Direct Translation via Google Translate. Edited.
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by Denis Davydov
[REGNUM] From the first time, a gray-haired, lean man could not tell about his grandfather who died in August 1942: he was crying like a little one.
Mikhail Dubischak and his large relatives every year went near Rzhev to lay flowers on the grave of their soldier. In 1971, the daughter of the Red Army soldier Ivan Tsepennikov wrote a request to the Central Archive of the Ministry of Defense with a request to indicate where her father died and was buried. They answered that in the village of Bakhmutovo, where his name is honestly indicated on the monument.
“And suddenly, on December 4, 2022, a call from the commander of the Pioneer detachment, Mikhail Bogdanov, that they had found our grandfather. I didn't believe it at first, I thought it was a prank. Do you understand? 40 years to go to one place - and ... ” - at this place, Mikhail Vasilyevich’s lips begin to jump, and his cousin enters the conversation for him, and his relatives vyingly show photos of the soldier on the phone.
Here he is still young, in military service - this picture was put on the coffin. But the whole family with serious faces. Already on June 22, 1941, a military commissar arrived with a photographer, the first dealt with mobilization issues, and the second attached a simple background to the fence and took pictures of everyone for a long memory. Here he is, Ivan Nikolaevich with a beard, a respectable forty-year-old man who was no longer destined to return home.
He is one of 586 fighters found around Rzhev by search parties and solemnly buried on the 82nd anniversary of the start of the Great Patriotic War at the military memorial cemetery. And at the same time one of the 39 identified, established by mortal medallions, documents miraculously preserved in damp clay, and even by rare awards in 1942.
Such a result is called outstanding by the search engines. During the bloody meat grinder of the Rzhev battle, where only 15 months fought for the liberation of the regional center, standard bakelite cases with a letterhead inside were no longer issued.
“A home-made medallion from a cartridge case is a fairly typical situation for Rzhev. The soldiers themselves wrote notes, put them in cartridge cases and put them in a pocket so that their relatives would know where they were. For the wife to receive a pension.
So that they remember, they don’t think that they were captured, but they know that they died for their land.
These homemade notes are read in 99% of cases. Therefore, when we find a note in a cartridge case, we rejoice: as a rule, it is not washed away with water, like a form of a regular medallion filled with a fountain pen,” explains “pioneer” commander Bogdanov. He knows how to find words that make everyone cry, but he himself manages to remain calm outwardly. Rare quality.
But by the end of the farewell ceremony, the great-granddaughters of Stepan Nogovitsyn are already calm, taking the tablet with the personal belongings of their soldier without tears. They carried the coffin to the edge of a huge pit lined with spruce branches, and somehow let go. But they have been waiting for this meeting all their lives. Tatyana Lebedyantseva says that their grandmother missed her father very much and always talked about him at family celebrations. Everyone hoped that he would return.
She didn’t wait a bit: she left in 2018, and Stepan Andriyanovich “returned” in 2022. To the granddaughters who have preserved within themselves a living feeling passed down by inheritance.
“We believe that those who wait, who live in the hope of finding their loved ones, they will wait. You have to believe,” says Tatyana, who brought photographs of the whole family to show her grandfather. He was identified just by a homemade medallion, like his comrade Stepan Tyrtsakov.
Two namesakes died together and lain together in the same funnel for 80 years. They were also buried in the same coffin, inseparable forever. And the two families of descendants, who came from different places, also seemed to become related, although not a single word was uttered.
Everything here is like in Vysotsky's song, there is not a single personal fate, "all fates are merged into a single one." The bulk of the dead are nameless, and more than a million died in these places. And everyone has a family left, a large or small clan, and the majority remembers, searches, and is already waiting for the fourth generation.
After each message about the found name in the mail and personal messages, a stream of requests begins to pour in: find ours, it's somewhere out there. This will be confirmed by any search engine that has been doing its job for a long time. And they are convinced that when relatives do not forget about their soldiers, come to see them off on their last journey or take them home, the connection between the living and the dead only grows stronger. From the next world, the warriors will thank and help, of course.
There is no way without mysticism, it is strong and proven by many cases. Even right on June 22 in Rzhev there were at least two of them.
Mirsait Shafikov, identified by the medal "For Courage", connected relatives who had long been lost and did not communicate with each other.
One family flew in from Kazakhstan, and a granddaughter from Perm. And Omsk Nikolai Prudkov, his distant relatives in Siberia, did not even remember, but she told about the Belarusian branch of the family. After the war, the elder brother of the soldier, together with his regiment, ended up in Belarus, and stayed there. And all his life he also tried to find his beloved brother, who was now met by a happy niece. She got Catherine's silver ruble as a keepsake, which the uncle evidently took from home as a talisman and kept with him.
“When a fighter really wants to return, when they are waiting for him at home, Heaven itself probably helps him, ” says Mikhail Bogdanov about one of those found. They lifted the guy, and on the edge of the excavation there were fragments of paper, which, at first glance, were fragments of a newspaper.
On the second visit, they decided to pick it up after all, after it had all been in the open air for a week. - When our colleague Sergei began to soak this "newspaper" at home, the dirt came off and exposed the calico cover from the Red Army book. On it, the fighter wrote his data with a pencil. The book itself was rotten, but the fragile cover helped to return the Red Army soldier Roman Stepanov from the missing.
Each of those who were on the wires, according to tradition, threw earth on the soldiers' coffins.
And there is also such a sign: if there is a “nominal” fighter in a new or long-unvisited place, then he begins to help his comrades return. It so happened that when Private Vasily Kosarinov was found in the Gorbovo tract, it was immediately as if an inaudible command was given. Around this point, 16 more fighters were found in a short time, and as many as seven had names. Among them was Ivan Tsepennikov, who was unfairly considered buried twenty kilometers from the place of death and returned to his grandchildren along with his comrades.
And these are just a few of the thousands of stories of the war, when thousands were burned in battle for each village. From no one do such stories sound as real as from search engines, passing everything through their hands and soul. They are most often not heard, since it is customary for us to talk about the past either pathetically or in categories of impersonal statistics. But hardly anyone could have more correctly assessed the feat and sacrifice of our soldiers, preserved their memory not only in granite slabs, but in an intangible, deep family feeling that unites millions of people who do not even know each other.
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