Finished! A Few Bolt Action Russian Infantry and a Book

I have assembled and painted up the 8 Russian "tank riders" that unexpectedly came with the three IS II tanks. Having recently watched quite a few Soviet era WW2 feature films on YouTube - Liberation, Operation Typhoon, The Fall of Berlin etc - I have noticed the uniforms of the Russian infantrymen show a great deal of variety of colours - so I decided to paint my latest batch of figures in a similarly rag tag fashion - on the basis that the Russian film makers probably knew what Red Army soldiers looked like during the war and were representing them accurately in their films!

A sniper (male, for a change!)

Well known Soviet anti-tank weapon!

Note three different shades of green for the three helmet wearing soldiers

And now I have the dreaded ATR in 28mm!

And crewed by a female soldier, to boot!

URRAH!

The recently finished book:

I pulled this from an online review:

A sobering account of conflict on the Eastern Front of World War II told from the perspective of a Russian soldier.

Honest and irrepressibly frank, these are the dramatic memoirs of a Russian officer on the Eastern Front, where he played his part in a clash of titans and witnessed the shuddering collapse of the Third Reich.

The cataclysmic battle of Kursk in 1943 put an end to Hitler’s hopes of victory on the Eastern Front, and it was Evgeni Bessonov’s first battle. From then on, the Germans were forced into a long, bitter retreat that ended in the ruins of Berlin in 1945. An officer in an elite guards unit of the Red Army, Bessonov rode tanks from Kursk, through a western Russia and Poland devastated by the Germans, and right into the heart of Nazi Germany.

Tank Rider is the riveting memoir of Evgeni Bessonov telling of his years of service at the vanguard of the Red Army and daily encounters with the German foe. He brings large-scale battles to life, recounts the sniping and skirmishing that tried and tested soldiers on both sides, and narrates the overwhelming tragedy and horror of apocalyptic warfare on the Eastern Front.

So much of the Soviet experience of World War II remains untold, but this memoir provides an important glimpse into some of the most decisive moments of this overlooked history.

A few impressions of the book. The author was quite lucky in some respects and spent the first year of his service at an officer training school, firstly as a student and later as an instructor. He also seems to have been very lucky thereafter, and mentions it on several occasions - on one occasion, he moved from the lead tank to the second tank and minutes later, the lead tank was hit by the Germans and most of the tank riders were killed. He was repeatedly the only officer fit for duty in his company and was often in temporary command of the company (often amounting to no more than 25-35 men due to attrition), even though he never rose above the rank of a platoon commander, despite his longevity (he insinuates the senior officers of his battalion/brigade "had it in for him")! There are often comments like "Battalion commander Kozienko was nowhere to be seen....."

Other officers come and go, one in particular, Petr Shakulo, the authors best friend, was repeatedly wounded in battle, disappeared for a while, returned to the unit after a stay in hospital, and was promptly wounded again - it felt as if this sequence was repeated 5 or 6 times in the course of the advance from Orel to Berlin! Also, the MG platoon commander pp 189 "Alexander Gushenkov sometimes also visited there. He already had four or five wounds, and this was the first operation in which he was not wounded "!!

Comments about German air power are interesting and a distinct contrast to the Western Allies' experience - the Red Army seems to have had little to no air cover and advanced with a great deal of trepidation, even in early 1945 - perhaps the Germans retained most of the Luftwaffe for use on the eastern front?

Also comments about the attitude of the people in areas the Red Army liberated from the Nazis are enlightening - pp 48/49 for example "The population welcomed us warmly, regardless of how hard it was for them to provide food to soldiers .... such attitudes were common only in the Eastern Ukraine. As soon as we entered Western Ukraine .... the attitude of the population was quite different ...people hid from us .... those places were Bandera areas*, where the nationalistic movement was quite strong .... as a rule. they would say to us in Ukrainian " We do not have anything; the Germans took it all"

One of the reviews I read said this is not a well written book and I would tend to agree, it has no real literary style and to be honest, having read all your blogs, I am sure any one of us could have done a better job of actually writing Bessonovs story - I do wonder if this partly a result of poor translation skills as well - some of the sentences and grammar lack proper "English" syntax and look like they are almost literal translations from Russian, with half the words necessary to make complete sense in English, missing!

*Stepan Bandera - Bandera remains a highly controversial figure in Ukraine. Many Ukrainians hail him as an example, or as a martyred liberation fighter, while other Ukrainians, particularly in the south and east, condemn him as a fascist, or Nazi collaborator, whose followers, called Banderites, were responsible for massacres of Polish and Jewish civilians during World War II. On 22 January 2010, Viktor Yushchenko, the president of Ukraine, awarded Bandera the posthumous title of Hero of Ukraine, which was widely condemned. The award was annulled in 2011 given that Stepan Bandera was never a Ukrainian citizen. The controversy regarding Bandera's legacy gained further prominence following the Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022

Notwithstanding the fact this isn't a particularly well written book, it was a good read and interesting to get a different perspective on the war from the Russian point of view. If you are interested, I came across this web site via a Google search on Bessonovs name - Tankers - I REMEMBER

Finally, this tune turned up in a couple of the films I watched - this is about the best of many videos on YouTube 

IThe Sacred War - YouTube

The lyrics are translated in various ways but they are all approximately similar to this from Wikipedia

Arise, vast country,

Arise for a fight to the death

Against the dark fascist force,

Against the cursed horde.

Chorus:

Let noble wrath

Boil over like a wave!

This is the people's war,

A Sacred War!

We shall repulse the oppressors

Of all ardent ideas,

The rapists and the plunderers,

The torturers of people!

Chorus

Let noble wrath

Boil over like a wave!

This is the people's war,

A Sacred War!

The black wings shall not dare

Fly over the Motherland,

On her spacious fields.

The enemy shall not dare tread!

Chorus

Let noble wrath

Boil over like a wave!

This is the people's war,

A Sacred War!

We'll drive a bullet into the forehead

Of the rotten fascist filth.

For the scum of humanity,

We shall build a solid coffin!

Chorus

Let noble wrath

Boil over like a wave!

This is the people's war,

A Sacred War!