—— Red Army Sniper ——12‘He was bringing up the rear,’ somebody replied.
‘I know that. I put him at the tail of the column myself, to keep
an eye on all of you. But where is he now? What’s happened to
him? He can’t have been swallowed up by the earth!’
I looked at the bare fields, devoid of a single bush, on both sides
of the highway and did not see anybody,
‘That’s not so good. We’ll all have to go back and look for
Kotelnikov.’ We found him already dead, in the same ditch, 300
metres back.
And now we were home. My arm was still aching, but I didn’t
hurry to the dressing station; I sat thinking. It was the third month
of the war. A few days back we were in Leningrad – the remnants
of the 154th NKVD Rifle Regiment. Up until the perfidious fascist
attack on our country the regiment – its headquarters, rearguard
and some of its detachments – was based in a small border town
in Karelia.
The real battle for us began on 26 June 1941, when Finland
formally declared war on the Soviet Union in an attempt to regain
territory we’d taken during the Winter War of 1939–40. But up
till then, from the 22nd onwards, there were smallscale, sporadic
clashes with the enemy. In the course of fierce and bloody battles
we had to withdraw through Vyborg towards Leningrad. It was
not an easy journey for any of us. We lost many troops and officers
dead and wounded.
And so several days earlier the survivors of our regiment
had been added as reinforcements to the 14th Red Banner Rifle
Regiment of the 21st NKVD Rifle Division. The regimental
commander was Lieutenant Colonel Rodionov. On the nearby
southwestern approaches to Leningrad, the FortySecond Army
was in action. It also included our division which consisted of
the 6th and 8th Rifle Regiments as well as our own, the 14th. The
divisional commander was Colonel Mikhail Panchenko.
The division received orders to defend Leningrad from the
south, from the Gulf of Finland to the River Neva and, farther
eastward, to Zapevki, and not to let the enemy into the city.