This was a tipping point, and Father yelled, “I am resigning from this lousy school. I am going to go and talk to the school commander! You think that you will go home and make love to your wife while we are doing your teaching job and the war waits patiently without us.”
So, after the meeting adjourned, my father, the assistant commander, and the other five Communist Party organizers went to the commander’s office. He claimed he had heard nothing about all this but wanted to know everything that the officers had to say. The assistant commander again argued that the Caucasian officers should teach the other officers how to speak better and, especially, how to write Russian.
Father fearlessly told the school commander, “I have won an Order of the Red Army and I know what gunpowder smells like. I have studied very hard and I have the highest marks in your school. Nevertheless, I am going to quit and I am going to send a report about the school with an explanation of why I no longer want to study here. It will tell them that the school staff is not taking its responsibilities seriously and the slack discipline has allowed robberies to occur from the cleaning crews. In addition, the class scheduling is sloppy and causing needless problems. I will enclose my student record book so the high official can see that I am not just a disgruntled student.”
Mikhail added, “The officers are here as students; not as teachers. That is the job of the school staff. I am not here to teach Russian, I am here to learn how to catch spies. Further, it is wartime and the eight hours per day put in by the school staff is unacceptable. Everyone should be working at least 12 to 14 hours a day. The front line troops are working 24 hours a day. You entrenched yourself here and made a nice cozy nest for yourself but there is a war out there and good people are dying. You should be ashamed of yourself!”
Father’s threat to inform the Moscow Communist Party was his right and his responsibility as a party organizer. This action would most probably bring death, not just prison time, to anyone who was subsequently found guilty of improper action. Father was not concerned that the school staff would give him a hard time or inhibit him from successfully completing the school. He was clever, and if nothing else worked he could write another report. A factor in his favor was that he was from a very poor family and the Communist dogma was to favor the poor people over the formerly rich people. This, together with father’s fearless attitude, allowed him to follow his conscience and do what he thought was right.
The commander convinced Mikhail not to resign. He was one of the best students and it would appear odd to Moscow if he did resign. The commander got father to agree to wait a week before sending his report, to give him time to sort out the mess and institute changes. Many of the officers overheard this discussion through the thin walls in the commander’s office. My father never uses profanity, but this night he used every word in the book. Father thought that the commander was a good man and that he would make everything right. This story ended well. The boss immediately instituted changes and the school finally obtained the expected standards.
I initially found out about this incident when I was a teenager, as I overheard a friend of my father kidding him about his unheard-of swearing that night. This friend was one of the six Communist Party organizers at that school meeting. I can recall father saying that he himself was surprised at his words when he thought about it later; he didn’t know that he was capable of something like that. Recalling that incident still makes my father angry.
Father completed the course work with honors and went to Moscow to receive his new orders. He had the choice of army or naval intelligence and he decided to stay with the army. He managed a few visits with Moscow relatives but he had no chance to visit his wife in Arscent’evo. Rejoining the front lines as a Military Intelligence Officer, he was there for the long awaited USSR invasion of Manchuria. His career was on a fast track after the Moscow trip and he looked forward to a brilliant future in the Red Army. If everything stayed on track, he would probably become a general.
The Japanese military forces continued their aggressive master plan as they conquered large areas of Southeast Asia, all the way to India as part of the “Greater Southeast Asia Coprosperity Sphere.” The Red Army was active in Kamchatka, the huge peninsula jutting into the North Pacific Ocean. They would rescue and return downed Americans who had plane trouble on bombing runs over Japanese bases in the Northern Kuril Islands. This was a little-known but successful invasion threat tactic used by America to neutralize some of the Japanese armed forces. By international standards, the Soviets should have interned these American airmen until the end of the war. However, the Soviets were happy that Americans were fighting the Northern Japanese and wanted to support them.
Around this time, father posed with a group of Red Army Officers at an unknown Officers Club. Senior officers are in front and Father is in the middle row, second from the right. There are numerous pictures of Comrade Stalin on the wall behind them.
Father with Red Army Officers, 1940s.
The American Lend-Lease Program supplied military armaments and foodstuffs to the USSR. This amounted to about a fifth of the USSR’s gross domestic product. It was substantial aid and it gave support to the hypothesis that the USSR and the United States were joined together to fight fascism. Many stories came out of the Lend-Lease Program. The Russian soldiers seldom had a full stomach so food was always welcome. The Americans as a standard procedure included a pre-set ratio of cartons of condoms in supply boxes. This was very amusing to the recipients. The Soviet troops would scratch their heads and ask, “What are these for? There are no women here. Maybe the Americans think that we should make love to each other?”
The situation between the USSR and the U.S. was complicated as both sides were using each other. The USSR was already moving its chess pieces with the goal of postwar territorial expansion. America wanted the USSR to break the back of the German Army, which it eventually did. Also, America needed time to mobilize and it took three years to recruit and train the troops for the Normandy Invasion. Russia had to sacrifice millions to contain Hitler for those three long years from June 22, 1941 until June 6, 1944. Russia paid a heavy price for this gift of time. Russia’s World War II deaths were approximately 27 million and this includes possibly 19 million civilians, many of them women and children. The World War II fatalities for America were fewer than a half million (292,131 battle deaths and 115,185 other deaths).
Control of power in Asia was still open to question in early 1944. The United States, Britain, and their allies had fought long and hard there. The Yalta agreement between the United States, England, and the USSR scheduled the Red Army to enter the war with Japan three months later. Then U.S. nuclear research scientists provided the atomic bomb and the U.S. felt the USSR was no longer needed. However, the Red Army attacked Japanese forces under their own timetable.
After the War in accordance with the Potsdam commitment, the USSR received Sakhalin and the Kuril Islands. The USSR joined with the United States and the United Kingdom as the Big Three of the world.
Soviet Forces had invaded and occupied Manchuria from July 1945 to August 1946. After Japan surrendered and the Chinese Nationalist were pushed back, the Soviet technicians rapidly helped Chinese Communists restore Manchuria’s huge industrial capacity, which strengthened the Chinese Communist Forces. After four more bitter years of fighting, the Communists completely defeated the Nationalists in the Chinese Civil War, except on the island of Taiwan. The northern Chinese soldiers had an epidemic of stomach problems, which left them helpless for months and this illness cancelled a planned invasion. This “southern bug” saved Chiang Kaishek’s Nationalist forces on Taiwan from annihilation.
Anti-communists heavily criticized the American President Harry S. Truman for not entering China with troops to prevent the communist take-over. However, hindsight reveals his actions were correct as American involvement could not have diverted the overwhelming red tide.
The debate on justification for the Americans using the
atomic bombs to end the War in the Pacific still remains unresolved. No one can say whether it saved more lives than it cost. World politics may well have been involved in the decision, such as to prevent Soviet entry into the Asian war or to provide the Soviet Union and other countries with a graphic example of the devastation it would face if it challenged American supremacy in the postwar world. America continued with Operation Dominic involving 36 nuclear explosions detonated in the Pacific. The devastating effects created powerful arguments to ban the bomb. However, after 1949 the Soviet Union also had the bomb and this constituted an even stronger argument for holding on to atomic weapons.
Just a few years later, the American General Douglas MacArthur in the “Korean Police Action” wanted to drop numerous atomic bombs on Manchuria to counteract the Chinese horde pouring across the Yalu River. But President Truman instead fired MacArthur, refused to bomb Manchuria, and abandoned his dream of a liberated and democratic Korea as the war ended with an unsettling truce at the 38th parallel. American voters were not happy but historians admired Truman for that decision. Interestingly, MacArthur was said to be against using atomic bombs against Japan in 1945.
New information now casts doubt upon the old dogma that America’s two atomic bombs dropped on Japan ended World War II. During the 1980s period of perestroika in Russia, reformers made Stalin’s papers available for the first time. Similarly, in Japan long closed archives of Emperor Hirohito belatedly emerged from the Japanese sensitivities about the role of their emperor in World War II. The Japanese people considered their emperor Hirohito as embodying in a near-mystical way the divine spirit of the Japanese race.
This newly available information suggests that Japanese War Lords thought that the two atomic bombs dropped in August, 1945, had exhausted the American supply and thus atomic bombs were no longer an immediate threat, although they were a factor in the equation to surrender. The USSR’s aggressive attacks against Japanese troops in Manchuria, Korea, and the Kuril Islands revealed the very real possibility of a USSR invasion of the Northern Japanese mainland, which in conjunction with the pending American southern invasion, provided the main reason for the Japanese unconditional surrender. Thus it appears correct that the two atomic bombs did not end the war. Rather, it was the entry of the USSR that convinced the Japanese hierarchy to surrender.
The Soviet Union people’s response to the dropping of the two atomic bombs on Japan was very negative. They felt that it was wrong to destroy two cities and sacrifice so many civilian women and children. This wiped out most of the good will created by the joint effort of fighting fascism. Even today, a discussion of this event induces angry reactions from Russians against Americans.
Most Russians feel that the Cold War with all its lies, fears, and apprehensions happened partially because of these two atomic bombs. How can one trust or respect a country that kills tens of thousands of civilians with so little compunction?
Atomic bomb explosion.
30. How it was
The Soviet Union considered the ninth day of May 1945 as the first day of peace after the Communism victory over German fascism. This date still evokes tearful emotions and continues to be a major holiday that Russians joyously celebrate.
Soviet history books call it World War II but that is not how Russian citizens think and speak about it. For a few years it was called by other names such as The People’s War and The Great Patriotic War but now it is simply referred to as The War. Conversations involved phrases like “before the war” or “during the war” or “after the war,” and it referred only to the struggle between the communists and the fascists. The involvement of other countries and their battles were somehow irrelevant.
May 9, 1945 was a day when women’s eyes filled with tears. Millions of Russian widows were hugging their children, overcome with joy and relief that the war was over but brokenhearted with the realization that they would never again see their lost beloveds. All of the Soviet Union people celebrated that day, dancing and hugging even strangers just because they were alive. The Soviets extended their traditional Labor Day celebration which came on the first day of May to include the end of World War II, giving them a nine-day holiday.
Why were the Germans defeated in Russia? One claim is that the size of Russia made a swift German victory impossible. However, the truth is that the endless Russian plain actually aided the Panzer Tank armies by giving them limitless maneuver room to thrust forward and encircle the enemy. This blitzkrieg technique cost the Red Army 3 million men in the first months of the war. Another claim was that the Germans should not have targeted Moscow as did Napoleon. This is not true as the 1941 Moscow was much more valuable than the 1812 Moscow and a German victory there would have had a huge effect militarily and provided propaganda benefit. Another claim was that winter defeated the Germans, but in fact, the Germans spent two months with diversions in the Balkans and in debate. If the invasion date of June 22 was two months later than necessary, do not blame winter for that.
The Red Army’s defeat of the German Wehrmacht had to do with the late start in the spring offense, the logistical nightmare of mud and unpaved roads, and the fact that the Germans underestimated Soviet reserves including both manpower and industry output. At the peak of the war, the USSR had 12 million men under arms and Soviet industry was producing twice the fighting equipment that Germany produced. Two other large factors swung the balance. The Nazis’ own brutality alienated a population otherwise hostile to Stalinism. The Russians were defending their own turf with a ferocity and tenacity that could not be denied.
The cost of victory was staggering! A United Nations source states that possibly 43 million people worldwide lost their lives in World War II, although exact numbers are unknown. More than 27 million Russian men, women, and children died in the years of that horrible bloodbath according to some Russian figures. It is believed that Soviet casualties were ten times greater than those of all the other Western United Nations combined.
The destruction included five million buildings in 1,700 devastated cities and 70,000 ruined villages. That includes 84,000 schools, 43,000 libraries, 31,000 factories, 13,000 bridges, and 40,000 miles of railway track. Also lost were seven million horses, 17 million cattle, 20 million pigs, and 27 million sheep and goats. Some losses were irreplaceable such as official records of births, marriages, and deaths, and family pictures. How could one celebrate the end of a calamitous war like that?
Red poppies have long been associated with World War I memorials through the poem, In Flanders Fields, by John McCrae. Veterans groups and others have related the red poppy symbol to World War I. For me, the red poppy belongs to World War II. Way back when I was about ten years old, I was on a bus as part of a children’s excursion from a resort on the Black Sea. It was a long trip and the bus stopped near the remains of a large town so we could stretch and have a snack. After a few minutes I concentrated on the surroundings. The uninhabited town’s ruins were marked by the bare broken skeletons of several multiple-story buildings. Houses and shops were just jumbled heaps of old brick and debris. It looked as though a giant had smashed the town with an enormous fist. This image was in sharp contrast to the surrounding flat lands and the beautiful Black Sea that lapped at the western edge of this former Russian town. The sun was shining brightly from a deep blue sky and a few white fluffy clouds changed shape for us as they floated by. Nearby chirping birds competed for attention with the laughing children. We were told that the town was a World War II casualty of the Wehrmacht. The outlying land was literally covered with red poppies.
Coming out of that war was exceedingly difficult. However, a few good things always happen with the bad. War always brings knowledge and advances in certain fields such as medicine, logistics, and product design. Necessity is the mother of invention. For instance, Russia became the world leader in developing artificial insemination for farm animals, an amazing technique to replenish the nearly depleted herds and flocks with superior genetics.
Th
e fighting men and women of the USSR started to trickle back home in 1945 as their units released them. The Ryazan train dropped veterans from Arscent’evo off precisely at 7:00 p.m. at the closest station, which was Denezhnikovo seven kilometers away. At about 8:00 p.m., village women began to closely watch the two roads on the higher ridge across the river. A man at that distance was too small to distinguish without a sixth sense. Nevertheless, without fail, some woman would scream out a name in recognition and run for the bridge. As the distant roads approached the river bridge, they converged and disappeared from view behind large trees lining the river. After crossing the bridge, a returning veteran had only a short distance to traverse before the joyous family and friends overwhelmed him.
Many men had died and those who did return appeared only every few months. The waiting was long and hard and communication almost nonexistent. Even those informed by the government of their loved one’s death still waited expectantly-in some cases for years. Arscent’evo had supplied over 20 fighting men to the Red Army and only six survived.
My grandmother Varvara waited to her dying day for her son Vassily who had been missing without word since 1941. My mother’s girlfriend Varoonka had received the bad news that her husband Timmofe had died in action but she continued to wait for him even though she knew he would never return.
One day, the redheaded Alexe, a friend of Timmofe, returned with a chest full of medals and without a single wound. Alexe had earlier been involved in a love triangle. Many years before he had loved Varoonka very much and she knew that, but she loved Timmofe. Some six years before World War II, lucky Timmofe placed a wedding ring on Varoonka’s finger. They had two children: a baby boy and, a year later, a baby girl.
My Russian Family Page 21