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Between Two Aerodromes
A line had already formed there of people with minor injuries who needed
bandages. Amazingly, no one had been killed or seriously wounded among all
our acquaintances.
Our neighbor—the factory foreman, a former artilleryman—had taken cover
during the explosions with his entire family in the cellar.When the most terrifying
part was over, he also attempted to search for my remains.When he saw me
whole and unharmed, with my mother almost beside herself, he offered to give
me a thrashing as a warning. He often used this method on his own five children.
This time his offer was not accepted. But soon another occasion presented the
opportunity for such an educational lesson.
The immediate destruction and fires from the depots in the area blowing up
were surprisingly small. However, thousands of artillery shells of various calibers,
hand grenades, and boxes of cartridges were scattered over a radius of more than
three kilometers. Red Army units mobilized to collect this ammunition that was
so hazardous for the populace and so essential to the army, but they could not
manage to gather and neutralize it all. No one could clearly explain why such a
large amount of artillery shells had been stored at the depots since they had been
in catastrophically short supply during the czarist army’s war with the Germans.
The Red Army was also on hunger rations and was compelled to make use of
booty captured in battles with the Whites.
Sappers, who had blown up whole piles of ordnance in the Studenyy ravine,
enlightened the curious little boys as to “what was what” as far as ammunition
goes. I decided that the war was continuing, and that in any case, it wouldn’t do
any harm to have my own arsenal. Unbeknownst to the grownups, my comrades
and I stashed a couple dozen 3- and 6-inch unexploded shells and bottle-necked
and fragmentation hand grenades under the porch of our house, which was at
the same time my parents’ place of business. Fortunately, the grenades had no
fuses. We learned how to get the explosive out of the ammunition and were
delighted by the lighting effects when we threw it into the campfires that we
made on the riverbank.While putting away gardening tools under the porch, a
grownup discovered our arsenal. The sappers were called immediately, and the
factory cell of the Communist Party demanded an investigation into the possible
counterrevolutionary plot to seize power in our area, or at least, at the factory
and in the village of Shelepikha. I confessed our secret plan to my parents: we
had been preparing a gift for the Red Army for the crushing defeat of the White
Poles. The plot scenario faded, but in this case, the neighbor insisted that his
educational method be applied. For the first and last time in my life, my father
gave me a thrashing, using an ordinary office ruler as the implement for the
corporal punishment.
The edge of the antenna field of the Khodynskaya radio station, the largest in
Russia, lay just 2 kilometers from the annihilated powder depots. The steel and
wood towers, which were over 100 meters high, stood at intervals of 100 meters.
Strung between them, on garlands of insulators, hung the sausage-shaped anten-
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