Penalty Strike

The Memoirs of a Red Army Penal Company Commander 1943–45

Alexander V. Pyl'cyn

• Publisher: Helion & Company
• Year: 2022
• Print ISBN: 9781874622635
• eBook ISBN: 9781907677533
• Subtopic: Russian History

From a decorated officer, an extremely rare account of a World War II Soviet military unit comprised of prisoners of war.
Made up of soldiers who conducted "unauthorized retreats," former POWs deemed untrustworthy, and Gulag prisoners, the Red Army's penal units carried out some of the most terrifying assignments on the Eastern Front, such as storming German machine-gun nests. Alexander Pyl'cyn led his penal company in the Soviets' massive offensive in the summer of 1944, the Vistula-Oder operation into eastern Germany, and the bitter assault on Berlin in 1945. He survived the war, but 80 percent of his men did not.
Alexander Pyl'cyn, drafted into the Red Army at eighteen in 1941 and wounded three times, earned the Order of the Red Banner, the Order of the Great Patriotic War, and the Order of the Red Star for his actions during World War II.

1

Beginnings

In 1923 I was born into the family of a railway worker in Russia’s Far East. Our home was so close to the railway, that when a train passed by the whole house would shiver, as if it was itself ready to leave on a long journey. We all got so used to this proximity of railway and noise, that when we moved to another house, far away from the railway, we could not get used to the silence, it seemed unnatural to us. My father, Vasily Vasilievich Pylcyn, was born in 1881. He was from Kostroma, but for some reason, either trouble with the police or an unsuccessful marriage, he had to escape to the Far East. He spoke about this matter very vaguely and unwillingly, but he even changed his last name. I believe his real last name was Smirnov. He was a rather learned person for his time. We had a vast library of classic Russian literature in our home. If I remember correctly, he was a foreman of railway workers and then a railway master. He was an extremely skilful craftsman. Sophisticated carved wooden furniture, a fair amount of metal cutlery, and all sorts of wooden barrels for pickling vegetables, were all things he made himself. He was so strict in family life that we children were afraid of his mere look at us, although he never hit us.

Despite the active role that he played in social life, especially in defence voluntary organisations, such as Osoaviakhim and others, he was never a member of the Communist party. In 1938 my father was arrested for negligence in repair of a railway. It almost led to the crash of a passenger train. He was sentenced to three years in jail. The sentence was considered by everyone to be just. He returned from jail immediately before the outbreak of the Great Patriotic War. My father had a strange habit of talking aloud to himself. One time he said, out loud, that “Hitler turned out to be smarter than all our genius leaders”, and that the main leader, i.e. Stalin, merely “screwed Russia”. Someone heard this and informed the authorities. There were plenty of ‘woodpeckers’, or informers, in those days. My father was again arrested. In the same way as many other people, he was sent from the Far East somewhere to the North, or to Siberia, where he vanished for good.

My mother, Maria Danilovna, was 20 years younger than my father. She was from the family of a simple railway worker. He was Siberian, a real Russian, as they said in those days, chaldon Danila Leontievich Karelin. In those days the word chaldon was pronounced as cheldon in the Far East, and was interpreted by some people as chelovek’s Dona, a man from Don River, i.e. a Don Cossack. It was much later that I learnt that chaldon actually meant ‘a real Russian Siberian’, not an immigrant from the rest of Russia.

My grandmother, on my mother’s side, was Ekaterina Ivanovna. Her maiden name was Smertina. She was from Khakassia. My grandfather would tell us that he ‘stole’ her from the neighbouring village of Khakassian. My mother’s parents were illiterate, although Granny Kate could count money very well, almost without looking. My mother was also illiterate, but knew a great number of sayings and superstitions. I taught her to read and write when I went to the first grade of school, although I could read when I was only four or five years old. I insisted that she attended likbez, a ‘liquidation of illiteracy’ study group, and I ‘supervised’ her. My mother learnt the basics of literacy well. She could read, slowly but steadily, and write, although with some difficulty. She did not have much time or patience for more. However, that level of literacy was enough for her to learn a trade. She became an automatic-railway-point operator at Kimkan station, when the war broke out and women had to replace men in many trades. She also worked in that office for many years after the war.

Our family was not rich before the war. I think there were no rich families at all in those days. But we survived, even the tragic famine year of 1933, without losing anyone in our family. It was mostly the taiga that was supplying us with food. Our father was also a dedicated hunter and supplied us with game. I remember that during the winter it was especially hard. He would go into the taiga every weekend and bring back a couple of rabbits, or several squirrels, and sometimes wood-grouse. Thus, we were well supplied, and inclined to squirrel meat, which was quite tasty. As well as all that, father was processing, and turning in to the State, rabbit and squirrel furs, getting flour and sugar in return. Also, he would go on vacation in the autumn and go into the taiga to harvest Siberian pine seeds. He would bring whole bags of those seeds home, and extract excellent oil out of them with a press that he made himself.

Mother used remains of the seeds for making ‘Siberian pine milk’, by boiling them in water. She also used the seeds for adding to flour in making bread. Mother would bake bread from a small amount of flour, mixed with barley acorn ‘coffee’ that one could buy in shops in those days, and crushed oats. The bread was dark black or brown, but it rescued us from starvation. Our family tradition of harvesting berries, wild fruits, plants and mushrooms, also rescued us. Those pickled and dried preserves protected us from hunger, and from scurvy that was widespread in the Far East in those days. From childhood we were taught to pick up mushrooms and berries, and knew them well. There were not many wild fruits in the Far East, except for wild ‘Chinese apples’ as they were called. Jokers said that they were sold by ‘glasses’, not by kilograms, because they were so small. However, there were a lot of berries, from wild strawberry, to honeysuckle and wild grapes.

My father and grandfather knew how to make baskets. They fished in a nearby cold and fast river, not with a fishing rod, but with a specially shaped basket. Sometimes they would bring small fish, with such delicacies as graylings. During the spawning of salmon they would bring humpback salmons, Siberian salmons that weighed up to 6–8 kilograms! Of course, on such days we had plenty of red caviar, although at that time it was readily available from shops. All the seafood was boiled in soup or fried, and also smoked, pickled and dried for winter. Everything was used for food. It was that variety that helped us to survive long and cold winters, and maintained our ‘Siberian’ health. It is probably due to those reasons that we survived the years of famine better than people in Central Russia or the Ukraine.

Seven children were born into our family, but three of them died very young. It was quite usual in those days. Only four of us lived to see the outbreak of war, two of my older brothers, my younger sister, and me. My father never told us about our ancestors, and I did not know anyone further back than my grandfather Danila and Granny Kate. At that time it was not common to dig up old genealogical connections. You never knew if you would find something unfavourable for you and your family! However, I knew relatives on the side genealogical branches quite well. They were the other children and grandchildren of the Karelin family who lived not far from us. First of all, there was my mother’s brother, Petr Danilovich. He was also a railway master and a Communist. Absolutely unexpectedly, he fell under the ‘steamroller of arrests’ in 1937, and vanished into the endless expanses of Siberia or the Extreme North. He left behind a sick wife and five children. They managed to grow up, get education and survive the war. Many of them are still alive today.

It is only now, seventy years later, that I start to realise there simply could not have been so many ‘saboteurs’ and ‘enemies of the people’. However, I must honestly acknowledge that in the atmosphere of that time, searching for ‘enemies of the people’, and the arrests, despite the absence of electronic media, often captured the minds of many people, even us schoolchildren. I remember that when we were in the 2nd and 3rd grades, we would look for secret signs of, “off with VKP (b)!” on the covers of our notebooks, and in reproductions of Vasnetsov’s paintings in our textbooks. Even if we could not find them, the teachers would tell us that we ‘searched for them badly’. Sudden arrests of our relatives, as for example, my uncle, who seemed to be completely innocent, were perceived as ‘small mistakes’, in the huge country-wide effort to “arrest saboteurs, spies, and any sorts of enemies of the people”. The saying, “you cannot make an omelette without breaking eggs”, was stressed in the media a lot in those days. The amazing thing is, that in addition to a campaign of searching for ‘enemies’, the media propagated love towards our country, and ideals of Communism, not only among youth, but also among the entire population of the country. You just have to recall the films and patriotic songs of those days. All of them intensified our love for the Motherland, and the high patriotism with which we entered the ‘holy’ war against Nazi Germany.

The repression of those years, despite taking away our family members, did not spread out to their relatives. Maybe that was the case only in Russia’s Far East. My mother’s younger sister Klavdia Danilovna, born in 1915, continued to work as a telegraph operator, a rather responsible office in those days, despite their brother being arrested. She married an engineer, Vasily Alekseevich Baranov, who went to the Front on the very first days of the war, and became a KGB officer after the war. He worked as a KGB officer in Riga, Latvia, till the end of his days, in 1970. Through them I have a cousin Stanislav, who was born in 1938. He graduated from the Border Guard Academy and became a good officer. Before the collapse of the Soviet Union, he became part of the list of ‘red witches’ in Latvia. Because of threats of repression from the Latvian authorities, he had to leave the Latvian Republic when that became hostile, and simply flee back to Russia.

As I mentioned, I had two brothers. I looked amazingly similar to my older brother who was born in 1918, so that even our friends confused us. We both looked like our mother and our grandfather Danila. Ivan had a lot of different talents. He could play all sorts of musical instruments, including the harmonica, and had an amazing talent for drawing. He was also very good at maths. Immediately after graduation from high school, he was invited to teach mathematics in our village seven-year school. In 1937 he was drafted into the Coastal Defence of the Pacific Fleet. There he taught maths to sailors and soldiers who were still illiterate, and himself received the training of a radio operator. In 1942 he was sent into active service. He was killed in action, in September 1943, while serving in the 5th Shock Army of the Southern Front. “Guards Sergeant Ivan Vasilievich Pylcyn, faithful to his oath, displaying heroism and bravery, fell in battle for our Socialist Motherland on September 18, 1943”. That was the official message that my family received with his death certificate.

My second brother Viktor, who was three years older than me, did not have any special talents. The only thing that he inherited from our father was the habit of talking aloud, especially during sleep, and also his rather pedantic manners. After graduation from high school, he worked as a station chief assistant for one year, and was drafted into the Red Army in 1939. He served in an airborne brigade in the Far East. Shortly before the outbreak of the war, his brigade was transferred to the Ukraine. There he had to face the first deadly strikes of the German military machine, and experience the bitterness of retreat. He was wounded in the defence of the Northern Caucasus. Later he fought in Stalingrad, and went missing there in December 1942.

My sister Antonina Vasilievna, who was born in 1927, now lives in St Petersburg, formerly Leningrad. The fact that her father and uncle were arrested in Stalin’s era never prevented her from being elected into her village Soviet. Later she moved to Leningrad. There, she worked as a clerk in top secret documentation, at one of the city’s recruitment offices for the Army. The fact that my father was arrested did not prevent me from becoming a member of the Communist party. I then progressed from being a simple Red Army man to a Colonel, and served honestly and faithfully a full forty years in the Army. So we both got to see, that ‘a son or daughter are not responsible for the deeds of their father’. I guess everyone had a different destiny, and relatives of the arrested ones could still go on with their lives.

I studied in our village school until graduation from the 7th grade. That was where I became a member of the Komsomol. From the 8th grade on, I studied in the railway school of Obluch’e, a nearby town. It happened at exactly the time when my father was in jail. My older brother was drafted into the army, so it was impossible for my mother to pay for my dormitory room and studies in the school, given Viktor’s low salary. Then I decided to write a letter to the Narkom¹ of the Railways, L. M. Kaganovitch. In it I described all the difficulties of our family in getting me educated. I also wrote that my father was serving a term in jail for negligence. Quite soon I, a schoolboy, received a government letter. It contained an order of the Narkom that provided all payments for dormitory and studies in my secondary school, up to the moment of graduation. I would also have free railway tickets to and from school. I clearly remember the unique signature on the official letterhead, “L. Kaganovitch”, with an oversized letter L for Lazar. So I had three years of studies paid for.

As I learnt later, the husband of my aunt Klavdia Danilovna, took an even more desperate step when he was a kid. He was not admitted for further studies, after the sixth grade, due to the extreme poverty of the family. So he, a fourteen years old teenager, from a god-forsaken village in the Yaroslavl area, went to Moscow himself. He managed to get a meeting with Nadezhda Konstantinovna Krupskaya, Lenin’s widow, who was at that time serving as Deputy Narkom of Education of the Russian Federative Socialistic Republic. As a result, the People’s Commissariat of Education issued an order, “Accept Vasily Baranov into seventh-grade school”. After that he went into a trade school, and so on! It is amazing that in those days quite a lot of problems were solved in such a simple manner.

Obviously care for children was important then. My sister and I, and our five cousins, the children of my arrested uncle, were cared for and brought up by our mothers. Both of them had lost their husbands. May the memory of those ordinary, hard-working Russian women be treasured forever!

Unlike at our village school, in the railway secondary school in Obluch’e, we had daily defence activities after school. In fact, it was a well organised, military education. We did not have teachers of military science, but we had Sergeants from the Army units stationed in the cities. They visited us regularly and trained us in all military science subjects. Boys and girls alike were eager to study everything related to it. There were some boys who attended air clubs, where they learnt to fly aircraft and jump with parachutes. That gave them an opportunity to enter Air Force Academies immediately after the 9th grade.

The military organisation of the school consisted of platoons, or classes, and companies, i.e. all classes of the same age. For example, three 10th grades comprised a company. Given all the 8th, 9th and 10th grades of the school, we had a ‘young army battalion’. Prefects of the classes were platoon leaders. The most diligent of them would be appointed company commander. The oldest student of the 10th grade would be battalion commander. When I was elected secretary of the school Komsomol organisation, in the 9th grade, my rank became ‘battalion commissar’. Naturally, Komsomol leaders of each class were the company’s ‘political officers’. We took those ‘young army’ responsibilities very seriously! We would even sew collar-tabs on to our shirts and jackets, with the corresponding rank pips made of squares and bars of tin, and were very proud of them. The manner of address also corresponded, “Comrade young battalion commissar!” In our school, from the youngest upwards, that was how respect for the armed forces was nurtured. There were also many who developed some leadership skills. I recalled this ‘young army’ experience, with a feeling of appreciation, when I was drafted into the army at the outbreak of the war. All those skills were essential!

We graduated from the 10th grade in 1941, two days before June 22. That date was a fatal one for our entire country. Right after our graduation party we went to a regional centre, in the town of Bira, in order to apply for military academies. In those days, Soviet youth were crazy about the Military Academies for the Air Force, as well as the Tank and Artillery Academies, and so on. I chose Novosibirsk Military Institute of railway engineers, because of the strong traditions of our family, and in gratitude to the railway People’s Commissariat for my free education. It was still a military institute, after all. But all our plans and dreams were interrupted by the news of war that we heard there, in Bira. It was where we heard Molotov’s speech. Incidentally, the news of war only reached us in the Far East at seven o’clock in the evening, then just noon in Moscow. Immediately, as if a command was given, a long line of men appeared in front of the army recruiting office. It should have been a happy and carefree Sunday night! All those men were longing to join the army. Those arrogant Nazis had gone too far, and we wanted to show them that we were ready to strike back. “A little blood will be shed, when on enemy soil, To the last we destroy hostile forces²”.

For two days, as fresh school graduates, we did not hear anything about our applications for the military academies. I had immediately changed my mind and written a new application for a tank academy. Then we were told that all the military academies were already full and that we were drafted as regular rank and file men. We were given two days to pack. We quickly went home to pack our belongings. A short farewell to our families and soon military trains were taking us into different areas of the Far East.

I was on the train with several school friends, the train was going west, but our joy was short-lived. Two days later we arrived in the town of Belogorsk, and that was it. The town was a mere 300 kilometres from our homes. There we became part of the newly formed 5th Reserve Rifle Regiment of the 2nd Red Banner Army of the Far East military district. The district was already renamed a Front, but was not yet active. That urgently formed regim...

Table of contents

• Front Cover
• Title
• Dedication
• Copyright
• Contents
• 1 Beginnings
• 2 Rogachev and the first experience of battlee
• 3 ‘Rokossovski’s gang’
• 4 Operation ‘Bagration’
• 5 Wounded
• 6 The Narev Bridgehead
• 7 In defence on the Narev
• 8 Marriage
• 9 The Vistula-Oder Offensive
• 10 Over the Oder to Berlin
• 11 Victory!
• Photographs
• Notes
• eBooks published by Helion & Company