Ivan Makarov - Born Under a Lucky Star

I van Makarov was my grandfather on my mothers side. He was a veteran of the Great Patriotic War. From my childhood, I remember that he loved to tell stories about the warabout his childhood and life. Ivan also had an old typewriter and was constantly typing on it. In early 2000, he came to visit us, gave a bundle of printed stories to my mother, and said, These are my memoirs of the war, one day you should publish a book. Let people know the real truth about the war, as all my life, I have never seen the real war portrayed in any book or movie.

There are hardly any accounts detailing what the war was like for a Red Army soldier from the front line, especially in the first years. A profoundly changed man returned from there. Those who managed to return, as a rule, did not like and could not recount the real events that had transpired, and many of the Russian military documents of those years are still inaccessible to the public.

Ivan wrote these stories from 1992 to 1998, after the Soviet Union collapsed and it became possible to talk about what had really happened openly. Before this time, he could easily go to prison for such writings. This book is a collection of individual stories. These events Ivan recalls in detail, from Stalingrad to Germany. During the first half of the war, Ivan was a machine gunner and a regimental scout during the second. He talks about what he personally saw and experienced during the war, and what difficulties were faced by ordinary soldiers. Ivan describes how he was captured by the Germans, escaped, and returned to the Red Army, and how he served in the machine gun company once more. Later, he was assigned to the armys intelligence services and performed special tasks. Despite all the difficulties on the front line, he maintained his desire to live, managed to survive, and returned to Russia. On the fortieth anniversary of the victory of the Great Patriotic War, my grandfather decided to visit the places where he fought during the war. At that time, the Soviet Union was a closed country, and Ivan was only able to reach the border with Poland as he did not have a special permission to travel any further.

Ivan was not a professional writer. In his memoir, he merely recalls real events that happened to him at the war front and his childhood. Details of many of the people whom he mentions I have found in archival documents on Feat of the People It is amazing how accurately he remembered the time and place of eventseven fifty years laterand how his memoir is an accurate recollection of archival documents. I furthermore had the good fortune to find the map detailing the hostilities of the German approach to Stalingrad in an old book from 1947.

These stories I found in my mothers house before I moved to Australia in 2014. I started reading and could not stop, I found it captivating. After reading and making copies, I decided that it was necessary to publish the book and even translate it into English. Very few books were written by soldiers who actually fought on the Eastern Front. Usually, the authors of Russian war memoirs were commanders or political workers, whose stories were vastly different. Not many soldiers managed to survive the war, let alone live to the 1990s and have such stories to tell.

I really wish I had found these manuscripts earlier when my grandfather was still alive. Unfortunately, death takes a man and all his memories forevernothing can be done about that.

Luckily, Ivan penned down his memories and the events recorded in those pages will live on forever. Soldiers of the Great Patriotic War are worthy of remembrance!

W ar scorched me in the summer of 1942 . Though I was only eighteen years old, I began to realize that there are such things as fear, patriotism, heroism , cowardice, and morals. My heart aches when I watch a movie or read a military book about invented heroic feats and patriotism. There are stories of men knocking out tanks with hand grenades and of men throwing their bodies over machine-gun muzzles. During the entire war, I had not heard nor seen the fictional characters who would throw themselves under tanks and over the muzzles of machine guns. I am proud of my military comrades because they did not demand awards and honors. All of them had a common cause for victory, but not for the idea or the love of our leaders. Only Russian soldiers and no one else saved the world from Nazism. It is a pity how quickly the world forgot about the role of Russia and Russian soldiers in the new democratic repartitioning of the world. God willing, our grandchildren will live in prosperity and happiness. Hopefully, they will not have to save the world from war, plundering, terrorism, and the immoral quest for personal unrestrained glory and power.

Patriotism in battle is not the human act, whereby the soldier loudly declares allegiance and gives his life for the cause. Quite the opposite, it occurs when a soldier saves his life in the name of an idea, thus indirectly or directly saving the lives of others. A patriot is a person who remained faithful to his people and country to the end. A hero is anyone who directly took a part in the battle, did not hide behind others though frightened himself, and stayed to face danger and death.

Fear is inherent in every person. It is given by nature to encourage self-preservation, and we should not be ashamed of this gift.

I write about what I saw, experienced, and felt. Despite all the hardships and thousands of useless deaths, the morale of our soldiers and loyalty to the motherland increased every month.

Once again, I want to say that the main duty of a soldier is to save the life of himself and others. Your motherland needs you alive, only your enemies need you dead. The winner is the one who destroys the enemy and survives.

If you want yourself, your children, your people, and your original culture to live, you should follow the laws of nature the laws of God: do not kill, do not steal. Knowing this truth, all else will fall into place.