Alexey Tolstoy In Memoriam

80 years ago, on February 26, 1945, a national mourning was declared in the USSR in memoriam of Alexey Tolstoy, an outstanding writer who passed away just a few months before the Great Victory over Nazi Germany.

Official cause of his death was lung cancer, diagnosed a year before. In lots of photos and portraits, Tolstoy is depicted with a smoking pipe. However, those who knew him well attributed his death to his activities at the Extraordinary State Commission, set up to investigate the atrocities of Nazi invaders and their accomplices.

Tolstoy could not stand any talk of illnesses and ailments, to say nothing about deaths and viewing dead persons. Nevertheless he assumed the position of deputy chairman of the above mentioned organization. As a result he had to eyewitness atrocities that ordinary people can’t even hear about.

My father was born in 1912 in the village of Baturino in the Smolensk province. 4 years later he and his family moved to Podolsk near Moscow. In mid-60s, during a business trip to Smolensk, he visited Baturino in an attempt to find traces of his childhood.

During the Great Patriotic War, the Smolensk region was occupied by German troops for more than 26 months. “I already knew that Baturino, like any other neighboring village, suffered heavily,” my father wrote in his memoirs. “But the reality was beyond my previous knowledge and imagination!..”

The website dedicated to the liberation of Smolensk region says:

“The war rolled through Smolensk region like monstrous, deadly millstones. During the occupation, the Nazis inflicted colossal destruction and committed unheard-of atrocities. They razed 12 cities to the ground while Smolensk was 97 percent destroyed. Workers’ settlements, district centers and hundreds of villages were wiped off the face of Earth. Many villages were burned down along with their residents, including old people, women and children. Compared to pre-war times, the population of the region was reduced by half, and many districts were deserted.”

So was the village of Dentyalovo, neighboring Baturino and the birthplace of my grandmother. The only memory left of the local Church of the Dormition of the Mother of God is a photo taken by German soldiers on January 15, 1942.

Chimneys sticking out of the ruins became a hellish symbol of the occupation. To quote the report of a Red Army officer:

“The retreat route of the German army is a path of destruction and unheard-of atrocities. Not a single village where the Nazis did not commit atrocities, did not shoot women, old people and children. From March 8 to March 29, 1943, we liberated 368 villages and towns, turned to ashes. Everywhere lay bodies of the shot and burned Smolensk people.”

The Extraordinary State Commission where Alexei Tolstoy took the position of deputy chairman was formed in November of 1942. It established that the total number of victims among civilians of the Smolensk region amounted to at least 546 thousand people. It meant that one out of every three local citizens died during the occupation. Even today the Smolensk region, the only one in Russia, has not been able to restore its pre-war population.

To quote a document submitted to the Extraordinary Commission by the leadership of the Baturino district:

“Before the German occupation, there were 34,420 residents in our district, Only 11,695 survived. 85 villages were completely destroyed. The invaders burned and destroyed 4,499 out of 6,908 collective farm workers’ houses, 37 of 45 schools, 2 hospitals, 50 of 61 nurseries, 37 of 40 collective farm clubs, 4 churches, 2 flax mills, 1 brick factory, all of 19 mills, 368 of 372 buildings of district government institutions.”

From a document called “On the atrocities, devastation, violence of the German fascist occupiers in Baturino District”:

“1,517 persons were shot and hanged. They were workers of collective farms and their families, families of party and economic activists, and relatives of partisans.

The Germans cut off the ears and nose of Baranov, chairman of the Timoshensky village council, gouged out his eyes, and then shot him. Evdokiya Guseva, the wife of the chairman of the Krapivinsky village council, had her breasts cut off, her body slashed with bayonets. After that she was shot and thrown into a pit filled with water. Ustinya, a collective farmer from the Voroshilov collective farm, was subjected to severe physical injuries.

They set her house on fire, threw her into the fire and burned her alive. Tamara Konstantinovna Kazakova was raped, brutally tortured and beaten with sticks only because she worked as a foreman on the Druzhba collective farm. Germans shot and burned Dmitry Ivanov only because he had previously worked as a collective farm chairman. In the village of Terekhovka, Germans laid out a pile of women, children, and old people who were still alive, layered them with straw and set them on fire. 75 people died.”

The Belorussian village of Khatyn became a symbol of the mass extermination of civilians, carried out by Nazis and their henchmen in the occupied territory of the USSR. In the Smolensk region, according to the most conservative estimates, nearly 300 villages shared the same fate.

The “Consolidated Act on the Atrocities of the Nazi Occupiers against Peaceful Soviet Citizens and Prisoners of War in the Territory of the Smolensk Region,” compiled on January 25, 1945, states: “Instances of mass burning of live people took place in the Baturino District (461 persons killed), Gzhatsky (357), Glinkovsky (384), Dzerzhinsky (141), Demidovsky (299), Znamensky (280), Mosalsky (483), Novoduginsky (139), Semlyovsky (384), Sychevsky (213), Temkinsky (158), Tumanovsky (156).”

An excerpt from the article “Smolensk Khatyns”, published on July 22, 2009 by the Smolensk regional newspaper “Rabochy Put”:

“On February 15, 1943, 147 civilians, women, old people, and children, were killed in the village of Gutorovo in the Baturino district. They were shot and burned for helping partisans. Accoring to Antonina Delendik, ‘The executioners arrived at noon and immediately headed to the huts to see how many people were left in our village. I went out into the yard and heard shots in our hut… They killed my grandma Ksenia and my little brother. Those who remained alive were driven to the village council. A policeman threw a 5-year-old girl into the fire. Then he snatched a 3-year-old child from her mother’s hands and threw her in there as well.'”

Soon after the war started, the village of Klushino in the Smolensk region was occupied, too. Yuri Gagarin was born there and went to local school on September 1, 1941. The invaders turned the Klushino Church of St. Nicholas the Wonderworker into a stable and then blew it up.

The Gagarin family’s hut was occupied by a German soldier nicknamed “Devil” because of his habits. Winter was approaching, and Yury, his parents, two brothers and a sister had no shelter. Fortunately, Yury’s father was a jack of all trades. He made a dugout, covered it with turf and equipped it with a stove. The Gagarins spent two years in it until the Red Army returned.

But before that the “Devil”, a real sadist fond of mocking children, hung Yury’s 6-year old brother Boris by his scarf on an apple tree.

Only quick reaction of their mother saved Borya’s life. And in February 1943, the Gagarins’ daughter Zoya and their eldest son Valentin were sent to a labor camp in Germany along with other young residents of Klushino. Fortunately, they both managed to escape.

Thus, it was a sign of highest justice that on May 1, 1945, the Victory Banner was installed on the roof of the Reichstag in Berlin by Mikhail Alekseevich Egorov, a native of Smolensk region.

One of Alexey Tolstoy’s colleagues from the aforementioned Extraordinary Commission later recalled:

“There are many photos left of Tolstoy as a member of this body. Many shots depict him standing on the edge of freshly dug ditches, filled with dead bodies.”

He saw it all with his own eyes and could have testified at the Nuremberg Trials, but 9 months before it started Alexey Tolstoy died in his own battle for truth.