DIGITAL COLLECTIONS ITEM TRANSCRIPT Yuli Kutner. Full, unedited interview, 2006 ID CA006.interview PERMALINK http://n2t.net/ark:/86084/b42b9g ITEM TYPE VIDEO ORIGINAL LANGUAGE RUSSIAN TABLE OF CONTENTS ITEM TRANSCRIPT ENGLISH TRANSLATION 2 CITATION & RIGHTS 13 2021 © BLAVATNIK ARCHIVE FOUNDATION PG 1/13 BLAVATNIKARCHIVE.ORG DIGITAL COLLECTIONS ITEM TRANSCRIPT Yuli Kutner. Full, unedited interview, 2006 ID CA006.interview PERMALINK http://n2t.net/ark:/86084/b42b9g ITEM TYPE VIDEO ORIGINAL LANGUAGE RUSSIAN TRANSCRIPT ENGLISH TRANSLATION My name is Yuli Kutner. I was born in 1925, April 17, in Moscow. I am a native Muscovite. I was born, lived, and studied in Moscow. I lived in the center of the city, on Pushkin Square. Every Muscovite knows that spot. The war encountered me, or rather I encountered the war, in its very first days, when the Germans were bombing Moscow. At night, we would go on the roof of our building and throw down the firebombs dropped by the Germans in an attempt to burn Moscow down. Moscow was engulfed in flames. I vividly remember how it felt to look down from the roof at our beautiful city, our capital, our beloved city, and see it burning on all sides. This is how I was introduced to the war. In the first days of the war I went to work at a military factory. Actually, before working at the military factory, I went to work as a sailor on a steam tugboat that was transporting valuables out of Moscow. These included Gosbank [State Bank] assets, the paintings and property of Tretyakov Gallery and [other] renown Moscow art museums. When the Germans came close to Moscow, the Moscow-Oksk steamship company—where I worked as a tugboat sailor—stopped functioning. So then I worked in the military factory, from where I was almost immediately sent to build fortifications outside of Moscow. There I received my first “combat wound” when a reinforced- concrete beam was dropped on my leg and broke a few bones. After that, I had to return to Moscow on crutches. In the meantime, the factory [where I was working] was evacuated and I no longer had any ration cards, or any other means of living a normal life in Moscow. So I had to leave. I left Moscow and headed to the place where the Kiev [Kyiv] film studio had been evacuated, because my uncle worked as a director at that studio. The studio had been evacuated to Ashgabat, Turkmenistan, the capital of Turkmenistan. So that is where I went. On the way there, I made a stop in Almaty because I knew that my father, who by that point already had a different family with young and infant children, had evacuated to Kazakhstan. I didn't know where exactly in Kazakhstan it was. The first thing I did was go to the market on my crutches to buy something to eat. At the market, as strange as this seems, I ran into my father. Such incredible coincidences happen sometimes. He came from the village where he was working, which was about 35 kilometers from Almaty, in the mountains. He also came to buy food, to exchange some things for food. That's how it was usually done at the time. —[People] bartered instead of paying with money? Yes, usually people exchanged things for food because money really didn’t have any value at the time. You just couldn’t buy anything with money. Naturally I went back with him and for a while worked at the lumber factory where my father worked. I worked as an electrician there. I stayed there until I found out that in Ashgabat, the city where I had intended to go, they were recruiting students for a navy school. They would train long-distance navigators. This school was located in Kherson at the time, in Ukraine, and I wanted to 2021 © BLAVATNIK ARCHIVE FOUNDATION PG 2/13 BLAVATNIKARCHIVE.ORG DIGITAL COLLECTIONS ITEM TRANSCRIPT Yuli Kutner. Full, unedited interview, 2006 ID CA006.interview PERMALINK http://n2t.net/ark:/86084/b42b9g ITEM TYPE VIDEO ORIGINAL LANGUAGE RUSSIAN enroll. All my life I dreamed of being a sailor. I quickly left everything in Kazakhstan and traveled to Ashgabat. I went to the military recruiment office. They accepted me as a student, put me on a train, and sent me toward Krasnovodsk so that we could cross the Caspian Sea and get to Kherson, where the enrollment was taking place. But when we got to Krasnovodsk, we found out that Kherson had already been captured by the Germans and there was not going to be any enrollment. So they gave us their blessing to go wherever we wanted. I returned to Ashgabat and worked for the Kiev film studio, which was working at full capacity. I met many interesting people there, including Yuri Karlovich Olesha, the famous author, and many others. From there I was drafted to the army. I volunteered when I was seventeen years old. I had finished ninth grade in Moscow and had already taken my entrance exams and enrolled in the Kharkov Hydrometeorological Institute, which was also evacuated to Ashgabat. I completed one year in this Kharkov Hydrometeorological Institute, after which I went to the army. As a fairly educated person, I was immediately and in accordance with my wishes accepted to the airborne forces. I was trained in a reserve unit as a paratrooper; we were trained in the art of sabotage work, in addition to jumping with a parachute in different conditions. I liked this a lot. As my friends were still completing their first jump, I would already finish folding my parachute and then get back in line for another jump. I liked it and would eagerly repeat it even now, but unfortunately this is America, and it isn’t so easy to parachute here as it was there at the time. —I'm sorry, was this in 1941? This was in 1942. I received complete training as a parachutist-saboteur and was sent to an airborne brigade. There weren't many of these around yet; this was a new type of army formation, composed of parachutists-saboteurs trained in reserve units. This was a reserve unit of General Command. It was a kind of a Guards unit enagaged in high-stakes special assignments, in times of dire need. As a parachutist- saboteur, I took part in small-group operations. Our missions included setting explosives in the enemy's territory and other difficult tasks. One such mission, for instance, was blowing up a power station in the town of Svidevok [Svydivok]. It's a hub in Ukraine, not far from the city of Kanev [Kaniv]. Kanev, Kiev—Ukranians know these cities. And a host of other operations where I also participated as a saboteur. After my first injury I was dismissed from the paratroopers, declared unfit for such duties. From then on, I fought on the ground. I fought in the artillery, an anti-tank artillery unit. It is, I would say, a very inconvenient [form of combat], because you had to repel tank attacks with a small cannon, and that cannon simply could not pierce the German tank armor. So you had to somehow come up with a way to damage the advancing tank before it got to you. Then I was in the heavy self-propelled artillery unit which was a completely new formation, organized and 2021 © BLAVATNIK ARCHIVE FOUNDATION PG 3/13 BLAVATNIKARCHIVE.ORG DIGITAL COLLECTIONS ITEM TRANSCRIPT Yuli Kutner. Full, unedited interview, 2006 ID CA006.interview PERMALINK http://n2t.net/ark:/86084/b42b9g ITEM TYPE VIDEO ORIGINAL LANGUAGE RUSSIAN launched during the war. In this unit I served in the Guards Kirovogradsky regiment. I was assigned to reconnaissance because of my paratrooper experience. For some reason I always found myself in these reconnaissance missions once in ground forces. —But you only went through training that one time and that's it? There was no new training in the new units? I was trained in the beginning as a saboteur. Afterward I was in reconnaissance, where no other special training was needed. I had a sufficient general education. I was mostly working in artillery reconnaissance. We had to gather intelligence on the enemy’s objectives, plot them on the map, and prepare firing-target data. It was easy for me to learn, because I basically already had a secondary education and was studying at an institute. It was mostly trigonometry. In addition we had missions like reconnaissance by fire. In other words, we would get in our command tank, armored vehicles, and motorcycles armed with machine guns and go toward the enemy and engage in combat. When the enemy retaliated, we recorded their firing positions, locations, and other relevant data, fulfilling our main objectives. At first I participated in the battles of the 1st Ukrainian Front, and then I was transferred to Karelia with the heavy self-propelled artillery unit. There I participated in battles and performed reconnaissance work on the shores of Svir River. We were getting ready for an offensive and had to cross the river. I had to swim across that river—in winter. This river has a very fast current, so I had to go up by about half a kilometer from where I had to cross; otherwise I would have been carried too far off. As I said, the river has a very fast current, and this took place in winter. Despite the freezing temperatures, the river does not freeze fully, only near the banks. I had a radio transmitter with me.