On Defender of the Fatherland Day, it is customary to congratulate all men without exception and age discounts. The male? Congratulations! So he deserved it. But only a few of them know what service is. An experienced wife of an officer tells about how the military live and serve.
To become the wife of a general, you need to marry a lieutenant and wander around the garrisons with him. But a rare bird will fly to the middle of the Dnieper, which means that with a successful combination of circumstances, you will meet old age with your husband-colonel. Or you won’t if you run away earlier, unable to withstand all the hardships and hardships of military life.
C - Stability
She just doesn't exist. You will never know how long you will live in one place and where you will then be sent. Most likely further away. The more remote the place of its location, the higher the chance that you will go there.
Every time you need to start all over again and be prepared for the fact that the water is in the column, and the amenities are on the street.
T - Patience
We need to find its inexhaustible source. And draw liters from there - one glass on an empty stomach for prevention, and in advanced cases, increase the dosage until the symptoms disappear.
About - Communication
With anyone, but not with her husband. Sometimes he leaves in the morning, as usual, for service and returns not even at night (this, by the way, is excellent and consider yourself lucky!), But two weeks later, simply because the Motherland said: “We must!”. The voice of the wife is deliberative, but by no means decisive.
D - children
At first it’s hard with them, grandparents are far away, there is often no one to help, you can only rely on yourself. But children grow up and become like cats! That is, they walk on their own. In a closed area where everyone knows each other, nothing bad will ever happen.
F - pity
Forget! First, you will learn not to spare yourself, otherwise you will not survive, because the whole life is on you, and there is no time for your husband - he has a service. Then stop feeling sorry for others. And if you see that someone is not conscientiously fulfilling their duties, just do not remain silent. And it is right!
AB-SA-RA-KA
bloody land:
The stories of the officer's wife
Colonel Henry Carrington
DEDICATION
This story is dedicated to Lieutenant General Sherman, whose proposal was accepted in the spring of 1866 at Fort Kearny, and whose energetic policy of solving the Indian problems and quickly completing the Union Pacific to the "Sea", crushed the last hope of an armed insurrection.
Margaret Irvine Carrington.
PREFACE TO THE THIRD EDITION
Absaraka, indeed, became a bloody land. The tragedy, in which the army lost twelve officers and two hundred and forty-seven brave soldiers in 1876, was but the continuation of a series of skirmishes which brought about peace after the catastrophe of 1866. Now you can learn more about a country that was so dependent on the military to expand settlements and solve Indian problems.
In January 1876, General Custer told the author, "It will take another massacre of Phil Kearney for Congress to give generous support to the army." Six months later, his story, like Fetterman, has become monumental thanks to a similar catastrophe. With extensive experience on the frontier—Fetterman was a rookie—and with a belief in the ability of white soldiers to overcome overwhelming numbers of Indians, fearless, brave, and peerless horsemen, Custer believed that an army should fight hostile savages under any circumstances and at every opportunity.
A brief history of events in this country is of great value to all who are interested in our relations with the Indians of the Northwest.
The map attached here was considered sufficiently detailed by Generals Custer and Brisbin. General Humphreys, chief of US engineers, pointed out additional forts and agencies on it.
The first appearance of the military in this country is accurately represented in the text. There has never been a more insane impulse of the Americans than that which forced the army into the country of the Powder and Bighorn Rivers in 1866, doing the will of irresponsible emigrants, regardless of the legal rights of the local tribes. There has never been a wilder takeover for gold than taking over the Black Hills in the face of solemn treaties.
Time brings to the surface the fruits of an unreasonable policy - the agreement of 1866 in Laramie - a simple deception, as far as it concerned all the tribes. These fruits are ripe. The fallen can attest to this. I am ready to state that at the time of the massacre, if this line had been severed, it would have required four times as many forces in the future to reopen it; since then, more than a thousand soldiers have faced a problem that was then solved by less than a hundred. The battle for the Bighorn Country was presented in one statement: “Having had a partial success, the Indian, now desperate and bitter, looked upon the reckless white man as a sacrifice, and the United States had to send an army to deal with the Indians of the northwest. It is better to incur the costs immediately than to delay and provoke a war for many years. It needs to be understood here and now.”
There is no glory in Indian warfare. If too little has been done, the West complains; if too much is done, the East condemns the massacre of the redskins. The lies of justice are between extremes, and here is the quality of that Indian policy which was inaugurated during the official term of President Grant. So little truth, mixed facts, and such a strong desire to be popular by pointing to the scapegoat at the first public condemnation of a war that lasted for six months, that, even now, public opinion has drawn only a few vague lessons from that massacre. Indeed, it took another tragedy to try to sort out the relationship between the Americans and the Indian tribes and solve this problem.
Henry Carrington
Journalist and writer Vasily Sarychev has been writing down the memoirs of old-timers for fifteen years, fixing the history of the western region of Belarus through their destinies. His new story, written especially for TUT.BY, is dedicated to Soviet women, who in 1941 were left to fend for themselves by the Soviet authorities. During the occupation, they were forced to survive, including with the help of the Germans.
Vasily Sarychev is working on a series of books "In Search of Lost Time". As the author notes, this is “the history of Europe in the mirror of a Western Belarusian city, which was told by old people who survived six authorities” (Russian Empire, German occupation during the First World War, the period when Western Belarus was part of Poland, Soviet power, German occupation during the Second World War wars and again Soviet power).
Fundraising for the publication of a new book by Sarychev from the series “In Search of Lost Time” ends on the crowdfunding platform “Beehive”. On the page of this project, you can get acquainted with the content, study the list of gifts and participate in the publication of the book. Participants will receive a book as a gift for the New Year holidays.
TUT.BY has already published Vasily about the incredible fate of an ordinary person who fell into the millstones of big politics, “polite people” from 1939, and about escaping naked from prison. The new story is dedicated to the wives of Soviet commanders.
When Western Belarus was annexed to the USSR, they came to our country as winners. But then, when their husbands retreated to the east with the active army, no one needed them. How did they survive under the new government?
I'm on you like in a war. Abandoned
“Let your Stalin feed you!”
Many years ago, in the sixties, there was an incident at the checkpoint of a Brest factory. The enterprise is more female, after the change of workers, an avalanche hurried home, and conflicts occurred in the crush. They did not look at faces: whether it was an editorial or a deputy, they applied it with proletarian frankness.
At the turnstile, as in a bath, everyone is equal, and the wife of the commander from the Brest Fortress, who headed the factory trade union - not yet old, twenty years had not passed since the war, having survived the occupation - was pushing on a common basis. Maybe she hit someone - with her elbow or during distribution - and the young weaver, who heard from her friends such things that they don’t write about in the newspapers, whipped backhand: “German prostitute!” - and she grabbed her breasts and croaked: “If you have small children ...”
So in one phrase - the whole truth about the war, with many shades, from which we were carefully taken away.
In conversations with people who survived the occupation, at first I could not understand when they made the remark “this is already after the war” and began to talk about the Germans. For the inhabitant of Brest, hostilities flashed in one morning, and then another power, three and a half years of deep German rear. Different categories of citizens - locals, Easterners, Poles, Jews, Ukrainians, party workers who got out from behind the wire of prisoners, commander's wives, soltyses, policemen - each had their own war. Some survived the misfortune at home, where neighbors, relatives, where the walls help. It was very bad for those whom hard times caught in a foreign land.
Before the war, they arrived in the “liberated” western region as mistresses - yesterday's girls from the Russian hinterland, who pulled out a lucky ticket (we are talking about the events of 1939, when Western Belarus was annexed to the USSR. - TUT.BY). To marry a lieutenant from a stationed regiment meant to take off in status. And here - the "liberation campaign" and in general a different world, where people, when they meet, raise the brim of their hats and turn to "pan", where in the store without an appointment there are bicycles with wonderfully curved handlebars, and private traders smoke a dozen varieties of sausages, and for a penny you can take at least five cuts on the dress ... And all these people look at them with their husband with caution - they look right ...
Nina Vasilievna Petruchik - by the way, the cousin of Fyodor Maslievich, whose fate was already in the chapter “Polite People of 1939”, recalled that autumn in the town of Volchin: “The wives of the commanders were in boots, printed cotton dresses with flowers, black velvet jackets and huge white scarves. At the market, they began to buy embroidered nightgowns and, out of ignorance, put them on instead of dresses ... "
Maybe the weather was like this - I'm talking about boots, but they are met by clothes. This is how an eleven-year-old girl saw them: very poor people came. People, chuckling, sold nightgowns, but laughter with laughter, and the newcomers became the masters of life in a year and a half before the war.
But life calculates for random happiness. It was these women, perceived with hostility, with children in their arms, with the outbreak of war, who were left alone in an alien world. From a privileged caste they suddenly turned into pariahs, thrown out of the queues with the words: “Let your Stalin feed you!”.
It was not so with everyone, but it was, and it is not for us now to judge the ways of survival that young women chose. The easiest thing was to find a guardian who would warm and feed the children, and protect them somewhere.
“Limousines with German officers drove up to the building and took away young women, the inhabitants of this house”
Photo is illustrative Vasily Prokopuk, a boy from the time of the occupation, who was snooping around the city with his friends, recalled that on the former Moskovskaya (we are talking about one of the Brest streets. - TUT.BY) one could see young women with soldiers walking in the direction of the fortress. The narrator is convinced that it was not local girls who “spasted” under the arm, for whom it is more difficult to accept such courtship: there were parents, neighbors, in whose eyes the church grew, finally. Maybe polkas are more relaxed? - “What are you, the Poles have ambition! my respondents answered. “There was a case, a panenka was seen flirting with an occupier - the priest screwed this into his sermon ...”
"The war is walking around Russia, and we are so young ..." - three and a half years is a long time in a short Indian century. But this was not the main motive - the children, their eternally hungry eyes. The troubled boys did not delve into the subtleties, they muttered contemptuously about women from the former houses of the officers: “They found themselves ...”
“In the center of the courtyard,” writes the author, “there was a rather exotic wing in which lived a German major, our present chief, along with a beautiful young woman and her little child. We soon learned that this was the ex-wife of a Soviet officer, left to the mercy of fate on the tragic days of June 1941 for the Red Army. In the corner of the barracks yard stood a three-story brick building inhabited by the abandoned families of Soviet officers. In the evenings, limousines with German officers drove up to the building and took away the young women who lived in this house.”
The situation allowed options. For example, weren't the commander's wives forcibly taken away? According to Ivan Petrovich, “it was a small barracks, converted into a residential building, with several apartments per floor. Young women lived here, mostly with small children. It is possible that even before the war it was the house of the command staff, where the families found the war: I did not see guards or any signs of forced detention.
More than once or twice, I witnessed how the Germans drove up here in the evening: our camp was across the parade ground from this house. Sometimes they dropped in on the commandant, other times straight. It was not a trip to a brothel - they were going to the ladies. They knew about the visit, smiled like good friends. Usually the Germans came in the evening, went upstairs, or the women themselves went out dressed up, and the cavaliers took them away, one might assume, to a theater or a restaurant. I didn’t have to catch the return, with whom the children were, I can’t know. But everyone in the camp knew that these were the wives of the commanders. They understood that for women it was a means of survival.”
Here's how it turned out. In the last days before the war, commanders and party workers who wanted to take their families out of the city were accused of alarmism and expelled from the party - and now women have been left for the use of Wehrmacht officers.
The son's name was Albert, the Germans came - he became Adolf
Photo is illustrative It would be wrong to say that the women left behind were looking for such support, it was just one of the ways to survive. Unpopular, stepping over the line, beyond which - gossip and piercing glances.
Women who came to Western Belarus from the east often lived in twos, threes, it was easier to survive. They went to distant (they didn’t give them to the neighbors) villages, but you can’t live on alms alone, they settled down to wash wagons, barracks, and soldiers’ dormitories. Once a German gave a large postcard to the wife of a political worker from the artillery regiment, and she hung it on the wall to decorate the room. Many years have passed since the war, and the baboons remembered the picture - they vigilantly looked at each other during the war.
The wife of the battalion commander of the rifle regiment, who stood in the fortress before the war, at the beginning of the occupation, copied her little son from Albert to Adolf, she came up with such a move, and after liberation she again made Albert. Other widows moved away from her, turned away, but for the mother this was not the main thing.
Someone will be closer to her truth, someone to the heroic Vera Khoruzhey, who insisted on going to the occupied Vitebsk at the head of an underground group, leaving a baby and a little daughter in Moscow.
Life is multifaceted, and those who survived the occupation remembered different things. And a romantic-minded person who left the terrible building of the SD was clearly not after torture, and the German’s love for a Jewish girl, whom he hid to the last and went to a penal company for her, and a city plantation worker who hastily appeased a Wehrmacht soldier nearby in the park until she was shot by a client who caught a bad disease. In each case, it was different: where is the food, where is the physiology, and somewhere - a feeling, love.
Outside of service, the Germans became gallant wealthy males. Bright in her youth, the beauty N. said: at least don’t go beyond the threshold - they stuck like ticks.
Statistics will not answer how many red-haired babies were born during the war and after the expulsion of the Germans from the temporarily occupied territory, as well as with the Slavic appearance in Germany at the beginning of the 46th ... This is a delicate topic to take deeply, and we went somewhere then to the side...
Maybe in vain in general about commander's wives - there were enough restless women of all statuses and categories, and they all behaved differently. Someone tried to hide their beauty, while someone, on the contrary, turned it to good. The wife of the commander of the reconnaissance battalion Anastasia Kudinova, older, shared shelter with young partners who also lost their husbands in the fortress. All three with children - such a kindergarten-day nursery. As soon as the Germans appeared, she smeared her friends with soot and kept her away from the window. I was not afraid for myself, my friends joked, our old maid ... They pulled their mother's strap and survived without the enemy's shoulder, then they joined the fight.
They were not alone, many remained faithful, waiting for their husbands throughout the war and later. However, the opposition - arrived, local - is not entirely true. Everywhere there are cultured and not very cultured people, with principles and creeping, pure and vicious. And there are depths in any person where it is better not to look, the nature of all sorts of things mixed up, and what will manifest itself with greater force depends largely on the circumstances. It so happened that since June 22, 1941, the most destitute, stunned by these circumstances, were the “easterners”.
Another would not be missed - the reason. How did it happen that you had to flee to Smolensk and further, leaving weapons, warehouses, the entire army of personnel, and in the border areas - also wives to the delight of Wehrmacht officers?
Then there was a noble rage, the science of hatred in a journalistic performance and a real one, which increased tenfold strength in battle. This hatred helped to carry out combat missions, but in a surprising way it was not transferred to the direct culprits of many sufferings.
In modern society, interest has grown in the study of small groups acting as a social microenvironment that has a direct impact on the individual. A small group is a kind of community in which certain social relations are realized, and which, at the same time, are mediated by joint activities. Consideration of such communities allows us to most fully reveal the picture of everyday life, to consider the life of an ordinary person.
One example of a closed community is one in which a person's behavior strategy is built in accordance with ideas about the people around him. These representations form knowledge about daily practices and their temporal distribution among the residents of the town during the day, work features, preferences and interests, values inherent in one or another category of people living here.
The limited space, "life in plain sight", close relationships in a military camp leads, on the one hand, to the cohesion of the inhabitants, and on the other, to the formation of separate communities in the military environment, for example, women's. In Soviet times, women, having the opportunity to make a career on an equal basis with men, to participate in public life, faced a difficult choice between family priorities and their own needs for self-realization. The officer's wife, being a civilian, nevertheless, experienced all the "hardships and hardships of military service", which often expressed for her in the absence of opportunities for professional and cultural growth, as well as general dissatisfaction with life. Since on the territory of the military camp the position of women as a whole initially depended on the attitude towards their husbands-officers, and within the residential part of the town, women formed a relatively independent community with their own hierarchy and organization of life. This determined the research interest of the authors in the study and analysis of this problem using the biographical method. The study was conducted in April-October 2011 (the sample consisted of 10 women from 45 to 84 years old) and made it possible to identify the features of the life stories of wives. No other male profession has such an impact on the position of women in society as the military profession. On the one hand, the phrase “military wife” itself is just a definition of the marital status of a woman, and more is said about the husband than about the woman herself.
But on the other hand, behind this definition there is a whole layer of specific ideas, the wife of a military man is an independent female status not only within the military community, but also civil. The definition of "officer's wife" is self-sufficient, enshrined in the language as an independent formula, and behind it is a whole layer of ideas related to a certain generalized image. In the course of the study, we covered a fairly large period of time, in connection with which one can notice certain changes that have occurred in the daily routine of military camps and in the minds of people. All respondents who participated in the study had an education and a profession, and during the survey there was such a tendency that predominantly all women had a pedagogical, medical or economic education. “It has always been interesting for me to observe the pattern “the work of the husband is the work of the wife”.
I even compiled some rough statistics. It turns out that more than 50% of officers' wives work as teachers, medical workers or cooks. Another 40% are housewives, trade workers, and only 10% are engaged in completely different things. Sometimes, it seems that God specially creates such couples for a strong union” (N.V., aged 51). The dating stories were quite similar. They took place at dance parties that were held in schools and institutes, as well as among friends.
So, for example, several respondents in their youth went to dances in military schools, and some, on the contrary, tell how festive events were held in their educational institutions, to which young people from military schools were invited. Short and rare, due to barracks life, meetings of the cadet, as a rule, ended with a marriage proposal. Graduation at the school, golden shoulder straps, wedding and departure to the place of service. This is where the romance ended, and the harsh everyday life began. “Beyond the walls of the military camp there was a different life ... It was an army, the service may be inconspicuous, without shoulder straps and titles, but just as difficult, and maybe even harder, than that of her husband. Not everyone survived” (E.S., 47 y.). A military camp is related to a military unit as a women's space is to a man's. Women are mainly engaged in the organization of everyday life, and men are engaged in military service.
Women's and men's perceptions of the appropriateness of occupied space are determined in accordance with relatively different value systems. The identity of an officer's wife is initially formed through the awareness of self-affirmation, primarily through the achievements of her husband. The service hierarchy directly affects the relationship of their wives, defining the boundaries of communication between them. And this is clearly seen in the stories of the respondents themselves. The key moments in the life of an officer's wife are: early (most often) marriage, the birth of children (in the very first years of marriage), constant moving from one military camp to another, everyday overcoming of difficulties associated with the remoteness of towns from administrative centers, lack of work, therefore , in most cases a life-long profession of a housewife. Since, on average, the family of a serviceman moves 3-5 times during the service of an officer. For a civilian, moving is always an event, and a turning point in his personal destiny. For members of military families, this is a completely predictable and inevitable fact. Within the framework of the “common destiny”, a change of residence, on the one hand, is a common phenomenon, one might even say, “routine”.
"Life on suitcases", temporary housing, the absence of one's own "home" - all these topics make up an idea of the general fate of the military. At the same time, undoubtedly, the fact of changing the place of service of an officer is an event in the life of the whole family, but an event that does not go beyond the usual course of things. In general, moving does not entail a change in the living environment. There is a certain "knowledge" about the types of military camps, the hierarchy of its inhabitants, the conditions of relationships between people, the usual types of everyday practices that are formed in the process of living in a military camp. Therefore, the development of events is predicted in accordance with this knowledge. An important place in a woman's life is how she distributes time during the day. A military wife lives the life of her husband: her daily routine is entirely focused on the departure / arrival of her husband.
In his absence, she takes care of household chores; violations in a clear schedule are always associated with the service of an officer, and the wife is able to "explain" any delays of her husband at work or his absence for a certain time ("urgent business trip", "exercises", "barracks position", after all, "something It happened at work." This is expressed in phrases such as: "our service." Regardless of whether a woman works or not, her main “profession” is the duties of a “military wife”. “The regime was certain, it was normal, sometimes they went to the exercises, To the exercises ... for three days, in general, not for long, but the fact that you yourself are always there is unequivocal. The only thing he left at eight, from two to four break, as it should be at this time, I have to feed, drink and put him to bed, he had to rest, as expected, and he left until eight in the evening. And you're alone all day, that's for sure. These are household chores, girlfriends, you will go, take a walk. On weekends he is in a dress or somewhere else ”(E.P., 48 years old). An important place in the life of any woman is occupied by a child, but in the life of a military camp, a child is an important condition for the involvement of a woman in a social circle consisting of neighbors and other women who have children - “mommies”, which are the majority in a military camp. “You quickly get to know each other there, everyone walks with strollers, the neighbors help each other out a lot, at least they lived very friendly.
The specifics of the garrison, they are rocket men, they went on duty for weeks. They went on weekly duty, i.e. I haven't had my husband for a week, as they say, do it yourself” (S.S., aged 47). In general, a characteristic feature of the composition of the population of a military town has always been complete families, which consisted of a husband, wife and children. Unmarried girls in the towns are, as a rule, only the eldest daughters in officer families. There were almost no other unmarried women in military camps, because the only way to become its resident is to marry a military man. As a rule, everyone in the unit knew single women living without a husband, in this case we are talking, first of all, about divorced women, who most often remained in the unit after a divorce. On the territory of the military camp, they became the object of increased attention and evaluation.
Single women are associated with such everyday plots as pandering and sexual relations with married officers. “... we shared our thoughts with each other that husbands should not be left, because there are many divorced and all of them, as a rule, remain in the same town, the husbands leave further according to distribution. Therefore, one must protect one's own, vigilant. She gave birth to children and did not go to her mother, we only went on vacation together once a year, for two months with the children” (S.S., aged 47). All conflicts that arose in the women's society were resolved with the participation of the Women's Council. Very often, in the context of the interview, such a character as the “commander's wife” (“chief's wife”) appeared - an older woman who is the wife of an officer commanding a separate unit. The fact that the wives of the military, who are subordinate to the senior officer, recognize the seniority of his wife, calling her "the wife of the commander", this indicates that women form a separate part of the community of the military camp, the relationship between members of which is built in accordance with the hierarchy , according to the position of the husband.
The perception of the life of that time, the difficulties that one had to face: poor living conditions, constant moving, staying in places remote from the city's "benefits" - material and spiritual - are always present in stories about a past life, but most often they were overlapped by the fact that that "but it was friendly and fun," were young. Therefore, to the question “How can you evaluate your decision to marry an officer today?”, They answered positively: “Why not, love does great miracles, you will follow him anywhere, and you won’t have anything in the military - this is unequivocal, except for their state salary, they have no left money, ... therefore, one must be prepared for anything. At that moment, the officer's salary was enough to support me, my children, and save something else” (I.V., aged 45). Thus, our study shows that the study of small groups, the disclosure of internal connections, norms, and attributes specific to these groups is an important and promising area of modern social research. Such studies make it possible to look into another "world", to look at a different reality through the eyes of its direct participants.
V.N. Rakachev, Ya.V. Rakacheva
