From the publications at our Telegram channel “Beorn And The Shieldmaiden”

Mariya Vasilyevna Oktyabrskaya (16 August 1905 – 15 March 1944) was a Soviet tank driver and mechanic who fought on the Eastern Front against Nazi Germany during World War II. After her husband was killed fighting in 1941, Oktyabrskaya sold her possessions to donate a tank for the war effort, and requested that she be allowed to drive it. She received and was trained to drive and fix a T-34 medium tank, which she named “Fighting Girlfriend” (“Боевая подруга”). Oktyabrskaya proved her ability and bravery in battle, and was promoted to the rank of sergeant. After she died of wounds from battle in 1944, she was posthumously made a Hero of the Soviet Union, the Soviet Union’s highest honour for bravery during combat. She was the first female tank driver to be awarded the title.

The story of Mariya Oktyabrskaya, who bought and piloted a tank during WWII is not unique. While relatively uncommon in that she became the tank driver of her own tank, buying weapons for the army using own savings was a mass phenomenon.

According to the large Soviet encyclopedia, in total, 2,500 combat aircraft, thousands of tanks, 16 boats and 8 submarines were built on the donations the Soviet people. According to historians’ calculations, the citizens of the USSR fully paid a year’s worth of the army upkeep during the war.

The mini-documentary from NTV tells of some of these people and their donated machines.

Backup at Rumble.

A Fact, and Not an Advertisement

The the mass nature of donations to the Red Army by the Soviet people found reflection in this drawing by B.Fridkin, published in “Krokodil” issue №5 from 1943.

— Is the tank fine?
— In full working order! We are buying them ourselves for the army!

On February 8, 1945 — exactly 80 years ago — a group of ten Soviet prisoners of war led by Mikhail Devyatayev carried out one of the most daring escapes from Nazi captivity.

In July 1944, Devyatayev’s plane was shot down near Lvov, and he was captured unconscious. A month later, the senior lieutenant attempted to escape, but was caught and sent to the Sachsenhausen death camp.

The pilot managed to swap his death row inmate patch for a penal prisoner’s number, assuming a new identity. Under a false name he went to a different concentration camp on the Usedom Island, near the Peenemünde rocket centre in the Baltic Sea, where German scientists were testing V-2 rockets.

On February 8, Devyatayev and his comrades were taken out for repair works at a local airfield. The Germans were unaware that they had a highly experienced Soviet pilot among the prisoners. Before his capture, the fighter pilot had completed nearly 200 sorties, took part in dozens of aerial battles, and shot down multiple enemy aircraft.

Seizing the opportunity, Devyatayev and nine other Soviet prisoners stealthily killed a guard and hijacked a German Heinkel bomber. The Soviet pilot broke away from the pursuit and flew beyond enemy lines.

Upon returning to the Soviet Union, Devyatayev provided valuable intelligence on the location of missile installations, which were later destroyed in an airstrike. The Peenemünde testing site was captured by Soviet forces in March 1945.

On August 15, 1957, Mikhail Devyatayev was awarded the title of Hero of the Soviet Union.

Source: Russian MFA

This short documentary from NTV tells the story of Mihail Devyatayev, providing an added layer of detail to the commemorative post from the Russian Foreign Ministry.

Here we present three stories that convey a fraction of the suffering and sacrifice that the Soviet people had to go through during the Great Patriotic War.

No on is forgotten!
Nothing is forgotten!

Published first at our telegram channel “Beorn And The shieldmaiden”.

How I stopped collecting stamps

— A passage from the book by Mihail Ancharov “The Improbability Theory. Golden Rain”

Inmate orchestra at Yankovsky KZ, who were forced to play during hanging of other inmates.

And now I’ll tell you how I stopped collecting stamps. It happened after our troops reached Lvov. The machine gunners were told to find out where the Yankovsky camp was located. It was here somewhere, but no one knew where. Then a man with a dancing face who knew of it was found. For some reason, it is impossible to tell of this in detail, one can only tell the details. One can tell about a narrow-gauge railway outside the city, along which a train approached every two hours, and in just one day they brought fourteen thousand people. One can tell how we all walked through a soft field covered with gray sand, machine gunners and the commission, and ahead there were some birch groves, not even groves, but groups of birch trees planted in a checkerboard pattern. And a man with a dancing face suddenly ran across the gray sand to these groves and grabbed the trunk of a birch tree and began to shake it. We wanted to, but we couldn’t get him away from the birch tree, he just mumbled and swayed the trunk, and then the birch tree collapsed, turning out the roots, and we saw a bunker filled with naked people, dead and without hair.

One can tell how we walked up a soft hillock strewn with gray sand, and there was a sweet smell, and we noticed that it was not sand, but some large particles. And it turned out to be burnt and ground human bones. After all, there are fourteen thousand people every day. It smelled like burnt human fat. But the man with the dancing face was alive because he was turning a special machine with sieves that sifted through the ground bones, and in the sieves there were small gold bars melted from dental crowns that were not noticed during the search, and gold was collected — on average three kilograms per day, that is, ninety kilograms of gold per month, that is, a ton of gold per year, and if all this were still working now, imagine how much gold could be mined this way.

Otherwise, one can also tell about the warehouse, where plump paper bags with “camp number so-and-so” stamps were stacked on the shelves, and when my friend poked the blunt barrel of the machine gun into a neat bag, two braids fell out – black and gold. They were prepared for mattresses on submarines. One can also tell what kind of expressions there were on the faces the machine gunners had and what kind of expressions were on commissions’, generals’, scientists’, and employees’ faces. One can tell how the beard of Metropolitan of Krutitsky and Galitsky got wet. And it got wet from crying. The others did not cry and looked at each other with dry eyes.

There were also four mountains — a mountain of men’s shoes, a mountain of women’s shoes, a mountain of children’s shoes, and a mountain of envelopes, photographs, and passports in all European languages. I tore off a German stamp with a swastika from one envelope, because even the great philatelist did not have one, since he did not know “German with a swastika”, but only knew “German about Lorelei with golden braids”. I wrapped the stamp in paper because it issued a sweet smell. And when I came to Moscow to attend an infantry school a month later and presented this stamp to my brother (he was a schoolboy and inherited my album), I had to tear out a sheet from the album: despite the fact that I changed the wrapper three times while I was carrying this stamp, a greasy stain formed in the album, which gave off a smell.

In memory of Vasily Bugrov

Siege of Leningrad, 872 days of hell. A day like an endless nightmare. Nights filled with hunger and the sounds of air raid sirens – the sound that eats into your ears forever and make your blood run cold in your veins.
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