It's Victory Day, the anniversary of Germany's capitulation in WWII, which happened 5/9, Moscow time. It's probably been our most meaningful holiday, unfortunately marred lately by Putin's garish & sickening overboard patriotic/militaristic theatrics. But this isn't about him...

This is going to be about my grandfathers, because they deserve it. Even though I know very, very little about them. Thing is, most of our men who came back didn't tell anything about what they saw. In my case, it was literally zero. I have never heard a single word. None...

What I know now, I know from scraps of memorabilia I have kept, meagre accounts of my dad and my late grandma, and, most of all, the website of the Russian Ministry of Defense, which, thankfully, does some good things, too. Here is what I have discovered...

This is private Yakov Derenovski, 89th Belgorod-Kharkov Infantry Division of the Soviet Guards, separate communications company 5. The only picture of him I have, and he's got a Hitlerstache on it. Great. At least I know where my eyebrows come from...

He was a "telephonist", apparently, a comms specialist. Strung a wire between infantry units. Probably never shot a German, but who knows. The "Bravery Medal" is on the left side of his chest, the "Red Star Order" on the right, above the Guardsmen badge. What did he get them for?

No idea. I have found the signed decoration orders. They were classified until 2007. No circumstances are given. This is his division liberating Belgorod in '43. Grandpa is probably setting up his gear somewhere. This picture was taken 18 days before he got his Bravery Medal.

Grandpa's Red Star (a damn big deal for a humble "telephonist") is dated 1/2/44. They were driving the Nazis out of Western Ukraine. Of the 16 soldiers in his elite Guards division awarded the Red Star in January, he is one of only two privates. What did you do?

I don't know and never will. What I do know is what was under those medals when his photo was taken. Pieces of German shrapnel that were stuck in his body and that Soviet doctors couldn't take out. They figured he'd last longer if they stayed. He lasted until 1953...

I don't have pictures of my other grandpa, Soviet Navy seaman Alexander Malamutov. He died in 1990, aged 67, more than fulfilling the life expectancy of severely traumatized, hard-drinking Soviet males. He never talked to me about the war. Not once, under any circumstances...

He never talked about it with my dad, either. All my dad knows is that Usher Malamud, a Bessarabian Jew, was given the clumsily Russified name by his "politruk" (a political officer, attached to every Soviet unit), so he could claim to be ethnically Russian if he got captured...

My dad played with his father's medals as a kid, but doesn't remember what they were. I was able to find them. The standard "Victory Medal", "Defense of Odessa" and "Defense of the Caucasus" medals, and "For Battle Merit" medal. This one, when I found it, was big...

Because the archive had the full order, signed by the ship's commanding officer. And this piece of 75-year-old paper gave me more info on my grandpa than I ever had. I found out that he served onboard battle cruiser Molotov, which means he took part in the defense of Sevastopol.

The Molotov was part of the Black Sea fleet and saw plenty of action in the deadliest Soviet naval theater. She was almost sunk by a German torpedo in 1943, losing most of its stern. But, importantly for me, she took part in the famous Malaya Zemlya marine landing in Jan of '43.

Malaya Zemlya literally means “small land”, which it is. A tiny scrap near Novorossiysk, where 800 Soviet marines, cobbled together from crew members of several Black Sea vessels, gained the beachhead and were immediately blasted by a German counteroffensive with air support.

They held their ground, somehow, in this Soviet version of Omaha Beach, and secured the starting point for the offensive that drove the Nazis out of Caucasus.
Colonel Leonid Brezhnev was there, as a political officer. He later wrote a book about it, greatly exaggerating his role.

Brezhnev was rarely in any danger, of course, but my grandpa spent two weeks in that hell. A machine gunner of the 83rd Marine Regiment, "comrade Malamutov showed himself a brave soldier, a glorious defender of his Motherland." Also, a damn lucky Jew...

He passed through the meat grinder with a bullet in one arm and a bullet in one leg. This is what the document says. I don't know how he was hit, I don't know how he survived, I don't know what happened next. I don't know anything beyond the two paragraphs on this paper.

"Worthy of the Nakhimov Medal", says the ship's commanding officer in the document, written 2 yrs later. The squadron leader actually upped it a notch, giving gramps "For Battle Merit." Damn straight. Firing a machine gun at a shitload of Nazis with two holes in you? Fuck, yeah!

Malaya Zemlya is such a ridiculously famous battle, too. There are songs about it, paintings, books. It's goddamn legend. There is a monument on the spot of that beachhead now. Seaman Malamutov was there. Fuck, I need to write my dad and tell him. HE NEVER KNEW!

What is amazing is that Malamutov, a badass marine in as deadly an offensive as you can imagine, got a medal way lower in the pecking order than the quiet telephonist Derenovsky. What the fuck did you do, private? His decoration order has no specifics. It's killing me.

Private Derenovsky never said a thing. Seaman Malamutov served until 1948 and drank in silence for 42 years. All the stupidity Russia is gorging on "in honor of the victory" is such a disservice to their memory. War is the worst of horrors, folks. We are lucky we can only imagine

My parents' generation, what Americans call Baby Boomers, is sometimes called "Miracle Children" in Russia. Meaning that they were only born due to a miracle, a father coming back alive. Considering the losses we incurred (definitely upwards of 20 mil, but who knows), it was.

My mother and father only exist because seaman Malamutov survived the absolute hell of Malaya Zemlya with two German bullets in him. And because private of the Guard Derenovsky survived the untold horrors somewhere in Ukraine and lived just long enough to conceive my mother...

This is all I know. That they were the improbably lucky ones. It's not enough, but it will have to do.

As an addendum to yesterday's thread, my father, who lives in Winnipeg, has just sent me this. It's seaman Malamutov's medals, preserved by my aunt in San Francisco.
Upper row on the right is "For Combat Merit", which he got for Malaya Zemlya. The least glamorous looking one.