The unknown soldier book to read online. Unknown Soldier

Yes, yes, please, we'll meet again. We have a lot to discuss. We must decide with the first book of Sovremennik. A historical fact for us - the first book of the publishing house.

No, I haven't read Rybakov. I don't have time for serious writers. Blinov interrupted the director: - Tonight we will meet in the main editorial office and decide. His face turned purple with excitement. He concluded in a firm voice:

But in general, Yuri Lvovich, we will agree right away: the selection of manuscripts and their preparation for publication is the business of the editors and the main editorial board. As for the first edition, I will offer a book by Mikhail Aleksandrovich Sholokhov. Maybe we should include his war stories in it.

This was Blinov's first action against Prokushev, Mikhalkov, Kachemasov and Yakovlev - Jewish gods who sought to start a publishing house created for Russian writers by publishing a book by a Jewish author, by the way vile and slanderous in content. With this courageous act of his, Andrei Dmitrievich sharply marked a crack in relations with the director, which will soon turn for him and for us, his deputies, into a deep, insurmountable ditch.

Yes, yes - of course, everything will be so, but you boldly come out from behind my back, fight with this devil - I'm already tired of him, he's starting to bother me.

They walked in silence for a minute. In the dining-room Andrei Dmitrievich continued:

Here is the first book. We have already decided, and the Committee agrees, - we are publishing Sholokhov's stories, and now he is again: "Let's start Krosh's Notes." I flared up: “Yes, how much can you! We have already decided, and everyone agrees, and the editor is already working, we have agreed with Sholokhov. Some obsession!”

Now the prose is your concern, connect quickly. I can't deal with him alone.

That day I got a call from the Union of Russian Writers - from Mikhalkov. An acquaintance from the institute called, a small man in the Union, but, apparently, at someone's prompt.

Congratulations on your appointment. All the new prose of Russian writers will now go through your hands. With whom did you decide to start? Whose book will be the first? - We decided the fate of the first book together: we will publish Sholokhov. And the design is already being prepared, the printing house has been determined ... - That's right, but you, old man, are the deputy chief and are responsible for everything there. - Yes, for what to answer? For Sholokhov? He is our first writer, who should we publish if not him?

The first is the first, but only your publishing house Sovremennik - this, after all, also says something. Should modern literature be published? And Sholokhov is good, of course, but this is a civil war.

Where are you heading? Are you advocating for Natan Rybakov? I tell you the issue is settled. Karelin gave good.

Well, okay, old man... You don't hear the conjuncture well. You need to look higher - not at Karelin. You are now out in the open. Here you will get a draft from all sides. Look, it wouldn't blow. I'm talking to you in a friendly way. And if you want to continue to inform you that here on Olympus they think what kind of winds blow, - keep quiet about our conversation. Keep it a secret, I'll be nice.

Anatoly Rybakov

UNKNOWN SOLDIER

As a child, every summer I went to the small town of Koryukov to visit my grandfather. We went with him to swim in Koryukovka, a narrow, fast and deep river three kilometers from the city. We undressed on a hillock covered with sparse, yellow, crushed grass. From the state farm stables came the tart, pleasant smell of horses. There was the sound of hooves on the wooden deck. Grandfather drove the horse into the water and swam beside him, grabbing the mane. His large head, with wet hair stuck together on his forehead, with a black gypsy beard, flickered in the white foam of a small breaker, next to a wildly squinting horse's eye. So, probably, the Pechenegs crossed the rivers.

I am the only grandson and my grandfather loves me. I love him very much too. He brought back good memories of my childhood. They still excite and touch me. Even now, when he touches me with his wide, strong hand, my heart aches.

I arrived in Koryukov on August 20, after the final exam. Got a four again. It became obvious that I would not go to university.

Grandfather was waiting for me on the platform. The same as I left it five years ago, when I was last in Koryukovo. His short, thick beard had gone a little gray, but his broad-cheeked face was still marbled white, and his brown eyes were as lively as ever. The same faded dark suit with trousers tucked into boots. He wore boots in both winter and summer. Once he taught me to put on footcloths. With a deft movement, he twisted the footcloth, admired his work. Pathom was pulling on his boot, grimacing not because the boot was tight, but from the pleasure that he sat so well on his leg.

Feeling like I was performing a comic circus act, I climbed onto the old cart. But no one on the forecourt paid any attention to us. Grandfather touched the reins in his hands. The horse, shaking its head, ran off at a brisk trot.

We drove along the new highway. At the entrance to Koryukov, the asphalt turned into the well-known cobbled pavement. According to grandfather, the city itself should pave the street, and the city has no funds.

What are our incomes? Previously, the tract passed, traded, the river was navigable - it became shallow. There is only one horse farm left. There are horses! There are world celebrities. But the city has little to gain from this.

My grandfather reacted philosophically to my failure at the university:

If you enter next year, if you don’t enter the next, you will enter after the army. And all things.

And I was saddened by the failure. Bad luck! "The Role of the Lyrical Landscape in the Works of Saltykov-Shchedrin". Topic! After listening to my answer, the examiner stared at me, waiting for the continuation. There was nothing for me to continue. I began to develop my own thoughts about Saltykov-Shchedrin. The examiner was not interested.

The same wooden houses with gardens and orchards, a small market on the square, a district consumer union store, a Baikal canteen, a school, the same centuries-old oaks along the street.

The only thing new was the motorway, which we again got on, leaving the city to the stud farm. Here it was still under construction. Hot asphalt was smoking; it was laid down by tanned guys in canvas mittens. Girls in T-shirts, headscarves pulled over their foreheads, scattered gravel. Bulldozers cut the ground with shiny knives. Buckets of excavators bit into the ground. Mighty machinery, rattling and clanging, advanced into space. There were residential trailers on the side of the road - evidence of camp life.

We handed over the britzka and the horse to the stud farm and went back along the bank of Koryukovka. I remember how proud I was when I crossed it for the first time. Now I would cross it with one push from the shore. And the wooden bridge, from which I once jumped with my heart beating with fear, hung over the water itself.

On the path, still hard as in summer, cracked in places by the heat, the first fallen leaves rustled underfoot. Sheaves turned yellow in the field, a grasshopper crackled, a lone tractor raised a chill.

Earlier, at this time, I was leaving my grandfather, and the sadness of parting was then mixed with the joyful expectation of Moscow. But now I just arrived, and I did not want to return.

I love my father and mother, I respect them. But something familiar broke, changed in the house, became annoying, even the little things. For example, mother's address to familiar women in the masculine gender: "dear" instead of "sweetheart", "dear" instead of "dear". There was something unnatural, pretentious about it. As well as the fact that she dyed her beautiful, black and gray hair in a reddish-bronze color. For what, for whom?

The first memorial in honor of the unknown soldier was built at the very beginning of the 1920s in France. In Paris, near the Arc de Triomphe, with all the proper military honors, the remains of one of the countless French infantrymen who remained lying on the fields of the First World War were buried. In the same place, at the monument, the Eternal Flame was lit for the first time. Soon after, similar burials appeared in the UK, near Westminster Abbey, and in the USA, at Arlington Cemetery. On the first of them were the words: "Soldier of the Great War, whose name is known to God." On the second, the memorial appeared only eleven years later, in 1932. It also read: "Here lies in honorable glory an American soldier whose name is known only to God."

The tradition of erecting a monument to a nameless hero could have arisen only in the era of the world wars of the twentieth century. In the previous century, with its cult of Napoleon and notions of war as an opportunity to show personal prowess, no one could have imagined that long-range artillery, heavy machine-gun fire, the use of poison gases and other modern means of warfare would make the very idea of individual heroism. New military doctrines operate with human masses, which means that the heroism of a new war can only be mass. As well as inextricably linked with the idea of ​​heroism, death is also massive.

By the way, in the USSR in the interwar decades, this was not yet understood, and the Eternal Flame in Paris was looked at with bewilderment, as a bourgeois whim. In the Land of Soviets itself, the mythology of the Civil War developed around heroes with big names and biographies - popular favorites, legendary army commanders and "people's marshals". Those of them who survived the period of repression in the Red Army in the mid-30s never learned to fight in a new way: Semyon Budyonny and Kliment Voroshilov could still personally lead the attack on the enemy (which Voroshilov, by the way, did during the fighting for Leningrad, having been wounded by the Germans and deserving of a contemptuous rebuke from Stalin), but they could not afford to abandon dashing cavalry attacks in favor of strategic maneuvering of masses of troops.

With arms held high

We are embarrassed to write about the instability of our troops in the initial period of the war. And the troops ... not only retreated, but also fled, and fell into a panic.

G.K. Zhukov

We made an analysis of losses during the retreat. Most fell on the missing, a smaller part - on the wounded and killed (mainly commanders, communists and Komsomol members). Based on the analysis of losses, we built party-political work in order to increase the stability of the division in defense. If in the days of the first week we allocated 6 hours for defense work and 2 hours for study, then in the following weeks the ratio was the opposite.

From the memoirs of General A.V. Gorbatov about the events of October-November 1941

Russian offensive tactics: a three-minute fire raid, then a pause, after which an infantry attack with a shout of “hurrah” in deep echeloned battle formations (up to 12 waves) without heavy weapons fire support, even in cases where attacks are made from long distances. Hence the incredibly large losses of the Russians.

From the diary of German General Franz Halder, July 1941

Revolt of the masses

It is almost certain that no cultured Westerner will ever understand the character and soul of Russians. Knowledge of the Russian character can serve as a key to understanding the fighting qualities of a Russian soldier, his advantages and methods of his struggle on the battlefield ... You can never say in advance what a Russian will do: as a rule, he shied from one extreme to another. His nature is as unusual and complex as this vast and incomprehensible country itself. It is difficult to imagine the limits of his patience and endurance, he is unusually bold and courageous, and yet at times he shows cowardice. There were cases when the Russian units, selflessly repulsed all the attacks of the Germans, unexpectedly fled in front of small assault groups. Sometimes the Russian infantry battalions were confused after the first shots fired, and the next day the same units fought with fanatical stamina.

To some extent, the high fighting qualities of the Russians are reduced by their slow-wittedness and natural laziness. However, during the war, the Russians were constantly improving, and their senior commanders and headquarters received a lot of useful things by studying the experience of the combat operations of their troops and the German army ... The commanders of the junior and often the middle level still suffered from sluggishness and inability to make independent decisions - due to severe disciplinary sanctions they were afraid to take responsibility ... The herd instinct among soldiers is so great that an individual fighter always strives to merge with the "crowd". Russian soldiers and junior commanders instinctively knew that if they were left to their own devices, they would perish. In this instinct one can see the roots of both panic and the greatest heroism and self-sacrifice.

Friedrich Wilhelm von Mellenthin, "Tank Battles 1939-1945"

The rest was a matter of time. As soon as the moral factor came into play, as soon as the Red Army got a taste of the first victories, the fate of Nazi Germany was sealed. Undoubtedly, the Soviet troops still had to learn many bitter lessons from the enemy, but the advantage in manpower, as well as a meaningful readiness to fight, gave the mass heroism of the Red Army and Red Navy a different character compared to the first stage of the war. Now they were driven not by despair, but by faith in a future victory.

Heroes with a name

One can doubt the official Soviet version of the events of the history of the Great Patriotic War. We can consider the level of training of our pilots in 1941 to be so low that supposedly nothing more worthwhile than a ground ramming of a cluster of enemy troops could have come out of them. It can be assumed that Soviet saboteurs operating in the near German rear in the winter of 1941 were caught not by Wehrmacht soldiers, but by local peasants who collaborated with them. One can argue to the point of hoarseness what happens to the human body when it leans on a firing heavy machine gun. But one thing is clear - the names of Nikolai Gastello, Zoya Kosmodemyanskaya, Alexander Matrosov and others would never have taken root in the mass consciousness of Soviet people (especially those who themselves went through the war), if they did not embody something very important - perhaps exactly what helped the Red Army withstand the onslaught of the Nazis in 1941 and 1942 and reach Berlin in 1945.

Captain Nicholas Gastello died on the fifth day of the war. His feat became the personification of that critical situation when the enemy had to be fought with any means at hand, in the face of his overwhelming technical superiority. Gastello served in bomber aviation, participated in the battles at Khalkhin Gol and in the Soviet-Finnish war of 1939-1940. He made his first flight during the Great Patriotic War on June 22 at 5 am. His regiment suffered very heavy losses in the very first hours, and already on June 24 the remaining aircraft and crews were reduced to two squadrons. Gastello became the commander of the second of them. On June 26, his plane, as part of a link of three cars, took off to strike at a concentration of German troops advancing on Minsk. Having bombed along the highway, the planes turned east. At this moment, Gastello decided to shoot a column of German troops moving along a country road. During the attack, his plane was shot down, and the captain decided to ram the ground targets. His entire crew died with him: Lieutenants A.A. Burdenyuk, G.N. Skorobogaty, senior sergeant A.A. Kalinin.

A month after his death, Captain Nikolai Frantsevich Gastello, born in 1908, commander of the 2nd Aviation Squadron of the 42nd Long-Range Bomber Aviation Division of the 3rd Bomber Aviation Corps of the Long-Range Bomber Aviation, was posthumously awarded the title of Hero of the Soviet Union and awarded the Gold Star and the Order of Lenin . Its crew members were awarded the Order of the Patriotic War, 1st class. It is believed that during the years of the Great Patriotic War Gastello's feat was repeated by many Soviet pilots.

About martyrdom of Zoya Kosmodemyanskaya became known in January 1942 from the publication of the military correspondent of the newspaper Pravda, Pyotr Lidov, under the name "Tanya". In the article itself, Zoya's name has not yet been called, it was established later. It was also later found out that in November 1941, Zoya Kosmodemyanskaya, as part of a group, was sent to the Vereisky district of the Moscow region, where German units were stationed. Zoya, contrary to popular belief, was not a partisan, but served in military unit 9903, which organized the sending of saboteurs behind enemy lines. In the last days of November, Zoya was captured while trying to set fire to buildings in the village of Petrishchevo. According to some sources, she was noticed by a sentry, according to others, a member of her group, Vasily Klubkov, who was also captured by the Germans shortly before, betrayed her. During interrogation, she called herself Tanya and completely denied her belonging to a sabotage detachment. The Germans beat her all night, and in the morning they hanged her in front of the villagers.

The feat of Zoya Kosmodemyanskaya became an expression of the highest resilience of the Soviet spirit. The eighteen-year-old girl did not die in the heat of battle, not surrounded by her comrades, and her death had no tactical significance for the success of the Soviet troops near Moscow. Zoya ended up in the territory captured by the enemy, and died at the hands of the executioners. But, having accepted a martyr's death, she won a moral victory over them. Zoya Anatolyevna Kosmodemyanskaya, born in 1923, was presented to the title of Hero of the Soviet Union on February 16, 1942. She became the first woman to receive a Gold Star during the Great Patriotic War.

Feat Alexandra Matrosova already symbolized something else - the desire to help comrades at the cost of life, to bring victory closer, which, after the defeat of the Nazi troops at Stalingrad, already seemed inevitable. Matrosov fought from November 1942 as part of the Kalinin Front, in the 2nd Separate Rifle Battalion of the 91st Separate Siberian Volunteer Brigade named after Stalin (later the 254th Guards Rifle Regiment of the 56th Guards Rifle Division). On February 27, 1943, the Matrosov battalion entered the battle near the village of Pleten in the Pskov region. The approaches to the village were covered by three German bunkers. The fighters managed to destroy two of them, but the machine gun installed in the third one did not allow the fighters to go on the attack. Sailors, having approached the bunker, tried to destroy the machine-gun crew with grenades, and when this failed, he closed the embrasure with his own body, allowing the Red Army soldiers to capture the village.

Alexander Matveyevich Matrosov, born in 1924, was presented to the title of Hero of the Soviet Union on June 19, 1943. His name was given to the 254th Guards Regiment, he himself is forever enlisted in the lists of the 1st company of this unit. The feat of Alexander Matrosov for propaganda purposes was dated for February 23, 1943. It is believed that Matrosov was not the first soldier of the Red Army to cover a machine-gun embrasure with his chest, and after his death, about 300 more soldiers repeated the same feat, whose names were not so widely known.

On the December days of 1966, in honor of the 25th anniversary of the defeat of German troops near Moscow, the ashes of the Unknown Soldier, delivered from the 41st kilometer of the Leningrad Highway, were solemnly buried in the Alexander Garden near the walls of the Kremlin, where in 1941 there were especially fierce battles for the capital.

On the eve of the celebration of the 22nd anniversary of the Victory, on May 8, 1967, the architectural ensemble "Tomb of the Unknown Soldier" was opened at the burial site. The authors of the project are architects D.I. Burdin, V.A. Klimov, Yu.A. Rabaev, sculptor - N.V. Tomsk. The center of the ensemble is a bronze star, placed in the middle of a mirror-polished black square, framed by a platform of red granite. The Eternal Flame of Glory bursts out of the star, delivered to Moscow from Leningrad, where it was lit from a flame blazing on the Field of Mars.

On the granite wall is engraved the inscription “To those who fell for the Motherland. 1941-1945". On the right, along the Kremlin wall, blocks of dark red porphyry are lined up, under which earth is stored in urns, delivered from the hero cities - Leningrad, Kyiv, Minsk, Volgograd, Sevastopol, Odessa, Kerch, Novorossiysk, Murmansk, Tula, Smolensk, and also from the Brest Fortress. Each block has the name of the city and a chased image of the Gold Star medal. The tombstone of the monument is crowned with a three-dimensional bronze emblem depicting a soldier's helmet, a battle banner and a laurel branch.

Words are engraved on the granite slab of the tombstone.