—— Red Army Sniper ——198baking sun, or in a downpour, in a snowstorm, or frost, and also
perhaps in the sights of a Nazi sniper. It is far from easy. Especially
if you have taken part in handto hand combat the day before and
you have still not recovered from it, not rested, not slept enough
and you are hungry to boot. All the same we persisted in doing our
job, striving to wipe out as many of the Nazi scum as we could.
To this day I remember my pupils – Senior Sergeant Pyotr
Derevyanko, Privates Vasily Mushtakov, Anatoly Vinogradov,
Solovyov, Ryakhin, Dyakov, Zosya Mitskevich and the others.
There were about fifty of them and they wiped out over 600 Nazis.
And how could I forget our ‘International’ – Ukrainian sniper
Ivan Dobrik, Byelorussian Vasily Shevchenko, the Tartar Zagid
Rakhmatullin, the Russian lads Ivan Karpov, Vladimir Shubin,
Sergei Dmitriev, Valentin Loktyev, Nikolai Kachalin, Vladimir
Dudin, Yuri Semyonov, Ivan Vasilyev, the old schoolteacher Pugin,
and other regimental mates.
And our girls – Maria Mitrofanova (now Barskova), Maria
Nazarov, Margarita Katikovskaya, and others, who lay in ambush
with a sniper’s rifle and patiently endured all the adversities and
burdens of war? For them, as for us, there was no carefree youth
and the only joy was that of seeing the tally of vengeance grow.
At the end of 1942 I was transferred to counterintelligence and
my sniper’s score was cut off at the total of 324. I had nevertheless
kept the pledge I had given to Andrey Alexandrovich Zhdanov and
all those present at the first rally of snipers at the Smolny. Having
liberated Leningrad from the enemy siege, our division, along
with other units of the Leningrad Front, pressed forward, drove
the Nazis back and reached their actual den. Travelling the entire
route with me was my sniper’s rifle, the butt of which still bears
the three large, two mediumsized and four small stars traced on
it during the war years...