—— Back in the Regiment ——129swore he would shoot Zagid for not carrying out his order. The
sniper was bailed out by regimental counterreconnaissance,
which had caught both of them – the ‘captain’, who turned out to
be a Nazi dressed in our uniform, and the captured major.
Wounded several times at the front, Rakhmatullin returned
to his collective farm a war invalid, where he rejoined the tractor
brigade. His military decorations were complemented by a medal
for peacetime labour. From 1945 to 1958 he was elected as a
deputy to the Ziyanchurin Rural Council and he was a people’s
assessor in the district court. I once read a testimonial to Zagid
presented on some occasion: ‘A good family man, caring father,
conscientious worker, supportive comrade, humble and always
ready to offer help to anyone in need of it. His children are most
disciplined and won top places in both their studies and work.’
Could it be otherwise?
For every soldier battles are played out within the context of
his own bounds, his own settings. In the case of Platoon Deputy
Commander Sergo Kazarian these amounted to eightynine Nazis
whom he wiped out with his sniper’s rifle over a short period of
time, repeated raids into the enemy rear, and continual fighting
and serious wounds. One of his tussles on the southern slopes of the
Pulkovo Heights, which blocked the Nazis’ path to Leningrad, also
turned out to be a boundary line for Communist Sergo Kazarian.
The 2nd Platoon was advancing. Having stood in for his
wounded platoon commander, Red Army Private Sergo Kazarian
was observing nervously how precisely his orders were being carried
out, how well the troops, covering one another, were dashing from
cover to cover as they drew nearer to the enemy trenches. The 1st
and 3rd Platoons, which were attacking from the flanks and were
behind the 2nd, had fallen back. The Germans had managed to
surround Kazarian’s platoon and trap it in a ring of fire.
‘Dig in!’ Kazarian ordered his troops and was the first to get
stuck in with his sapper’s shovel. Now the Nazis were unable to
target their fire, but they still managed to knock out a number
of men.