17 kilometers southeast of Bialystok
June 20th, 1988
Gorbachev’s speech had finally come to an end, and the veterans broke up into their own mingling groups to look over the vast area that once encompassed a single desperate battle. Twenty-three old men, all of them aged over sixty-five years, decided to return to Hill 331. The Red Army had kindly supplied troop transports, of wartime vintage, and drivers to give the veterans a mobility reminiscent of their own time in the army. Nikifor Talenskij, Andrei Suvorin, Evgenij Bessonov were among those who returned to the hill, taking with them Arsenij Chafirov and Vadim Radek. The truck halted on the road where an entire column of transports had been ambushed by Germans forty-six years earlier. The old men gingerly piled out and began walking the battlefield in their own groups. Thirteen of them had actually participated in the actual fighting there; the other ten had missed the fighting and were living the events through their old comrades’ words.
Suvorin had taken the lead, his instinctive leadership asserting itself, in pointing out features reminiscent of the war. “It was here,” his gestures indicated lines in the ground, “where there was the first trench. There was a wooden pillbox over there, though we didn’t have to take it. They must have had four machine guns in the area. We had to use smoke to finally approach it.”
Nikifor nodded. “Yes. At that point, it was Suvorin and I who actually assaulted the trench, followed closely by Bessonov and Ilya. Irinei, Valeri and Timur had been pressed by Brezhnev into giving covering fire.” Nikifor halted in confusion for a moment. “Bessonov? What happened to Timur? That was the last time I saw him. He never made it up to the front with the rest of them.”
Bessonov’s face tightened sadly. “A stray German shell killed him, I think. I’m not entirely sure myself. They were coming up with others and an explosion struck nearby. Nobody noticed at the time since we were too intent on advancing quickly, but later on only his spine was found.”
Everyone shook their head at the casual brutality of war. The moment passed; they each were burdened with too many memories of carnage and friends killed already. They continued their ponderous walking, taking care not to trip amongst the low ditches that were once formidable German trenches. Suvorin continued his narrative, in a slightly more somber tone. Finally they reached the location of the last German trench. Before them they saw a hill. Of the five faces, three hardened at the sight and two simply looked curious, though with some understanding of what was to come. Nikifor and Suvorin looked at each other and finally Nikifor took up the narrative. “It was just our luck. The only hill in Belarus and we had to take it from, what, fourteen German tanks? It didn’t help that Brezhnev screwed up the smoke screen and artillery bombardment. The battalion had to charge it unaided. Does anyone know what’s happened to Brezhnev anyway?”
The change in narrative took everyone by surprise and they looked to each other before Vadim finally replied. “I think he was purged in Stalin’s Great Purge, in 1951. That was the year, of course, that the Germans finally paid off their reparations and were able to assert their independence from Moscow. Stalin did not take that news too well.”
“And Brezhnev suffered?”
“Yes. I think he was in charge of the reparations committee, or essentially of making the reparations period as long as costly as possible for the Germans. Apparently it wasn’t enough for Stalin.”
“Well, good riddance.” Everyone nodded.
Bessonov took this moment to continue the narrative. “We had to take the hill unaided. The battalion lost a lot of men. Simbirsk was killed near the foot of the hill. It was here were Andrei lost his arm to shrapnel. Well, it was lost in the surgery that followed, but the wound was here, as we were crawling up the slope. Once we reached the top though, we destroyed all the tanks. But there were, of course, many more beyond and we had lost good men.”
The veterans were slowly climbing up the hill themselves. Finally reaching the top, winded by the long climb, they saw that a monument had been erected. The men looked up at it, the gray stone from which it was carved. It showed heroic Soviet soldiers climbing up a slope, the lower reaches covered with the dead. It was flanked by two shattered, twisted forms that had once been actual German tanks. Suvorin quietly noted, “The monument shows it well. This is how it happened.”
The men bowed their heads, in remembrance of the terrible fighting for the hill, of the battle and of the war as a whole. Too many good men had died, men who were a wealth beyond any German reparations.