24

p October 21-28, 1941

p October 21, 1941. District village of Vskhody,  [24•* 
Smolensk Region

p Autumn is waning; the rooks have departed;
The forest stands naked, the fields lie deserted.

p Bleak, windy and rainy. The snow has melted, the last leaves on the trees rustle and float through the air one by one. There isn’t a soul about in the village, people are hiding in the few decent houses left. All that lives is the highway teeming with German vehicles of all shapes and sizes. And sometimes there are long columns of prisoners.

p Grief has cast her shadow over our country.

p What am I? Who am I?

p First of all I am wounded. My leg wound is improving, but slowly, since I’m on the go from morning to night as I am, in the second place, a medical instructor. To put it plainly, I’m medical orderly in an infirmary for the Soviet wounded in the village of Vskhody.

p First I was on the dressings and operations and also a kind of general help. Now they have put me in charge of the general anaesthetic during operations and attached me to the children’s ward. It has six patients: Manya, Nina, Panya (all 3-5 years old), Vanya (12), Dusya and Polya (17).

25

p October 28, 1941

. .. Dead of night. A thick, putrid stench of festering wounds... . The close, oppressive, sticky air is filled with groans, animal-like wailing, wild shrieks... . It’s unbearably stuffy. In the dim light from the splinter painfully glistens the blue eye (the other is smashed) of a boy, a good boy, his stomach ripped open by a shell splinter.

p Leonid Kulik was born in 1883. After leaving school he studied at Kazan University. But he was not to finish his studies. He was in charge of an organisation of the Russian Social-Democratic Labour Party. On instructions from the Bolshevik centre he carried out a raid on a tsarist prison to liberate a condemned revolutionary. The bold plan paid off but Kulik himself was arrested and exiled to Orenburg Gubernia.

p There he worked as a forester’s assistant, which suited him well since he was a great nature lover. He collected minerals, studied plant life and geology and became an expert on mineralogy, ornithology and botany.

p After the 1917 Revolution his work and knowledge were widely recognised and he became Scientific Secretary to the Meteorite Commission of the U.S.S.R. Academy of Sciences. He journeyed all over the country in search of meteorites.

p He was particularly fascinated by the riddle of the Tunguska meteorite. He gave twenty years of his life to this problem, during which time he made countless expeditions to the place where the giant Tunguska meteorite had fallen. These were difficult journeys which entailed much danger and sacrifice, all willingly endured for the purpose of unravelling the secret.

p When war broke out. Prof. Kulik was 60. But he joined the ranks of the people’s volunteer detachments. Neither the Academy of Sciences nor the entreaties of his colleagues and wife could persuade him to remain in Moscow. He had made up his mind that his place was alongside the anti-fascist fighters.

p And so, a hard life at the front began for the elderly scientist. Soviet troops were on the retreat. In the autumn of 1941, during a battle near Spass-Demensk on the Smolensk plain, a group of men including Leonid Kulik found themselves behind the lines. They decided to fight their way back. Soon they ran into an enemy patrol. In the ensuing skirmish the professor was hit in the leg and lost consciousness. When he came to, he gritted his teeth and began crawling eastwards. His leg wound was agonising and he was craving for water. Once again he fainted. This time he regained consciousness in a nazi prison camp. Interrogations began. The Germans soon realised they had a noted Soviet scientist in their hands.

p They tried everything to break him down. But they failed. Kulik got in touch with the villagers and through them with the partisans. He organised an infirmary in the camp and sat many 26 long nights at the bedside of the wounded doing his best to relieve their suffering.

p The partisans devised a plan for rescuing the professor. But it did not come off. One hour before the appointed time, the Germans sent him off to Spass-Demensk where he was pitched into a typhus barracks.

Here, too, he did what he could to ease the suffering of the delirious patients. But, faint with hunger, the old scientist’s organism was not equal to it, and on the third day he, too, went down with typhoid fever. For a long time he raved in a delirium, fighting battles, escaping from the camp, calling to his wife and daughter, shouting something to the partisans, cursing the enemy and persuading someone to go with him in search of the Tunguska meteorite. Death cut short the scientist’s sufferings. On April 14, 1942, Prof. Leonid Kulik passed away.