The events of the novel take place during the Great Patriotic War. Winter, end of 1942, Siberia. A new batch of prisoners arrives at a quarantine camp near Berdsk. For several days, recruits are prepared for life in the camp - they are assigned to companies, assigned responsibilities, and shaved bald. The camp life and the horrors of life for prisoners are described in detail - lack of suitable clothing, hunger, poverty, cold, beatings, loss of everything human. One of the most poignant episodes of the first part of the novel is the arrival of a train with Kazakh soldiers at the station. They are in this condition - disabled people who have lost limbs; living corpses (and lifeless bodies of people who did not reach the camp alive) horrify even prisoners.

The trial of the artist Felix Boryachik and the prisoner Zelentsov, who fell under the hot hand, is described. This is one of the few relatively “bright” episodes of the novel - the trial ultimately does not end with the execution desired by justice, and the convict sent to the penal company is seen off as a real local hero.

After this event and until the onset of the new year, discipline in the camps gradually worsened. This leads the authorities to think about the need for executions – including of innocent people – for educational purposes. After the New Year, in January, those who survived the horrors of winter are sent to the front.

The events from the winter of 1943 to the autumn of the same year are described quite briefly - until the crossing of the Dnieper (the companies spent all this time in battle). The crossing itself and the living conditions of a front-line soldier are described in great detail, not much different from the living conditions of a prisoner in a quarantine camp. For many, the crossing turns out to be the last military operation - the army suffers unprecedented losses. The main characters of the novel - Shestakov, Buldakov, Ryndin - escape with wounds, albeit quite severe ones.

Despite the fact that this crossing operation is considered by many to be a failure, it becomes the turning point of the war - the advantage gradually passes to the Soviet troops and the enemy army begins to retreat.

The novel teaches you to maintain humanity and remain strong in spirit no matter what.

Picture or drawing Cursed and killed

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• Summary About this Mayakovsky

The action takes place at the end of 1942 in the quarantine camp of the first reserve regiment, located in the Siberian Military District near the Berdsk station.

Part one

Recruits arrive at the quarantine camp. After some time, the survivors, including Lyoshka Shestakov, Kolya Ryndin, Ashot Vaskonyan and Lyokha Buldakov, are transferred to the regiment's location.

The train stopped. Some indifferently angry people in worn military uniforms kicked the recruits out of the warm carriages and lined them up near the train, dividing them into dozens. Then, having lined up in columns, they led us into a semi-dark, frozen basement, where instead of a floor, pine paws were thrown onto the sand, and they were ordered to sit on bunks made of pine logs. Submission to fate took possession of Lyoshka Shestakov, and when Sergeant Volodya Yashkin appointed him to the first squad, he accepted it without resistance. Yashkin was short, thin, angry, had already been to the front, had an order. Here, in the reserve regiment, he ended up after the hospital, and is about to go back to the front line with a marching company, away from this damn pit, so that it burns - so he said. Yashkin walked through the quarantine, looking at the recruits - thieves from the gold mines of Baykit and Verkh-Yeniseisk; Siberian Old Believers. One of the Old Believers called himself Kolya Ryndin, from the village of Verkhniy Kuzhebar, which stands on the banks of the Amyl River, a tributary of the Yenisei.

In the morning, Yashkin drove the people out into the street to wash themselves with snow. Lyoshka looked around and saw the roofs of the dugouts, lightly dusted with snow. This was the quarantine of the twenty-first rifle regiment. Small, single and four-seater dugouts belonged to combat officers, economic service workers and simply idiots in ranks, without whom not a single Soviet enterprise can do. Somewhere further, in the forest, there were barracks, a club, sanitary services, a canteen, baths, but the quarantine was located at a decent distance from all this, so that the recruits would not carry any infection. Lyoshka learned from experienced people that they would soon be assigned to barracks. In three months they will undergo combat and political training and move to the front - things were not going well there. Looking around the polluted forest, Lyoshka remembered his native village of Shushikara in the lower reaches of the Ob.

The guys felt a pang in their hearts because everything around them was foreign and unfamiliar. Even they, who grew up in barracks, in village huts and in the huts of city suburbs, were dumbfounded when they saw the feeding place. Behind long counters nailed to dirty pillars, covered on top with plank troughs like coffin lids, military men stood and consumed food from aluminum bowls, holding onto the pillars with one hand so as not to fall into the deep sticky mud under their feet. This was called the summer dining room. There was not enough space here, as elsewhere in the Land of the Soviets - we took turns feeding. Vasya Shevelev, who managed to work as a combine operator on a collective farm, looking at the local order, shook his head and said sadly: “It’s a mess here too.” Experienced fighters laughed at the newcomers and gave them good advice.

Recruits had their heads shaved. It was especially difficult for the Old Believers to part with their hair; they cried and crossed themselves. Already here, in this semi-inhabited basement, the significance of what was happening was instilled in the guys. The political conversations were conducted not by the old, but by the thin, gray-faced and loud-voiced captain Melnikov. His whole conversation was so convincing that one could only wonder how the Germans managed to reach the Volga, when everything should have been the other way around. Captain Melnikov was considered one of the most experienced political workers in the entire Siberian district. He worked so much that he had no time to expand his limited knowledge.

Quarantine life dragged on. The barracks were not vacated. The quarantine dugouts are cramped, there are fights, drunkenness, theft, stench, lice. No out-of-turn outfits could establish order and discipline among the rabble of people. The former prisoners-prisoners felt the best here. They formed gangs and robbed the others. One of them, Zelentsov, gathered around him two orphanage residents Grishka Khokhlak and Fefelov; hard workers, former machine operators, Kostya Uvarov and Vasya Shevelev; Babenko respected and fed him for his songs; I didn’t drive Lyoshka Shestakov and Kolya Ryndin away from me - they’ll come in handy. Khokhlak and Fefelov, experienced pluckers, worked at night and slept during the day. Kostya and Vasya were in charge of provisions. Lyoshka and Kolya sawed and carried firewood and did all the hard work. Zelentsov sat on the bunk and led the artel.

One evening, the recruits were ordered to leave the barracks, and were kept in the bitter wind until late at night, taking away all their pitiful possessions. Finally the order came to enter the barracks, first for the marchers, then for the recruits. A crush began, there was no room. The marching companies took their places and the “bastards” were not allowed in. That evil, merciless night has sunk into my memory like delirium. In the morning, the guys were placed at the disposal of the mustachioed foreman of the first company, Akim Agafonovich Shpator. “With these warriors I will have laughter and sorrow,” he sighed.

Half of a gloomy, stuffy barracks with three tiers of bunks is the abode of the first company, consisting of four platoons. The second half of the barracks was occupied by the second company. All this together formed the first rifle battalion of the first reserve rifle regiment. The barracks, built from damp wood, never dried out and was always slimy and moldy from the crowded breath. It was warmed by four stoves, similar to mammoths. It was impossible to warm them up, and the barracks were always damp. A rack for weapons was leaning against the wall; several real rifles could be seen there, and there were white models made of boards. The exit from the barracks was closed by a plank gate, and there were extensions near them. On the left is the captain's quarters of company sergeant Shpator, on the right is the orderly's room with a separate iron stove. The entire soldier's life was at the level of a modern cave.

On the first day, the recruits were fed well, then taken to the bathhouse. The young fighters cheered up. There was talk that they would be given new uniforms and even bed linen. On the way to the bathhouse, Babenko began to sing. Lyosha did not yet know that for a long time he would not hear any songs in this pit. The soldiers never saw any improvement in their lives and service. They changed them into old clothes, mended on their stomachs. The new, damp bathhouse did not warm up, and the guys were completely chilled. There were no suitable clothes or shoes for the two-meter tall Kolya Ryndin and Lyokha Buldakov. The rebellious Lyokha Buldakov took off his tight shoes and went to the barracks barefoot in the cold.

The servicemen were not given any beds either, but they were sent out for drill the very next day with wooden mock-ups instead of rifles. In the first weeks of service, the hope in the hearts of people for an improvement in life was not yet extinguished. The guys did not yet understand that this life, not much different from prison, depersonalizes a person. Kolya Ryndin was born and grew up near the rich taiga and the Amyl River. I never knew the need for food. In the army, the Old Believer immediately felt that wartime was a time of famine. The hero Kolya began to lose his face, the color disappeared from his cheeks, and melancholy appeared in his eyes. He even began to forget his prayers.

Before the day of the October Revolution, boots for large-sized fighters were finally sent. Buldakov was not pleased here either; he dropped his shoes from the upper bunks, for which he ended up having a conversation with Captain Melnikov. Buldakov pitifully told about himself: he came from the urban village of Pokrovki, near Krasnoyarsk, from early childhood among the dark people, in poverty and labor. Buldakov did not report that his father, a violent drunkard, almost never left prison, as did his two older brothers. Lyokha also kept silent about the fact that he himself only got out of prison by being drafted into the army, but he poured out like a nightingale, telling about his heroic work on the timber rafting. Then he suddenly rolled his eyes under his forehead and pretended to have a seizure. Captain Melnikov jumped out of the quarters like a bullet, and from then on during political classes he always looked sideways at Buldakov with caution. The fighters respected Lyokha for her political literacy.

The winter canteen was opened on November 7th. In it, hungry soldiers, holding their breath, listened to Stalin's speech on the radio. The leader of the peoples said that the Red Army took the initiative into its own hands, thanks to the fact that the Land of the Soviets has an unusually strong rear. People firmly believed this speech. The commander of the first company, Pshenny, was present in the dining room - an impressive figure with a large face, the size of a bucket. The guys knew little of the company commander, but they were already afraid. But the deputy company commander, junior lieutenant Shchus, who was wounded on Khasan and there received the Order of the Red Star, was accepted and loved immediately. That evening, companies and platoons dispersed to the barracks with a friendly song. “If only Comrade Stalin spoke on the radio every day, if only there was discipline,” sighed Sergeant Major Shpator.

The next day the company's festive mood passed, the good spirits evaporated. Pshyonny himself watched the morning toilet of the fighters, and if someone was being cunning, he personally pulled off his clothes and rubbed his face with prickly snow until he bled. Sergeant Major Shpator just shook his head. Mustachioed, gray-haired, thin, who was a sergeant major during the imperialist war, Shpator met various animals and tyrants, but he had never seen anyone like Pshenny.

Two weeks later, the soldiers were distributed among special companies. Zelentsov was taken into the mortar squad. Sergeant Major Shpator tried his best to get Buldakov out of his hands, but he was not even accepted into the machine gun company. Sitting barefoot on a bunk, this artist spent the whole day reading newspapers and commenting on what he read. The “old men” remaining from previous marching companies and who had a positive effect on the youth were dismantled. In return, Yashkin brought a whole squad of newcomers, among whom was a sick Red Army soldier Poptsov, who had reached the point of death, urinating on himself. The foreman shook his head, looking at the cyanotic boy, and exhaled: “Oh God...”.

The foreman was sent to Novosibirsk, and at some special warehouses he found new uniforms for the daredevil malingerers. Buldakov and Kolya Ryndin had nowhere else to go - they entered service. Buldakov dodged his studies in every possible way and damaged government property. Shchus realized that he could not tame Buldakov, and appointed him on duty in his dugout. Buldakov felt good at his new post and began to carry everything he could, especially food. At the same time, he always shared with his friends and with the junior lieutenant.

The Siberian winter was entering its middle. The hardening rubdown with snow in the mornings had long been canceled, but still many soldiers managed to catch a cold, and a booming cough plagued the barracks at night. In the mornings, only Shestakov, Khokhlak, Babenko, Fefelov, and sometimes Buldakov and old Shpator washed their faces. Poptsov no longer left the barracks; he lay in a gray, wet lump on the lower bunk. I only got up to eat. They didn’t take Poptsov to the medical unit; everyone there was already tired of him. There were more and more goners every day. On the lower bunks lay up to a dozen crouched, whining bodies. The servicemen suffered from merciless lice and night blindness, or hemeralopia, according to scientists. The shadows of people wandered around the barracks, groping along the walls with their hands, always looking for something.

With incredible resourcefulness of mind, the warriors sought ways to get rid of combat training and get something to chew. Someone came up with the idea of ​​stringing potatoes on a wire and lowering them into the chimneys of officers' ovens. And then the first company and the first platoon were replenished with two individuals - Ashot Vaskonyan and Boyarchik. Both were of mixed nationality: one was half-Armenian and half-Jewish, the other was half-Jewish and half-Russian. Both spent a month in the officer's school, reached the end of their rope there, were treated in the medical unit, and from there they, somewhat revived, were dumped into a damn pit - it will endure anything. Vaskonyan was lanky, skinny, pale-faced, dark-browed, and had a strong lisp. At the very first political lesson, he managed to ruin the work and mood of Captain Melnikov, objecting to him that Buenos Aires is not in Africa, but in South America.

It was even worse for Vaskonyan in the rifle company than in the officer school. He got there due to a change in the military situation. His father was the editor-in-chief of a regional newspaper in Kalinin, his mother was the deputy head of the cultural department of the regional executive committee of the same city. The domestic, pampered Ashotik was raised by the housekeeper Seraphim. Vaskonyan should have been lying on the lower bunk next to the goner Poptsov, but Buldakov liked this eccentric and literate person. He and his company did not allow Ashot to be killed, taught him the wisdom of a soldier’s life, hid him from the foreman, from Pshenny and Melnikov. For this concern, Vaskoryan retold them everything he had read in his life.

In December, the twenty-first regiment was being replenished - reinforcements arrived from Kazakhstan. The first company was assigned to meet them and quarantine them. What the Red Army soldiers saw horrified them. The Kazakhs were called up in the summer, wearing summer uniforms, and arrived in the Siberian winter. Already dark-skinned, the Kazakhs became black as firebrands. The carriages shook from coughing and wheezing. The dead were lying under the bunks. Arriving at the Berdsk station, Colonel Azatyan grabbed his head and ran for a long time along the train, looking into the cars, hoping at least somewhere to see the guys in better condition, but everywhere there was the same picture. The sick were scattered among hospitals, the rest were divided into battalions and companies. Fifteen Kazakhs were assigned to the first company. The leader over them was a huge guy with a large Mongolian-type face named Talgat.

Meanwhile, the first battalion was sent to roll out timber from the Ob. The unloading was led by Shchus, assisted by Yashkin. They lived in an old dugout dug on the river bank. Babenko immediately began to hunt in the Berdsky bazaar and in the surrounding villages. On the banks of the Oka there is a gentle regime - no drills. One evening the company trudged into the barracks and encountered a young general on a beautiful stallion. The general examined the haggard, pale faces, and drove along the bank of the Ob, lowering his head and never looking back. The soldiers were not allowed to know who this fast-moving general was, but the meeting with him did not pass without a trace.

Another general appeared in the regimental canteen. He floated through the dining room, stirring soup and porridge in bowls with a spoon, and disappeared through the opposite doors. The people expected improvement, but nothing came of it - the country was not ready for a protracted war. Everything was getting better along the way. Young people born in the twenty-fourth year could not withstand the demands of army life. The food in the canteen became scarce, and the number of goons in the companies increased. The company commander, Lieutenant Pshenny, began to fulfill his duties.

One chilly morning, Pshenny ordered every single Red Army soldier to leave the room and line up. They even raised the sick. They thought he would see these goons, take pity on them and return them to the barracks, but Pshenny commanded: “Stop fooling around! March to class with song!” Hidden in the middle of the formation, the “priests” slowed down. Poptsov fell while jogging. The company commander kicked him once or twice with the narrow toe of his boot, and then, inflamed with anger, he could no longer stop. Poptsov responded to each blow with a sob, then stopped sobbing, somehow strangely straightened up and died. The company surrounded the dead comrade. “He killed it!” - Petka Musikov exclaimed, and a silent crowd surrounded Pshenny, raising their rifles. It is unknown what would have happened to the company commander if Shchus and Yashkin had not intervened in time.

That night Shchus could not sleep until dawn. The military life of Alexei Donatovich Shchus was simple and straightforward, but earlier, before this life, his name was Platon Sergeevich Platonov. The surname Shchus was formed from the surname Shchusev - this is how the clerk of the Transbaikal Military District heard it. Platon Platonov came from a Cossack family that was exiled to the taiga. His parents died, and he was left with his aunt, a nun, a woman of extraordinary beauty. She persuaded the guard to take the boy to Tobolsk, hand him over to the family of pre-revolutionary exiles named Shchusev, and paid for it with herself. The boss kept his word. The Shchusevs - the artist Donat Arkadyevich and the literature teacher Tatyana Illarionovna - were childless and adopted the boy, raised him as their own, and sent him to the military path. His parents died, his aunt was lost in the world - Shchus was left alone.

Senior lieutenant of the special department Skorik was assigned to deal with the incident in the first company. He and Shchus once studied at the same military school. Most commanders could not stand Shchusya, but he was the favorite of Gevork Azatyan, who always defended him, and therefore they could not put him where they needed to be.

Discipline in the regiment was shaken. Every day it became more and more difficult to manage people. The boys scurried around the regiment's location in search of at least some food. “Why weren’t the guys sent to the front right away? Why should healthy guys be reduced to an incapacitated state?” - thought Shchus and could not find an answer. During his service, Kolya Ryndin became completely stupid from malnutrition. At first, so lively, he closed himself off and fell silent. He was already closer to heaven than to earth, his lips were constantly whispering a prayer, even Melnikov could not do anything with him. At night, the fading hero Kolya cried from fear of the impending disaster.

Platoon commander Yashkin suffered from liver and stomach disease. At night the pain became stronger, and Sergeant Major Shpator smeared his side with formic alcohol. The life of Volodya Yashkin, named the eternal pioneer parents in honor of Lenin, was not long, but he managed to survive the battles near Smolensk, the retreat to Moscow, the encirclement near Vyazma, injury, and transportation from the encirclement camp across the front line. Two nurses, Nelka and Faya, pulled him out of that inferno. On the way, he contracted jaundice. Now he felt that he would soon be on his way to the front. With his straightforwardness and quarrelsome character, he cannot cling to the rear due to health reasons. His place is where there is final justice - equality before death.

This slow march of army life was shaken up by three major events. First, some important general came to the twenty-first rifle regiment, checked the soldiers' food and gave a dressing down to the cooks in the kitchen. As a result of this visit, peeling of potatoes was canceled, due to this the portions were increased. A decision was made: fighters two meters and above should be given an additional portion. Kolya Ryndin and Vaskonyan and Buldakov came to life. Kolya also worked part-time in the kitchen. Everything that was given to him for this, he divided among his friends.

Advertisements appeared on the club's billboards, announcing that on December 20, 1942, a military tribunal show trial of K.D. Zelentsov would take place at the club. Nobody knew what this scoundrel had done. And it all started not with Zelentsov, but with the artist Felix Boyarchik. His father left only his last name as a keepsake for Felix. Mom, Stepanida Falaleevna, a masculine woman, an iron Bolshevik, was in the field of Soviet art, shouting slogans from the stage to the beat of drums, to the sound of a trumpet, with the construction of pyramids. When and how she got the boy, she hardly noticed. Stepanida would have served until old age in the district House of Culture, if the trumpeter Boyarchik had not done something and ended up in prison. Following him, Styopa was thrown into the Novolyalinsky timber industry enterprise. She lived there in a barracks with family women, who raised Felya. Most of all, Thekla Blazhnikh, who had many children, pitied him. It was she who advised Styopa to demand a separate house when she became an honored worker in the field of culture. Styopa settled in this house, divided into two halves, together with the Blazhny family. Thekla became a mother for Felix, and she also accompanied him into the army.

At the Lespromkhoz House of Culture, Felix learned to draw posters, signs and portraits of leaders. This skill came in handy in the twenty-first regiment. Gradually, Felix moved into the club and fell in love with the ticket girl Sophia. She became his unmarried wife. When Sophia became pregnant, Felix sent her to the rear, to Thekla, and the uninvited guest Zelentsov settled in his side room. He immediately started drinking and playing cards for money. Felix could not drive him out, no matter how hard he tried. One day, the head of the club, Captain Dubelt, looked into the storeroom and found Zelentsov sleeping behind the stove. Dubelt tried to grab him by the scruff of the neck and take him out of the club, but the fighter did not give in, hit the captain with his head and broke his glasses and nose. It’s good that he didn’t kill the captain - Felix called the patrol in time. Zelentsov turned the court into a circus and theater at the same time. Even the experienced chairman of the tribunal, Anisim Anisimovich, could not cope with him. Anisim Anisimovich really wanted to sentence the obstinate soldier to death, but he had to limit himself to a penal company. Zelentsov was seen off as a hero by a huge crowd.

Part two

Demonstrative executions begin in the army. The innocent Snegirev brothers are sentenced to death for escaping. In the middle of winter, the regiment is sent to harvest grain at the nearest collective farm. After this, at the beginning of 1943, the rested soldiers went to the front.

Unexpectedly, Skorik came to the dugout of junior lieutenant Shchusya late in the evening. A long, frank conversation took place between them. Skorik informed Shchus that a wave of order number two hundred twenty-seven had reached the first regiment. Demonstrative executions began in the military district. Shchus did not know that Skorik’s name was Lev Solomonovich. Skorik's dad, Solomon Lvovich, was a scientist who wrote a book about spiders. Mom, Anna Ignatievna Slokhova, was afraid of spiders and did not let Lyova near them. Leva was studying in his second year at the university, at the philology department, when two military men came and took his dad away, soon his mother disappeared from the house, and then they pulled him into Leva’s office. There he was intimidated and he signed a renunciation from his parents. And six months later, Lyova was again called to the office and told that a mistake had occurred. Solomon Lvovich worked for the military department and was so classified that the local authorities did not know anything and shot him along with the enemies of the people. Then they took away and, most likely, shot the wife of Solomon Lvovich in order to cover their tracks. His son was apologized and allowed to enter a special military school. Leva's mother was never found, but he felt that she was alive.

Lyoshka Shestakov worked together with the Kazakhs in the kitchen. The Kazakhs worked together and also learned to speak Russian together. Leshka has never had so much free time to remember his life. His father was one of the exiled special settlers. He wooed his wife Antonina in Kazym-Mys; she was from a half-Khatyn, half-Russian family. My father was rarely at home - he worked in a fishing crew. His character was difficult and unsociable. One day the father did not return on time. The fishing boats, returning, brought the news: there was a storm, a brigade of fishermen drowned and with it the foreman Pavel Shestakov. After the death of her father, her mother went to work at Rybkoop. The fish catcher Oskin, known throughout the Ob River as a loafer nicknamed Gerka, the mountain poor man, frequented the house. Lyoshka threatened his mother that he would leave home, but nothing had any effect on her, she even became younger. Soon Gerka moved into their house. Then Leshka gave birth to two sisters: Zoya and Vera. These creatures evoked some unknown kindred feelings in Lyoshka. Leshka went to war after Gerka, a poor mountain man. Most of all, Leshka missed his sisters and sometimes remembered his first woman, Tom.

Discipline in the regiment was falling. We survived until the emergency: twin brothers Sergei and Eremey Snegiryov left the second company somewhere. They were declared deserters and looked for everywhere possible, but were not found. On the fourth day, the brothers themselves showed up at the barracks with bags full of food. It turned out that they were with their mother, in their native village, which was not far from here. Skorik grabbed his head, but there was nothing he could do to help them. They were sentenced to death. Regimental commander Gevork Azatyan ensured that only the first regiment was present at the execution. The Snegirev brothers did not believe until the very end that they would be shot; they thought that they would be punished or sent to a penal battalion like Zelentsov. Nobody believed in the death penalty, not even Skorik. Only Yashkin knew for sure that the brothers would be shot - he had already seen this. After the execution, the barracks were enveloped in an unpleasant silence. “Cursed and killed! All!" - Kolya Ryndin rumbled. At night, having drunk to the point of insensibility, Shchus was eager to punch Azatyan in the face. Senior Lieutenant Skorik was drinking alone in his room. The Old Believers united, drew a cross on paper and, led by Kolya Ryndin, prayed for the repose of the souls of the brothers.

Skorik visited Shchusya’s dugout again and said that immediately after the New Year, shoulder straps would be introduced into the army and the commanders of the people’s and tsarist times would be rehabilitated. The first battalion will be sent to the grain harvest and will remain on collective and state farms until sent to the front. The second company is already at this unprecedented work - winter threshing of grain.

At the beginning of January 1943, the soldiers of the twenty-first regiment were given shoulder straps and sent by train to Istkim station. Yashkin was sent to the district hospital for further treatment. The rest went to the Voroshilov state farm. The company moving to the state farm was caught up by the director Ivan Ivanovich Tebenkov, took Petka Musikova, Kolya Ryndin and Vaskonyan with him, and provided the rest with firewood filled with straw. The guys settled down in huts in the village of Osipovo. Shchusya was placed in a barracks with the head of the second department, Valeria Mefodievna Galusteva. She took a separate place in Shchusya’s heart, which was still occupied by his missing aunt. Lyoshka Shestakov and Grisha Khokhlak ended up in the hut of the old Zavyalovs. After a while, the well-fed soldiers began to pay attention to the girls, and this is where Grishka Khokhlak’s ability to play the button accordion came in handy. Almost all the soldiers of the first regiment were from peasant families, they knew this work well, they worked quickly and willingly. Vasya Shevelev and Kostya Uvarov repaired the collective farm combine; it was used to thresh grain that had been preserved in the heaps under the snow.

Vaskonyan ended up with the cook Anka. Anka didn’t like the strange bookworm, and the guys changed him to Kolya Ryndin. After this, the quality and calorie content of the dishes improved sharply, and the soldiers thanked the hero Kolya for this. Vaskonyan settled with the old Zavyalovs, who greatly respected him for his learning. And after some time, Ashot’s mother came to see her - regimental commander Gevork Azatyan helped her with this. He hinted that he might leave Vaskonyan at the regimental headquarters, but Ashot refused and said that he would go to the front with everyone else. He already looked at his mother with different eyes. Leaving in the morning, she felt that she was seeing her son for the last time.

A few weeks later the order came to return to the regiment's location. There was a brief but heartbreaking parting with the village of Osipovo. Before we had time to return to the barracks, there was a bathhouse and new uniforms. Sergeant Major Shpator was pleased with the rested soldiers. That evening Lyoshka Shestakov heard the song for the second time in the barracks of the twenty-first rifle regiment. The marching companies were received by General Lakhonin, the same one who once met the Red Army soldiers wandering across the field, and his longtime friend Major Zarubin. They insisted that the weakest fighters be left in the regiment. After much abuse, about two hundred people remained in the regiment, half of whom were terminally ill and would be sent home to die. The twenty-first rifle regiment got off easy. The entire regimental command was sent to positions with their companies.

Marching companies were assembled in the military town of Novosibirsk. Valeria Methodyevna came to the first company, bringing greetings and greetings from Osipov’s sweethearts and hosts, and little bags filled with all sorts of food. The regiment was taken out of the barracks at dawn on a combat alert. After speeches by numerous speakers, the regiment set off. The marching companies led to the station in a roundabout way, through remote outlying streets. They only met a woman with an empty bucket. She rushed back to her yard, threw the buckets and sweepingly baptized the army after her, admonishing her eternal defenders for the successful completion of the battle.

Book two. Bridgehead

The second book briefly describes the events of the winter, spring and summer of 1943. Most of the second book is devoted to a description of the crossing of the Dnieper in the fall of 1943.

Part one. On the eve of the crossing

After spending the spring and summer in battle, the first rifle regiment was preparing to cross the Dnieper.

On a clear autumn day, the advanced units of two Soviet fronts reached the banks of the Great River - the Dnieper. Lyoshka Shestakov, collecting water from the river, warned the newcomers: there is an enemy on the other bank, but you cannot shoot at him, otherwise the entire army will be left without water. There was already such a case on the Bryansk front, and on the banks of the Dnieper anything will happen.

An artillery regiment as part of a rifle division arrived at the river at night. Somewhere nearby there was also a rifle regiment, in which the first battalion was commanded by Captain Shchus, the first company by Lieutenant Yashkin. Also here the company commander was Kazakh Talgat. The platoons were commanded by Vasya Shevelev and Kostya Babenko; Grisha Khokhlak, with the rank of sergeant, commanded the squad.

Arriving in the Volga region in the spring, the Siberians stood for a long time in the empty, plundered villages of the Volga Germans who were destroyed and deported to Siberia. Lyoshka, as an experienced signalman, was transferred to the howitzer division, but did not forget the guys from his company. General Lakhonin’s division took its first battle in the Zadonsk steppe, standing in the way of the German troops that broke through the front. Losses in the division were insignificant. The army commander really liked the division, and he began to keep it in reserve - just in case. Such an incident occurred near Kharkov, then another emergency occurred near Okhtyrka. Lyoshka received the second Order of the Patriotic War for that battle. Colonel Beskapustin treasured Kolya Ryndin and sent him to the kitchen all the time. He left Vaskoryan at headquarters, but Ashot defied his superiors and stubbornly returned to his native company. Shchusya was wounded on the Don, he was discharged for two months, went to Osipovo and gave Valeria Methodyevna another child, this time a boy. He also visited the twenty-first regiment, visiting Azatyan. From him, Shchus learned that Sergeant Major Shpator died on the way to Novosibirsk, right in the carriage. He was buried with military honors in the regimental cemetery. Shpator wanted to lie next to the Snegirev brothers or Poptsov, but their graves were not found. After recovery, Shchus arrived near Kharkov.

The closer the Great River became, the more soldiers who could not swim became in the ranks of the Red Army. A surveillance army is moving behind the front, washed, well-fed, vigilant day and night, suspecting everyone. The deputy commander of the artillery regiment, Alexander Vasilyevich Zarubin, again had full authority over the regiment. His longtime friend and unexpected relative was Prov Fedorovich Lakhonin. Their friendship and kinship were more than strange. Zarubin met his wife Natalya, the daughter of the garrison commander, while on vacation in Sochi. They had a daughter, Ksyusha. She was raised by old people, since Zarubin was transferred to a distant region. Soon Zarubin was sent to study in Moscow. When he returned to the garrison after a long training, he found a one-year-old child in his house. The culprit for this turned out to be Lakhonin. The rivals managed to remain friends. Natalya wrote letters to the front to both of her husbands.

In preparation for crossing the Dnieper, the soldiers rested and splashed around in the river all day. Shchus, looking through binoculars at the opposite, right, bank and the left-bank island, could not understand why this particular disastrous place was chosen for the crossing. Shust gave Shestakov a special task - to establish communication across the river. Lyoshka arrived at the artillery regiment from the hospital. He got so bad there that he couldn’t think about anything other than food. On the very first evening, Leshka tried to steal a couple of crackers, was caught red-handed by Colonel Musyonok and taken to Zarubin. Soon the major singled out Leshka and put him on the phone at regimental headquarters. Now Leshka had to get at least some kind of watercraft to transport the heavy reels with communications to the right bank. He found a half-collapsed boat in a bog about two versts from the shore.

The rested people could not sleep; many had a presentiment of their death. Ashot Vaskonyan wrote a letter to his parents, making it clear that, most likely, this was his last letter from the front. He did not spoil his parents with letters, and the more he became friends with the “fighting family,” the more he distanced himself from his father and mother. Vaskonyan was rarely in battle, Shchus took care of him, pushed him somewhere to the headquarters. But from such a cunning place, Ashot was eager to go home. Shchusya also couldn’t sleep, he was again and again wondering how to cross the river while losing as few people as possible.

In the afternoon, at an operational meeting, Colonel Beskapustin gave the task: the reconnaissance platoon should be the first to leave for the right bank. While this suicide platoon will distract the Germans, the first battalion will begin the crossing. Having reached the right bank, people will move along the ravines into the depths of the enemy’s defenses as secretly as possible. By the morning, when the main forces have crossed, the battalion should enter the battle in the depths of the German defense, in the area of ​​Height Hundred. Oskin's company, nicknamed Gerka - the mountain poor man, will cover and support the Shchusya battalion. Other battalions and companies will begin to cross over on the right flank to create the impression of a mass attack.

Many did not sleep that night. Soldier Teterkin, who had been paired with Vaskonyan and had been following him since then, like Sancho Panza after his knight, brought hay, laid Ashot down and took a nap next to him. Another couple cooed peacefully in the night - Buldakov and Sergeant Finifatiev, who met in a military train on the way to the Volga. Distant explosions were heard in the night: the Germans were blowing up the Great City.

The fog lasted a long time, helping the army, prolonging people's lives by almost half a day. As soon as it became light, the shelling began. The reconnaissance platoon started a battle on the right bank. Squadrons of attack aircraft passed overhead. Fake rockets poured out of the smoke - rifle companies reached the right bank, but no one knew how many were left of them. The crossing has begun.

Part two. Crossing

The crossing brought huge losses to the Russian army. Lyoshka Shestakov, Kolya Ryndin and Buldakov were wounded. This was the turning point of the war, after which the Germans began to retreat.

The river and the left bank were covered with enemy fire. The river was boiling, full of dying people. Those who could not swim clung to those who could, and dragged them under the water, overturning rickety rafts made of raw wood. Those who returned to the left bank, to their own, were met by valiant soldiers of the foreign detachment, they shot people, and pushed them back into the river. The Shchusya battalion was one of the first to cross and delved into the ravines of the right bank. Leshka and his partner Syoma Prakhov began to cross.

If there were units here that were well trained and could swim, they would have reached the shore in combat shape. But people arrived on the island beyond the river, having already swallowed too much water and drowned their weapons and ammunition. Having reached the island, they could not move and died under machine gun fire. Lyoshka hoped that Shchusya's battalion had left the island before the Germans set it on fire. He slowly floated downstream below the common crossing, unwinding the cable - it was barely enough to reach the opposite bank. Along the way, we had to fight off drowning people who tried to overturn the flimsy boat. On the other side, Major Zarubin was already waiting for Leshka. Communication across the river was established, and the wounded Zarubin immediately began giving guidance to the artillery. Soon the fighters who survived the morning crossing began to gather around Zarubin.

The crossing continued. The advanced units hid in the ravines, trying to establish contact with each other until dawn. The Germans concentrated all their fire on the right-bank island. Oskin's company, which retained its core and the ability to carry out a combat mission, reached the right bank. Oskin himself, wounded twice, was tied to a raft by the soldiers and set adrift. He was a lucky man - he ended up among his people. From the mouth of the Cherevinka River, where Leshka Shestakov landed, to Oskin’s company that crossed the river - three hundred fathoms, but not destiny.

It was expected that the penal company would be thrown into the fire first, but it began to cross already in the morning. There was nothing to breathe above the shore, called the bridgehead. The battle has calmed down. Thrown back to Height Hundred, the thinned enemy units no longer attacked. The penalty soldiers crossed almost without loss. Far from everyone, a boat under the command of military paramedic Nelka Zykova was crossing the river. Faya was on duty at the medical post on the left bank, and Nelka was transporting the wounded across the river. Among the penalty box was Felix Boyarchik. He helped the convicted Timofey Nazarovich Sabelnikov bandage the wounded. Sabelnikov, the chief surgeon of an army hospital, was tried for having a mortally wounded man die on his table during an operation. The penal company dug in along the shore. Penalties were not given food or weapons.

Captain Shchus's battalion dispersed along the ravines and consolidated its positions. The scouts established contact with the regimental headquarters and selected the remnants of platoons and companies. The remains of Yashkin’s company were also found. Yashkin himself was also alive. Their task was simple: to go as deep as possible along the right bank, gain a foothold and wait for the partisans to strike from the rear and land from the sky. But there was no communication, and from the shooting the battalion commander understood that the Germans were cutting off his battalion from the crossing. At dawn it was calculated: four hundred and sixty people were digging in on the slope of Height One - all that was left of three thousand. The scouts reported that Zelentsov had a connection. Shchus sent three signalmen to him. Shchus remembered two of them, but did not recognize the third - Zelentsov, who had now become Shorokhov.

Shestakov anchored the boat below the mouth of the Cherevinka, behind the toe, and with relief returned under the ravine where the fighters were digging in and digging minks in the high slope. Finifatiev almost brought a longboat full of ammunition to the right bank, but ran it aground. Now we had to get this longboat. Here signalmen arrived from Colonel Beskapustin, who, as it turned out, was not far from Cherevinka. The longboat was dragged to the mouth of the river in the morning until the fog cleared. At sunrise, Nelya and Faya arrived for the wounded Zarubin, but he refused to swim and remained to wait for a replacement.

The command clarified the intelligence data and sank. It turned out: they recaptured from the enemy about five kilometers of coast in width and up to a kilometer in depth. The valiant commanders spent tens of thousands of tons of ammunition, fuel and twenty thousand people killed, drowned and wounded on this conquest. The losses were staggering.

Lyoshka Shestakov went to the water to wash himself and met Felix Boyarchik. Some time later, Boyarchik and Sabelnikov were guests of Zarubin’s detachment. Boyarchik was wounded in the Oryol region, treated at the Tula hospital, and sent to a transit point there. From there Felix ended up with the artillerymen, in the control platoon of the fourth battery. Recently, an artillery brigade left the battle, where it lost two guns, the third gun was separated from the battery and hidden in the bushes. In the Soviet country, vehicles were always valued more than human life, so commanders knew that they would not be praised for lost weapons. The battery had written off two guns, and the third was rusting in the bushes without a wheel. The battery commander “discovered” the missing wheel while Boyarchik was on guard. So Felix ended up in court, and then in a penal company. After everything he had experienced, Felix did not want to live.

At night, on two pontoons, a selected foreign detachment, armed with new machine guns, was transported to the bridgehead. Along with the detachment, ammunition and weapons were transported - for the contingent condemned to atone for guilt with their blood. They forgot to transport food and medicine. Having unloaded, the pontoons quickly headed back - too many important matters awaited the warriors across the river on the other side of the river.

Ostsee Hans Holbach and Bavarian Max Kusempel were partners from the very beginning of the war. Together they were captured by the Soviets, they escaped from there together, and through Holbach’s stupidity they ended up back at the front. When the penalty box moved into battle, Felix Boyarchik shouted: “Kill me!” rushed straight into the trench towards these Germans. Felix was not killed, he was captured, although he wanted to die with all his might. Timofey Nazarovich Sabelnikov was one of the first to die in this battle.

This day was especially alarming for Shchusya. Having killed the penal company, the Germans began to liquidate the partisan detachment. The battle lasted two hours, by the end of it the planes were buzzing in the sky, and the landing began. This operation was carried out so ineptly that a selected, carefully trained landing detachment of 1,800 people died before reaching the ground. Shchus understood that now the Germans would attack his detachment. Soon he was informed that Kolya Ryndin was seriously wounded. Shchus called Lyoshka Shestakov by phone and instructed him to transport Kolya to the other side. A whole squad was dragging Kolya Ryndin to the boat. Vaskonyan pushed the boat away and stood on the shore for a long time, as if saying goodbye. Arriving at the left bank, Leshka barely dragged the wounded man to the medical battalion.

Lyoshka’s journey across the river did not go unnoticed. Almost all telephone lines laid from the left bank fell silent. The head of communications ordered Shestakov to transport communications from one bank to the other. Major Zarubin understood that Leshka was being forced to do someone else’s work, but remained silent, leaving the soldier to decide for himself. Taking several wounded people into the boat, Leshka barely made it to the left bank. They gave him a reel of cable and two assistants who could not swim. When we swam back, it was already light. The Germans began to fire at the boat as soon as it was in the middle of the river, where the fog had already risen. The rotten, fragile little boat capsized, Lyoshka’s assistants immediately sank to the bottom, Lyoshka himself managed to swim to the side. He worked his legs with all his might, trying to get to the shore without thinking about the dead that lay at the bottom of the river. With the last of his strength, Leshka reached the sandy shore. Two fighters grabbed him by the arms and dragged him under the cover of the ravine. Left to his own devices, Shestakov crawled into cover and lost consciousness. Lyokha Buldakov took care of him.

Opening his eyes, Shestakov saw the face of Zelentsov-Shorokhov in front of him. He reported that a battle was underway, under the height of Hundred the Germans were finishing off the Shchusya battalion. Having risen, Leshka reported to Zarubin that it was not possible to establish communication, and asked permission to leave for a while. The major did not ask where and why. Lyoshka crossed the Cherevinka and began to quietly make his way upstream. Further along the ravine, Leshka discovered a German observation post. A little further he discovered a place where a Russian detachment came across the Germans. Among the dead were Vaskonyan and his faithful partner Teterkin.

Meanwhile, Lieutenant Colonel Slavutich came to Zarubin. He asked the major to give him people to take the German observation post. Zarubin sent Finifatiev, Mansurov, Shorokhov and Shestakov, who arrived in time. During this operation, Lieutenant Colonel Slavutich and Mansurov were killed, Finifatiev was wounded. From the German prisoners they learned that the enemy headquarters was located in the village of Velikiye Krinitsy. At half past four, an artillery attack began on the height of Sto, the guns bombed the village, turning it into ruins. By evening the height was taken. Chief of Staff Ponayotov moved to the right bank to replace Zarubin and brought some food. They carried the major into the boat; he no longer had the strength to walk on his own. All night the wounded sat and lay on the shore, hoping that the boat would come for them.

Nelka Zykova's father, a boilermaker from the Krasnoyarsk locomotive depot, was declared an enemy of the people and shot without trial. Mother, Avdotya Matveevna, was left with four daughters. The most beautiful and healthy of them was Nelka. Nelka’s godfather, doctor Porfir Danilovich, enrolled her in nursing courses. Nelka went to the front immediately after the start of the war and met Faya. Faya had a terrible secret: her entire body, from neck to ankles, was covered with thick fur. Her parents, regional operetta artists, blithely called Faya a monkey. Neli loved Faya like a sister, looked after her and protected her as best she could. Faya could no longer cope without her friend.

At night, Shorokhov replaced Shestakov at the telephone. During the war, Shorokhov felt good, as if he had entered into a risky business. He was the son of the dispossessed peasant Markel Zherdyakov from the Pomeranian village of Studenets. In the far corner of my memory it was imprinted: he, Nikitka Zherdyakov, was running after the cart, and his father was reining in his horse. Workers from a peat harvesting village picked him up and gave him a shovel. After working for two years, he ended up in the company of thieves, and off he went: prison, prison, camp. Then escape, robbery, first murder, again prison, camp. By this time, Nikitka had become a camp wolf, changing several surnames - Zherdyakov, Cheremnykh, Zelentsov, Shorokhov. He had one goal: to survive, to get hold of the tribunal judge Anisim Anisimovich and to thrust a knife into his enemy.

Soon a hundred soldiers, several boxes of ammunition and grenades, and some food were transported to the bridgehead. Beskapustin demanded all this. Shchus occupied a strong dugout, recaptured from the Germans. He understood that this would not last long. In the morning, the Germans again began to attack the Shchusya battalion, with which a temporary connection had been established, cutting off the escape route to the river. And at this disastrous hour, the bleating voice of the head of the political department, Lazar Isakovich Musenok, was heard from across the river. Taking advantage of his precious connection, he began to read an article from the Pravda newspaper. Shchus was the first to break down. To prevent a conflict, Beskapustin intervened and disconnected the line.

The day passed in continuous battles. The enemy cleared the height of Sto and pushed back the sparse Russian army. A large army was amassing on the left bank, but no one knew for what. The morning was hectic. Somewhere in the upper reaches of the river, the Germans crushed a barge with sugar beets, the current washed the vegetables to the bridgehead and the “harvesting” began in the morning. All day long there was fighting in the air above the bridgehead. The remnants of the first battalion suffered especially hard. Finally, the long-awaited evening descended on the earth. The head of the political department of the division, Musyonok, was allowed to work with the rebellious coast. This man, being at war, did not know her at all. Beskapustin held back his commanders with all his might.

Lyokha Buldakov could only think about food. He tried to remember his native Pokrovka, his father, but his thoughts again turned to food. Finally, he decided to get something from the Germans and decisively stepped into the darkness. At the deadest hour of the night, Buldakov and Shorokhov fell into Cherevinka, dragging three German backpacks full of provisions behind them, and divided it among everyone.

In the morning the Germans stopped active operations. The division headquarters demanded that the situation be restored. At the end of his strength, Colonel Beskapustin decided to counterattack the enemy. Officials from the regiment's headquarters, swearing loudly, gathered people along the shore. Buldakov did not want to leave Finifatiev, as if he felt that he would not see him again. During the daytime bombardment, the high bank of the river sank and buried hundreds of people, and Finifatiev also died there.

Beskapustin’s regiment was successful at first, but then the Beskapustins ran into a mined slope of the Sto Height. The soldiers threw down their weapons and rushed back to the river. By the end of the second day, Beskapustin had only about a thousand healthy soldiers left, and Shchus had about half a thousand in his battalion. At noon they began the attack again. If Buldakov’s boots had fit, he would have long ago reached the enemy machine gun, but he was wearing tight boots tied to his feet with string. Lyokha fell into a machine gun nest from the rear. Already without camouflage, he walked toward the sound of a machine gun and was so focused on the target that he did not notice the niche covered by a raincoat. A German officer jumped out of the niche and unloaded the clip of his pistol into Buldakov’s back. Lyokha wanted to rush at him, but lost a precious moment due to his tight boots. Hearing shots behind them, an experienced pair of machine gunners - Golbach and Kuzempel - thinking that the Russians had bypassed them, took to their heels.

Buldakov was alive and beginning to feel himself. The last day of the bridgehead was somehow especially psychotic. There were many unexpected fights and unjustified losses. Despair, even madness, gripped those fighting on the Velikokrynitsky bridgehead, and the forces of the warring parties were already running out. Only stubbornness forced the Russians to hold on to this bank of the river. By evening, rain poured over the bridgehead, which revived Buldakov and gave him strength. With a groan, he rolled over onto his stomach and crawled towards the river.

An impenetrable cloud of lice covered the people on the beachhead. The heavy smell of decomposing drowned people floated over the river like a thick cloud. Height One had to be abandoned again. The Germans hit everything that tried to move. And over the still working communication line they asked to be patient. Night fell, Shestakov took up his next duty. The Germans fired heavily along the front line. Leshka already got on the line several times - the connection was cut off. When he once again restored the line, he was thrown into a ravine by a mine explosion. Leshka did not reach the bottom of the ravine, fell on one of the ledges and lost consciousness. Already in the morning Shorokhov discovered that Leshka had disappeared. He found Shestakov in a ravine. Lyoshka sat clutching the end of the wire in his fist, his face was disfigured by the explosion. Shorokhov restored contact, returned to the phone, and reported to Ponayotov that Leshka had died. Ponayotov chased the reluctant Shorokhov after Leshka and got a boat sent from the other bank to fetch the wounded. Nelka quickly organized the crossing. Approaching the boat after some time, she found a wounded man there. He lay with his arms thrown over the side. It was Buldakov. Despite the overload, Nelya took him with her.

Around noon, up the river about ten kilometers from the bridgehead, artillery preparation began. The Soviet command once again launched a new offensive, taking into account previous mistakes. This time a powerful blow was delivered. Construction of a crossing began on the river. What began in the newspapers would be called the battle for the river. At dawn, a crossing was also started down the river. The remnants of the units of the Velikokrynitsky bridgehead were ordered to join forces with their neighbors. Everyone who could move went into battle. Shchus walked ahead with a pistol in his hands. Soldiers from the new bridgehead rushed towards them in a crowd.

In the farmstead, where several burnt-out huts remained, food, tobacco, and soap were distributed to the soldiers. Having tied a shortened raincoat under his stigma, Musyonok flew along the shore. On the outskirts of the farm, in an empty, half-burnt hut, officers who had survived the battles were sleeping on straw. Little Musyonk flew here too and made a scandal about the absence of a sentry. Shchus couldn’t stand it and again became rude to the head of the division’s political department. Working as a correspondent for Pravda, Musyonok wrote scathing articles about the enemies of the people, and drove many people into camps. Musyonka was hated and feared in the division. He knew this very well and climbed into every hole. Musyonok lived like a king; he had four cars at his personal disposal. In the back of one of them, housing was equipped, where the typist Isolda Kazimirovna Holedysskaya, a beauty from a repressed Polish family who already had the Order of the Red Star and the medal “For Military Merit,” was in charge. Nelka had only two medals “For Courage”.

Scolding Shchusya, the combat commander, like a boy, Musyonok could not stop. He did not see the captain's glassy eyes and face distorted by a spasm. Comrade Musyonok did not know these tormented hard-working officers well. If I had known, I would not have entered this hut. But Beskapustin knew them well, and he did not like Shchusya’s gloomy silence. Some time later, Shchus found Musyonka’s car. His driver Brykin fiercely hated his boss, and at Shchusya’s request he willingly left for the whole night to get the gas key. Late in the evening, Shchus returned to the car and found that Musyonok was already sleeping soundly. Shchus climbed into the cab and drove the car straight towards the minefield. I chose a slow slope, accelerated the car and jumped off easily. There was a powerful explosion. Shchus returned to the hut and fell asleep peacefully.

On the right bank of the river, fallen soldiers were buried and countless corpses were dragged into a huge pit. On the left bank there was a magnificent funeral for the deceased head of the political department of the guards division. Next to the luxurious gilded coffin stood Isolda Kazimirovna in a black lace scarf. There was chamber music and heartfelt speeches. A hill with a heap of flowers and a wooden obelisk rose above the river. Beyond the river, more and more holes were filled with human mess. In a few years, a man-made sea will appear in this place, and pioneers and war veterans will lay wreaths at Musyonok’s grave.

Soon Soviet troops will cross the Great River and connect all four bridgeheads. The Germans will pull their main forces here, while the Russians will break through the front at a distance from these four bridgeheads. The Wehrmacht troops will still launch a counteroffensive. It will hit Lakhonin's corps hard. Lakhonin himself will receive the post of army commander and take the Shchusya division under his wing. Colonel Beskapustin Avdey Kondratyevich will become a general. Nelka Zykova will be wounded again. In her absence, Faya's faithful friend will commit suicide. Company commanders Yashkin and Lieutenant Colonel Zarubin will receive the title of Hero and will be discharged for disability. Having bled the enemy dry in the autumn battles, two powerful fronts will begin to deeply envelop enemy troops. Retreat in winter conditions will turn into a stampede. Hungry, sick, covered with a cloud of lice, foreigners will die in the thousands, and finally they will be trampled, crushed by the tracks of tanks, and blown to pieces by shells from the pursuing Soviet troops.

"Cursed and Killed"

Even during the war of 1941-45, and after it in even greater numbers and density, poems, poems, stories and novels began to flow about this terrible and protracted war. And they began to dry up, perhaps only towards the end of the 20th century. At first glance, it may seem strange that Viktor Astafiev, who personally experienced the worst conditions of this war, wounded, shell-shocked, almost killed, for almost 40 years of his literary activity remained almost silent about that Great War, except for occasional slips of the tongue. And only in the 1990s, suddenly - and late from so many? – published a two-volume book “Cursed and Killed.”

Victor Astafiev The terrible truth about the war

I reject any idea that Astafiev was deliberately silent, realizing that his book would not pass the censorship. Moreover, for reasons of comfort: not to be naked? Not like that, not like his character! Astafiev remained silent for a long time according to the law of Russian folk lips, not invented by him. Our people, through the entire depth of their history, have always been late to speak out, except in melodious folklore. Astafiev was crowded everything he had experienced so inexhaustibly that he had to experience human powerlessness to express all this humanity, and even compete with a multitude of easily sliding explanations. And when did he publish? At 70 years old, he is a one-eyed disabled man, far from the successful capitals.

And his book turned out to be so impossible for the usual acceptance that it was better for the public not to notice, not to notice it too much - or to unconvincingly trash it as “slander.” Outweighed the first.

Astafiev begins the picture of the war with cruel fidelity from a reserve rifle regiment in front of Novosibirsk - in a place, to say the least, unsuitable for human life - with the ferocious situation of damp basements in the forest, in fact, without built-in latrines (instead - the surrounding forest), without arranged heating, without baths – cave life, where sanitation measures consist of a solution of carbolic acid and chlorine squelching on the floors. At the end of 1942, 18-year-old recruits born in 1924 were brought to these “barracks” in the winter, sweeping the Siberian expanse all over the place. (The breath of the disturbed depths of the people! - from the Old Believer hinterlands to the most modern thieves at rock.) A terrifying picture of dirt and untidiness - and it’s named quarantine. After a while, after the marching companies are sent to the front, the quarantined ones are transferred to the vacated, but no better equipped, premises of the sent ones. Uniforms and shoes are not adjusted to size, and they also smear some kind of foul-smelling disinfectant in the hair areas. Lice swarm (and only crawl off the dead on their own). You cannot wash yourself in an unheated bath. Potatoes not only unpeeled, but not washed from the soil, are poured into the cauldron. And through such a chilling life, the defenders of the homeland are trained on a “parade ground” (a dug up field) with wooden mock-ups of rifles - and straw effigies of “Krauts”. (To the fallen one: “Get up, scoundrel!” - and they kick.) In such conditions, the author writes, “half is busy with business, and half is getting food for themselves” (revelry for at rock!). (It turns out that the residents are defending themselves from thieves with daggers and axes.) Goners appear, and on the transition to spring, the storekeepers are massively engulfed in “night blindness.” The general helplessness of everyone, “sluggish agreement with everything that is happening.” Yes, “they’d better go to the front as soon as possible,” “they won’t send you further than the front, they won’t keep you worse than here,” “to one end, or something.” – Vegetable storage facilities placed on the bulkhead steal potatoes, but where can they be baked? They manage to lower them by weight into the sparkling chimneys of officer dugouts - and how burnt and how half-baked - they burst into diarrhea. (Astafiev more than once calls these barracks the “Devil’s Pit”; that’s what he also called the first half of the book.)

But for the health-impaired reserves, political studies are also carried out carefully and regularly. Astafiev also quotes pieces from the Information Bureau reports - now again striking our forgetful memory: what terrible losses the Germans are suffering, how many tanks and guns they are destroying every day! – but the battlefields, populated areas, and dark fog are not named. But political studies in themselves are a “blessed comfort” for the soldiers: while the political commissar murmurs how caringly “the country and the party are thinking about you,” to everyone, and the reservists have at least some time to sit in peace and relative warmth. (However, the commissar notices their drowsiness, from time to time he commands: “get up! sit down!”) But who believes these victorious reports, and on November 7, after reading Stalin’s speech - amazing! - “tears flowed from the storerooms”, and “they parted with a friendly, menacing song.” (And of course – forced singing along with the marching of the hungry and exhausted.)

All this flows through Astafiev not as a literary presentation, not as a literary claim, but as a sick memory of natural life, it torments him, overwhelms him with cruel real knowledge. The author singles out about a dozen fighters about whom he makes extensive digressions - sometimes so much so that he even inserts their previous lives in separate chapters. (The inflexible Old Believer giant Ryndin is depicted in vivid detail. The author, as it were, removed himself from the book.) This method enhances our carnal sensation from 18-year-old poor fellows. Where he gets very irritated - and gives himself direct freedom to express himself on his own behalf: “this scoundrel, insolent snout, spitting saliva in fits and starts, rogue inclinations, moral monster, scarecrow...”

These major authorial distractions in time greatly enrich the reader’s perspective (and Astafiev himself provides channels for the pain of the past). Here is the dispossession of Cossacks throughout the Irtysh and Ob. And How special settlers died in barges while rafting them to the North. (And how they bought off victims from the guards; a beautiful woman saved one baby, someone else’s child, by giving up her body to the guard, and we know of other cases of such ransoming.) “Special settlers” in Arkhangelsk also end up here. Lots of sad family biographies. With sympathy and truth about a dispossessed family: “The downtrodden Russian people, who do not remember evil, - where did they learn delicacy?” – The battle near Khasan also comes into this – and with details that have probably not been covered before: how a cadet company, having been pointlessly kept for a day in the rain, was sent to attack a hill “to smash the presumptuous samurai to smithereens, to cover our banners with unfading glory” – and the exhausted cadets “they went up a steep slope in a frontal attack, and the Japanese shot them from a height and did not allow them to engage in a bayonet fight.” And then, during the negotiations, the Japanese swaggered over the tyranny of the Soviet rulers and received all the compensation. (And in the Soviet memory remained... our glorious victory.) - And many more, from an eyewitness, details of the disorder in the Red Army. - Here is the memory of her platoon commander, recovering from injury, about the battles near Smolensk in 1941: “fresh units, late for the battles for the city, were swept away by an avalanche of retreating troops,” involved in her panic movement. “We tried to gain a foothold on poorly prepared lines, but the damned word “encirclement” immediately overtook people - and they fled in heaps, crowds, herds and scattered.” “The best fighters died without seeing the enemy, without even being in the trenches.”

Such deep digressions, very typical of Astafiev’s pen, often disrupt the structure of the book, but they always enrich the content with new material. Here flashes General Lakhonin, a representative of the Voronezh Front, expecting reinforcements from our rifle regiment (and wisely leaving the weakest ones aside from sending them, let them get treatment). Meanwhile, he also remembers the Totsky camps in Orenburg - more ferocious than ours here. There they are - in the desert steppe, the building materials for the barracks are willows and bushes, from them - and canes instead of sticks for the “gun” model and support for the goners. The reserves slept in sand and dust without undressing. Sandstorms, dysentery epidemic. “It happened that dead Red Army soldiers lay forgotten for weeks in half-collapsed dugouts, and their rations were received by the living. So as not to dig graves, they buried them in dugouts” - “They dug up the burial grounds of dead cattle, trimmed the meat from them.” And “none of those who checked dared to report on the disastrous condition and insist on the closure of such a military camp: all ranks firmly remembered the words of Comrade Stalin that “we have never had such a strong rear.”

During the difficult months of their stay in the reserve regiment, the reservists increasingly understand the purposelessness of their existence here: there is no shooting training, no tactical training, everything is with mock-ups, it’s not really the same war. And they are kicked out of the barracks by the rise. Primitive life. Still the same blind-skinned soldiers, supported by the walls, wander, if not to the trash heap, for peelings and potato peels, then to the barracks, and there are still fights for places on the upper bunks. The number of goons in the regiment is growing. When a company is assigned to battalion duty in the kitchen, everyone rushes to stuff their mouths with someone else’s food and wild artificial lard instead of natural fat.

Suddenly, one after another, two tribunal hearings burst into this barracks life. The first of them quickly ends with the victory of the accused criminal and such helpless disgrace of the tribunal that at first the whole episode seems fictitious: it doesn’t happen! (Why would socially close and not gain the upper hand?) But soon the next second tribunal “corrects” the impression: a real reprisal against defenseless simpletons, privates, two Snegirev brothers. Their home village was about thirty miles from the barracks, and they simply decided to go home in bad weather. (The mother also wrote about the joy of home: the cow calved!) But their absence lasted up to two days (they returned with a treat for friends), they were spotted, registered in a special department - and here the tribunal did not waver: shoot both, immediately and publicly. Many, including those sentenced themselves, did not believe it at first: they frighten, they will soften it. No matter how it is! And this execution, described in detail by Astafiev, will be etched into Russian literature with the cruellest picture. (And the mother of those shot was sent to prison, where she soon went crazy.) And our readers, raised on Soviet “military prose” for half a century, did not experience such stupefaction.

Numerous voluminous and weighty digressions, of course, break the overall structure, the composition is not held together, and the language of the book is not easy, the texture of the text becomes heavy. From Astafiev’s early works, those spontaneous outbursts of language, bright self-born words, faded and decreased in number. The author’s speech has moved towards a well-worn business presentation, alternating its levels, sometimes undeveloped sets flash through, such as “surrounding reality”, “negatively influenced”, “did not want to lag behind the advanced culture”, “scientifically speaking, spent energy”, “confusion in the ranks "(at the general's arrival), "according to the historical moment." And directly explanatory phrases like “Stalin habitually deceived the people, lied outright in his festive November speech”, “our beloved baptized people are on the rails of advanced experience”, and often inappropriate irony, attempts at sad jokes: “condemned by the progressive public”, “alien” ideas of the proletariat", "working tirelessly in the field of maintaining morale." – And he often expresses his hostility head-on, head-on: “slick hawks with the faces and grips of courtyard lackeys”, “at the height of demonism, in the kingdom of a holy fool’s despot.” Doesn't bother to organize the phrase. - Sometimes - quotes from the prayers of the Old Believer (the title of the entire book is taken from there, according to an unknown cut: “And they will be cursed and killed by God” - that’s where).

The final chapters of The Devil's Pit suddenly bring us a relief change in the entire atmosphere. This is why: two companies (which the author followed in more detail) were transferred to a state farm near nearby Iskitim for the belated harvesting of dying grain (a typical picture for the villages of the first two war winters, exposed by male labor - this is the most important thing in order for us to see the whole situation more fully ): which grain fell off in the frost, which became damp in the thaw. Broken tubes of stems - “as if funeral candles were smoldering day and night over a deceased field of grain, grains that had already wept tears.” In the economy of that state farm, “everything smelled of decay,” “the combines were like antediluvian animals that wandered and wandered along the wilted waves of grain and stopped, dejectedly lowering their trunks.” The reserve soldiers are enlivened and inspired by the separation from the “stinking, dark, almost rotten barracks, which smells like a grave,” and by receiving healthy peasant food, and from the abundant presence of girls. But most of all, Astafiev himself comes alive with his soul - from immersing himself in his native rural environment. And in general, always prone to deviations from the narrative core - here Astafiev willingly surrenders to a complete change of genre: chapter after chapter flows poem rural life. Here is a place for saving work, and for songs, for youth courtship, and club dancing. And here the author’s nature began to sparkle, he sweeps his gaze, speech and soul - over the entire history of agriculture from its origins in humanity - when “the planet with sprouts attaches a person to the earth, rewards him with an invincible love for the grain field, for every earthly plant.” And - century after century, when “a parasite who knew no shame arose on the earth” and “spit in the hand that gives bread”, “brought sterility to the most fertile Russian land, extinguished humility in the minds of the most good-natured people.” “It is unknown to whom the land is guilty. And she is only to blame for long-suffering.” In these reflective considerations we will also read about “Galifa drunken commissars”, “disorganized gangs screaming about world proletarian equality.” Here, nearby, we are told the details of the life of wolves, yes, for balance to everything, we must not forget the intelligent life: there is one Armenian soldier in the company, and his mother comes to him, and the level of their conversations is corresponding. - Suddenly - episodes of good-natured humor, suddenly - lyrical ones.

And the happy days are flowing away - and the time has come for these children of Narym special settlers to be “thrown into the fire of war like straw with a fork.” While Voronezh has not yet been completely surrendered to the Germans (a small patch of the city remains), the Siberian Rifle Division is being formed. If only sick soldiers could be treated, the barracks need to be emptied, says the set born in 1925. But - when these teach combat “in a situation close to combat”? The executed Snegirev brothers are still fresh in everyone’s memory... The marching companies are suddenly dressed in real combat uniforms, they are transformed! They leave the village hugging the girls. Before the departure, “The storm was roaring, the rain was noisy,” they had never sung so unanimously for “the vile barracks life, the cattle existence.” Through this farewell song, “the hidden power in these young guys” broke through. And only among them the platoon commander, who had already been at the front and was wounded, began to cry from the song: “he knew what awaited those singers in the war.” - Who then baptizes them (to baptize now is inconvenient, it’s not allowed, even adult peasants don’t all dare.) - The corroded political commissar gives his farewell words - and the brass band takes off. (We are being sent now - to a military town near Novosibirsk, to the old pre-revolutionary barracks - “brick, with thick walls, dry, warm, spacious, with many service rooms, washrooms, toilets”... They will see how it was under the tsar. And the author sighs widely after : “Russian people, how naked and unforgiving your heart is!”)

-----------------------

In the very transition from the rear half of the book to the second, front half, Astafiev, naturally, could not stay at the point at And the understanding, understanding and language of a simple ordinary soldier. This transition of eight months, through the height of the stormy year of 1943 right up to its autumn, could only be outlined with a rare dotted line - in the general’s understanding and in terms of general reports (“they completed the task with honor”, ​​etc.) - and go ahead, refrain from universal manner. However, interspersed with that - and about the devastating battle around Kharkov, silent in our country (and still forgotten), in the spring of 1943: “Instead of one sixth of Paulus’s army, which died at Stalingrad, they strangled in a noose, placed in the liquid spring snows, six Soviet armies,” “the valiant troops scurried even more zealously,” the Germans, having closed the ring, “took twenty Soviet generals prisoner at once,” “Russia does not cease to supply cannon fodder.” (Yes, for those we have printed judgments - after all, it was necessary to wait half a century...) And then, by the summer, we already knew the Siberian Rifle Division, with the already known gene. Lakhonina, “switched to a tough active defense,” and with her the artillery regiment of Major Zarubin, also known to us from the first part.

Through all the inconsistency of these revelations - the author must, by the beginning of the autumn actions on the Dnieper - hold out intact some of his characters from the first half of the book. And many of them have already faded and dissolved. But after all the exhaustion, they also got a quiet, short stay in the spring in the “Republic of Volga Germans” cleared of Germans. Still, they recovered from the period of stockpiling - and now they are ready to fight further. (Here is the unfunny, even ironic humor of their mutual conversations.) Here is the surviving commander of their company, Shchus (the same one who was once rescued as a boy from dispossession by an escort from the Yenisei barge) - and now the battalion commander, captain. And the fighter Lyoshka Shestakov, who was modestly played in the background in the 1st part, now, as if an experienced liaison officer, became the senior telephone operator of a howitzer battery, thereby at the center of the upcoming battle on the Dnieper.

This entire transition through 1943 could not be given a coherent presentation, especially with Astafiev’s organic manner of distractions - landscape (Lyoshka’s longing for the Ob in comparison with the Dnieper), soldiers’ and even commanders’ jokes, and their previous family stories, or their sluggish philosophical reasoning (not without quoting Merezhkovsky...). Taken together, all these episodes (and also brushing aside the political officers - which should also not be forgotten) create a slow prolongation. The writing is sweeping, unrestrained, the transitions from piece to piece are not clearly marked, don’t ask for a single end-to-end style, the work seems to be done not with a chisel, but with a very frayed brush. And the Dnieper - here, in front of us, it is inevitable to cross - but with weapons and with heavy telephone coils - on what? everyone is on the lookout for “watercraft”, destroying sheds for boards, and Lyoshka cleverly finds a hidden boat and hides it from his rivals further. And all this took many, many pages.

There are no floating devices, and they won’t be sent from anywhere - you still have to swim on your bellies. And you can’t wait: the enemy is still strengthening his shore. Send a reconnaissance platoon - a suicide platoon - across the river, and, already at the beginning of artillery preparation, the battalion begin crossing to the steep right bank, and then make their way, climb the ravines - to the German heights. But during a night operation, what can you provide?.. The first intended ferrymen “were given in advance vodka, sugar, tobacco and porridge without quota.” And the regimental political officer opens the party meeting - to rush at the last moment to accept fighters into the party - “do not disgrace the honor of the Soviet soldier! to the last drop of blood! The Motherland is behind us! Comrade Stalin hopes." (Some will forget about this reception - and then they will be looking for them in hospitals and after the war, collecting increased party contributions.) - And here, in the last hours before the start of the night crossing, - Astafiev shows patience in three or four pages to outline an old insignificant meeting two very minor characters. And that's not all. Astafiev experiences a constant spiritual thirst from time to time, at a moment that he considers important, to interrupt his presentation - for his direct moral appeal to the reader. So here, before the crossing: “How the human mind must become clouded, how the heart must become rusty, so that it is tuned only to black, vengeful deeds, because they, great sins, will then have to be atone for” (I interrupt the quotation, the author will still remember the medieval customs - and that’s not all.)

This book is a unique case when the war is described by a simple infantryman, a “black war worker,” who at that time did not even imagine that he would become a writer.

The description of the Dnieper crossing, with all its disorder, obscurity, even contradictions and invisibility of individual movements, is vital precisely because of its confusion, not covered by a single general explanation. But an operational review is not available even to an experienced officer, and even then after a long time from the event. Also with a huge delay, with a sweeping look, Astafiev can write about this crossing: “These first units will, of course, die without even reaching the shore, but still an hour, two, three, five people will walk, fall into the river, swim, gurgle in the water until the German is exhausted and uses up his ammunition.” Should we reproach the author for not showing this mass scale, like “20 thousand were killed during the crossing”? But we read how telephone operator Lyoshka, saving himself and his coils in the boat (the major’s task is to extend communications along the river bottom), hits the heads of others, our drowning soldiers, with an oar, so that they, clinging, would not capsize the boat and ruin the operation. There are no gasps from anyone over the freshly killed, simple life. Although you can whine from this mess from the spontaneity of the retelling - but there are more and more new episodes, and all are true. There is no stable meaningful connection between the episodes - so the soldier only sees fragments of events, much less understands the tactical situation.

Perhaps with a plank longboat: it is loaded with ammunition and weapons ahead of time, and needs to be pushed to the river island. “Hundreds of times it was said where, to whom, with whom, how to sail, but all this became confused, mixed up” when cannon and machine gun fire began from both sides. Battalion commander Shchus and his company commanders are driving in strained, hoarse voices: “Forward! hurry up! To the island! And the fighters, having thrown their shoes and pouches onto the longboat, wander, swim and pull as much as they grab the sides themselves. Someone screams that they are drowning. Inexplicably, the longboat still reaches the island. Now - go around the island and into the channel under the steep right bank! “But the channel was lifted into the air, splashed, explosions tore its bottom” - and more liquid mud filled the water. In wet clothes they dragged on, and the Germans continuously illuminated the channel with rockets for better shelling. Some of our people were stuck on the island, others were already running into the cracks of the right-bank ravines, and there they squeezed into the saving soil or tried to climb higher. Some drank too much water, some drowned their weapons, and in a matter of minutes German planes appeared and hung yellow lanterns on their parachutes - and so did the Soviet ones, seeding tracer bullets. Clutching each other, people drowned in bundles.

In this midst, Astafiev, true to himself, inserts a preachy digression: “Dear God, why, why did you choose these people and throw them here, into the fiery boiling hell of the earth, which they created? Why did you turn your face away from them and leave them to be torn to pieces by Satan? Has the guilt of all mankind really fallen on the heads of these unfortunates, driven to death by someone else’s will... Here, in this disastrous place, answer why you are punishing the innocent? Thy judgment is blind and terrible, Thy vengeance flies with a striking arrow in the wrong place and not at those who need to be struck. You look after it poorly, you maintain the order you created in a bad way.” (Astafiev’s appeals to God, according to his various works, are not rare, but is he a believer? Or a God-fighter? Let us remember here how the title of the book was born: cursed - by whom?)

V. Rasputin reproached Astafiev for this book for “negative patriotism.” Indeed, not a single fighter, not even the best officers, think about their homeland: at best, only about their duty, and the soldiers think about how to survive, where to get food, and their earnings and funerals. But this is the truth. “Let me sacrifice for my homeland, let me take a risk for my homeland” - this never happens.

The end of the crossing and subsequent battles on the German coast are described in detail by Astafiev.

Fresh - several scenes with penalty boxers (and why they ended up in the penalty area, by what wild accident). But although there are episodes in the book with NKVD landings– they seemed to pass through people’s souls without any consequences. Except that sex people are talked about unnaturally openly. And understanding what exactly is being introduced Soviet regime- almost not. The author’s own biography could have taught him bitterly? But the feeling of how many millions hated the Soviet regime before that war and wanted to “suffocate” from it - this not at all. (If the author is horrified by war, then only as a pacifist, and not as a victim of this regime. His philosophy seems to be anarchism, with no sign of statehood.)

“The river was thick with corpses that had begun to limp, with their eyes pecked out, with foaming, as if soaped faces, torn, smashed by shells, mines, and riddled with bullets. The river smelled bad, but the sickly-sweet spirit of roasted human meat covered all sorts of odors like a layer, floating under the ravine in a stable place. The sappers sent to pull the corpses out of the water and bury them could not cope with the job. Holding their caps to their noses, they used hooks to pull the dead into the water, but the corpses, stubbornly circling, stuck to the shore, hit the stones, and sometimes an arm or leg was torn off with a hook and thrown into the water. Damned place, dead world"; and “sometimes carrying the mutilated corpse to the pool, to the guard, there the corpse was picked up, put on its feet and, raising its arms, spinning in a dead dance, it plunged into the sleepy depths.” And later in the fall, “the water in the river decreased. And that’s why the corpses dried up... All the creeks and bends were littered with black, bloated corpses, a gray, washed-out rag was being dragged along the river, in which, already indifferent to everything, the dead were floating face down somewhere... Flies, crows, rats celebrated their terrible celebration on the shore feast. The crows pecked out the eyes of the drowned, gorged themselves on human flesh and, sitting comfortably, dozed on the floating dead.” (And also: sappers completely rob the dead by searching their pockets.)

How many millions of dead did this soldier have to survive to write something like this to us half a century later!

But there are also strange, invigorating inserts (“Day One”, after the crossing).

Separate chapters follow the biblical rhythm: “Day Two”, “Day Three”, “Day Four”, “Day Five”, “Day Six”, “Day Seven”... This is all - the volume is immense here.

What the author completely fails is all the scenes on the German side. Oh, it would be better if he didn’t give them at all. After all, he doesn’t know, doesn’t feel, uses secondary caricatured descriptions from Soviet publicity. The false idea just keeps on going, it only increases the general looseness and collapse of the narrative. For some reason, he also undertakes to tell the pre-war stories of some German soldiers - well, very superficially, from some scraps he read. It reaches the language of anti-German newspaper revelations of that wartime, almost to the Crocodile. So, in many ways, he loses his taste, his sense of proportion. He even undertakes to describe a German general - well, it’s out of hand. (And when he returns to the Russian side, there is immediate revival and meaningfulness.)

Astafiev wants express the whole truth about the war, but it does not come up in the disclosure to the top state and does not stoop to the depths of the reasons. His irritation, considerable in places, remains at the level of political instructors, their slogans and their behavior. The ridicule of political instructors and their chatter is sometimes farcical, but not scary. Here is a true scene: how division commissar Musyonok, who knows no boundaries, mocks the exhausted officers who were barely saved on the bridgehead. Captain Shchusya, half dead, is forced to rise from his bed to listen to the scolding. (Then it is hinted to us that Shchus inexplicably blew up Musyonka - and was not even suspected.)

The conscientious political instructor Martemyanov, who is ashamed of his position and role, is also believably added.

Tone.– The author’s tone is strangely inappropriate for such a menacing plot, often with unnecessary or even aimless fervor. There are many attempts at humor (to make it easier for the reader?). But the humor is somehow strong, artificial. (And he himself responds in the dialogue: “don’t crush me with humor,” “there’s no time for humor now.”) There is too much cheap, unfunny soldier jokes - to the detriment of any deep feelings, as if the soldiers do not have them even in moments of great danger. Snooty idle talk, clowning - and not funny, and even impossible given that stunned, which most often occurs when there is a lot of shooting and acute danger. - And here is from the author himself: about such a major event as the death of our airborne assault - adopting a critical tone without understanding the essence.

And at the same time, sometimes - quite suddenly, with dissonance, without anything prepared, pathetic prayers burst out from Astafiev. And they just work out for him, because they come from the heart. “Good God! Why did You give such terrible power into the hands of an unreasonable creature? Why did You, before his mind matured and became stronger, put fire in his hands?..”

And so: “Blessed be the heavenly Creator, who left for this restless planet a particle of darkness called night. He knew, knew, therefore, that his children would need time of rest in order to accumulate strength to create evil, devastation, extermination, murder. If it were always day, if it were light, all the wars would have ended long ago, people would have killed each other. There would be no one to stir up trouble.”

The officers leisurely call each other by their first names and patronymics, as is almost never the case in a warring army. The dialogues between the officers are lifeless, and there are few of them.

Language- rich. Astafiev easily picks up the most diverse words, and how many of them are extraordinary, the most free and bright. Lots of soldier jargon. Rough forms of words are numerous, but natural. (However, less swearing would have been enough.)

Astafiev’s habit of repeated repetitions as soon as he needs to be reminded of a character is tiring (about one, well, up to 20 times: “the bar doesn’t have a beard,” about another, not much less often: “the mountain poor man”). In the author’s speech, he sometimes inadvertently slips into formality or into “culture” (“intellectually”, “limited in the cultural sense”). Allows for standard expressions or from official military reports: “moved to a tough active defense”; “exsanguinated by continuous battles”; "imperialist war" (First World War).

That battle on the Dnieper is described in the book (the author did not find another word like “novel”) abundantly, over many days, in skirmishes on the bridgehead, and there were two more day crossings. As if from an immense bag, many and many different episodes have poured out onto us, but not in a single semantic connection - the actual combat ones, and politically tense ones (clashes with political instructors), and everyday, personal ones. All of them are vividly real and imbued with accumulated bitterness; they are not at all fascinating for every reader; I admit that many people skip, not everyone follows this bloody work.

It's a pity! Oh, not everyone, not everyone can fully imagine, can feel the ferocious air of that War: much has been smoothed over both by time and by liars.

Astafiev - albeit only in his old age, albeit without a harmonious structure, albeit in a variable level and tone - brought this truth to us.

An excerpt from an essay about Viktor Astafiev from the “Literary Collection” written by A. I. Solzhenitsyn.

Solzhenitsyn wrote the first version of the essay about Astafiev in 1997: he limited himself to analyzing the second part of the novel “Cursed and Killed.” In a significantly revised form, this version is included in this essay. A.S. read the first and second parts of the novel in the magazine “New World” (1993. No. 10 – 12; 1994. No. 10 – 12). (In the library of A.I. Solzhenitsyn, the last three issues of the magazine are with notes in the text and in the margins.)

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The events take place at the end of 1942 in the quarantine camp of the first reserve regiment, which was stationed in the Siberian Military District near the Berdsk station.
The quarantine camp is constantly being replenished with new recruits. Ashot Vaskonyan, Kolya Ryndin, Alexey Buldakov, and Lekha Shestakov are transferred to the regiment.
The recruits arrived by train. They were driven out of the warm carriages by people in worn-out military uniforms and lined up in rows of ten people. Then they were led in columns into a frozen, dim and damp basement, where instead of a normal floor there were pine boards on the ground. Everyone was placed on bunks made of pine logs. Lesha Shestakov was already accustomed to submitting to fate and without resistance accepted the first outfit to which Sergeant Vladimir Yashkin appointed him. The sergeant was short and thin; he already had an order on his chest, since he had been at the front. He was assigned to the reserve regiment after the hospital, he kept saying that with the marching company he would soon go to the front line and be far from this damned pit so that he would burn. The sergeant calmly walked through the quarantine and looked at the recruits; there were Siberian Old Believers and thieves from the gold mines of Verkh-Yeniseisk and Baykit. One of the Old Believers was Kolya Ryndin, from the small village of Verkhniy Kuzhebar, which is located on the banks of the Amyl River.
Early in the morning, Yashkin kicked people out into the street to wash themselves with snow. Leshka looked around, there were only dugouts covered with snow. This is what the quarantine of the twenty-first rifle regiment looked like. The dugouts were divided into single and four-seater ones. They belonged to local officers, economic service workers, as well as idiotic officials, without whom the Soviet government could not do without. In the depths of the forest there were barracks, sanitary services, a club, a bathhouse, and a dining room, but to prevent the recruits from infecting anyone, all these facilities were located at a great distance from quarantine. Leshka learned from the locals that they would soon be placed in barracks. In three months they must undergo political and military training, after which they will be sent to the front, since there were not enough people there. Looking at the littered forest, Lekha remembered his native village of Shushikara, which is located in the lower reaches of the Ob.
The guys felt uneasy because they were in an unfamiliar place. They had seen a lot in their lives, lived in huts, barracks, and village huts, but they were horrified when they saw the place where they were eating. Behind long counters nailed to dirty poles and covered with plank troughs, soldiers stood eating from aluminum pots, holding on to these poles with one hand so as not to drown in the sticky mud. This was the summer dining room. There was not enough space for everyone, so feeding took place in turns. The experienced fighters laughed at the frightened look of the newcomers and gave them some advice.
All new arrivals had their heads shaved. The Old Believers had a hard time parting with their hair, crossing themselves and crying. In the basement they realized the full significance of what was happening. A thin, middle-aged captain Melnikov conducted political conversations. He said everything so convincingly that one could only be surprised how the Nazis were able to reach the Volga, when it should have been the other way around. In the Siberian District, the captain was the most experienced political worker. He worked almost around the clock, so he had no time to expand his knowledge.
Life in quarantine went slowly. The barracks had not been vacated for a long time. In the dugouts there were constant fights, drunkenness, overcrowding, lice, stench, and also theft. Even extraordinary outfits did not help to establish discipline and order. The former prisoners were most comfortable here. They were constantly robbing the other guys. One of them was Zelentsov, who gathered certain people around him: orphanage residents Fefelova and Grisha Khokhlak; Vasya and Sheveleva; former machine operators; respected Babenko for his songs; and just in case, he kept Kolya Ryndin and Lekha Shestakov close by. Fefelov and Khokhlak slept all the time during the day and worked at night, as they were experienced pluckers. Vasya and Kostya managed the provisions. Kolya and Leshka were given responsibility for all the hard work. And Zelentsov led his people from the people.
One evening, the newcomers were kicked out of the barracks and kept in the scorching wind until late at night, with all their property taken away. Then, on command, the marchers returned to the barracks, and after them the recruits. A crush began, and there was not enough room for everyone. Companies of marchers took up positions and did not allow newcomers in. That merciless night was remembered as delirium. In the morning, the boys were placed at the disposal of the foreman of the first company, Shpator Akim Agafonovich. After he saw the recruits, he sighed that with them he would experience both laughter and sin.
The first company consisted of four platoons. Her barracks was gloomy and stuffy, with three-tiered bunks. The second company was located in the second half of the barracks. Both companies represented the first rifle battalion of the reserve regiment. The barracks did not have time to dry out, since it was built from damp wood, so there was always mold here. It was heated using four stoves that resembled mammoths. But it was difficult to warm them up, so dampness in the barracks was common. There was a rack with weapons installed on the wall; there were several original rifles on it, and most of them were wooden models. The entrance to the barracks was closed with a gate made of boards. On the left was the captain's quarters, where Petty Officer Shpator was located, and on the right was a warm room for the orderlies. The entire life of soldiers could be compared to a cave.
The newcomers were well fed on the first day, after which they were taken to the bathhouse. The young fighters' spirits immediately rose. There were rumors that they would soon be given uniforms and bed linen. Babenko started singing on the way to the bathhouse. Leshka did not yet suspect that he would no longer hear songs in this pit for a long time. The recruits never saw any improvement in their living conditions. They were dressed in mended old clothes. The bathhouse did not warm up at all, so the young fighters were very cold. Lekha Buldakov and Kolya Ryndin were two meters tall, so they could not find shoes or clothes for them. Buldakov had to take off his tight shoes, and he walked barefoot in the cold to the barracks.
The soldiers never received any bed linen. But the very next day they were sent out to drill with wooden mock-ups of rifles. For the first few weeks, the boys still had hope for improvements in their lives. They did not yet understand that such life was practically no different from prison. Ryndin grew up near the rich taiga and the Amyl River, so he never knew the need for food. But in the army he realized that wartime really is a period of famine. Large Kolya lost weight in his face, the color disappeared from his face, and there was melancholy in his eyes. Over time, he began to forget all his prayers.
For oversized guys, boots were sent on the eve of the October Revolution. But even these shoes did not fit Buldakov, and he threw them from the upper bunks, after which he had to talk with Captain Melnikov. Buldakov with a pitiful face told about himself: he was born in the urban village of Pokrovka, which is located near Krasnoyarsk, and from childhood he knows what the poor and hard work are. But he did not say that his father and two older brothers were heavy drinkers and were constantly in prison. He also kept silent about the fact that he himself escaped imprisonment thanks to being drafted into the army, but he beautifully described his backbreaking labor in the logging camp. After that, he pretended to have a seizure, rolling his eyes. Melnikov ran out of the storeroom, and after that he kept looking askance at Buldakov during political classes. But the guys respected Lekha for his political literacy.
The winter canteen opened on November 7. Here you could listen to Stalin's speech on the radio. The leader reported that the Soviet troops took the initiative into their own hands, since the Soviet Union had a fairly strong rear. The soldiers unquestioningly believed his words. In the dining room there was a man with a large figure and a majestic face - it was Pshenny, who was the commander of the first company. The guys were unfamiliar with him, but they had already begun to be afraid. But the deputy company commander fell in love almost immediately. He was junior lieutenant Shchusya, who was wounded on Khasan, where he received the Order of the Red Star. This evening the company went to the barracks with a song. Shpator sighed - if Comrade Stalin spoke on the radio every day, then discipline would improve.
The next day, the good spirits and festive mood left the young fighters. On this day, Pshenny watched the morning water procedures, and if he noticed that someone was shirking, he himself tore off his clothes and rubbed him with snow until he bled. And the foreman just shook his head. Thin and mustachioed Shpator had met many idiots and animals in his life, but the likes of Pshenny had never met in his life.
The fighters began to be distributed to special companies within two weeks. Zelentsov was assigned to mortar duty. Sergeant Major Shpator tried with all his might to get rid of Buldakov, but he was not even accepted into the machine-gun company. He spent whole days on his bunk and read newspapers, commenting on everything he read. Experienced fighters who remained from previous marching companies and who had a positive influence on the young were dismantled. In return, they brought in a whole squad of recruits, among whom was a sick and thin guy Poptsov, who urinated on himself. The sergeant major looked sadly at the newcomer and sighed.
The foreman was sent to Novosibirsk on a business trip, and he managed to find new uniforms for the guys in some warehouses. Now Ryndin and Buldakov needed to get into formation. Buldakov constantly tried to sneak away from classes and damaged government property. Shchus had already accepted that he would not be able to tame Buldakov, so he assigned him to duty in the dugout. Buldakov felt comfortable in his new position and began to carry everything that was bad, especially food. And he didn’t always share it with his comrades and the junior lieutenant.
The middle of the Siberian winter has arrived. By this time, snow wiping in the early mornings had already been canceled, but many of the guys had gotten sick, and there was a continuous cough in the barracks at night. Only Khokhlak, Shestakov, Fefelov, and in some cases Buldakov and Shpator went out for water procedures. Poptsov did not leave the barracks; he always lay on the lower bunks, wet and gray. I only got up to eat. Poptsov was not taken to the medical unit, since everyone was already tired of him. Every day there were more sick and thin guys. There were about a dozen such fighters on the lower tier. Night blindness and lice did not spare the servicemen. At night, shadows of people were visible around the barracks, constantly looking for something.
Many tried to avoid drills and at this time find something to eat. One of the soldiers came up with the idea of ​​stringing potatoes on a wire and lowering them into the stove pipes of the officer barracks. At this time, the first company was replenished with two guys - Boyarchik and Ashot Vaskonyan. They were people of mixed nationality. Both were in the officer school for one month, then they ended up in the medical unit, and from there they were sent to the damn pit, because she can endure anything. Vaskonyan was tall, thin, with a pale face, black eyebrows, and had a lisp. On the very first day, he ruined Melnikov’s mood during political class. He objected to him that Buenos Aires is in South America, not in Africa.
In the rifle company, it was even more difficult for Vaskonyan than in school. He got there due to changes in the military situation. His father worked as editor-in-chief of a local newspaper in Kalinin, and his mother worked as deputy head of the culture department of the regional executive committee. The pampered and domesticated Ashot was raised by the housekeeper Seraphim. If Buldakov had not taken a liking to this scholar, he would have been lying on the lower bunk next to Poptsov. He would not allow Ashot to be bullied, gave him good advice and hid him from Pshenny, Melnikov and the foreman. In gratitude for this, Vaskonyan recounted to them the books that he had read before the war.
In December, the twenty-first regiment was fully equipped, after reinforcements from Kazakhstan. The first company was entrusted with meeting them and distributing them in quarantine. The Red Army soldiers were horrified by what they saw. The Kazakhs wore summer uniforms, as they were drafted in the warm season, after which they arrived in the harsh winter. Dark by nature, they became even blacker. The carriages shook from constant coughing and wheezing. There were corpses under the bunks. Colonel Azatyan and Berdsk, upon arrival at the station, grabbed their heads and ran through all the cars, hoping to find recruits in better condition, but the picture was the same everywhere. The sick were assigned to the hospital, and the rest were assigned to companies and battalions. The first company received fifteen Kazakhs. Their leader was a large guy with a Mongolian face named Talgat.
At that time, the first battalion was engaged in rolling out timber from the Ob. Shchus and his assistant Yashkin supervised the unloading process. They settled in a dugout that they dug on the river bank. Babenko began to earn money at the local market and in nearby villages. It was calmer on the river bank - no fuss. One evening, when the company was heading to the barracks, I met a young general on a stallion. The general glanced at the pale faces of the soldiers and continued driving further along the river bank, lowered his head and tried not to look back. The soldiers were not told who it was, but the meeting with the general did not pass without a trace.
In the regiment's canteen, the soldiers noticed another general. He walked along the dining room, stirring the soup and porridge in the bowls, and came out from the opposite side of the room. People expected a speedy improvement, but this did not happen, since the Land of the Soviets was not prepared for a long war. Young people who were born in the twenty-fourth year were not able to withstand the conditions of army life. The food was quite meager, and the number of goners increased every day. Millet began to take care of his duties in earnest.
One day, on a frosty morning, the company commander gave the order to everyone to leave the barracks and line up. Sick soldiers were no exception. Everyone hoped that he would feel sorry for the goons after he saw them, but he said that he would stop pretending and sent them off to class with a song. The sick were hidden in the middle of the line, who constantly lost their step. Poptsov fell during his morning jog. Millet, running, kicked him several times with the sharp toe of his boot, and after that made several more strong blows. Poor Poptsov sobbed after each blow, and at one point he stopped making sounds, straightened up and died. The guys surrounded their dead comrade, and Petka Musikov shouted that “it was the commander who killed him.” An angry crowd surrounded the lieutenant, raising their rifles. If Yashkin and Shchus had not intervened at this time, it is unknown what would have been done to the company commander.
Shchus could not sleep all night that day. The army life of Alexei Donatovich Shchus was straightforward. But before that he was called Platon Sergeevich Platonov. His last name was Shchusev, but the clerk of the Transbaikal Military District heard it as Shchus and wrote it down. He comes from a Cossack family that was exiled to the taiga. After the death of his parents, he remained with his beautiful aunt. She asked the guard to hand over the boy to a family of pre-revolutionary exiles named Shchusev in Tobolsk, and offered herself as payment. The boss helped the boy. Family The artist and the literature teacher could not have their own children, so they adopted the boy and raised him as their own, and then sent him to military training.
Skorik, a lieutenant in the special department, was entrusted with handling the emergency situation. At one time, he studied at the school together with Shchus. Many commanders did not like Shchus, but he was under the protection of Azatyan, who constantly came to his defense, so no one could contradict him.
After this, discipline in the regiment became even worse. The fighters were difficult to control. The guys constantly ran around the regiment in search of food. Shchus kept thinking, “Why weren’t they sent to the front line right away? Why bring them to this state?”, but he could not answer these questions. During his service, Kolya Ryndin became completely stupid from malnutrition. The lively guy fell silent and closed in on himself. He was already halfway to heaven, constantly reading a prayer, and even Melnikov did not know what to do with him. And at night Kolya cried, from the frightening thought of impending disaster.
Yashkin had stomach and liver pain. At night the pain intensified, and Shpator smeared his side with formic alcohol. Volodya Yashkin, who was named after Lenin, was still quite young, but had already participated in the battles of Smolensk, the encirclement of Vyazma, the retreat to Moscow, and was also wounded. While being transported from the encirclement camp across the front line, he was pulled out of the heat by two nurses, Faya and Nelka. On the way, he fell ill with jaundice. Lately he has been haunted by the feeling that he will soon have to go to the front. With his straightforward character and quarrelsome attitude, he has nothing to do in the rear with his health. He needs to be where the only justice is equality before death.
Three events shook up the slow pace of army life. First, an important general visited the twenty-first regiment, and after checking the food, he gave all the cooks a thrashing. After this, the potato peeling job was canceled, as a result of which the portions became significantly larger. It was also decided that guys who are about two meters tall are given an additional portion. After such changes, Ryndin, Vaskonyal and Buldakov came to life. Plus, Nikolai worked in the kitchen, and what he got, he shared with his comrades.
An announcement appeared at the club’s stand that a show military trial of Zelentsov would take place on December 20, 1942. Nobody knew what he had done. It started not with Zelentsov, but with Felix Boyarchik, the artist. From his father he only got the surname Felix. And his mother was a real Bolshevik, masculine in appearance, and was always in the field of art. She practically did not notice how she gave birth to a boy. Stepanida could have served for the rest of her life in the House of Culture, but trumpeter Boyarchik received a prison sentence for something. And then Stepanida was assigned to the Novolyalinsky timber industry enterprise. I had to live with family women in a barracks, who raised Feli. The mother of many children, Thekla Blazhnykh, adored him most of all. It was she who persuaded Stepanida to get a separate house after she became an honored cultural worker. The house was divided into two families; Stepanida and Fekla’s family lived in one part. She replaced Felix's mother, and subsequently escorted him into the army.
At the House of Forestry Culture, the boy learned to draw signs, posters, and portraits of leaders. In the twenty-first regiment this skill came in handy. Over time, Felix began to live right in the club, where he fell in love with the usher Sophia. She became his common-law wife. After pregnancy, it sent her to Fekla, and then Zelentsov settled in the side part of the club. He drank constantly and played cards for money. Felix tried many times to kick him out, but nothing worked. At one fine moment, the head of the club, Dubelt, looked into the storeroom and saw Zelentsov there, who was sleeping behind the stove. He wanted to throw him out, but Zelentsov hit him with his head and broke his nose and glasses. Felix promptly called the patrol service. Zelentsov turned his own court into a circus. Even the chairman of the tribunal was unable to cope with him. He wanted Zelentsov to be sentenced to death, but he was sentenced to a penal company. Zelentsov was seen off by the whole crowd.
Part two.
Demonstrative executions began to take place in the regiment. The Snigirev brothers were sentenced to death for attempting to escape. In the middle of winter, the regiment was sent to the nearest collective farm to harvest grain. And at the beginning of 1943, the soldiers were sent to the front.
One day, late in the evening, Skorik came to Shchusya’s dugout. They talked for a long time. Skorik asked the junior lieutenant about the rumors of order number two hundred twenty-seven. Demonstration executions began in the district. Shchus never knew that Skorik’s name was Lev Solomonovich. Skorik's father was a researcher and wrote a book about the life of spiders. And the mother, in turn, was terribly afraid of spiders and did not let Leva near them. He was a second-year student at a philological university when the military came for his father. Then they took the mother away and began to drag Lev himself into the office. After prolonged intimidation, he signed a statement that he renounces his parents. Six months later he was called again and informed about the error. Solomon Lvovich worked for a secret military department, but local authorities did not know about this, and he was shot, along with the enemies of the people. And to cover their tracks, they shot his wife. The son was apologized and allowed to enter a military school under special conditions. His mother's corpse was never found, so he always felt that she was alive.
Alexey Shestakov worked in the kitchen together with the Kazakhs. They worked together and learned Russian together. Lekha had little time to remember her past life. His father was an exile. He went to Kazym-Mys to woo his wife; she belonged to a half-Khatyn, half-Russian family. Father rarely appeared in the house, as he worked in a fishing crew. He was unsociable with a difficult character. But one day he returned home on time. The fishermen's boats returned with the news that due to the storm, the boat with the fishermen, whose foreman was Pavel Shestakov, sank. After that, my mother went to work in a fish cooperative. The fish catcher Oskin became a frequent guest in the house; throughout the Ob he was known as a rogue, nicknamed Gerka. Then Lekha told his mother that he would leave home, but his mother could not do anything, she had even looked several years younger lately. After some time, Gerka began to live with them. After this, Lekha had two sisters: Vera and Zoya. These girls evoked kindred feelings in Leshka. After Gerka, Leshka also went to war. Most of all, he missed his sisters, and sometimes he remembered his first girlfriend, Tom.
Discipline in the regiment was constantly declining. There was even an emergency: the Snigirev brothers disappeared from the second company. They soon announced that they were deserters; they searched everywhere, but were never found. On the fourth day they themselves came, with full bags of provisions. It turned out that they were visiting their mother, who lives nearby in the nearest village. Skorik began to worry about what to do, but he was no longer able to help them. After which they were sentenced to death. The regiment commander ensured that only the first regiment should be present during the execution. Until the last moment, the brothers could not believe that they would be shot; they believed that they would be punished or sent to a penal battalion, like Zelensky. Even Skorik did not believe in the death penalty. But Yashkin had already seen this, so he was firmly convinced that they would be shot. After the execution, reign reigned in the barracks
dead silence. Ryndin shouted “Cursed and killed. That’s it” Shchus wanted to punch Azatyan in the face when he got drunk at night. Skorik was quietly drinking in his room. The Old Believers jointly drew a cross and began to pray for the repose of the souls of those killed, led by Kolya Ryndin.
Soon Skorik again came to Shchus’s dugout and said that after the New Year, shoulder straps would be introduced. And the first battalion will be sent to grain harvesting work, where they will remain until they are sent to the front. A second company is already engaged in such work, in severe frosts.
At the beginning of 1943, the soldiers of the twenty-first regiment were given shoulder straps, after which they were sent by train to Istkim station. Yashkin was sent to the hospital so that he could recover normally. The rest were sent to the Voroshilov state farm. During a trip to the state farm, director Tebenkov Ivan Ivanovich caught up with Kolya Ryndin, Petya Musikov and Vaskonyan and told them to come with him; for the rest, wood logs filled with straw were provided. In the village of Osipovo, the children were distributed to homes. Shchus settled in the barracks of the head of the second department, Galusteva. She remained in Shchusya’s heart for a long time. Grisha Khokhlak, together with Lesha Shestakov, was assigned to the home of the old Zavyalovs. After the soldiers had retreated a little after a hearty meal, they began to look at the local girls, and this is where Grisha Khokhlak’s ability to play the button accordion came in handy. Almost all the fighters from the first regiment came from peasant families, so this kind of work was familiar to them, and they quickly coped with all the work. Kostya Uvarov and Vasya Shevelev were able to repair the combine, which they then used to thresh the grain that had been preserved under the snow.
Vaskonyan lived with the cook Anna. She didn’t really like the strange literate man, and then the soldiers decided to change him to Kolya Ryndin. Soon after this, the nutrition became much better, for which Nikolai was thanked. And Vaskonyan was assigned to the old Zavyalovs, who respected him for his education. And then Azatyan made sure that Ashot’s mother came to see him. The regiment commander even invited him to stay at the regimental headquarters, but Ashot categorically refused and said that, like everyone else, he would go to the front. He already looked at his mother with different eyes. When she left in the morning, she felt that she was seeing her son for the last time.
After several weeks, an order came to return to the regiment's location. Nobody wanted to part with their beloved village. As soon as we arrived at the barracks, all the soldiers were sent to the bathhouse and given new uniforms. Shpator couldn't be happier looking at the rested soldiers. This evening Lekha Shestakov heard the song for the second time in the regiment. The marching companies were received by General Lakhonin, whom they met in the field then, as well as Major Zarubin. They made sure that the weakest and sickest soldiers remained in the regiment. After great disagreement, they decided to leave about two hundred guys in the regiment; those who cannot be cured will be sent home so that they can die in peace. The Twenty-first Regiment got off easy. The entire regimental command was sent away.
All marching companies were assembled in the military town of Novosibirsk. Valeria Methodyevna arrived in the first company and conveyed greetings from the Osipovsky residents. At dawn, the regiment was taken out of the barracks on combat alert. On the way they met only one woman with an empty bucket. She then rushed back into the yard, threw out the buckets, and baptized the army, admonishing the successful completion of the battle to her defenders.
Book two. Bridgehead
In the second book, events unfold from mid-winter to the summer of 1943. The main part of the book is about the crossing of the Dnieper in autumn.
Part one. On the eve of the crossing
After numerous battles in the spring and summer, the first regiment was preparing to cross the Dnieper River.
One cold autumn day, units of two fronts began to advance to the banks of the Dnieper River. Lekha Shestakov collected water from the river and warned the recruits that enemy forces were located on the other bank, but they could not be shot at, since the entire army could be left without water. A similar incident happened on the Bryansk front, and anything can happen on the banks of the Dnieper.
The rifle division, which included an artillery regiment, was at the river late at night. A rifle regiment was also located nearby, where the first battalion was led by Captain Shchus, and the commander of the first company was Lieutenant Yashkin. Talgat was a company commander among the Kazakhs. The command of the platoons was entrusted to Vasya Shevelev and Kostya Babenko, and Grishka Khokhlak commanded one squad with the rank of sergeant.
The Siberians arrived in the Volga region in the spring, and for a long time stood in empty and plundered villages where the Volga Germans lived, but they were deported to Siberia. Lech was a good signalman, so he was transferred to the howitzer division, but he never forgot his comrades from his company. The first battle of General Lakhovin's division took place in the Zadonsk steppe, when they met the Germans on their way, who broke through the front. The division's losses were few. The army commander paid attention to this division and kept it in reserve just in case. Such an incident occurred near Kharkov, then there was an incident near Okhtyrka. For that battle, Lech received the second Order of the Patriotic War. Colonel Beskapustin valued Nikolai Ryndin very much and kept him in the kitchen all the time. Vaskonyan was constantly sent to headquarters, but there he constantly quarreled with the boss, and he was returned to his native company. Shchusya was wounded on the Don, after which he was discharged for two months, he went to Osipovo, and together with Valeria Mefodieva they created another baby, this time a boy was born. He also went to visit Azatyan in the twenty-first regiment. There he learned that Sergeant Major Shpator had died on the way to Novosibirsk, right in the carriage. He was buried in the regimental cemetery. Shpator wanted to be buried next to Poptsov or the Snigirev brothers, but they could not find their graves. After Shchus was cured, he came to Kharkov.
The closer the troops came to the Great River, the more soldiers said that they could not swim. Behind the front, an army is advancing, well-fed, washed, but vigilant around the clock. The castle of the artillery regiment, Zarubin, again became the full owner of the regiment. His old friend and unexpected relative was Prov Fedorovich Lakhonin. Their kinship and friendship were quite strange. Zarubin met the boss’s daughter and his future wife Natalya in Sochi while on vacation. Soon she became pregnant and they gave birth to a beautiful board, Ksyusha. The old people had to raise them, because Zarubin was transferred to a distant region at that time. Then he was sent to study in the capital. After returning to his native garrison, after a long training, a child at the age of one year was already running around in his house. Lakhonin took part in this. But they were able to remain friends. Natalya wrote to both husbands at the front.
While preparing to cross the Great River, the soldiers basked in the sun and swam in the river all day. Shchus carefully examined the left-bank island and the right opposite bank of the Dnieper through binoculars, and did not understand why they chose this unfortunate place for the crossing. Shchus gave a special task to Shestakov so that he would establish communication across the river. Lekha returned from the hospital to the artillery regiment. He got to the point where he couldn’t think about anything else except food. On the very first day, he tried to steal several crackers, but he was caught red-handed by Colonel Musenko, who took him to Zarubin. Soon the major assigned Leshka to the regiment via telephone. Now Lekha had to think about how he could cross to the right bank with a heavy communication coil. Two kilometers away he found a battered boat.
After resting, the soldiers could not sleep for a long time, everyone felt that tomorrow they would die. Ashot began to write to his parents, and in it he made it clear that most likely this would be the last letter he wrote from the front. He did not write often to his parents, and the closer he became to his comrades, the further away he became from his family. Vaskonyan rarely took part in battles, since Shchus took care of him and assigned him to the headquarters. But even from such a warm place, he was constantly eager to see his fighting friends. Shchus also could not sleep, he kept thinking about the best way to cross the river with minimal human losses.
Many fighters were unable to sleep that night. Soldier Teterkin, who was assigned to be paired with Vaskonyan, followed him like a devoted squire, brought some hay and laid Ashot down, and he lay down next to him. In the night, Buldakov and Sergeant Finifatiev, who met in a military train as they advanced towards the Volga, quietly talked. Numerous explosions were heard in the distance; the Germans were bombing the Great City.
The fog did not dissipate for a long time, thereby increasing the lives of many soldiers by almost half a day. After enlightenment, the artillery shelling began. On the right bank, the reconnaissance platoon began the battle. Squadrons of attack aircraft flew overhead. The rifle companies were already on the right bank, but no one knew how many soldiers remained. The crossing has begun.
Part two. Crossing
Russian troops lost many people during the crossing. Kolya Ryndin, Lekha Shestakov and Buldakov were wounded. Throughout the war, this moment was a turning point, after which the German troops began their retreat.
The entire left bank and the river were covered with enemy fire. The river simply boiled, in which there were a large number of dying soldiers. Those who could not swim tried to cling to those who could, and thereby dragged them to the bottom, the shaky rafts, which were hastily made from raw wood, rotated. If someone tried to return back to the left bank, they were shot by the soldiers of the foreign detachment and pushed into the water. The Shusya battalion was one of the first to cross and headed into the ravines on the right bank. Together with his partner Prakhov, Leshka also began to cross.
If in this case all the units, which included soldiers who could swim, were well prepared, then the troops on the right bank would be in a fighting condition. People reached the island, drank plenty of water, and drowned all their ammunition, as well as weapons. As soon as they found themselves on the island, they immediately fell under machine gun fire and died. Lekha hoped that Shchus and his battalion managed to leave the island before the enemy set it on fire. He slowly floated downstream a little below the general crossing, and unwound the cable, which was enough to reach the right bank. During the crossing, he had to fight off drowning soldiers who constantly wanted to turn the boat over. Major Zarubin was already waiting for Lekha on the opposite bank. Now communication was established across the river, and the major began to transmit tips for artillery. After some time, soldiers who survived the crossing began to gather near Zarubin.
The crossing was still ongoing. Those units that reached the other bank first hid in ravines and tried to establish contact with the remaining units until dawn. The German fire was concentrated on the right bank river island. Oskin's company reached the right bank with minimal losses and was ready to carry out combat missions. And Oskin was wounded twice, after which the soldiers tied him to a raft and sent him down the river. Luck was on his side, and he ended up with his people. Leshka Shestakov landed at the mouth of the Cherevinka River, and there were about three hundred fathoms to Oskin’s company, no luck.
It was assumed that the penal company would be the first to cross, taking all the fire upon itself, but it only reached the opposite bank in the morning. There was nothing to breathe over the shore, which is called the bridgehead. The battle has subsided. The enemy units were thrown back to the height of Sto, and had heavy losses, so they stopped attacking. The penalty soldiers managed to cross with virtually no losses. Far from the general crossing, a boat sailed under the leadership of military paramedic Nelka Zykova. Faya remained on duty on the left bank, and Nelya was busy ferrying the wounded across the river. Felix Boyarchik was among the penalty box. He was engaged in bandaging the wounded together with the convicted Timofey Nazarovich Sabelnikov. Timofey was an army hospital surgeon who was tried for causing the death of a wounded soldier on his table during an operation. Penalties dug in along the entire shore. The penal company was not given weapons or provisions.
The Shchusya battalion settled down along the ravines and consolidated its positions. The scouts were busy establishing contact with headquarters and collecting the remnants of companies and platoons. In Bali, the surviving soldiers from Yashkin's company were found. He himself also survived. They had a simple task: they had to go deeper on the right bank, consolidate positions, and wait for the partisans from the rear and the landing from the sky to strike the enemy. But communication was never established, and the battalion commander understood from the shooting that the Germans were trying to cut off the battalion from the crossing. At dawn it was already known that about four hundred people had dug in on the slope of Height Hundred - this was what was left of the three thousand-strong army. According to intelligence reports, it became known that Zelentsov had contacted him. Shchus sent three signalmen to him. Shchus remembered two of them, but he did not recognize Zelentsov, who was now Shorokhov.
Shestakov left the boat at the lower reaches of the mouth of the Cherevinka River, and with a calm soul returned to the ravine, where the soldiers were making trenches in a high slope. Finifatiev almost managed to deliver a longboat with ammunition to the right bank, but it ran aground. Now we had to get to this longboat. The signalmen from Colonel Beskapustin, who was located near Cherevinka, were brought down. Until the fog cleared in the morning, the longboat was dragged to the mouth of the river. As soon as the sun rose, Faya and Nelya arrived for the wounded Zarubin, but he did not swim and began to wait for a replacement.
The command clarified the intelligence data and sank. It turned out that about five kilometers of the coast in width and about one kilometer in depth were recaptured from the enemy. To achieve such results, several tens of thousands of ammunition and fuel were spent, as well as twenty thousand people who were killed or drowned. The losses were horrific.
Shestakov went to the water to wash himself, and then he met Felix Boyarchik. After a certain time, Sabelnikov and Boyarchik were temporary guests in Zarubin’s detachment. Then, in the Oryol region, Boyarchik was wounded, then was treated in a hospital in Tula, where he was assigned to a transit point. After this, Felix was assigned to the artillerymen. Just recently, the artillery brigade lost two of its guns, and the third was separated from the battery and hidden in the bushes. In the Soviet Union, vehicles were valued more than human life, so the command realized that no one would praise them for the loss of a weapon. Two guns were written off, but another one was rusting in some bushes without one wheel. The missing wheel was discovered by the battery commander while Boyarchik was on duty. As a result, Felix was court-martialed and assigned to a penal company. After that he didn't want to live.
On two rafts, late at night, a selected foreign detachment was transported to the bridgehead, which was armed with new machine guns. Together with the detachment, it was decided to transport ammunition for the convicts, so that they could atone for their guilt with their blood. But they stopped sending food and medicine. After unloading, the pontoons were quickly sent back, since there was a lot of important business on the other side.
From the very beginning of the war, the Bavarian Max Kusempel and the Ostsee Hans Holbach were partners. We were in Soviet captivity together, and escaped from there together, and then ended up back at the front due to Holbach’s stupidity. When the penalty soldiers moved into battle, Felix shouted “Kill me” and jumped into the trench towards the Germans. But they did not kill him then, but took him prisoner, although he wanted to die. Timofey Sabelnikov was one of the first to die in this battle.
For Shchusya this day was especially alarming. After the penal company was destroyed, the Germans decided to liquidate the partisan detachment. The battle lasted about two hours, after which planes appeared in the sky and the landing began. The operation was not thought through to the end, as a result of which a well-trained landing force, consisting of almost two thousand people, was destroyed before reaching the surface of the earth. Now the Germans must take on Shchusya’s detachment, and he understood this. He was informed that Kolya Ryndin was seriously wounded in the battle. Shchus called Lekha Shestakov by phone and ordered him to transport Ryndin to the other side. The whole squad dragged Kolya to the boat. Vaskonyan pushed the boat away, and then stood on the shore for a long time, as if saying goodbye to his comrade. Having reached the left bank of the Lech, I barely dragged Ryndin to the medical battalion.
Leshka failed to cross the river unnoticed. Almost all telephone lines across the river fell silent. The communications chief gave orders to Shestakov to transfer communications from one bank to the other. Zarubin understood perfectly well that Shestakov was entrusted with someone else’s work, but decided to remain silent, leaving the fighter to make his own decision. Leshka took a boat with several wounded and reached the opposite shore. He was given a reel with a cable and two assistants who did not know how to swim at all. It was already dawn when they sailed back. The fog also began to clear, so as soon as the boat was in the middle of the river, the Germans began to fire at it. The rotten ship overturned, and the two assistants immediately sank, and Lekha swam to the side. He tried his best to work with his arms and legs, trying not to think about the corpses at the bottom of the river. He had enough strength to reach the sandy shore. Immediately two soldiers picked him up and dragged him into the trench. He then crawled into the shelter on his own and immediately lost consciousness. Lesha Buldakov took care of him.
After Shestakov came to his senses, he saw Zelentsov, aka Shorokhov, in front of him. He told him that he was going under the height of Sto, as the Germans were attacking the Shchusya battalion. Leshka stood up and reported to Zarubin that it was not possible to establish communication, and asked to leave for a while. The major did not ask why or where. Lekha crossed the Cherevinka River and began to move upstream. Then he saw a German observation post in the ravine. Then he found a place where the Russian detachment encountered enemy troops. Vaskonyan and Teterkin were among the dead.
And Lieutenant Colonel Slavutich came to Zarubin. He asked to give him several people in order to take the enemy observation post. Zarubin assigned Shestakov, Finifatiev, Shorokhov and Mansurov there. As a result of the operation, Mansurov and Slavutich died, and Finifatiev was wounded. Several Germans were captured, from whom it became known that the enemy headquarters was located in the village of Velikie Krinitsy. At four-thirty the artillery began shelling Height Sto, the guns turned the village into ruins. The height was taken in the evening. To replace Zarubin, the chief of staff Ponayotov arrived from the left bank and brought with him a lot of provisions. The major was unable to walk on his own, so they carried him to the boat. The wounded sat on the right bank all night, hoping that a boat would be sent for them.
Nelka’s father was a boilermaker at a locomotive depot in Krasnoyarsk, then he was declared an enemy of the people and shot. And the mother was left with four daughters. Nelya was the healthiest and most beautiful. Nelka’s godfather was the doctor Porfiry Danilovich, who enrolled her in nursing courses. As soon as the war began, Nelka found herself at the front, where she met Faya. Faya had a terrible secret: her body was completely covered with thick fur. Her parents called her a monkey. Nelka looked after Faya like her sister and constantly defended her. Faya could no longer cope without her friend.
At night, Shestakov was replaced by Shorokhov at the telephone. At the front, Shorokhov felt good, as if this was a risky game for him. He was the son of the dispossessed peasant Zherdyakov from the village of Studenets. It remained in his memory: he was running, and his father was buckling the horse. The workers of the peat harvesting village picked him up and gave him a shovel. After he worked for two years, he ended up in a criminal company, and then imprisonment. Then there was escape, robbery, murder, then again imprisonment and a camp. By this time, Shorokhov was already a real camp wolf, constantly changing his last names: Cheremnykh, Zherdyakov, Zelentsov, Shorokhov. At the moment, he had only one goal: to survive in battle, to find judge Anisim Anisimovich and kill him as his enemy.
After some time, about a hundred soldiers, several boxes of ammunition and some provisions were sent to the bridgehead. Beskapustin achieved all this. Shchus recaptured the dugout from the Germans and took up a position there. But he understood that this would be for a short time. Communication was established with Shchus, but in the morning German troops began to attack him, cutting off the reserve route to the river. And at this deadly hour, the head of the political department took over the telephone line, reading out an article from the Pravda newspaper. Shchusya did not have enough patience, then Beskapustin intervened and turned off the connection.
There were continuous battles all day. Enemy troops cleared the height of Sto, and slightly pushed back the Russian troops. Troops had already been formed on the left bank, but no one knew why. The morning was hectic. At the top of the river, the Germans blew up a barge that was transporting sugar beets; the vegetables were washed to the bridgehead by the current, so the soldiers began to harvest. Throughout the day the fighting did not stop. The first battalion suffered the most. As evening fell, the head of the political department was allowed to work. Being in the thick of things, this man knew absolutely nothing about the war.
Buldakov thought only about food. He tried to distract himself by remembering his native village and his father, but his thoughts still returned to food. Then he decides to get something from the Germans. In the middle of the night, Shorokhov and Buldakov returned with three German backpacks with food, which they divided among their comrades.
The Germans no longer took active actions when morning came. The division headquarters ordered the situation to be restored. Colonel Beskapustin decided to attack the enemy troops with his last strength. Buldakov did not want to part with Finifatiev, as if feeling that they would not see each other again. During the daytime bombing, the high bank subsided, and several hundred soldiers were trapped under it; Finifatiev died.
At first, Beskapustin’s regiment successfully moved forward, but on the slope of Height Sto they came across mines. The fighters ran back to the river, throwing away their weapons. After two days, Beskapustin had about a thousand combat-ready soldiers left, and Shchusya’s battalion had no more than half a thousand people. In the middle of the day the attack was resumed. If Buldakov had normal boots, he would have been able to run to the German machine gun, but he had tight boots that were tied to his feet with ropes. Leshka fell into a machine gun nest from the rear. He was no longer disguised, and focused on the target to such an extent that he did not pay attention to the niche that was covered with a raincoat. An enemy officer ran out of the niche and unloaded the entire clip of his pistol into Buldakov’s back. Lech didn’t have time to rush at him because of his tight boots. After the machine gunners heard shots behind them, they began to run, thinking that the Russian soldiers had bypassed them.
Buldakov was still alive. There were many unexpected battles and losses that day. The soldiers' strength was already running out. They held on to the shore only thanks to their stubbornness. In the evening it began to rain, which brought Buldakov to his senses. With the last of his strength, he turned over on his stomach and began to move towards the river.
Large numbers of lice plagued people. The smell of decaying corpses floated over the river. The height had to be left again. The Germans shot at everything that moved. And on the phone they asked me to be patient a little longer. As night fell, Shestakov went on duty. The Germans were shooting at the front line. The connection was constantly interrupted, so Leshka constantly came on line. After another connection break, he went to restore it, and was thrown into a ravine by a mine explosion. After which he lost consciousness. In the morning, Shorokhov discovered that Leshka was nowhere to be found. After some time, he found him in a ravine. He sat and clutched the end of the wire in his fist, his face was disfigured from the explosion. Shorokhov established contact and reported to Ponaitotov that Alexey had died. Ponayotov ordered Shorokhov to run after Leshka, and ensured that a boat was sent from the other side to pick up the wounded. The crossing was organized by Nelya. She found a wounded man in the boat. Buldakov was lying there. The overload did not frighten Nelka, and she took him with her.
A few kilometers from the bridgehead up the river, artillery preparation began. Taking into account previous mistakes, the command launched a new offensive. This time the artillery struck powerfully. Work began on the construction of the crossing. Early in the morning another crossing was being built further down the river. Those who survived were ordered to go into battle along with other units. Shchus walked ahead with a pistol.
In the remaining houses of the village, the soldiers were given soap, tobacco, and food. In one of the houses, officers were resting on straw. Musenok flew up to them and dispersed them due to the absence of a sentry. Unable to bear it, Shchus was rude to the political worker. Musenko was both feared and hated. He constantly minded his own business. He lived a royal life and had four vehicles at his disposal. In the back of one of the cars, a small housing was equipped, where the typist Isolde was located all the time. This beauty had the Order of the Red Star, as well as the medal “For Military Merit”.
Musenok could not stop when he began to scold Shchusya like a teenager. But he did not know the officers well, who spent several days in continuous battles. After some time, Shchus agreed with the driver Musenka, who also hated him, that he would go away all night to get the gas key. After Shchus was convinced that Musenok was already asleep, he started the car and drove to the minefield. I picked up a slight slope and pushed the car. There was a powerful explosion. After which, Shchus returned to the house and fell asleep.
On the right bank they dug a large hole and buried the fallen soldiers in it. And on the left bank they buried the head of the political department. Isolde stood next to the coffin in a black scarf. An obelisk formed on the river. And across the river they dug several more holes for corpses. In a few years there will be an artificial sea here, and war veterans and pioneers will bring flowers to Musenka’s grave.
Soon the Soviet army will cross the river and connect all four bridgeheads. The Germans will send their main forces here, and Russian troops will break through the front, far from these bridgeheads. German troops will still advance. Lakhonin's corps will still get a hard time. And he himself will become the commander of the army, and will take the Shchusya division under his wing. Beskapustin will become a general. Nelka will receive another wound. During her absence, Faya will commit suicide. Zarubin and Yashkin will be awarded the title of Hero, and they will be commissioned for disability. After the autumn battles, German troops will begin to cover the two fronts. Enemy troops will take flight. The Germans will begin to be overcome by lice, the troops will get sick and starve. And then the pursuing Russian troops will completely crush the enemy troops.

Please note that this is only a summary of the literary work “Cursed and Killed.” This summary omits many important points and quotes.