Great Patriotic War Veterans

Krushchev's grave

We started our day at the New Maiden Convent cemetery. The Russian Orthodox church didn't allow divorce, so the noblemen's wives would suddenly desire to be a nun, allowing their husbands to remarry. Several mothers of Czars ended up at this convent, so donations were plentiful. But after Peter the Great allowed divorce, donations went down, so the opened a graveyard for noblemen. Eventually this became the resting place for important communists: Gorbachev's wife, Boris Yeltsin, Andrei Tupolev, Nikita Krushchev, Andrei Gromyko, many World War II veterans, as well as singers, ballerinas, and movie stars.

Statue of Peter the Great

Our next stop was the statue of Peter the Great. Originally this was a statue of Columbus that Yeltsin was to give to Bush in 1992 (500th anniversary of Columbus discovering America). But the economy collapsed and Russia couldn't afford to ship the gift. Ever resourceful, in 1997 Columbus head was cut off and replaced with that of Peter the Great to celebrate the 300th anniversary of the Russian navy. So there is Peter with his back to the Kremlin on a 15th century ship.

Our last stop of the morning was the huge Church of Christ, the Savior originally built from 1837- 1883. In December, 1931, it was blown up by the Communists. Their plan was to build a skyscraper here taller than the Empire State Building. World War II intervened ending those plans. Krushchev later turned the foundation into a swimming pool. The church was rebuilt from 1995-2000 to the original design, though the materials used were cheaper. It still is quite impressive.

In the afternoon, 3 veterans of World War II, the Great Patriotic War talked to us. Remember 27M Russians died during the war, 13 M of them civilians. Our first veteran was a pilot who trained other pilots. "We were very inexperienced compared to the German pilots from 1941-43, it was at the Battle of Stalingrad that the tide turned. Much of this was due to the goods and planes supplied by America's lend-lease program."

Our second veteran , eventually became a general. As a 16 year old, he had one month of training before entering the battle. "The hardest time was the five minutes before the battle begins. When you see a large squadron of tanks approaching, you become fearful, but behind us was our Russian homeland. In 5 days of battle, I was one of 12 who survived from my unit of 1200. Even as a 12 year old, I went to school for half a day and worked the other half in a factory. Our motto was 'everything for the front line, everything for victory'. "

Veterans of the Great Patriotic War

Our final veteran was a woman nurse, one of 800,000 women who went to the front. "I was first stationed at Stalingrad and we were bombed with logs, rails, and nails falling from the sky. I was sixteen and started to cry, everything around me was on fire. I saw a wounded soldier on a nearby tank, but I was too short to reach him. A tall Siberian helped me reach him and I dragged him on his coat to the hospital. Later, our hospital was surrounded and I became a POW. As women, we carried buckets of sand to build a road, our hands would bleed from the weight. After 6 weeks, we were put on a train to Germany. Some men removed the floor boards from our car, we jumped under the speeding train to escape."

The general liberated a concentration camp near Berlin - only women remained, wearing wooden shoes with thing faced, many had been infected on purpose. All the men had been marched to the Baltic sea to be sunk on a barge. What impressed him most was the order of the Germans, the piles of shoes here, hair there, and suitcase in another pile. "Nearby we encountered German women and children torn from their homes by the war, we fed them with our supplies.

They went on, "In our day, everyone volunteered to defend the Motherland, regardless of politics. Today's generation is brought up by the media more than their parents. They see rich and poor people, this wasn't the case during Soviet times. Today they are fighting to get a good education because education brings riches. Most are envious of America".