Memoirs of the Soviet‐German war: part 2, Siberia, the front and hospital 1942–44

Abstract

After surviving the terrible first year of the Leningrad blockade [see SMS 14/4, Dec. 2001, pp.162–94], the author Evgenii Moniushko, and his family were evacuated to safety in Siberia. This excerpt from Moniushko's memoir describes his subsequent adjustment to wartime life in a small Siberian village, his summons into and service in the Red Army. After training as an artillery officer at a military academy in Tomsk, Moniushko served as a junior officer in an antitank artillery regiment in southern Poland where he was wounded in heavy fighting on the Sandomierz bridgehead in fall 1944 and evacuated for medical treatment. This article provides a unique, unprecedented, intensely human and often poignant perspective on day‐to‐day life in the Red Army as the Soviet Union struggled to prevail in its struggle against Nazi Germany.