Now is not the time to continue yesterday’s theme, but I will return to it. I don’t know about you, but every time I feel irresistible emotion and tears in my eyes at the approaching holiday of 9 May. Today I will remember my grandfather on Mama’s side.
My grandfather Dorofeev Sergei Sergeyevich was born on 31 March 1901 in the settlement of Bolshevo, 40 km from Moscow. He finished a parish school — that is only 4 classes. For that time, I understand, it was not a bad education. He wrote very correctly, drew beautifully, unfortunately only on scraps of paper, when I, quite little, asked him. I remember he could in a few minutes draw a skier coming down a hill. It seemed to me then that all adults drew well only because they were adults.
Thanks to his beautiful handwriting and literate writing, in the 1920s he served in the Baltic Fleet in Petrograd, at headquarters. Together with him served as a clerk Nikolai Kuznetsov. Yes, yes, exactly that Nikolai Kuznetsov who later became an admiral. I was already a teenager when I saw at Grandfather’s a book of memoirs of Admiral Nikolai Kuznetsov. The book perhaps appeared somewhere at the end of the 60s.
And then he said to me: “You see this book. We began service together; he called me to continue studying at evening school, where he himself went after duty. And I had other interests, to run after the girls at the tobacco factory for a cigarette. And the result you see yourself: he is an admiral, and I am a stoker…”
He worked in the boiler room at a scientific-military institute (the name is not exact), which was between Mytishchi and Bolshevo, all his postwar life until he was 77! And he went on night shifts, and early morning ones. I remember how he got ready for work. First of all, he carefully cut food for the cats into little “cubes.” That was sacred! In the house at that period, from about 1965, he kept no animals. And at work they waited for him….. cats!
I want to remind you that there was no special food for animals in the Soviet Union. Before the war they kept livestock (domestic animals). Mama recalls that Grandmother “did not touch” the household — she worked at a weaving factory and also did public work. So the heavy work around the house was done by Grandfather, and Mama and Mama’s sister Vera were helpers. And if they did not want to help, they got a clip round the ear from their mother.
I know that he could not kill animals. They specially invited someone “from outside.” Before the war Grandfather had a trained hen. Every day, at a time “set by her herself,” she went out the gate, into the street, walked a considerable stretch of the way and met Grandfather from work. Back he carried her in his arms. Such things happen!
And now I thought…. this man had to go to the front at 40 to kill….