, enough to make 19,000 coats.
I will conclude with citing the facts revealed by Stepan Gostev, leader of a tractor team. His team exceeded the region’s average quota per wheel tractor (which is quite high) by seven times, every tractor employed by the team ploughing 6,280 acres.
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| Red propaganda laid on a bit too thick? |
Addendum : the Testimony of Sergeant Leonid Volkovich.
[The Report resumes.] Rising to his feet – and to the occasion – Sergeant Leonid Volkovich was cheered to the echo by his comrades-in-arms as he began his own deposition.
‘Comrade Elena,’ he addressed the weaver Elena Bogacheva in an insultingly mocking pitying tone, ‘my dear feeble-minded mousekin, the real, ferocious and merciless character of war is best hidden from you! Hahaha! But let it be known! Your half million uniforms are now steeped in the blood of the devilish barbarous makaki! [Pejorative: Japanese monkeys.] Not forgetting Matrena’s wonder-working pairs of boots (laughter), trampling on one hundred thousand corpses.’
(Both women shuddered.)
The sergeant then gave vent to a few inarticulate roars and lowered his head like a mad bull ready to attack the weaver, who drew back more in confusion than fear. ‘You have no head to imagine our night attacks – storming ladders and naked weapons, murder and conflagration – scorched earth to Sakhalin.
‘Who could question our orders? “Soldiers, the town is yours for three days,” they said. The slaughter begins; torch and bayonet perform their business you may be certain. In the streets streams of blood and wine. A splendid festival of our men fighting like tigers among the bleeding dying, smoking ruins, and beautiful, naked, weeping women dragged by their hair to the feet of their conquerors!’
The demobilised troops war-whooped with merriment at this vivid memory. The sergeant grinned wolfishly, revealing broken front teeth, then raised his hand for silence to continue:
‘Why take prisoners and waste time and strength for them? Madness! Grand and glorious days! What fights! Eye-to-eye with the makaki and hand-to-hand. Slaughter without cease for hours, till our cold-blooded, invincible fury brought victory.
‘Cold-blooded, I say! Yes. Cold-bloodedness reigned. An entire village – men, women, children, babes-in-arms – were chased into a river and drowned. Children belonging to a village headman had their brains dashed out before his face; after which we threw the mother into a river, and she was drowned. One raiding party obliged many young men to force their aged parents to that river, where they were drowned. Captured wives even assisted in hanging their husbands; and mothers compelled to cut the throats of their children.’
(Elena Bogacheva, at this point in the sergeant’s recital of events, visibly paled, gave a choked cry and ran from the assembly hall. The welcoming committee had grown restless, faces grim.)
Unperturbed, Volkovich hardly raised his voice as he approached his peroration.
‘Bullets we rationed, of course, so this is the way of it. We’d compel a captured young man to kill his father, and then we’d immediately hang him. Or, after we’d done with a housewife, we’d force her to kill her husband, then oblige the son to kill her, and afterwards shoot him through the head. One bullet, see? Very often two thousand killed for the price of 500 bullets (Sergeant Volkovich winked) and unequalled in all state records for productivity!’
A crowd of ex-soldiers now flocked around the sergeant, considerably stirred by the gusto of his rhetoric. So aroused were they, it almost seemed they had fallen under the spell of a mass hallucination, as though they were still skirmishing, in the midst of havoc and death, in those remembered streets awash with blood and wine.
Suddenly, a giant Siberiak roared, straining every nerve to make himself heard: ‘More liquor now! Or we won’t trust ourselves! We will have blood!’ Very soon other voices from the demobbed soldiers took up the cry ‘We will have blood! Blood! Blood! We must have blood!’
Above the clamour, the harsher voice of the sergeant could be distinguished addressing the welcoming committee. ‘Give them liquor or this day we won’t answer for our deeds.’
(The meeting for the ‘Exchange of Information’ was swiftly brought to a close by the arrival of the local militia, who escorted the valorous returnees to the Refreshments tent without further incident.)
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Да здравствует сталинская конституция!
Long Live the Stalinist Constitution! |
‘There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics.’
If this belated addendum should strike the tender-hearted reader as too pitilessly cynical, it should not be forgotten that Olimpiy Kvitkin, the Chief Statistician in charge of the 1937 Census, which was devised to count every citizen in the Soviet Union, was shot on 28 September 1937 on the orders of Stalin, because Kvitkin’s census identified 6 million fewer persons than the General Secretary of the Central Committee of the Communist Party had projected, an inadmissible shortfall due to the brutal purges and extermination by hunger directed by the Bolsheviks to crush dissent in allegedly rebellious elements of the population.
See also, Red Spies’ Century-Old Creeping Barrage into Woolwich Arsenal.
http://catherineeisnerfrance.blogspot.co.uk/2017/05/stoneburgh-spy-campus-pt-8-red-spies.html
See also, Hushed Up Chekhov. In the centennial of Chekhov's death, this essay was published in the Jewish Chronicle (December 24 2004), in which is identified the anti-Semitic aspects of Chekhov's correspondence and writings and drama, airbrushed out of Soviet history books.
http://catherineeisnerfrance.blogspot.co.uk/2011/10/hushed-up-chekhov.html
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Catherine Eisner believes passionately in plot-driven suspense fiction, a devotion to literary craft that draws on studies in psychoanalytical criminology and psychoactive pharmacology to explore the dark side of motivation, and ignite plot twists with unexpected outcomes. Within these disciplines Eisner’s fictions seek to explore variant literary forms derived from psychotherapy and criminology to trace the traumas of characters in extremis. Compulsive recurring sub-themes in her narratives examine sibling rivalry, rivalrous cousinhood, pathological imposture, financial chicanery, and the effects of non-familial male pheromones on pubescence,
and Listen Close to Me (2011)
