The future blogger saw the world for the first time on July 12, 1994 in the village of Storozhevye farms in the Usman district of the Lipetsk region. Eldar spent the first years of his life in these places. By the age of 5, doctors discovered the boy had a disease - diabetes. In the future, this disease, acquired at such a young age, will affect physical development Eldara.
His early years were spent in a complete family; moreover, a few years after the birth of his son, his parents also had a daughter. When Eldar was six years old, the family changed their place of residence and moved to an industrial city called Novokuznetsk, located in the Kemerovo region. Already at this age, the boy began to be interested in music, dreaming of one day making a name for himself on the big stage.
School years, first attempts at music
Eldar Kazanfarovich went to first grade in 2000 regular school city of Novokuznetsk. During his studies, the guy did not show much desire for the humanities and exact sciences. But he always managed to be the life of the party and regularly take part in public events. To participate in one of the school concerts, Eldar, together with his school friend Alexander Smirnov, created a rap group called “Prototypes MC”. The guy really wanted to sing, but he understood that his voice was not very suitable for strong vocal performance, so rap attracted his attention.
The guys recorded the first performances of “MC Prototypes” on an old phone, but did not publish them anywhere, since the prevalence of the Internet in those years was not yet so great. But nevertheless, local clubs began to learn about the existence of the group, this led to the first success of the young performers. By 2010, “Prototypes MC” had already been invited to clubs several times to hold their concerts there. 
Since the future musician devoted all his time to his favorite activity and not to his lessons, after finishing nine classes he received a very mediocre certificate. The graduate only got fours in social studies, life safety, and art; all other grades were threes.
Tales of the village Storozhevoye
Nikolai Ivanovich Bozhkov was born two years after the end of the Great Patriotic War on a small farm a few kilometers from the village of Prokhorovka, near which a grandiose tank battle took place in July 1943, which is considered one of the largest in military history battles using armored forces. He was already over fifty when he began recording the stories of his fellow villagers and his childhood memories.
This was his duty to his mother, who last day I hoped that one fine day a writer would come from Moscow who would describe what the people experienced, through whose literally houses and yards the terrible machine of war swept through, and what kind of life they, the residents of the Storozhevoye farm, had to live. She died without waiting for anyone. And then her son, Nikolai Ivanovich - a public education worker, who by that time had become a farmer and beekeeper - realized that no one would come. Never. And if the memory of the past of his homeland is dear to him, then he needs to write everything down himself. So the farmer became a writer.
Potato
In June 1942, after the battle, the Germans went on the offensive. The front, after a long stay along the line Storozhevoye - Prokhorovka, rolled east towards Voronezh. The cannonade had not yet subsided when the farmers, most of whom at that time were huddled in the Prelestnensky farms, began to think about returning to their huts.
My mother and Uncle Tima, who was fifteen at the time, went on reconnaissance. Among the soldiers who settled in the house of my grandfather Pavel Nikolaevich was a very young German boy, the same red-haired and blue-eyed as Timofey. He immediately approached him and asked him in Russian with an accent.
≈ What is your name?
≈ Timofey Pavlovich.
“I’m Hans, Ivan in Russian,” he introduced himself and extended his hand.
Then, looking into the German-Russian phrasebook, he began to flaunt his Russian language, issuing phrases like: “How many kilometers to Stalingrad?” He said that he knew a way to stay alive in war.
≈ My father told me not to shoot at people. “I will shoot upward,” he showed, pointing the rifle above Timina’s head, “and I will return home alive.
Then he made a whole speech in which he proposed to pit Hitler and Stalin against each other, and to let all the soldiers go home.
The unit where Hans served was in the front line for the first time, did not participate in battles and, at that time, had not yet become brutal. So the residents returned home calmly.
This Hans turned out to be an active type. The manger in the barn - the Germans quickly ate the cow - he converted it into something like a toilet and immediately updated it. Timofey, seeing this, ran to his mother to report that the German was rummaging in the cow's manger. The fact is that the people were preparing for the arrival of the Germans, and all the most valuable things were buried in the ground. Polyethylene was not yet known at that time, so they tried to hide things under the roof. Grandmother's chest was buried just under the manger, and the fact that there was a play closet there saved it from looting. In the hungry winter of 1942, most of the surviving items were exchanged for bread, but the belongings of the front-line soldiers, their ceremonial civilian suits, were kept intact until Victory Day, until the heroes returned. They also saved my grandmother’s dowry, which included elegant knitted pillowcases, napkins, and cross-stitched festive handwoven towels. Now their great-granddaughters are taking care of them. A suitcase with documents, pre-war photographs and other papers has also been preserved.
Hans was tireless: he found a rope somewhere, pointed out to Tim that it needed to be secured at the very top of the barn, where the rafters meet under the thatched roof, he himself sawed down the edges of the board and it turned out to be a swing.
At first Tima pumped the German, and when he pumped up enough, he suggested that Uncle Tima try it too. Then we tried to swing together.
But the German Hans never knew how many kilometers to Stalingrad; he died from a shell explosion. One day he and two partners were cleaning a gun, and either a stray shell hit them from our positions, or Hans himself, while playing, dropped the shell, but all three died and were buried right under the wall of the hut.
Soon the beaten Germans appeared from near Voronezh. These were already embittered. This is how my sister Taisiya talks about it; she was five years old at the time.
“The first thing the Germans did when they arrived was to shoot our cow, heifer and sheep. For Christmas they set up a “Christmas tree”, took my beloved kittens away from the cat, strangled them and hung them in the yard on a cherry tree like toys. Then all the residents were driven into the cellars and sentries were posted.
I caught an orphaned cat, hid it in my bosom and was already going down into the cellar, thinking that I had saved it, and then I saw a machine gun pointed at me and heard barking curses. I threw the cat, she ran, and immediately the fascist fired a burst at her. Shreds of wool flew, a gray lump rolled on the ground and froze. I hid in the far corner of the cellar and cried silently for a long time. This was my first inconsolable grief, and our war had just begun. No one thought that they would stay in the cellar for three days, they didn’t take food, there was no water either, they ate raw vegetables. A neighbor, Aunt Shura, managed to smuggle in a piece of lard unnoticed. It was divided among everyone and eaten without bread. Tastier than food I haven't tried it since then┘╩
Three days later, all the inhabitants, and there were then about two hundred women, children and old people, were ordered to leave to the west.
“Mom,” my sister said, “put two coats on me, old and new, felt boots, a hat and a scarf. She herself took her three-year-old brother in her arms, hung a bundle of bread and scissors on her arm, gave me the hem of her coat and said: “Daughter, hold on tight,” and off we went. I was unbearably sleepy. I would tear myself away from my mother’s coat, fall into the snow and fall asleep, or maybe I first fell asleep, then fell. Realizing that I had fallen, my mother continued to walk for some time, then she laid her brother down in the snow and came back for me. Then again the hem of my mother’s coat, falling into the snow, and so on for all nineteen kilometers.”
The hunger in the German rear was incredible. They ate grass, acorns, buds from trees in winter, rotten vegetables, but no one died. Moreover, the Germans came with their “surplus appropriation system”. A cart moved through the village from yard to yard, and armed soldiers walked nearby shouting:
≈ Uterus, chicken, egg, milk!..
“The uterus” threw up her hands. I have nothing anymore...
Then, pushing her aside, they went into the yard and rummaged through the cellars and sheds, scooping out the last crumbs. In the yard of the mother of six children, Ksenia Mikhailovna Kharitonova, to her blessed memory, no food was found. There was nothing to look for there. Then they entered the hut, rummaged through the empty corners, looked into the stove, under the stove - nothing. They began to drive the children away from the stove. When the last one jumped off, a bag of millet was found in the corner. The fascist who looked into it smiled contentedly.
The mother, realizing that the last thing was being taken away from the children, dooming them to starvation, grabbed her purse with her hands. The healthy German held the bag. “Give it back, you bastard!” the mother shouted and grabbed the fascist face with all her might with one hand. The children, crying, rushed to their mother, pushing her away from the German. He clicked the shutter. The line went through the holy corner of the hut: it was his partner who managed to pull the gun by the barrel...
And in 1942 they returned from the German rear to the ashes. Everything was burned. There was absolutely nothing to eat. There were no bread cards or even the most meager rations in the occupied territories. The older guys learned how to make sparrow traps from captured camouflage netting. But this did not save us from hunger. Everything that Ksenia got somewhere, she gave to the children, but, as she said, she herself did not eat I wanted it and she was very happy about it. Then she saw that her legs were glassy, she could hardly move, and she realized that she was dying. Fear for her children overwhelmed her. Ksenia found the strength to stand up. She survived and saved the children.
Many years after the war, she was once called to a dying neighbor:
≈ Wants, ≈ they say, ≈ to repent.
“Neighbor,” he whispered, sobbing, “I’m sorry for setting fire to your hut during the war.” I was the first to arrive in Vinogradovka, and all the houses, I saw, had burned down, but yours was still standing. I felt embarrassed...
In Storozhevoye parents' house It also didn’t burn down and even some of the furniture was preserved, only after six months of quartering of enemy soldiers the spirit was heavy. Mom decided to whitewash the house. She started knitting a brush from the grass, and sent her brother to the slope for chalk. Whitewash was spread in an abandoned helmet. Climbing onto a rickety bench, she began whitewashing the ceiling. Suddenly Tim flew into the hut. His eyes were shining. In his hands he held a handful of potatoes.
≈ Look what I found!
-Where did you get them?
≈ In the cellar.
“So I saw that the Germans had cleared everything out there.”
“They fell into the crack behind the logs, but they were not found. Let's cook some soup, I'll collect firewood in a moment.
“You know what,” my mother said after thinking, “it’s summer now, I’d better make some nettle soup, and let’s plant some potatoes.” It looks like we will have to spend another winter under the Germans.
In the garden, the weeds stood almost as tall as a man. There was neither a scythe nor a shovel. But grass did not grow in place of the burned haystack. Tim found a suitable sharp piece of iron, and potatoes, finely cut according to the number of eyes, were planted in the ashes. A surprisingly good harvest was harvested that fall. I think the entire “people's war” consisted of such countless fragments. Only by episodes can you recognize the war. And the potatoes of 1942 remained forever in the memory of our family.
In the winter of 1945, Timofey turned eighteen years old. He was drafted, went to the front near Koenigsberg and in the first battle received a terrible concussion. He returned home mute, only a year later his speech began to return. Then he got married, raised children, entered the Kharkov Veterinary Institute at the age of forty, defended his diploma and worked at the Prokhorovsky Agroindustrial Complex until retirement. He died early: the shell shock still took its toll.
On the other side
Lida the cow was jokingly called “front-line soldier”. According to stories, she crossed the front line twice, and in 1943, before the offensive of our troops on the Kursk Bulge, she was evacuated to the rear, dragging a wheelbarrow with things, food and her mother’s older, pre-war children.
Frequent shelling, bombing and even minor injuries apparently influenced the character of the “front-line soldiers”. She did not let strangers near her, and it happened that her own people got the worst of it. In peacetime, they did not keep lively cows for a long time, but when there was nothing to plow the collective farm lands on, and in winter to transport firewood from the forest and manure to the fields, then there was no time for alertness or even milk. They grazed the cows in the morning, before work, a little at lunchtime, and in the evening after work. There was nothing to feed except grass. What kind of milk is there?
But Lida brought calves regularly, and this was a penny to the family of collective farmers, who received only “sticks” in the accountants’ papers for their work. Every autumn, grown bulls and heifers were taken to the procurement office. There, after beating the donor for a couple of days so that the unfed cattle would lose more weight, they were still accepted, and after some time they were given money.
It’s hard to even imagine how unimaginable peasant life without a cow was just recently. I also remember being on duty with Lida, who was grazing in the garden. For several days, while waiting for calving, she was not allowed into the herd, she was kept on a leash. My parents took turns visiting the barn at night, and I helped during the day. Behind the garden there was a small clearing dug with zigzag trenches, and beyond that there was a forest. Sitting on a pear tree near the magpie’s nest, I noticed that Lida was lying somehow strangely and something was sticking out of her.
While I was getting down, screaming, while I was running, while my mother and I were running back, Lida was already licking the black-and-white calf. And since the magpie fussed most of all, chirping above them, the newborn was named “Magpie.”
During the “reign” of Soroka, adolescence passed. Then, helping my father, I learned to remove manure, clean wool with an iron brush, and bite cow’s hooves with special pliers, which are constantly growing, like human nails. And if you don’t “cut” them regularly, they will curl painfully.
Every year the tips of the horns were cut off with a hacksaw. In Soroka they did not grow sideways upward, as in most cows, but forward inward, curving towards the forehead.
In the middle of summer the gadfly began to appear. The flies bit through the tough cow skin, drank blood and laid eggs. After some time, larvae emerged from the eggs, grew quickly, and in the heat began to actively move under the skin, driving the cows into a frenzy. With their tails in the air and their eyes bulging, they began to run chaotically with a terrible roar, and then scatter in different directions in search of shade and a place where they could scratch their backs. This phenomenon was called “tongue”. It is impossible for a shepherd to cope with him. At the slightest sign of the beginning of the language, the herd was hastily driven home. Even after taking refuge from the heat in the barns, the cows continued to go wild for some time. They tore chains, broke mangers, mutilated themselves and their owners.
My father did this: he pointed the neck of a bottle at the swollen area of a cow's hide and sharply hit the bottom with his fist. In this case, the larva of the gadfly was squeezed out from under the skin into the bottle. The cow apparently experienced relief and tolerated the procedure calmly. And I helped my father find these swellings under the fur.
Under Soroka, the first manual separator was purchased. After each distillation of milk, dividing it into cream and skimmed milk, the separator was disassembled into two dozen parts, thoroughly washed, dried and reassembled. Cottage cheese was obtained from the skim milk, some went to the calf and pig, the cream was dropped into the basement, and after a few days, when it had turned sour into sour cream, it was churned into butter. For this purpose, the house had a special butter churn, a fifteen-liter wooden tub, similar to the cylinder of a very large pump, in which a wooden piston with holes moved up and down. Oil was obtained if sour cream was passed through these holes a couple of thousand times. The process took up to an hour. The churn was also washed each time and the parts were hung on the fence to dry. In rural families, this work was usually done by the older children. There were even fights over the right to turn the separator.
The daily evening ringing, caressing the ear, coming from the open doors of the barn, remained in my childhood memory. It was the sound of the milk pan ringing under the tight streams of milk. A cat with kittens came running to the sound. They sat around an old aluminum bowl lying on the ground and humbly waited for a portion of milk. When I returned from the street, having caught a whole jar of cockchafers with my forage for the chickens, I also received my share directly from the can hanging on the branch of the pear tree, in which my mother cooled the strained milk. It happened that in the dark I came across a hedgehog who, with enviable punctuality, was checking the cat’s bowl - what if they hadn’t finished drinking...
That morning started out beautifully. The herd sleepily wandered to the east, where the place of sunrise was already clearly marked. The log was filled with such dense fog that it looked like a white river of milk. The cows entering it disappeared piece by piece. At first the legs disappeared from sight, then gradually the body, tail and horns.
But when Mishka and I plunged into the fog ourselves, it felt like we had ended up in a refrigerator. The clothes immediately became wet and stuck to the body, but, most importantly, the cows were not visible. True, they soon made themselves known with the loud crunch of corn stalks and cobs.
The feeling of complete hopelessness that I then experienced is still alive in me, running with a wild scream through two-meter-high corn wet with dew, lashing with a stick left and right on the backs of cows, who did not react to either the scream or the stick until they had eaten enough belly
There were two dangerous moments here: the destruction of collective farm crops, for which a large fine could be imposed, and even more terrible - “blowing” and the mass death of livestock from overeating wet greens. The parents would never be able to pay for this.
The sun began to warm up. The fog cleared. We drove the herd out into the open and laid it down. Experienced shepherds know that to do this they need to overtake the leader cow twice around the herd. After that, we caught our breath, wrung out our clothes, laid them out in the oven to dry along with our shoes, and unwrapped our breakfasts.
Thank God, everything worked out. Nobody noticed anything; there were no cows blown over. But after such a test, I began to firmly insist that the parents surrender the one-year-old heifer Milka. Why such pain and such risk?
That same fall she was taken to the procurement office. The mother, accompanying the procession with a twig, cried for the entire ten kilometers. And then she told everyone about it, constantly wiping her wet eyes with a handkerchief. She said that Milka also had tears flowing all the way.
≈ The brute, but she understood everything┘
Huts
When my father returned from the war, my mother had already managed to build a hut herself. How it was possible to decide to build a house on the complete ashes left after a tank battle with bare hands still remains a mystery to me. The most amazing thing is that almost all the female soldiers also formed by the end of the war. A new street, Stolbyanka, was even formed on the edge of the farmstead, named after the method of construction. Hut walls and even ceilings were made from posts lined and coated on both sides with clay. They stood as “standard” huts in an even row, all as one, covered with rye straw, poured on top with a solution of chalk and clay, with the eaves neatly trimmed with a sharply sharpened piece of a scythe.
Everything inside was the same too. A kitchen with a Russian stove in the corner to the left of the entrance, and a stove (rough) dividing the hut in half. The oven opened onto two windows into the hall. Although few window frames were required for the hut, there was enough hassle in making them back then. All the famous carpenters in the area were taken away by the war. By chance, an old man from near Korocha ended up on the farm looking for work. Their villages suffered much less than ours, and there was no work for him there. Despite the fact that he carpentered with primitive tools and used waste material, almost all the frames and doors on the farm made by his hands still serve to this day.
To get glass for our house, my aunt and a distant relative traveled all the way to Kharkov on freight trains. They were given clothes, money and a chest for glass, and were also instructed to buy two notebooks for my older sister, who went to first grade.
There were no fewer crooks in Kharkov then than there are now. We rode on the tram standing, tightly face to face, because according to rumors, pickpockets cut the faces of those who were looking around with razors. They managed to buy glass, but they couldn’t lift the chest, which was heavy even without glass. They were dragged to the station, then jostled in freight trains, but all the glass was delivered intact. But their notebooks “lessons” were cut off along with their pockets. Apparently they mistakenly took them for money.
It is known that a hut with windows, but without a stove, is not yet a hut. Bricks were needed for the stoves. They mined it wherever they had to. They collected debris from pre-war buildings scattered by shells in their gardens and carried them with railway, where the Germans bombed a barracks at a junction, they transported former church bricks from distant villages on cows.
There was no stove maker. There was talk that there was a stove maker somewhere and would soon appear on the farm, but he still didn’t come. Then the mother took a bunch of twigs, went to the only surviving stove on the farm, took measurements from it and took up the masonry herself.
Before I even had time to lay out my oven, a line formed. So a good half of the farm’s stoves are my mother’s work.
Everyone had an earthen floor, greased with fresh mullein and colored clay.
They also built a canopy, but not a “maple lattice” one, but a very small one, with one window. That’s why they were called not “seni”, but “seni”. From them it was possible, if desired, to get to the room covered with dusty cobwebs under the roof, where, according to legend, the brownie lived.
I recently had to dismantle one of these houses. The most surprising thing was the nails. Almost all of them were homemade, of all shapes and sizes. Small ones, for fastening brushwood shingles, were cut from wire; larger ones for fastening poles and armor, reminiscent of horseshoes in their shape, apparently worked by a blacksmith. Rafters and beams (matits) were fastened with railway spikes.
With truly soldierly ingenuity, women used war trophies on the farm. In almost every yard, from the gate to the porch, a path made of a tank caterpillar was laid, and the porch itself was a tower hatch. The driver's hatch was used for stove burners. The chicken coops were covered with aluminum planes, even the balsams and geraniums on the windowsills grew in short shell casings.
At that time, there was plenty of metal in the Prokhorov fields, but the houses were built of wood. It was possible to get several strong logs for the hut only in the forest. One winter night, my mother and her neighbor went into the forest to get “building materials”. They went far so that the forester, having discovered traces of felling, would look for the intruder not on the farm. We selected two oak trees from the ravine, cut them down, cut off the branches and tried to drag them. The snow was deep and the climb was steep. With great difficulty, they took turns carrying both logs to the edge of the forest and sat down on them to catch their breath. Suddenly, a neighbor asked: “What do you think, if our men return from the front alive, they will beat us, chase us, and baptize us with obscenities like before the war?”
“In my head,” my mother said, “immediately terrible episodes of the war flashed: bombings, hunger, cold, bullying by the Germans. I didn’t even think then that after everything I had experienced, someone’s hand would rise or their tongue would turn. And while I was wondering what to say, the neighbor answered heavily, as if she were doomed: “Bu-u-u-dut ┘╩
These women remembered until their death and could tell in great detail the history of each pole and rafter. It was so difficult for them. Near the farm there was a small tract Plotavets, more simply, Plotavina. There was literally not a bush or tree left of it - only a stump. But they gave rise to growth. She rose before my eyes, you could say that we grew up together. Only now I’m bald, and there’s a mighty oak forest rustling there.
Recently, one of the women, dying, told me a secret connected with that time. Great grief befell her. She has four children, and she got sick. And one could only rely on God. He sent her a dream in which he ordered her to do a good deed for a stranger and so that no one would know about it. That's when the fire happened. One widow's house burned down.
“We must,” the woman decided, “to help the fire victim.”
She got up at night, took an ax and a saw and went into the distant forest. She cut down a tree there that was barely able to be dragged. By dawn she dragged him to the burnt yard. Pregnant. And the disease went away.
The churches then stood without singing, but, apparently, her lonely prayer was strong...
Fedora's grandmother
I don’t know how many churches there were in the Prokhorovsky district in the post-war period. And did they exist at all? As a child, in my youth, I never saw one. Meanwhile, everyone born on the farm was promptly baptized here, and the dead were buried. All rituals according to Orthodox canons were performed by grandmother Fedora, nicknamed “The Mantis.” She baptized my daughters and invited me more than once as a godfather.
One day a priest came to the farm. Since there is no female priesthood in Orthodoxy, I asked him: are Fedorina’s rituals valid? After the priest clarified all the details, he answered in the affirmative:
≈ In this case, they are┘
And the details of grandmother Fedora’s life are as follows. She was born in 1894 into the family of peasant Nikolai Trofimovich Krivchikov as the fourth child. Before her, Pavel, Timofey and Praskovya were born, and the youngest was called Ivan. In her youth, she was lucky: in 1917, Chursin Frol Leontievich from Prokhorovka took her in marriage.
Fedora ended up in a very strong Prokhorov family. Her husband Frol had two brothers: Mikhail and Alexey, sisters Maria and Anna and mother Elena. The family had several horses and was engaged in carriage. They even had a covered carriage - a phaeton, on which passengers arriving by train were transported from the station to distant villages, and even to Korocha. On the second day after the wedding, Fedora got up before her husband and brothers, fed and watered the black horses, put the harness in order, and the most amazing thing was how she, the woman, treated the horses and the horse towards her. It was accepted among us that horses were the lot of men.
By holidays Fedora, riding a pair of horses in a phaeton, visited her relatives in Storozhevoye and Maloyablonovo. She brought gifts for everyone and her goddaughter Sonya.
In the same phaeton Fyodor was carrying a bride for his brother Ivan, who had returned from captivity. The wedding was in a meat-eater. It snowed all night before the wedding, and it was snowy in the morning. The bride Marfa Titovna lived in Zhimolostny, and the groom's church parish was in Maloyablonovo. When the men woke up and looked outside, they decided to postpone the wedding, but it turned out that Fedora had already harnessed the horses and was waiting. When we arrived at the bride’s house, we saw that it was completely covered with snow. The in-laws thought that no one would come to such an abyss, so they slept. We had to dig out the bride ourselves. It was with difficulty that we got to Maloyablonovo through snowdrifts. We arrived at the wedding table in Storozhevoye when it was already dark.
Despite the hungry time, the guests were given a glass of vodka. A guest magician was also present at the celebration. First, he poured a handful of gold five-ruble coins into Fedora’s hem, which mysteriously disappeared immediately, and then he asked my grandfather Pavel for a watch, crushed it with a hammer in front of everyone, but then returned it intact.
Collectivization began in 1930. Fedora's brother Ivanok promptly gave the collective farm two cows and a horse-drawn crop, from which he had a good income and a comfortable life. This saved him from dispossession. But Fedor’s family refused to go to the collective farm. In 1932, government officials came to them and demanded that they pay the tax within two days. The amount indicated was impossible. For non-payment, Fedora and her husband were taken to the police station. At night, compassionate police officers let Fedora go home. She managed to light the stove, cook soup for the children, and return to her cell in the morning.
In December 1932 they were dispossessed. The convoy put Frol's family on a sleigh, and they drove off through the frost. They didn’t give me any warm clothes or food to take with me. A train of Stolypin's kulaks was sent to the Karelo-Finnish Republic. By that time, Frol and Fedora had four children: all were placed in barracks. The adults worked in the logging area. Women are equal to men. Then we were transferred to a fishing collective farm, and the food became better. It was not prohibited to send or receive letters.
A tradition has emerged in Brother Pavel’s family. Every year on Easter, the family gathered at the table, and everyone together wrote a letter for Fedora, so as not to miss any details. Letters were also sent at other times, but always on Easter. The answer did not come until Trinity, where Fedora wrote that not all of their snow had melted yet...
During the years of exile, Fedora's little daughter, husband, and mother-in-law died of starvation. The eldest son, Nikolai, died in the war. In 1944, with two surviving children, Dusya and Mitya, Fedora decided to return home. They set off on their journey illegally, having neither money nor food. How they got there, how long they were on the road, what they ate, I don’t know, only one night they knocked on the door of Praskovya’s sister at the Gostishchevo station. And the very next day, leaving the children, who were tired on the road, with their sister, we went with our niece to Storozhevoye.
They approached the house in the evening; people were still working, some in the garden, some doing housework. Niece Raya, a lover of jokes and practical jokes, approached my grandfather Pavel Nikolaevich and asked:
“Won’t you let this girl spend the night?” and pointed to Fedora.
The grandfather really saw a thin girl of about fourteen, as it seemed to him in the twilight. My own sister he didn't recognize her. At that time there were a lot of people wandering around our area. Some were returning from evacuation, some were looking for relatives, some were simply wandering without shelter.
“We can spend the night, there is straw, and there is a corner in the hut, but we just have bad food,” he said. Maybe you’ll walk around the farm before it gets dark,” the grandfather turned to Fedora, who had been silent until then, “gather alms, and we’ll add something.” So you'll have dinner.
Here the guest’s nerves could not stand it.
“Brother,” “it’s me, your sister,” “Fedora,” she said through a lump in her throat, “and threw herself with tears on her brother’s chest.
There were a lot of tears, even more conversations. By that time they had not seen each other for 11 years.
From that day on, another, already fifth, surname, the Chursins, settled in my grandfather’s dilapidated house. My ancestors also lived there - my grandfather Pavel Nikolaevich and my grandmother Vasilisa Ivanovna, their three children, sons-in-law, daughters-in-law, three grandchildren, a stray old man with a strange surname - Cherny, a total of sixteen souls in one room and kitchen.
Fedora became famous on the farm for being able to do everything. She treated panaritium (an internal abscess of the finger, popularly called “hair”), and non-surgically. I read fear from the children. Based on the shape of a pregnant woman's belly, she could accurately determine the sex of the child. Sick cattle were brought to her.
In the difficult post-war times, when quinoa was still added to bread, when there was nowhere to live and nothing to wear, people remembered God only by looking at Fedora. She managed to convince the farmers to fence off the cemetery, where cattle grazed over the overgrown graves. She did not hesitate to shame those who did not take care of the graves of their ancestors. Not a single person dared to use foul language in front of her.
Knew Fedora Old Slavonic language, read the psalter freely and with understanding. She knew all Christian prayers and church hymns by heart. She blessed the water. According to the Bible, she predicted the future. She kept in touch with some monastery in Ukraine, nuns constantly came to her.
The holy corner of her hut, filled with icons, resembled a church altar; a lamp was almost always burning there. When the monastery was closed during the time of Khrushchev, three chests of old church books were brought to her. Then these books, along with the icons, were taken away by the nuns somewhere. I received from my grandmother Fedora only one book, soaked in the soot of church candles, which she never parted with all her life and even carried with her through exile: this is “ New Testament Our Lord Jesus Christ" in Slavic and Russian languages, printed in the Synodal Printing House of Petrograd in 1915.
Thanks to her phenomenal memory, Fedora Nikolaevna remembered all our ancestors from the moment they moved from near Tula during the reign of Alexei Mikhailovich. As a student, during the holidays I bought a general notebook of ninety-six sheets, entitled “The History of the Krivchikov Family” and even wrote two sentences from memory: “When the boyar children, the Krivchikov brothers, first arrived at the indicated place, the future village of Maloyablonovo, they saw a large ravine, on the edge of which huge wild pear trees grew, and in their crowns there were nests of eagles. The birds themselves gracefully soared over the ravine.
Then it seemed to me that there was still a lot of time ahead, and someday, when there was absolutely nothing to do, I would go to my grandmother and write everything down.
Now you can only regret it┘
According to my passport, my place of birth is the village of Storozhevoye, which is true. I can indicate this location to the nearest square meter. I was born in April 1947 in a peasant hut. My grandmother Fedora took me from my mother’s womb, and she tied the umbilical cord.
Love
Two old women without teeth
They were talking about love...
Varvara Timofeevna told me about love at first sight.
After the war, Marusya Ozerova worked at the forestry enterprise. Then she left for Kharkov. I rented an apartment there and got a job. She works and works, but doesn’t go home - everything is busy, she has to do laundry on the weekend... And her mother - Nastya - lived on a farm in Storozhevoy - began to get angry. What is it, she left and her nose doesn’t show! The garden needs to be weeded, this and that. I would come and help. At least she didn’t promise, otherwise: I’ll come, I’ll help... I just sent a letter - how do you, mom, live there? That's all.
She weeded the garden, whitewashed the house, washed everything, put everything in order and thinks: “Let me write her a letter that I’m so sick, that the end of the world is the end of the world for me, that maybe you won’t be able to capture me alive.” I want to see you for the last time.”
And she scribbled out this letter... Marusya rushed by train, from the station - then it was called Kuski - running. She came running and saw that there was complete order all around, everything was clean and swept. He enters the hut, there is earth (earthen floor ≈ auto.) greased, the corners were lined with ocher, the pillowcases on the pillows were washed, ironed, everything was beautifully put away, in a homely way. And there is no mother. “Probably,” Marusya thinks, “the neighbors did their best for the funeral and helped. And the mother has already been buried.” She jumped out into the yard and stood there, not herself. Lo and behold, the mother is coming from the garden with a hoe.
≈ Mom?! ≈ was stunned, ≈ why did you scare me so much!
- How can I not frighten you when you don’t show your eyes, don’t go to your mother. She would come, tell me about herself, ask me how I am here.
≈ Yes, I just got a job, I just started working, I haven’t understood anything yet, but I’ll tell you already. You are curious, but I was running, my heart was stopping, is that really possible?
≈ Okay, reprimand, you better sit down and eat.
- Yes, I suffered so much that I don’t even want to eat.
≈ That's it, forget it. I saw you, you saw me too, that means everything is fine. Mother's done, rest.
- No, mom, you can’t rest, I have to go tomorrow morning, the director let me go to the funeral, not to rest.
The mother collected food and cooked eggs for the road.
We talked almost all night - mother told her stories, Marusya told her stories. We fell asleep in the morning. In the morning I got on the train. Well, he thinks, now I’ll peel the testicle and eat it. She had just broken an egg when a guy approached her. She hid this egg. Young people: it’s inconvenient to chew in front of a guy. He himself is a soldier, on his way home from the army. And she, just a farm girl, is embarrassed. She moved to another place, he came up again and sat down.
≈ Why don’t you want to talk to me? - says.
≈ What should I talk to you about?
≈ Isn’t that what we’re talking about? I was a soldier, I served, I wasn’t home for three years, I forgot my peaceful life. I'm interested in everything. What's new with you, how are you living now?
“I,” she answers sharply, “I don’t know you, you don’t know me either, there’s no need for me to talk to you.”
Transfer in Dergachi. At that time, a lot of meat was transported from the suburbs to Kharkov to sell. Some were carrying a piglet, some a calf. Collective farms didn’t pay money back then, but everyone needed to put on shoes and clothes, so they brought them.
During the transfer, Marusya tried to hide behind the bags; she thought the soldier would lose sight of her. No, I didn't lose it. “Here,” he thinks, “what an impudent one,”
Where I go, he goes too.
I changed cars and got on another train. This is the punishment, what should I do? She sees that the soldier will not lag behind.
And he really doesn’t let up:
≈ Girl, what is your name?
“Lena,” she lied.
≈ Where do you live?
Lena was the name of the owner's daughter. Marusya gave him the address of this Lena and even told him her last name. Under a false name, Marusya-Lena became bolder, talked to the soldier, and in Kharkov everyone got on their own tram - and they parted. As she hoped, for good.
A week has passed. Marusya wrote to her mother that she arrived safely, except that a soldier stopped on the train, so he didn’t let her eat eggs the whole way: she was hungry and arrived.
On another day off, Marusya took over the laundry from her landlady. And she was a very prominent girl - black hair, curly, slender.
He hears someone knocking on the door. The hostess came out.
≈ Does so-and-so live here?
“Here,” the hostess answers.
≈Can I see her?
≈ Please. Lena come out, they have come to see you!
Lena comes out, looking nothing like Marusya - blonde hair, shorter height and a stooped figure.
The soldier looked at her and asked:
≈ Is there another girl in your house by any chance?
“Marusya,” the hostess calls, “come on out, show yourself!”
Marusya comes out, flushed from the wash, beautiful, her sleeves rolled up high, her arms strong.
“Well,” says the soldier, “even though you cheated, I found you.”
“Wait, soldier,” the hostess intervened, “I’m her second mother here, if you’re a serious guy, then come into the house, we’ll talk.”
≈ That’s why I came to say that I fell in love with Marusya at first sight and intend to get married┘
The next day, Marusya writes a letter to her mother: “That soldier who pestered me on the train has become so attached to my soul that he wants to woo me.” He asks you to come to Kharkov to meet his parents. Here is their Kharkov address┘╩
As soon as the mother read the letter, Shura, her sister, comes.
“Shur,” she says, “Marusya writes” with her parents get acquainted┘ What to do?
- Let's go, we just need to get ready, not empty-handed.
There were no suitcases then. Wicker baskets were filled with food. Everything is as it should be: milk, sour cream, cottage cheese, cucumbers, tomatoes, onions, garlic, potatoes well dug up. We tied the baskets together in pairs to hang them over our shoulders, each in a bag, and off we went. We arrived in Kharkov and began to search. They thought that at the first house they would ask where Kolya Ivanov lived and they would be shown. But no matter how it is. It’s already evening, what should I do? They won’t find it, that’s all.
A policeman approaches.
- Citizens, who are you?
Whether long or short, they told him everything, he put them to bed in the department, and the next morning they all went together to look for the groom.
Almost immediately they found a street and a house at the address.
They knocked.
A guy comes out in an apron, smeared with clay, it’s clear that he is doing repairs.
The policeman asks:
≈ These two citizens are looking for you, do you know them?
The guy opened his mouth, and Shura said:
“You don’t know us, but we know you.” I have a niece, Marusya, the soldier met her on the train, and then came to her apartment. Do you happen to know him?
“I know, but you,” he turns to Nastya, “are probably her mother?”
Marusya was very similar to her mother.
- Yes, mom.
“Well,” says the hostess, “then please go into the apartment.”
The policeman took his leave:
“I see that I have found a groom for you, so, good-bye, citizens.” “And you,” he says to the groom, “then be sure to escort the guests to the train and seat them so that they can get home.
It turned out that the groom was already preparing a room for the wedding to share with his young wife. Divided a room in the house. I broke out the wood and made a partition so that the rooms were separate, and a kitchenette. I did everything myself. The guests found him at work as a stove-maker.
“He should have waited,” complained the soldier’s mother, “he should have taken a walk after the service.” And he wants to get married. When I saw your daughter, she doesn’t want to hear anything. The matchmaking took place on the same day, the table was set, the matchmakers were treated to whatever God provided, they sat down, discussed everything and soon celebrated the wedding.
So Marusya got married. Fifty-nine years have passed since the day when this love at first sight happened. And don’t believe those who say that such love does not exist - it does happen. And even, perhaps, many will have something to tell about this case.
Wild pears
IN modern world Technology reigns: this applies even to such an ancient activity as gardening. And my grandfather Pavel Nikolaevich Krivchikov, who did not live to see the era of technology, tied the scion to the rootstock with hemp and matting. He had no unsuccessful operations. They said that his hand was light, but I think it’s not so much about his hand as it is about his love for what you do.
At that time, my grandfather constantly communicated with beekeepers and amateur gardeners, walking dozens of miles in search of rare varieties of apple trees, pears, and cherries. Gardeners then generously shared grafting material with each other, so some of the brought buds remained free. The grandfather used them to plant wild apple and pear trees in the surrounding forests and copses.
During my childhood, along the edges of the forest, there were already mature trees, one half of whose branches were wild, and on the second, real garden pears or apples were ripening. Even then the boys pecked at them like birds. Before the war, there weren’t many gardens on the farm, but the Germans cut them down too. They needed visibility around the houses.
So we, post-war farm children, were lucky - we could feast on pears and apples to our hearts content in the forest, but in those villages where there were no forests nearby, the children did not even eat wild apples during that hungry time.
One day, a forester caught these boys picking pears and took them to us to draw up a report on the farm. The guys were not taken aback, threw the pears and ran in different directions. The annoyed Uncle Kolya drank the glass offered by his father and left, and our mother grabbed her head.
“What a heart you have to have,” she lamented, “to take it away from hungry children!”
Through her neighbors, she found out that these guys were from Pravorot, which is about six kilometers away, and almost all of them were children of soldiers’ widows. On the same day, my mother managed to convey through the shepherds to Pravorot that they would come for pears.
Last year I was driving my Moskvich from Belenikino along a field road and overtook an unfamiliar woman loaded with heavy bags. On the way, she told me that she lives in Belgorod, and they recently bought a house with an estate in Vinogradovka. From the story I realized that she was now the neighbor of our former forester. And indeed, when we arrived, Uncle Kolya, a gray-haired old man of about eighty, was sitting on the opposite side of the street on a large log in the shade under a willow tree. I said hello and sat down next to him.
He recognized me, was delighted, asked about my father, remembered his younger years, and shed tears.
When I finally dared and asked him if he remembered those kids with pears, he, immediately understanding what I was talking about, said reproachfully:
“Darling, you know how strict everything was: I had a plan, and a plan is the law.” According to the plan, I was supposed to collect so many pears, apples, acorns, nuts, including without labor costs, ≈ this means taken from the population; had to confiscate so many saws and axes from the poachers. I was then forced to walk around the village and beg people for useless rusty tools, sharpen axes by hand on stone so that they looked like real ones, make axes for them and hand them over to the authorities as selected...
He was silent for a minute, then suddenly laughed and said:
“Oh, dear, what a case I had once. The district chief of the auditor brings me from the region. Show me, he says, your farm. It was then considered one of the best in the region. The auditor harassed me for three days. But overall I was pleased. On the day of departure, our boss tells me: the auditor liked your pears. Take him a bag of the best ones, and make sure they are all one to one.
And just before that, I caught three women with bags in Popovik. Do you remember what pears were there then? Well, I think women are not boys. What to sort through after them? The bags were good enough, so I gave them away along with the pears, without overfilling them... How did I not fly away from work then! It turned out that one of these women had, as they now say, critical days. Apparently, she had nowhere to hide her household. She wrapped it in burdocks and put it in a bag under the pears... Oh, and I drank grief then! This is funny now...
Uncle Kolya recalled the harsh service of the post-war years, and I remembered how once behind my childhood back a trainer’s horse was snoring, my legs were getting tangled in collective farm peas, and my shoulders were painfully burned by a whip. But I don’t remember resentment against those forest rangers and guards, against those “famous” orders. Everything remained in a long series of romantic adventures of childhood, without which there would be nothing to remember.
Dresser
Our time is sometimes called the era of consumption. Nowadays there is hardly a person who can list all the things that belong to him. I also saw a time when the things in the house could literally be counted on one’s fingers. From the dishes we had three aluminum bowls - two large and one small, a liter copper mug, a frying pan, three cast iron pots of different sizes, a knife made from a braid, five aluminum spoons.
There was an iron bed, the parents slept on it, without a net, covered with boards, on which lay a feather bed and three pillows - two large and a small one - “dumochka”. At the dining table in the kitchen there was a large bench with a back and armrests. Mom tied a gauze bundle with cottage cheese to the armrest, the whey from which flowed into a placed cast iron pot. Once my brother and I gnawed a hole in a bundle, and we dragged cottage cheese through it. We got into trouble for this, but not because of the cottage cheese we ate, but because of the spoiled gauze.
Since we kept a cow, there was a butter churn, near the Russian oven there were two grab handles - “stags”, a chapelnik or “chaplya” - a long removable handle for a frying pan, a wooden shovel, with the help of which bread was planted in the oven, and a large poker. Nearby stood a wooden bowl called a “bowl,” in which my mother kneaded the dough twice a week.
My father had a gun, and my mother had a foot-operated sewing machine, which I learned to sew on before school. In 1947, the very year of my birth, a currency reform. There were rumors that the old money would not be exchanged and would simply disappear. My father collected every penny, went to Belgorod and bought two beautiful chairs with high backs and a gramophone. The gramophone then ended up in the club, and stayed there. There were also kerosene lamps. There were two of them: ten-linear and seven-linear. I don’t know exactly what the numbers meant, but the ten-line one had a wider wick, a larger burner and glass bulb, it shone brighter, but it also consumed more kerosene. It was lit when necessary, for example, when guests came to play cards. The flasks were cleaned of soot every day with crumpled newspapers, the wick was straightened with scissors, since the middle of it burned out faster, and the flame from the tongue turned into a forked snake tongue and began to smoke. The flasks often broke when cleaning or from sudden heating, but they were always available as essential goods in the “Velikiy” store. So, after the name of the manager of Velikikh Stepan Sviridovich, the only hardware store in the area was then called.
In the holy corner hung an icon of St. Nicholas the Wonderworker with a lamp, and on the walls, in rough wooden frames, were pre-war portraits of young parents, made by a master of photo enlargement with costumes completed in pencil. And there was a beautiful color reproduction in a frame made of gold baguette, where Stalin and Molotov and their children walked in a forest clearing. Vasya Stalin had a bright butterfly on his wrist, which he examined carefully, and little Svetlana was holding a net in her hands. The painting was bought in 1949 with “maternity capital,” which my mother received upon the birth of her fourth child, my brother Mikhail. After the 20th Party Congress, my father cut out the new composition of the Politburo, headed by Khrushchev, from the newspaper and pasted it on Stalin’s back. Like all farmers, balsams bloomed on the windowsills, in short shell casings. We called this flower “whim”. Later, two ficus trees and a Chinese rose appeared.
But the most outlandish thing in our house was a beautiful handmade chest of drawers with carved and turned details. The word “chest of drawers” came to us from France - there the adjective “commode” means “comfortable”. Indeed, in comparison with traditional chests and caskets, a chest of drawers is a convenient thing. Our chest of drawers had 4 drawers. Two large ones were kept there from Easter to Easter, ornate, homemade lace towels embroidered with red and black crosses, which were used to wrap the frames with photographs hanging on the walls and the mirror above the chest of drawers for the holiday. There were also two small ones: documents, parents’ military awards, father’s straight razor and all sorts of small things were kept there.
The chest of drawers was purchased before the war, when our parents had just gotten married, and it was their first jointly acquired property. They lived then in Belgorod on private apartment. When my father went to the front, my mother and her two children went to join her family in Storozhevoye. The chest of drawers remained in the owner's house. Together with the house, he survived the bombing, the front, the occupation and liberation of the city and, by a lucky chance, turned out to be safe and sound.
And so, in the winter of 1944, my mother received a letter from the owner asking her to pick up the chest of drawers. How to pick it up? There was no need to dream of a car, or even a horse and sleigh: all the equipment and horse-drawn forces were then at the front. Seeing her sister’s grief, Aunt Sonya offered to bring the chest of drawers on a sled. “Together, not alone,” she said. “We’ll get it somehow.”
Krivchikov's grandfather Pavel Nikolaevich had a sled on which four big guys sat on the hill. We got to Belgorod by train: with difficulty - there was no platform then - we dragged the sled into the vestibule. It was clear that the chest of drawers would not fit into the vestibule. By evening, the sisters were at the hostess's, spent the night there, and in the morning they pulled out the chest of drawers piece by piece, loaded them onto the sled and set off. The day was fine, the road was well-rolled, and the first thirty kilometers to the village of Yakovlevo were reached without problems, “only the pillars flashed.”
The next thirty kilometers turned out to be more difficult: a tractor with a sleigh passed along the road and left two deep ruts. Trained marathon runners in sports shoes and light clothes sometimes faint at the fortieth kilometer. And the sisters in padded jackets and felt boots have already walked fifty miles off-road. Their legs no longer obeyed, their arms could not raise. Night was falling and the frost was getting worse. It was already clear that they would not get home; spending the night in the field would mean certain death. During the war, wolves multiplied and their hungry packs even scoured the courtyards.
In the light of the moon they noticed a farmstead not far from the road and decided to go there. It's late. The dogs bark, but there is no light anywhere. They knocked on the window of the last hut; they didn’t open it. Only in the third - in response to a knock, the fire lit up and the door opened slightly. The woman said that she couldn’t let him in; a cow had just calved in the house. You can only spend the night in the senets, on straw. There was nowhere to go, and huddled closely together, the exhausted sisters instantly fell asleep.
In the end they dragged the chest of drawers. Aunt said that she didn’t remember the last kilometers at all. Neither how they arrived, nor who met, nor who brought the chest of drawers. From the stories I learned that, after feeding them, they were put to bed and slept the whole day. Surprisingly, we didn’t catch a cold or get frostbite.
Unfortunately, the chest of drawers has not survived. There was a grinder beetle in it. His father tried to fight him. But still, again and again, a fresh pile of wood dust was found on the floor. The chest of drawers was burned. For some reason I feel sorry for him. Old things intertwine times, they are the connection of times. By the way, for some reason I keep records from a non-existent gramophone.
Inveterate
My great-great-grandfather Trofim Yakovlevich had a sister. She got married in Teterevino. God did not give children, and when her husband died, the old woman was left alone. There was no one there to look after her, and her brother brought her to the farm. One morning my sister did not wake up. As expected, they washed her, dressed her, laid her on a trestle bed; they had not yet had time to make a coffin. At night, Trofim’s two daughters, Natalya and Ganya, and daughter-in-law Fevronya, the wife of my great-grandfather Nikolai Trofimovich, sat at the head of the room. Natalya read the psalter. After midnight, Fevronya and Ganya decided to lie down.
≈ Nata, you think I’m dead. I woke up a long time ago, but I couldn’t speak, I was afraid to scare you. I heard how you mourned me, I especially liked the way Khavrosha cried.
Well, then everyone in the house woke up, and although there was a little commotion, there was more joy and surprise. And she died only forty days later. Here, as expected, they waited three days and only then buried him.
Bees
U bad people there are no bees.
Well, whoever knew how to talk about bees was my godfather, Dmitry Pavlovich, whom I love and whom I always tried to be like. When I once asked him to remember everything that remained in his memory about the war, he even began this story with bees - and ended with them.
On the farm they called him Mityaka: all the villagers had the same surname - Krivchikovs, so everyone had nicknames. To distinguish Vasiliev, for example, Vasenya, Vasenok, Vasik, Vasyaka, Vasek, Vasilek, Vasechka were invented. And each of them was somewhat similar to its name. At least there was never any confusion about names. And Mityaku was never confused either with Mitya, who was his cousin, or with Mityuk.
However, he was distinguished not only by his nickname. Of his twelve siblings, no one probably suffered as many misadventures as Mityaki suffered.
When he was one year old, he looked at the little piglets that were brought into the house in the winter and fell from the stove on them.
At the age of two, while helping his father knock down frames for hives, he swallowed a nail, which later, thank God, came out safely. He was not yet three years old when, following his elders into the forest, he got lost. They looked for him all day, but found him only late in the evening, standing under a bush. With one hand he held a twig, and in the other he held a bouquet of flowers and smiled. Somehow in early spring He came back from a walk in the snow barefoot - his paws were so stuck in the mud on a thawed patch that he had to leave them there.
His father was more involved in his upbringing, since their mother Vasilisa was forced to constantly bother with the housework. My father loved nature and animals; he could imitate the howl of wolves so that on a winter night they began to respond to him. The children knew this. When one day they were collecting honey mushrooms in the forest, the father asked: “Should I call the wolf?” The older children shouted in fear: “Don’t!” And only Mityaka calmly said: “Call him, otherwise I’ve never seen him.”
In the hungry year of 1933, after Mityaka did not let his mother work for a long time, asking him to eat all the time, she gave him a piece of bread, poured old rancid molasses into a bowl, and she went to the garden.
After such a meal, I was terribly thirsty, but Mityak couldn’t find any water in the house. I decided to get water from the well myself. He did everything correctly: he scooped up a little water with a bucket and lifted it with a rope without much difficulty. But when, having fallen over the frame, he tried to reach the handle, he could not resist and, following the bucket, flew into the well. The adults saw him already standing in the middle of the yard, wet, with a broken face. Mityaka said that he fell into a well. They didn’t believe him, but traces of blood all over the corner of the log house confirmed his words.
The next day, the father took the poor fellow to the hospital. Prokhorovsky paramedic Timofey Sidorovich placed stitches on the cut forehead of four-year-old Mityaki without anesthesia. Mityaka did not cry.
Mityakin's father Pavel Nikolaevich was in charge of the collective farm apiary, which he brought to one hundred and twenty hives. Since the collective farm did not provide him with assistants, and such work was beyond the strength of one person, Mityaka began to seriously help his father at the age of ten. In the June summer of forty-one, they stood on a roam in a gully of a small copse. After a hot afternoon, heavy rain began to fall. A jam of last year's leaves and branches has formed near the apiary fence. Water pooled behind him. When Mityaka noticed this from the window of the lodge, he immediately realized that, having broken through the jam, the water could destroy the hives. He woke up his father. The hives were heavy and slippery. Wearing masks and closing the entrances was once. Disturbed bees stung. Father and son barely managed to remove the hives from dangerous place up the hill as water gushed out. Wet, tired and bitten, they went home. Farmers stood near the school, listening to the horseman who had arrived. That's how they learned that the war had started.
The forty-first year was fruitful, the apiary produced almost six tons of honey. When they divided it, there were three buckets per yard. And then the Germans came. They plundered their father's apiary of twenty hives, ate the honey, and froze the bees. Mityaka caught a cold that winter and developed pneumonia. When the Germans were stationed, he elder sister decided to cheat and told the officer that there was a boy with tuberculosis in their house and it was dangerous to move in with them.
“It doesn’t matter,” the fascist answered, “we’ll shoot the boy.”
In the first winter of the war, the farm found itself in the front line, since the Germans did not take the neighboring village of Pravorot. Therefore, on the evening of January 17, they drove all the farmers, and there were then more than two hundred people, to their rear. The family stayed overnight in Prelestnoye, on Yudinka with Anna Lazareva. They stayed there until spring.
The Germans assigned the older children to work, and twelve years old Mityaka and his younger brother Pavlik went to beg in the surrounding villages: Kartashovka, Kurly, Pritsepilovka, Ilyinka, Kochetovka. They fed the whole family. They rarely got bread. More often they served a handful of barley or oats, beet root, potatoes, carrots; in some households they did not give anything. And although the guys knew in advance where they wouldn’t serve it, they still came in.
When spring came, they began to secretly go to the farm, take out the seeds hidden there, dig up the ground and sow. Thanks to this, even though we lived through the second war winter under the Germans, we no longer had to beg, even though we were malnourished. But the main thing is that we returned to native home! Two swarms of bees, hidden in a trench, spent the winter with the family. In February 1943, the farm was liberated by the Red Army. And before the start of the tank battle near Prokhorovka, there were already five hives in the apiary.
Of course, no one knew that the incredible forces of war would collide just above the village of Storozhevo. They knew about the lines of defense that were being created, they saw that the soldiers were preparing for battle - but in war this is a common thing. On July 11, 1943, the military began asking all residents to urgently leave the front line and go east. Otherwise, they say, it will “begin” soon. Only Mityaki’s mother, Vasilisa Ivanovna, stayed behind; the soldiers from the field kitchen gave her flour, and since it was a hungry time, she immediately kneaded the dough and lit the oven. Mityaka went with all the refugees, but his mother there wasn't and there wasn't and he decided return to the farm. Troops were moving along the roads to the west. German bombers attacked several times. In the evening, already on the way to Storozhevoye, Mityaku was detained by a patrol. No matter how much Mityaka begged to let him go to his mother, there was no further passage. A general who drove up in a Willys helped out. He put Mityaka in the car and drove him to the house itself, warning him to leave quickly.
They began to hastily get ready. They put the chickens in a bag and put things on a wheelbarrow. In a hurry we didn’t notice that it was short summer night It had already given way to dawn, and the stove was just starting to burn.
Mityaka ran to dig up new potatoes, and his mother ran to the cellar to get some dough. At this time, a German shell pierced the wall of the house and exploded in the stove. The thatched roof, along with the ceiling and rafters, fell into the garden, crushing Mityaku. However, he was lucky again.
The cannonade of battle could already be heard. The mother wanted to grab the pot of dough and run, but then the soldiers took the wheelbarrow to take the wounded commander to the medical battalion. It was too late to run.
In the weeds near the house, between the currant bushes, a deep gap was opened. The narrow trench was quickly covered with a door torn off by a shell, logs and all sorts of rubbish. The entrance was covered with a beehive lid. They managed to take chickens in a sack and a pot of dough into the trench. At first, the screams of commands and the groans of the wounded were still audible, then everything grew into a continuous hellish roar. At every second, hundreds of shells, mines and bombs exploded, tank engines roared, planes howled, iron grinded against iron, drowning out machine-gun and rifle fire. The earth literally shook.
The farm changed hands several times, and waves of our and German counterattacks clashed over it several times. It is amazing that even in this hell the chickens, which the mother fed with dough, laid eggs. Apart from eggs and dough, there was no food in the trench. By the morning of July 18, the roar of the cannonade began to subside and recede, native speech was heard outside, and the inhabitants of the trench, who had turned gray in six days, got out of the shelter. Not a trace remains of the picturesque farmstead a week ago.
Soldiers, convoys, and equipment were moving along the country road. For most young soldiers, this was the first liberated settlement. On the ground plowed up by explosions, among the scattered remains of buildings, broken charred equipment and many corpses, they were met by an elderly woman and a teenage boy. One of the soldiers laid a piece of camouflage fabric on the ground in front of them and put a piece of bread. Soon a small mound of food grew, but they couldn’t eat it. They felt hunger only a few days later, when they gradually came to their senses and got used to not being afraid of the dead.
In place of the apiary there were chips and fragments of frames, and not far away on a currant branch, waiting for help, a swarm of surviving bees hung...
Chick
In the summer of 1943, the military warned the population of the village that terrible battles were about to begin. Olechka was persuaded to return to Novoselovka and take the heifer with her. Vasya decided to help. He led the animal by the leash, and Olya drove it with a twig. Novoselovka was already full of troops. They told Ole and Vasya to move on. After walking about ten kilometers, we arrived at some farm outside Podolkhi. Vasya went to look for bread and a place to stay for the night, Olya stayed in the meadow to graze the cattle. And then they came german planes. With the first explosion of the bomb, the heifer broke loose and rushed away. Olya follows her. She did not catch up with her soon; there was no leash on the heifer. At dusk they wandered for a long time through the ravines and fields until the girl found a piece of rope for the collar. Frightened by the bombing, the chick at first did not allow herself to be caught, then did not want to walk on a leash.
The farm where they parted with Vasya was completely burned down. There was no one to even ask about him. After crying, I went wherever my eyes led me. She spent the night, clinging to the chick, in some kind of ditch. For two weeks she ate by threshing the ripening ears of surviving rye into skirts. The grains seemed sweet to her, like candy. And the heifer was grazing at that time. During her wanderings, she managed to become so attached to the girl that she followed her even without a leash.
When the sounds of fighting began to subside a week later, the troops went to the West, followed by Olya. When we reached Prokhorovka, we came under bombing again, and again the heifer got scared and fell off. This time the soldiers helped catch her. But the closer to home, the more difficult it was to go. All the fields beyond Prokhorovka, from Lutovo to the Storozhevsky forest, were cut through by deep, many-kilometer-long trenches, which the heifer could not overcome. The native farm was already nearby, and they all wandered and wandered between the trenches, as if in a labyrinth, and tears of despair choked the girl. Near Storozhevo, the dead lay like sheaves, hanging on bushes and on barbed wire.
When we finally arrived at the farm, Olechka saw a huge crater in place of the house. From a farm of forty yards, only two entire huts remained, and those without roofs. That's probably why they didn't burn because the straw was thrown off them by explosions. They found their own in someone else's dilapidated three-walled hut; the fourth wall had been torn out by a shell.
At home they were already considered missing. How much joy there was! Olechka, the main helper in the family, is alive and the calf, the future nurse, is also at home. We went to bed late, and mom decided to stay up and look after the heifer. When it began to get light, she went into the house to warm up. Literally a minute later, one of the children came out to pee and saw that the chick was not there. At this point everyone woke up from their mother’s scream:
≈ The chick was stolen!
Someone saw that she was taken away by our soldiers who came to get water from a well that stood nearby. Mother knew where the soldiers were camped in the forest - and ran there.
≈ What is your name? “The brave-looking captain asked her.
≈ Alexandra.
Fate
There was another talk show on TV. Reasonable-looking people were heatedly discussing the question: “Can someone who is destined to hang himself by fate drown?” Some artist passionately told how three times in her life she had been on the verge of death and remained alive only because “it was not fate.” After listening, Pavlik - also known as Pavel Pavlovich, head of the carpentry shop at a local house-building plant - turned off the TV. Every boy who survived the war in our area knew well what Fate was.
When in the summer of 1942 the Germans, leaving the farmstead, moved east, the people discovered that in a large field, between the pond and the road to Pravorot, winter wheat, sown by the collective farm before the occupation, was ripening. Of course, it should have been removed, but bad luck: the Germans had mined the field. At the collective farm meeting, they decided to divide the field into shares, and then let everyone clean it as best they can.
Eleven-year-old Pavlik and his brother Tima fell to collecting wheat. The task turned out to be simple: first you need to find the guy wires, then, slowly, along the guy wire without touching it, reach the mine. In each of the two horns sticking out of it, insert a nail stored in advance or a piece of chopped wire. Now, even if the firing pin works, it will not reach the fuse. You can safely unscrew it and wind the stretch marks into rolls.
Valuable trophies, which, in fact, attracted the boys, were the shiny balls that were inside the mines, wire, and the most valuable thing - fuses. They were blown up solemnly, tied to a peg and pulled by a wire inserted into place.
The brothers were already packing the trophies when Nikolai, a neighbor on the plot, approached. He asked how to clear the mines. The brothers were experts in their field, they explained everything thoroughly, but he, apparently, misunderstood something, and the very first mine exploded right in his hands, ten steps from the brothers.
They fell to the ground and you could hear the balls falling. Then they stood up and looked around. Both are intact. We approached Nikolai; he was pale and frightened, but also safe. It was a miracle that all three survived. And Nikolai’s plot, like some of the others, remained uncleaned.
During the war and immediately after it, “miners” were all boys from five to eighteen years old, which is why only a third of them remained alive on the farm, some without fingers, some without arms, some without eyes. To this day, Pavlik’s memory preserves the terrible picture of those years.
It’s a sunny day, the beet growers, habitually squabbling, are breaking through the seedlings, and suddenly, in the nearby copse, there’s an explosion. Splinters are howling in the sky, and women, having thrown away their hoes, are running in a race to the copse with one thought: “Whose today?” And there, by the crater, three or four boys. The older ones, as a rule, were on the spot, and the younger ones, who were not allowed close to the “case,” were more often wounded.
In 1943, in the summer, before the offensive, our troops stood on the farm. Pavlik and his neighbor Leshka were grazing their cows in the ravine during their lunch break. In fact, the cows were mobilized for collective farm work, they were plowed and harnessed to carts instead of horses. We grazed them before and after work. But Leshkina’s cow was pregnant, her calving time was approaching, and she was released from work. Lunch was ending, and Leshka began to separate his cow from the herd. The shepherds were standing 10 meters from the cow when she stepped on an anti-tank mine. Before Pavlik’s eyes, the cow was torn in half so that its front part flew to the left and its back part to the right. Leshka, all black, began to rise from the ground.
≈ Guys, am I alive? I don't see anything...
There was no time for cows anymore. They took Leshka by the arms and led him to the farm. There was a military hospital on the way. One eye could not be saved, but the other one saw a little later.
Pavlik and Zhenka escaped with fear this time.
And in the fall - typhus. There was an infirmary in Martynov’s house, where typhus patients were taken. The father was the chairman of the collective farm and ordered Pavlik and his older brother Mitya to harness their cow to the cart and go to the forest to get firewood for the infirmary. The guys brought firewood, but Pavlik became infected in the hospital and soon fell ill.
“He’s the one who doesn’t want to go to school,” said Mitya.
But the school had nothing to do with it. That same day, in the evening, Pavlik fell into a coma. The only medicines were fresh milk and pre-war honey, which had been buried in the garden before the Germans arrived and found by chance when they started digging the garden before winter. A piece of gauze was moistened with honey and milk and placed in the patient’s mouth. During the time he lay there, three dozen new graves appeared in the cemetery - typhus knew no mercy. Pavlik woke up only two months later. There was no one in the kitchen where his trestle bed stood, and a conversation could be heard from the next room. Pavlik tried to call, but due to weakness there was no voice. Then he decided to go, but immediately fell to the floor. Everyone came running to hear the noise.
-Why did you fall? “asked Mitya.
“I wanted to come to you,” Pavlik whispered barely audibly.
A week later they took Pavlik to school. At first he couldn’t distinguish the writing on the board; everything blurred together. Then it began to become clearer, I began to see letters, I learned to speak, write, and count again. For a long time one of my legs couldn’t obey me; I walked with a crutch.
One day he went out into the yard to admire the fallen snow, and that day his sister Nyura rode a cow to Prokhorovka to get fertilizer for the collective farm. Pavlik made a snowball and wanted to test his former accuracy. He couldn't find a better target than the white spot on the cow's forehead. The throw turned out to be accurate, but there was not enough strength to dodge the cow. The cow crushed him with her horned forehead into a snowdrift, and if it weren’t for the stick in Nyura’s hands, no one knows how it would have ended.
And in early spring, with my friend Zhenya, we grazed heifers behind the vegetable gardens. We warmed ourselves with a “censer”. In a large iron can, frequent holes were punched with a bayonet and a piece of wire was tied like a handle. Dry weeds were lit in a jar, on which dung was placed. They took the end of the wire and spun it like a censer over their heads until it turned red from the heat. They put her on the ground and warmed her hands. One day, their neighbor Ilyushka came up to them, holding a shrapnel shell in his hands. He had already turned out the head with the fuse, and the lead balls, the main trophy, glowed inside, but did not spill out due to some kind of dynamite film.
“Guys,” said Ilyushka, “give me a light to burn out this film, the balls won’t spill out”
Pavlik put a dry stick into the censer, and when it caught fire, he handed it to Ilyushka. As soon as he brought the fire to the shell, there was a deafening explosion. Everyone got caught... When they came to their senses, they began to look around. The arms are intact, the legs are intact, the head, although noisy, is in place. Ilyushka has blood on his black, tarred face and the hand in which he held the fire. A smoking shell lay nearby. Fortunately, it was not torn apart, it simply spat out all its contents, tearing the “miner’s” finger, knocking out an eye, and tearing off the visor from his cap.
Fate... You could say she was protecting Pavlik. In 1944, tractors came to the collective farm and began to plow. Pavlik’s mother prepared lunches, and he delivered them to the tractor drivers. Pravorotsky Ilyukha plowed behind the collective farm garden; he was very short-sighted - he didn’t get to the front. The hungry tractor driver was not looking forward to lunch and Pavlik was very happy. Without leaving the running machine, he sat down, lowered his feet into the furrow, and began to quickly gobble up the food. Having finished the meal, he got up and went to the tool box - the “glove compartment”.
“Look, what a piece of crap,” Ilyukha handed Pavlik a German grenade on a long wooden handle. And I wonder what this is? “he asked, pulling out a white ring with a beautiful lace from it.
≈ Drop it!!! - Pavlik shouted and rushed into the furrow.
Ilyukha didn’t understand anything, but just in case, he stuck the grenade behind the tractor wheel.
The explosion only scattered the buckets standing behind the tractor and broke cans of machine oil. Neither the tractor driver nor Pavlik was scratched, and the tractor did not even stall.
“It’s good that you turned out,” Ilyukha said, catching his breath, “otherwise I was going to try it myself several times, but there was no time.” If I tried one, I would definitely save lunch...
Nightingales for Arina
The Germans dug a mass grave on our farm in the spring of '42. True, they didn’t bring in the prisoners of war themselves. Throughout the winter from 1941 to 1942, the farm was located in the front line. Several times our soldiers tried to recapture it from the Germans, but all attacks were drowned out by machine-gun fire. And in the spring, dead soldiers and animal corpses began to melt out of the snow. Well, the most massive burial turned out to be in the summer of 1943, when during a tank battle the farm passed from hand to hand several times.
One of the first to return to the liberated farm was my grandfather Pavel Nikolaevich Krivchikov. There were twenty-five dead in his garden alone. He did not wait for instructions, dug a grave at the end of the garden, buried the dead, erected a post and nailed a star to it. He later handed over the documents to the authorities, but kept a list of those buried with their home addresses. After some time, he sent letters to the relatives of all the victims, but received a response only from one soldier, who said that he was alive, and the documents were in the overcoat with which he covered his wounded friend...
It has become a tradition on July 12, the day of Saints Peter and Paul, to organize a memorial table at the grave. But every year fewer and fewer fellow countrymen come to the table. And only nightingales continue to nest and breed here every year. And over the mass grave, in the pauses between their trills, the famous song of Vladimir Vysotsky rings for me, as if dissolved in the air:
There are no crosses on mass graves
And widows don’t cry for them...
And it’s true—there were no tear-stained widows near the grave. We knew this for sure. From the windows of my parents' house the mass grave was visible. Every spring, when the snowdrops bloomed, we always went into the forest and each picked four bouquets. The first one was left at the civil cemetery, which is closer to the forest, laying flowers on the graves of relatives and friends. The second was taken to those soldiers who were buried in our garden, the third to the main mass grave, and only the fourth was taken home to my mother.
There were seventeen soldier widows on our small farm alone. Different women, different, sometimes incredible destinies. The only thing they had in common was that almost all of them were at one time wooed in the surrounding villages - Pravorot, Zhimolostny, Krasny. On the farm they were sung great wedding songs, in which they were always called by their patronymics, after which all the farmers, without exception, continued to call their daughters-in-law that way. During my lifetime, I also called them by their patronymics: Kizilova Okay Ivanovna, Shekhovtsova Alexandra Ivanovna , Shekhovtsova Solomeya Vasilievna, Shekhovtsova Fedora Fedorovna, Shekhovtsova Ksenia Petrovna, Chernova Arina Frolovna. The front rolled over them four times, burning them with hunger and cold, returning to the ashes, sometimes after the “funeral” for their husband they lost their last - children who died playing with bombs or with shells that littered the earth after the war...
It was only in the seventies, when adult children of fallen soldiers began to come to the mass grave, that the first tears were shed over it...
Now, if someone freed our widows from slave labor on collective farms, children and households, they would probably go on foot, hundreds of kilometers, without means, to their relatives, dear to their hearts, to the graves and there, of course, they would give free rein to tears...
I’m not an artist, but if I were asked what kind of monument should stand on our mass grave (there isn’t one yet), I would suggest installing an ordinary, poorly hewn wooden pillar, on which should be nailed with horseshoe nails a roughly hewn out shell from a large shell five-pointed star caliber. And on the opposite, western side of the grave there should be a widow bending over sobbing with her children holding her skirt - a symbol of all women who failed during their lives to do what they owed “to God and to themselves”
In 1987, the winter was unusually snowy, frosty and long. On Easter, in order to get to the graves, they dug trenches in the snow, and Easter was not early that year. After a long absence, I arrived at the farm at the end of April. The sun was shining brightly, the melted snow was glistening, the smells of childhood - the barn and the baking heat - washed over me and I suddenly felt an extraordinary joy from returning to my native place. And then - as if not several years had passed, but just yesterday I had been gone for a while - I heard someone calling me from the yard. This was Arina, a soldier’s widow who raised two sons, Boris and Ivan, without a husband, and even managed to bury the latter.
I stopped.
Grandma Arina stood on the porch and looked around at the snow.
- Come, Kolya, I want to tell you something.
I climbed over a snowdrift and a puddle of melt water, and squeezed through a gate frozen into the ice.
“Kolya, this is what I wanted to ask you,” Arina said seriously, “do you think the nightingales will come this year?”
I laughed┘
We understood each other and hugged.
Did these nightingales nest in her soul, in her heart? And what did they mean in her life? Now no one will know. But that spring they arrived for Arina.
STOROZHEVSKY HUTORS- With. Usmansky district, center of the Storozhevsko Khutorsky village council. Back in the second half of the 18th century. part of the village residents Storozhevoe began to go out into the steppe and settle in farmsteads. A church was built on these farmsteads in 1833, and the village began to be called... ... Lipetsk toponymy
Storozhevskie Khutora- 399368, Lipetskaya, Usmansky...
Storozhevskie Khutor, Lipetsk, Usmansky... Settlements and Russian indices
Administrative division of the Lipetsk region- established by the regional law “On the administrative-territorial structure of the Lipetsk region”. The boundaries and status of administrative territorial units are established by regional laws: “On establishing the boundaries of municipalities of Lipetsk ... Wikipedia
ATD Lipetsk region- The administrative division of the Lipetsk region is established by the regional law “On the administrative and territorial structure of the Lipetsk region.” The boundaries and status of administrative territorial units are established by regional laws: “On the establishment ... Wikipedia
Administrative-territorial division of the Lipetsk region- The administrative division of the Lipetsk region is established by the regional law “On the administrative and territorial structure of the Lipetsk region.” The boundaries and status of administrative territorial units are established by regional laws: “On the establishment of ... Wikipedia
Usmansky district of Lipetsk region- Usman district Coat of arms ... Wikipedia
Usmansky district- Coat of arms... Wikipedia
