“They intended to punish one of ours. He claimed he had been cleaning his pistol and had pulled the trigger by mistake and shot himself in the hand. He had gunpowder marks on his hand, you can’t hide that. And now what. The chief of the special division, the commander, and the chief of the politburo discussed the fate of that person. They decided to have him shot. And when shot, then in a way to be seen. Shot as a deserter. They stood us all around him and sat him on a stump. There was one warrant officer, Surnin, a small bloke, kind of crooked, annoying. He volunteered to do the shooting. No one else did. Well, a dunce, illiterate. They sat him on the stymp, and suddenly two Messerschmitts zoomed up, and as they closed in and started shooting, we scattered into the forest. And he remained there, sitting on the stump. They came in and strafed. When they left, we returned, the ground all around him was shot up. But he was untouched, sitting on the stump just as we left him. Nothing hit him. He didn’t get up, he hadn’t run. Perhaps from shock. He later said he couldn’t remember anything. When the Messerschmitts left, they called us back. The bullets had ripped up everything all around. But he was alive. So they conferred and then declared: ‘If they didn’t shoot you, neither shall we. We forgive you everything!’ And he burst into tears. He cried so hard that he shook. And he went on fighting.”
“He [the German] came at me. He was well built, his bayonet shone against the snow, and we had a tryokhlineyka [a Mosin-Nagant rifle - ed.]. I thought he’d skewer me and pitch me over. I started to deflect his attack... and whether in fright or by the force of the collision, I fired. I killed him. As he fell forward he cut though my army coat with his bayonet. He fell down and dropped his gun. Around me there were Russian soldiers shouting: ‘For the homeland! For Stalin! Forward!’ But I couldn’t pull free. The politruk [political officer - trans.] jumped up to me from behind and yelled: ‘Why are you standing!’ Then he saw that I couldn’t pull free of his gun, which lay on the snow. So the politruk yanked the gun out, and we rushed off to the attack together.”
“Say, Sasha Rogov. The only son of his parents. Small in stature. They hit him here in the neck. The bullet went right through. I screamed: ‘Sasha! Sasha! Sasha!’ Blood... And he just said: ‘Mum. Mum. Mum.’ Three times. And then: ‘Go away.’ I tore up the first-aid kit, bandaged him here and here. He said ‘Mum’ three or four times and then ‘go away’. He jerked twice and died. We buried him so. We dug a hole, a metre and a half. We placed a coat there, there weren’t any coffins. We wrapped him up n the coat. We found some planks. We placed the planks around him so the dirt wouldn’t fall on him; we put some bricks there too, and some pieces of crates, and covered him. I don’t know if they buried him again afterwards. We found some kind of triangle from a plane, we hammered it in there and wrote his name with an ink pen. Perhaps he’s still there. Perhaps they exhumed him. Who knows. Well, we wrote surname, name and nickname, year of birth, year of death, and his birthplace.”
Alexander Jegorovič Kolesnikov was born in 1923 in the village of Korobelnikovo in Altai Krai, Russia. His parents worked at a kolkhoz. Although they grew some crops on their own ladn as well, they suffered from a lack of food. And so Alexander and his siblings had to gather dock leaves, liquorice roots, and other forest plants, which he claims ensured his good health throughout his life. The war broke out just as he completed primary school. He volunteered to the draft. In autumn 1941 he was sent to Barnaul and then straight to the first line defending Moscow. He spent several months in the trenches there. He was wounded during one attack and taken to a hospital in Moscow. Three months later he was assigned to a tank school in Sverdlovsk (now Yekaterinburg). He underwent lessons in theory and combat training and was sent to the Belarusian front. He was assigned as the commander of a T-34 tank. After liberating a few villages his tank was destroyed and he was put in command of a self-propelled SU-122 howitzer. He and his crew managed to take out an enemy Tiger tank. However, shortly before reaching the German border, his machine was destroyed again and Kolesnikov was heavily injured. He got married after the war, he had four children and worked at a kolkhoz on a tracked tractor until he improved his education by graduating from the Barnaul Polytechnical School.
