DD Geopolitics

@DD_Geopoliti Vladimir Putin on the blockade, his parents during the war, and his deceased brother: The war began, my father volunteered to go to the front. He was sent to a sabotage detachment of the NKVD. They were thrown into the near rear to carry out sabotage acts but they were almost immediately ambushed. Someone betrayed them. They were chased through the forest, and he survived because he sat in a swamp for several hours and breathed through a reed. He heard German soldiers passing by, dogs barking. I was brought a file on this group from the Defense Ministry archive. Of the 28 people, four crossed the front line back to our troops. 24 died. Then they were sent to the Nevsky Pyatachok. It was probably the hottest place during the entire blockade. Our troops held a small bridgehead, it was supposed to be a bridgehead for breaking the blockade. There are dominating heights all around it, it was shot through. It is still all metal there. My father told me how he had been wounded there. He lived his whole life with shrapnel in his leg: they never took it all out. His foot never straightened out afterwards. It was winter already, the Neva was frozen, and he needed to get to the other bank somehow. There were few people willing to drag him to the other side, because the Neva was in full view there, and was under fire from both artillery and machine guns. There was almost no chance of reaching the other bank. But by pure chance, his neighbor in Peterhof happened to be nearby. And this neighbor, without thinking, dragged him. They both crawled there alive. The neighbor waited for him in the hospital, made sure that he had been operated on, and said: “Well, now you will live, and I will go to die”, and he went back. Later I asked my father: “Did he die?” They lost each other, and my father believed that the neighbor had died. In the 60s, he suddenly came home, sat down and cried. He met this savior of his. In a store. In Leningrad. By chance. He went into the store for groceries and saw him. Imagine that they both went to this store at that very moment. One chance in a million… My mother told me how she came to visit my father in the hospital. They had a small child, he was three years old. And there was hunger, the blockade… And my father gave her his hospital rations. In secret from the doctors and nurses. She hid it, took it home and fed the child. And then he began to faint in the hospital, the doctors understood everything and stopped letting her in. Then they took her child away. They did it on purpose, with the aim of saving children from starvation. They gathered them in orphanages for evacuation. They didn’t even ask the parents. He got sick there and didn’t survive. And they weren’t even told where he was buried. And then people I didn’t know worked in the archives and found documents on my brother. And this is indeed my brother. Not only the address from which he was taken matched. The first name, last name, patronymic, year of birth matched. And the burial place was indicated: Piskarevskoye Cemetery and even a specific plot. Father, when the child was taken away, Mother was alone, and he was allowed to walk, went home on crutches. When he approached the house, he saw that the orderlies were carrying corpses out of the entrance. And he saw my mother. He approached her, and it seemed to him that she was breathing. He said to the orderlies: “She’s still alive!” – “She’ll get there on the way, she won’t survive.” He said that he had attacked them with crutches and forced them to lift her back into the apartment. He nursed her back to health. She stayed alive. And she lived until 1999. He died at the end of 1998. There was no family where someone did not die but they did not hate the enemy, that’s what’s amazing. I still can’t, honestly, fully understand this. Mom said: “What kind of hatred can there be for these soldiers? They are ordinary people. They were just driven to the front.” I remember these words from my childhood.