My name is not important, but what I will accomplish in twelve days just might be. I am but a small piece in the Soviet military machine. I may as well be just a nut or a bolt. I am a piece that will pilot one of the Lend-Lease B-25J Mitchell bombers filled with electronic equipment. How I got here might be of some interest to future historians.
I was born in Moscow, in October of 1923, and that makes me twenty-three years old today. I do not remember much of my childhood, especially before my fifth year. I do remember my father getting upset at someone, or something and yelling and cursing in a strange voice that I had never heard before. It was a garbled version of his usual manner of speaking, and he was staggering around our kitchen. I was watching from the doorway as he suddenly lost his balance and fell, hitting his head on the edge of the kitchen table and then hitting the floor with a sound that I will never forget. I can still hear it if I think back far enough, the sickening thud, as his head bounced off the floor and finally came to rest in an ever-expanding pool of blood. I remember being fascinated by that spreading pool walking over to touch it. My mother was screaming and crying, as she pulled me away and tended to my father.
My older sister took charge of me at that point, and the memory fades as to what happened next.
The next, and final, memory of my father is visiting him in what must have been a hospital. People in white clothes were rushing around here and there. To this day I can’t stand hospitals… it was something about the smell. My father never recovered from his fall and just sat in his chair in the shared kitchen, listening to the radio… always the radio and always the same station. He could speak, but he never did, and I never did find out why he fell or what circumstances caused him to get so drunk. My mother never said a word about it, and neither did he. He died the same day the radio station went off the air, two years later. The station went silent and so did he.
From what I understand I was pretty lucky to have grown up when I did. Before the Revolution children had a pretty hard life in Moscow. They were considered total dependents of their parents in all matters and were frequently put to work in all sorts of hazardous situations, such as in the mines and in factories. Child labor was normal for most families, and only the well-off went to any kind of school. Illiteracy rates were high. Children as young as ten were considered adults as far as the law is concerned and were tried as adults and were put in prison or labor camps with adults. Imagine going to prison for doing some of the more impetuous things you did, as a youth.
If you were a rebellious youth and did not respond to your parent’s corrective measures, they could have you arrested and put in prison until you changed your ways. You can imagine what would happen to a ten-year old in a work camp filled with hardened criminals and I’m sure many of those things you can imagine did in fact happen. It was pretty amazing considering such conditions, that anyone turned out to be even close to being a productive member of society but they did, including my mother and her parents.
A friend of mine had a large female teacher who liked to sit on the corner of his desk when she talked to the class. He was near the front of the class so she just used his desk when she got tired. This bothered him, as I’m sure it would bother anyone to have a large bottom covering what little space you had in your very controlled world. One day he acquired a straight pin and set it in a crack sticking straight up near the edge of the desktop. When the teacher sat down she was skewered by the pin and jumped up from his desk with a start running out of the room. He didn’t laugh or brag or even tell anyone but just played innocent.
Before the Revolution he would have been sent to prison but during my time he suffered no repercussions at all. She never sat on his desk again, and that was the end of the matter.
Before my father’s accident we were fairly well-off from what I am told. We had a two-bedroom apartment with only one other family living with us, more than enough food, and I grew up nice and healthy. My grandparents moved in with us when my father died and things got a little tougher but I never noticed. I had my friends and my boyhood interests to keep me busy. As long as I had food when I wanted and my mother and my friends, I was well-off. Besides the toys my grandfather would make, I had none and that was just fine with me. The toys he would make were wonderful and he traded them for extra food from time to time, as I got tired of them. He made sure I had a steady stream of wooden tractors, planes and boats. The most wonderful toys of all were the wooden soldiers he would carve. Each had a different face, and of course, in my mind, different personalities. My friend and I would play with the soldiers for hours on end when the weather was bad outside.
My mother cooked wonderful things but the best was the Pirogi. Pirogi were like ravioli, but filled with potatoes and sometimes cheese, but always with sauerkraut. We always had sauerkraut. First you boiled the pirogi and then you fried them in whatever oil you had but butter was the best. The rare smell of grandfather’s cigar and frying pirogi; will always mean home to me. Once I grew up, I found out that putting sauerkraut in pirogi was not normal but to me, a pirogi is not a pirogi without it.
Being just a child I was unaware that in 1926 the government declared that children in the Soviet Union enjoyed better conditions than anywhere else in the world, and that the criminal code provided us with more protections than any other children anywhere. The exceptional status of children in the Soviet Union was used a propaganda ploy for the nation and to increase international standing. The life of a Soviet child was often contrasted with the grim exploitation of other children abroad. Even the Americans’ ‘Time’ and ‘Life’ magazines had pictures of poor children being forced to work in the mines in some horrible place in some mountainous area there.
There were pictures of their little faces, covered with dirt and grime, some with tracks of tears or sweat running down their faces that still haunt me to this day. What kind of life must they have had? How could you not know that we were much better off in the USSR than in such a capitalist hell hole? America this bastion of wealth and capitalist corruption, was exploiting their children, robbing them of their future; and for what; to make money for the capitalist pigs? Those pictures were all we needed to know that communism was the true path of mankind. Those little faces still haunt me to this day, and that is why we must fight the capitalist pigs wherever they are found.
My childhood ended in May, 1931, when my mother took me to join the Young Pioneers. I did not know this at the time of course but this was the outcome of that event. I was eight years old and they turned me into a miniature adult; millions of eight year-old men willing to extol the virtues of Communism over capitalism… that was the end result of the Young Pioneers. Lenin had turned it into a substitute for religion. Being a child at the time, I knew nothing of this of course and was overjoyed to be able to belong to such a wonderful organization. The first time I saw the Pioneer Palace in our neighborhood, I was infatuated. There were rooms for clubs, crafts and sports. The sound of thousands of little voices singing the “Young Pioneer March” and shouting the motto “Always Ready,” still sends shivers up my spine. Indeed their purpose was to take away our childhood and make us all eight year-old men and they succeeded at it moderately well.
Even the girls were taught and treated, as males. This was ridiculous, and we all knew it. I mean girls were different and disgusting at that point in my life. They tried to eradicate their feminine traits but how could they? Being a woman meant religion, home, privacy, intimacy and relationships. This did not fit the socialist dialectic, and so it had to be eradicated. They all had close-cropped hair and wore plain shirts and black knee-pants in our club. It fooled no one but we had to put up with it because the adults said we had to.