Interesting and Humour - page 625

 
 
 
tol64:

big + in the rep for only a lakh.

good move

 
Mischek:

big + in the rep for only a lakh.

That's a good move.

Let's go for 500k each and do it again. )))

 
tol64:

Let's pool 500,000 each and do it again. )))

I do not have to prepare the public for the IPO)) and I do not need charity to fill in old mistakes.

It's a smart move, smart and, most importantly, cost-effective.

So you go ahead on your own. Come on down ))

 
Mischek:

big + in the rep for only a lakh.

good move.

You're such a cynic. :)

Fuck the motives, but in essence I agree, Wikipedia is a very valuable project.

 
MetaDriver:

What a cynic... :)

Fuck the motives, but in essence I agree, Wikipedia is a very valuable project.

Good thing we know that now.)
 
Mischek:
Good thing we know it now ))

I knew that even before I was born. ))

//---

Another interesting performance from 1980.

 

Than to suffer so much, it would be better to be killed ...". Fragments of memoirs of soldier Mikhail Dmitrievich Tkachenko

...In 1933, we were on the brink of extinction. I, Valya and Tanya went to neighbouring villages, begging for alms. At home, our big table was mostly soup (a handful of some kind of cereal for a bucket of water), in spring - pancakes made of white acacia, mokrichki and a jmenu of flour for bonding). "Coffee" made of acorns and roots. We collected undigested corn and barley grains from the piles of manure in the brigade yard, cooked soup and evenly poured it into bowls for us. We suffered a lot. Little Nadia and Grandma died. The others survived.

A picture of those years (not of '33, but of those years in general). We had a little piglet. So every morning some poor activist came and knocked on the pigsty with a stick. The piglet would grunt, responding. One day the pigsty responded with silence - we slaughtered the piglet. Activists immediately rushed in, started searching and took everything away.

I heard from people in the village that someone was taken away for telling a drunken joke about Stalin. I also know that they took away my aunt's husband, who was a locomotive driver in the town and a German by nationality.

He graduated from high school. In 1939, I entered the Dnepropetrovsk Industrial College. He lived in a hostel, starving. Studied poorly, though was quite capable. Behaved in the dormitory not in the best way. And everyone took my classes very lightly. I always got a scholarship, but it was a pittance. There were times when we couldn't even find a penny to buy bread and we had to walk along the tram tracks to the technical college (which was on Kooperativnaya Street), looking carefully under our feet. In those days, tramcars were made of wood and kopecks fell into cracks in the floorboards. If we managed to find 15-20 kopecks, we ate bread. Help from home was rare and insignificant. Just before the war Knyryk Mykola and I dropped out of school and went home. I worked in the collective farm.

At the age of 17 I was doing a hard man's work - grain delivery. We put the sacks of 80-82 kg of grain on scales, with scales on the cart, carried on reception points in Vovnigi, in Privolnoe, there from a cart again on scales, there to pull up on high mountains of grain on ramps under 45 degrees upwards and there pour out. You had to sow, mow, bukar (cultivate) and so on. There were not enough people, many men were conscripted to the army (to Poland and Finland).

Unexpectedly, I was mobilized to the mills in Krivoy Rog. I went and saw everything red: dust, water after the rain, miners' faces... I ran away. Almost went to trial, but my stepfather interceded and helped me. [Some certificates for bribes.]

War broke out. When the Germans were on their way, the kolkhoz evacuated their cattle. We, the older flocks, were mobilized to drive and guard the herd. Hundreds of thousands of cattle piled up near the Voyskove village on the crossing of the Dnieper. It was very hard: the rain and poor nutrition... All this wealth went to the Germans. We ran home.

When the first units of the German army appeared in the village, we were quiet, watching the motorcyclists moving along the highway. Many external signs of civilization on equipment and ammunition of Germans, various straps, loops, devices, all sorts of conveniences - as opposed to the Soviet simplicity - caught our eye. Right in the street the soldiers began to shave; everyone had a satchel, a towel, a razor, some trinkets. Cheerful, confident, calm.

The arrival of the Germans left in memory an oppressive feeling of hopelessness. Unlike us, the young men and women, the elder generation took the arrival of the enemy with calmness (if not affability). At a mature age they had had to live through collectivisation and the Holodomor; it seems that the Soviets had done enough damage to them.

The Germans renamed the kolkhoz Die Kollektivwirtschaft and restructured it: they distributed cattle among yards (we got a gray mare), everyone was given a task and everyone worked for the Germans. I worked in different jobs. One day, when we were celebrating obzhinki [the end of the harvest], I got drunk and said something in Russian in front of my fellow villagers. Then I was very ashamed in front of people for this prank.

There was an officer in one half of our hut, and we lived in the other half. [Traditional huts in this part of Ukraine consisted of two separate halves, each with its own cooker.] The Germans behaved politely, treating us with chocolate [an unprecedented delicacy for peasant children], asking us for sunflower seeds, calling them "Stalin's chocolate". When they were inexperienced in peeling the seeds, it was obvious that they were unfamiliar with it.

One day some Germans gathered, evidently they were celebrating a holiday and had a bottle of wine. They sat there and went away, leaving a half-drunk bottle behind. It is amazing.

In the spring of 1942 we could hear the distant hum of the front, somewhere from Kharkov. A week later it was quiet.

The Germans had been replaced by Hungarians or Romanians. Me and the boys climbed into the school, which stood empty. A soldier caught us there, made us empty our pockets and found a penknife in my face. A young guy, my age.

In 1942, they started sending young men to Germany. It came as a shock to me. The train was slowly making its way through the tracks, it seemed that we were already a long way from home. Terrible boredom! Hopelessness! The door of the goods waggon was ajar, a German was dozing with a submachine gun. I was lying by the door, slowly pushing it open with my foot, widening the door. On a long uphill section the train slows down, I fall out unnoticed. My bag was left in the carriage as a memento of me. It turned out we hadn't gone far, somewhere just outside Verkhnedniprovsk. In time I got home, through people made some kind of a reference, I got away with it all. But then a guy from our village, Ivan, was shot dead while trying to escape from the train.

Under all the authorities I had to run like a salted hare, everybody tried to drink blood the same way, communists or fascists.

The front was approaching. We, our relatives, neighbours, fellow villagers were waiting for ours. We knew then that we were going to the front, to death, but we waited all the same. Bashmachka village is 4 km away from the Dnieper. In autumn 1943 some Soviet unit from the side of Vovnig broke into Bashmachka. Probably reconnaissance. Immediately Germans threw several tanks, I saw how they moved across the field. Our people ran around the village, hid in people's houses, changed their clothes.

The Germans announced that all the young men had to report for registration, understandably to identify them. That night I, my brother-in-law Ivan and other boys from the village took their bags and rushed out of the village. We lived in plantations, in gullies. It got cold. Once we had to lie down without lifting our heads for two days. Germans had set up an observation post on a stack, we could correct the artillery fire, they stretched telephone wires. They were moving around, we were lying dead and alive. Suddenly they were very fast and ran away.

We returned to the village. I saw with my own eyes how a German soldier was running down the street with his bicycle, never got on it, threw it and ran on. Panic.

Ours came. Of course, great joy! A huge mass of Ukrainians did not like the Soviet power, did not want to give their blood for it, but still people were glad that ours had returned.

On October 29, 1943, I was called to the army by the field enlistment office. We were chased across the Dnieper, the crossing was bombed, everything ran. They promptly formed units, me, who had studied at technical college, as a more educated one, was appointed to the machine-gunnery as the third number to machine-gun "Maxim". No personal weapons were issued, the uniform was partially issued, I was left in my trousers and boots. Quickly back across Dnepr, to the west. Passed by Bashmachi, but had no time to stop by.

Arrived at the front. 458 rifle regiment of the 78th rifle division of the 3rd Ukrainian front.

We, who were in occupied territory, working for the enemy, were in the eyes of the Soviet authorities close to the punishment. That is we, without training, poorly armed and clothed, were thrown to secondary directions just like masses. Most were soon killed. "Not a great loss!" - thought the Soviet leadership.

The Germans were retreating, holding us back with small rearguards. Our commander, a junior lieutenant, rises to the attack, shouts, threatens with a pistol (with my own ears I heard the older men say that we should shoot him). The fighters reluctantly rise, run, fall down, crawl. They are running again. Especially the wounded in the stomach scream with horror. You run forward and you can see ahead how the enemy's line is knocking out fountains of earth. It seems I'll get there and that's it. But he's not just hitting one spot.

We threw out the machine gun's shield because we could see it from afar, the Germans were covering it with their mortars. We tied a 15-meter rope to the machine-gun, shot it, changed the position - we crawled over it, and then pulled the machine-gun by the rope. Autumn, it rained, the Germans had metal machine gun belts, we had canvas ones that got wet and constantly got stuck in the lock. I picked up a German rifle, heavier than ours, but automatic.

Constantly moving forward. I had given up a lot. Unshaven, hungry (we were barely fed), dirty. Rains. We took a wheelbarrow from some people in some village, rolling a machine gun...

One night the Germans let a tank along the front line with sirens blaring. Terrible panic, everybody ran like sheep.

One nighttime rest in a stack. I woke up in the middle of the night - alone. Our guys had moved on. I rushed to catch up, bumped into a German. Lonely German, ran away from me into the night. Run...

I am absolutely exhausted. Hunger makes me dizzy, my stomach burns. I can't stand it. I'd rather be killed than suffer like this. I sincerely thought so at the time!

In one of the attacks, all of a sudden, it was like a kick in the knee! Wounded. My brother Ivan helped me, he called the hospital attendants (he died soon after). Later they were pulling me to the cart and I begged them for a piece of bread and I chewed it. I was very hungry.

A heavy wound in the leg, damage to the tendons. Four months in a hospital in Tbilisi. I remember they gave me "Kagor" forty grams each. Quietly, quietly. There I recovered, got better...

(c) Mark Solonin