My Russian Family

by Lilia Sariecheva

  “That sounds excellent. I love that chicken soup smell; it turns any place into a home. I am already anticipating how good it will taste!” replied father with a great smile.

  Mother purchased a live chicken in the local morning market. She had the chicken decapitated, bled out, and the feathers plucked for only a small extra charge. She then got some spices and other small things to add to the pot. Mother returned to her one-room honeymoon cottage, cut off the chicken’s feet and put it into a pot of boiling water. She boiled the chicken for exactly one hour, then she added her other ingredients and let it simmer. As noon approached, the smell of chicken soup filled the small room. And soon her unsuspecting husband was home and climbing down the ladder. A proud and happy wife led her husband to the tiny table. She placed the chicken on a platter and put the broth into two large soup bowls.

  Father breathed in the delicious smell and smiled as he took a large spoonful of soup to his waiting mouth. Instantly, he spat it out.

  “What’s wrong, my dear?” my mother said.

  “Did you taste the soup?”

  Apprehension started to grow in Mareika. “Why no, I didn’t. Do I have to? What is wrong? I followed the recipe exactly, what could be wrong?”

  “It tastes like bile. Blaaah! Why didn’t you taste it? All cooks taste the food as they cook it, right?”

  Mareika tasted the soup and was almost in shock as she quietly and hastily removed the soup bowls. Her heart was heavy and the embarrassment covered her like a cloak. “I’m so sorry. But we still have the chicken.” She brought a knife to her new husband and gently handed it to him with a slight submissive nod of her head.

  He sought to reassure his wife, “Don’t worry dear, the chicken will be just fine. It looks great!” He turned the bird over and it dawned upon him that there were no openings to remove the guts, he looked further and finally he sliced open the belly and the evidence lay before him.

  “Well dear, let’s clean this off the table. I have some tinned fruit preserves over there in the corner. They will make a fine lunch.”

  The two young people laughed and made the best of it. Love solves many problems! Years later, my smiling mother gave me some expert advice prior to my own wedding. “Always remove the guts from the chicken before you make chicken soup for your husband!” This counsel was reinforced by the presence of that same yellowish pot, another item that mother managed to keep for many years and that I remember well.

  The next day for lunch, Mareika was determined to make her new husband a baked pudding. She had a good recipe so there would be no problems and she was determined to taste it during the cooking! She bought a small supply of milled semolina at the military store. She then filled a metal colander with the semolina and poured water over it to wash the semolina wheat flour nice and clean. The small particles of wheat easily passed through the holes in the colander and down into the dirty water in the oval tub. As the semolina vanished, the 18-year-old bride looked to the heavens and shrugged. Well, the tasting was no longer a problem.

  Lunch that day at the Sariechev honeymoon home was again tinned fruit preserves. Mikhail’s only comment was, “I did not know that semolina had to be washed. Gee, these cherry preserves are quite excellent!”

  That evening, Mikhail casually remarked, “We will be pretty busy tomorrow and short on time. Maybe we should just eat lunch at the officer’s canteen. Meet me there at 12:30. You know, they just got in some new supplies and the food is all right. We could just eat there for a while.”

  Mareika nodded in agreement, “Yes, dear, that sounds just fine.”

  After that, the little gas heater was used for tea and the small metal fireplace used for heat, but the few pots, pans, meat grinder, and other cooking utensils that Mareika had brought with her became simply decorative items.

  Another domestic duty undertaken by the bride was to make the groom look good. On a cold winter morning she hand-washed his second pair of military pants and hung them by the fire. When they were almost dry, she carefully ironed them and then she laboriously polished his second pair of high-topped black leather boots. She anxiously awaited the return of the warrior. It was anticlimactic when he did return. Upon inspecting the pants, he noticed that the crease was on the sides instead of the front of the legs. They had a giggling fit, and Mikhail commented, “Anyway, it is not a woman’s responsibility to iron a man’s pants and polish a man’s boots. I should keep doing it myself!”

  The bride did not have far to look to find another project. Their bare furniture with the plywood walls and floor was not attractive. She purchased some material from the camp store and set to work, keeping her project a secret until she was finished. After some days of hard labor, she had a nice cover for the red comforter and two colorful decorative covers to go over the headboard and footboard of the bed. She also had created a tablecloth and a cover for the piled up suitcases, so it was like a small table. She placed a small mirror, some hairbrushes, and a bottle of perfume on top. It was all well done, complete with frills, ruffles, and ruche (pleated fabric). The bride was flush with excitement as she fitted on the covers and laid the quilt cover on the bed just in time for her husband’s return from work.

  She decided not to point them out but just wait and see what his reaction would be to the home improvements. A preoccupied Mikhail had his lunch and did not notice anything, even that his wife was not particularly happy. The crafty bride came up with Plan B. “Dear, you look tried. Take a nap. I have not been out all day. I will take a short walk while you sleep.”

  She left as he muttered, “That sounds good!”

  She returned expecting praise and flattery, and instead found snores and her husband in his usual post-lunch position, flat on his back, fully dressed with his boots on top of the footboard. She could not believe her eyes!

  “What are you doing?” She asked.

  Her husband slowly awoke, rubbed his face, sat up and swung his legs to the floor. “What? What is it?”

  Mareika pointed to the covers and suddenly he understood.

  “Ohhh!” Mikhail studied the wrinkles on the comforter cover and the black boot polish on the white cover of the footboard. “Ohhh!”

  He started a dialog on the beautiful workmanship and the creative efforts of his wonderful wife. Her response was, “When you take your noon nap, take off your boots and pants and coat and lie underneath the comforter.”

  He responded, “Yes dear, of course.”

  In fact, that was excessive work for just a small nap. He started a new after-lunch procedure of just leaning back in their only chair and snoozing with all his clothes on. Nevertheless, the room was definitely improved! Mother did use part of their water ration to wash the footboard cover clean.

  Their life was unusual in this underground military town called Uluntsiric in the Gobi Desert of Mongolia. The name translates as Red Army Soldier in the Mongolian language. The town was a series of small rooms or burrows usually with fireplaces dug in the ground and sometimes connected by tunnels. A local woody plant known as saxaul was laboriously collected by the Soviets and dried for firewood. A friend of Mikhail worked for the railroad and he belatedly sent several gunnysacks of coal as a wedding present. It was the best wedding present they received, as they did not need saxaul for about six months.

  The Mongols cooked outside using animal dung as it was free and available, but it did leave a smoky dung smell which permeated hair and clothes. An advantage of dung smoke was that some insects avoided it. The sun-dried buffalo chips of the early American frontier were basically the same product.

  This desert, like all deserts was hot in the day and cold at night. The underground rooms had a high humidity and would not hold heat in the winter. It was common for the hair of the men to freeze to the sheets on a cold winter night. Tens of thousands of young Red Army troops lived there in very harsh conditions with minimal amounts of water. Sanitation was a major concern and the ubiquitous body lice were high on the list of problems. Follow
ing Mikhail’s suggestion, most of the young officers burned their skivvies when they became too dirty because they preferred to wash themselves every evening as was the custom rather than save water to wash their underclothes. This meant purchasing many sets of skivvies each month. The enlisted men continued to wash their underclothes. The closest large water well was 200 kilometers (124 miles) away and water was trucked in daily by a fleet of tanker trucks.

  At one point, some enlisted men disappeared, simply vanished. It was a growing and alarming mystery until finally a young troubled private reported in to his commanding officer and almost incoherently confessed. A tanker truck had arrived on the base that hauled bulk amounts of ethyl alcohol used for antiseptic and for other purposes such as a solvent or fuel. This colorless, volatile, flammable liquid, also called ethanol, is in beer, wine, liquor, and other beverages. Only a few men knew of this tanker but the word quickly spread. These bored and thirsty enlisted men used a canteen cup to reach inside the tanker and they generously helped themselves. The level of alcohol dropped and the merrymakers found that it was difficult to reach so they leaned way down inside the tank and seven of the men eventually fell in and died there. The alcohol was strong and the fumes were heavy with only one small hatch to the outside air. They died of asphyxiation according to the camp doctor. One hopes that they died happy, although it was a tragic event. The families of these dead solders officially received word that their boys had died honorably in combat.

  There was an official screening of young officers stationed in the USSR’s Far East to attend the Moscow Military Academy for advanced officer training. The screening cleared Mikhail and 12 other young candidates to attend. This was outstanding news, since completion of this rigorous school was a fast track to higher rank. All generals had first passed this milestone. Mikhail and two others took a train that was 24 hours behind the other ten officers. Their future appeared bright and they were all in exceptionally good spirits.

  Their train arrived in the large city of Novosibirsk, about halfway to Moscow, and they encountered great excitement and confusion in the huge railway station. It was June 22, 1941 and Hitler, without a declaration of war, had treacherously broken his pact with Stalin and attacked the USSR. The information was sketchy but it appeared that the attacking German Wehrmacht included millions of men and thousands of tanks along a 3,200-kilometer (2,000 mile) front from the Black Sea to the Baltic Sea. Moscow expected the Japanese to take advantage of the situation and launch a major attack on Mongolia. The three officers received new orders, “Return to Mongolia and assume your previous duties.”

  Bitterness salted this bad news. The other ten officers, just a day ahead of them, had already passed the halfway point of Novosibirsk and officials thus ordered them to continue on to Moscow and attend the Military Academy. The three officers returned to Mongolia with heavy hearts. It was not just the missed opportunity at the Academy caused by the one-day delay, Germany had been a foe for hundreds of years and they would rather fight Germans on Russian soil than Japanese on Mongolian soil. Mikhail and Mareika would talk about how unlucky it had turned out for them. Well, there was still honor to defend, the Japanese must not be allowed to defeat the Red Army as they had done to the tsar’s army 35 years earlier.

  War news slowly trickled into Mongolia. All ten of the officers had started classes at the Military Academy but that winter the Third Reich Blitzkrieg rapidly moved deep into Russia. Three army groups were occupying vast territories and capturing huge numbers of Soviet troops, millions in fact, by using a circle entrapment technique with tanks on the vast USSR plains. The Germans were advancing on all fronts. They had overrun Kiev, Kursk, Smolensk, and other strongholds. They held Leningrad in siege and they were approaching Moscow. All ten of the officer school candidates received reassignment to active duty on the Western Front. Within a year, all were dead. Mikhail and Mareika decided that maybe they were lucky after all.

  In terms of just numbers, the Red Army should have been able to stop the invasion at the border and then beat the enemy in his own territory, as was Stalin’s master plan. The Soviet Union’s industrialization and war mobilization had produced some 2.8 million troops, 20,000 tanks and 10,000 combat aircraft versus an invasion force of three million men, 3,600 tanks and 2,500 airplanes. In experience, strategy, and leadership, the German Army was the finest in the world at that time. Stalin made a series of blunders even though he was intelligent and willing to learn from past mistakes. He had prepared for the inevitable war with Germany but he misjudged both the timing and the artful scheming of Hitler. Thus, Russia was caught with incomplete border defenses and inadequate plans for just a short-term war. The Kremlin response after the German invasion was ineffective leadership, paralysis, and blunders with military strategy for months. Stalin’s public appearances during this period were, interestingly, very rare for a wartime leader.

  The earlier purges of the USSR officer corps had been severe and 35,000 to 40,000 of the officers were removed. Many were either shot or condemned to hard labor in the Gulag. Many of the replacements were not qualified military leaders. The Soviet military effectiveness and morale plummeted and the devastating problem was reinforced by Stalin upgrading the role of political commissars and reintroducing dual command by political and military personnel.

  The Red Army troops paid dearly for all these miscalculations. By the end of 1941, it was an unbelievable disaster with immense losses in arms, equipment, tanks, airplanes, military factories, food production areas, and men. Approximately three million Red Army troops were captured by the Germans who provided inadequate food, shelter, and medicine which resulted in hundreds of thousands of prisoner-of-war deaths. It was a brutal, nasty war and the unstoppable Wehrmacht appeared to have no conscience. Fifty-six percent of all the USSR military casualties occurred during the first year and a half of the four years of combat.

  The German invasion triggered Mareika’s evacuation by the Red Army to Ulaanbaatar, the capital of Mongolia, with the other officers’ wives. An overwhelming concern remained that Japan would again attack the Soviets in Mongolia. Mikhail and Mareika remained separated for a while. They missed each other so much that finally she ignored the danger and the orders and returned to her husband at the front. This caused some raised eyebrows but no one officially said anything about it.

  The winds of war were also blowing around other members of the family, sometimes with direct effects. The fighting on the USSR’s Western Front had not been going well for the Red Army. Stalin’s order, issued by the State Committee of Defense, prohibited any Red Army soldier to allow himself to be taken captive. Lack of ammunition was not an acceptable excuse. The choice was to go down fighting or be branded a traitor to the state. Any Soviet prisoner-of-war who was freed from German POW camps would receive punitive sanctions and his family would lose their ration cards. On July 28, 1941, an order came down that prohibited commanders in the field to retreat, even temporary tactical ones. “Not one step backwards,” was the declaration. Approximately one million USSR troops died and another 750,000 were wounded as they fought a defensive action to stop the huge German Battle Group from advancing toward Moscow; however the Wehrmacht kept coming. My aunt Tania was still living there with her three small children while her husband fought in that front line.

  By late November 1941, the Wehrmacht was within 20 kilometers (13 miles) of Moscow, which was under attack. It was bitterly cold and food, fuel, and electricity were in short supply. Rumors flew around like crows, and who could say what was really happening?

  Approximately 50 years later, efforts by Russian investigative journalists shed light on the life and times of that 1941 period in Moscow. The following stories have been sworn and testified to as true and they were corroborated by other witnesses.

  Stalin ordered all the intelligentsia including professors, teachers, writers, journalists, and artists to leave Moscow; none of them were to be allowed to stay. This was not to save them, but rather to avoid their g
oing over to the German side, as Stalin had been especially severe to them.

  The advancing Germans had created a wave of Russian civilians in front of them, fleeing the front lines. These refugees avoided Moscow, going around it as they headed east. This exodus was generally disorganized as officials concentrated on priorities such as dismantling war related factories to move the vital parts east and out of German hands. Small farms on the edge of Moscow were deserted as the animals were herded out of harm’s way. Although many chickens and pigs were saved, the ones that had to be left behind were killed and burned with the buildings so the Germans could not benefit from them. As these groups of animals, especially pigs and cows, were herded along the streets and alleys, local hungry citizens of Moscow would lie in wait, hiding behind corners or inside doorways. They would suddenly rush out and steal a pig or a piglet and hastily escape with their food-on-the-hoof. These robberies occurred with the peasant’s blessings and they pretended not to see it. The peasants knew people were very hungry and they had too many animals to take care of anyway.

  October 16, 1941 saw panic in Moscow streets. The director of a large factory tried to escape out the front gate of his factory in a truck. The factory workers stopped the truck and found it full of food. They angrily threw out the director, screaming at him as they rapidly cleaned out all the food. There were many other similar incidents.

  People were very hungry and small groups of them gathered in the streets desperately looking for food. They broke into stores and warehouses, causing severe damage, but little food was found. Groups joined together and became a moving mass of malicious seekers. By some time-honored irrational logic, a focal point of their anger was Jews. Many citizens rushed to train stations where hordes of people were trying to flee the city at the same time. The large station of Kazanskie received the brunt of it as it provided trains headed east, away from the advancing Germans. These potential travelers carried items of value hoping to use them as currency for tickets, food, or whatever was needed. Some had a destination with friends or relatives and others only wanted out of Moscow. People were arguing, bickering, and trading. They were afraid and they scolded and yelled at each other and at their children. People with pets like a cat, a dog, or a bird were told to leave them as there was only room for people. Hunger and fear of the unknown led them to verbally abuse the Jews who had a hard time of it. However, the militia prevented physical attacks and personal theft was rare. My Aunt Tania with three small children and a suitcase was in the middle of this confusion and noisy chaos as she made her way to the relative safety of her parents in Arscent’evo.