There are writers of “one book”, and Sergei Smirnov was a writer of one topic: in literature, in cinema, on television and on the radio, he spoke about people who died heroically in the Great Patriotic War, and after that - forgotten.

"In 1954, - writes Sergey Smirnov, - I became interested in the then still vague legend about heroic defense Brest Fortress and began to look for participants and eyewitnesses of these events. Two years later, I spoke about this defense and the defenders of Brest in a series of radio broadcasts “In Search of the Heroes of the Brest Fortress”, which received a wide response among the people. The flow of letters that fell upon me after these broadcasts, first numbered in tens, and then hundreds of thousands ... "

As a result, the name of the Brest Fortress has become a household name in our country. A book titled " Brest Fortress Every reader knows. And the television magazines "Feat" and, later, "Search", which were led by the writer Smirnov, became the beginning of not a state, but a popular campaign for the restoration of justice. Until now, in all the lands where the war took place, very young people are looking for and finding missing soldiers.

Sergei Sergeevich Smirnov

. The memory of him, believes Andrey Sergeevich Smirnov(his son), gradually erased from the media, a generation has grown up that has no idea that there was such a person, there was such a book. We are talking about the "Brest Fortress". In the 1950s, Sergei Smirnov found the living heroes of the Brest stronghold, spoke about their fate, and in the 55th, on the advice of Irakli Andronikov, he made a radio broadcast that literally the whole country listened to. After Stalin's death, Sergei Smirnov was the first to say that not all prisoners of war were traitors. The writer claimed that many suffered innocently. For these efforts to return good name Sergey Smirnov has already earned a deep bow to thousands of front-line soldiers. As a result of many years of searches and investigations, a book was published, for which the author was awarded the Lenin Prize. But soon, at the direction of Suslov, the set was scattered, and for almost two decades "Brest Fortress" was not published ...After 18 years it was re-released, I can't help but mention the people who made it: latest edition- Valentin Osipov, publisher who ensured that this book was republished on the anniversary of the Victory. This edition was charitable, it was practically not sold, it was sent mainly to libraries, and also presented as a gift to war veterans who came to Moscow to celebrate Victory Day. And now our mother reproaches me and my brother, says: "Why don't you do anything to remember your father?" To this I answer that he did such an important deed that, I hope, perhaps, over time, it should not be erased in the memory of the Russian people. And if it is erased, then all efforts are useless.

The fact is that people who do not go to work today on May 9 and March 8 do not even suspect that they also owe this to my father.

In 1955, for the first time on the radio, in the month of August, his radio programs were called "In Search of the Heroes of the Brest Fortress." On the first traces of these searches, he managed to find and question the first living participants in the defense of Brest. I went to school in two weeks, and it turned out that the whole country was sitting at the radio, literally the whole, my father instantly became famous. But what was the most important thing in these programs? Of course, stories about the heroism of the Russian soldier, about the people who fought, continued to fight in absolutely hopeless, hopeless conditions. After all, there were still pockets of resistance in the fortress, when the Germans were already beyond Smolensk, Minsk had already been taken. Nevertheless, these people, ordinary Russian guys - and not only Russians, of course, Russian guys, because there were Tatars, and Armenians, and Volga Germans, and whoever was there, and Kazakhs, in short, from all over the empire - continued to fight, did not give up, killed Germans, starved ... And, naturally, they all later - who did not shoot themselves or were not killed - were captured, repeatedly fled, then went to the party izans, when they succeeded, to the point that they tried to harm there, inside Germany. Yes, in fact, if there were no such soldiers, the outcome of the war would probably have been different. And all these people were denied the right to citizenship. Father was the first to talk about the fact that circumstances forced these people to be captured, that these are soldiers who have the right to the same, and perhaps even more respect than anyone else. And gradually, this was introduced not only into the consciousness of the people, but also into the consciousness of the authorities. I will never forget how we tried - when Brezhnev died, but the "living dead", the bosses, were replaced one after another, until it came to Gorbachev - in Once again I was with my mother on Staraya Square, in the Central Committee of the Party, and we talked about the fact that it would not be bad to publish this book. And every time they promised, they said that this is our national treasure, and then the editor in the "Young Guard" - I will never forget! - quite state voice he told me, explained it to me ... I remember my last name well - let this scoundrel, perhaps, or his children hear - his last name was Mashavets, then the editor-in-chief of the Young Guard publishing house, some kind of party or Komsomol leader. I vouch for the accuracy of the quote, because I wrote it down right there, outside the doors of his office. He explained that the book could not be in this moment republished because it gives "an incorrect and superficial assessment of the first stage of the war, and secondly, in the event of a publication, all references to those who were in captivity must be thrown out of the book." And those who were not in captivity were not mentioned in the book. It was already the time of Afghanistan, our army got stuck there, the problem of our prisoners rose to its full height, and therefore familiar guiding notes sounded. And in 1965, a decree followed that May 9, on the 20th anniversary of the victory, became a day off. I remind you that from 1945 to 1965 it was a working day. But the generous government also gave the people March 8, which was also a working day, and the decree said: as a sign of respect (something like that) for the contribution of Soviet women to the war and to work in the rear. So let them know when they drink on May 9 and March 8, with whom to clink glasses.

P. Krivonogov "Defenders of the Brest Fortress", 1951

Smirnov Sergey Sergeevich (1915-1976).

Smirnov Sergey Sergeevich (1915-1976).

Prose writer, playwright, journalist, public figure. Born in Petrograd. He began his career at the Kharkov Electromechanical Plant. In 1932-1937. studied at the Moscow Power Engineering Institute. Since 1937 - an employee of the newspaper "Gudok" and at the same time a student of the Literary Institute. A.M. Gorky. “In the Great Patriotic War, he takes part first as a combat commander, and since 1943 as a special correspondent for an army newspaper.”1 After the war, he worked at the Military Publishing House, then in the editorial office of the Novy Mir magazine. In 1950-1960. - Editor-in-Chief of Literaturnaya Gazeta. Member of the Soviet Committee of War Veterans, Secretary of the Moscow branch of the Union of Writers of the RSFSR, member of the Board of the USSR Writers' Union, member of the editorial board of the magazine "Change". He was awarded two Orders of the Red Star, the Order of the Red Banner of Labor, and medals.

S. Smirnov is the author of plays and screenplays, documentary books and essays about the unknown heroes of the Great Patriotic War, including "Brest Fortress" (1957; expanded edition - in 1964), "Stories about unknown heroes" (1963), etc. For many years he led on television popular show- TV almanac "Feat".

The most important feat of S. Smirnov is the rehabilitation of the heroes of the Brest Fortress. He was one of the initiators of the creation of the fortress defense museum; the materials collected by him (more than 50 folders with letters, 60 notebooks and notepads with records of conversations with the defenders of the fortress, hundreds of photographs, etc.) were transferred to the museum. A stand is dedicated to him in the fortress museum. Smirnov recalled: “Our enemies spoke with amazement about the exceptional courage, steadfastness and perseverance of the defenders of this stronghold. And we consigned all this to oblivion ... In Moscow, in the Museum of the Armed Forces, there is no stand, no photograph, nothing about the defense of the Brest Fortress. museum workers shrugged their shoulders: “We have a museum of the history of exploits ... What heroism could be on the western border. The German crossed the border without hindrance and reached Moscow under a green traffic light. Don't you know that?". In 1965, S. Smirnov became a laureate of the Lenin Prize for the book "The Brest Fortress." On this occasion, G. Svirsky wrote:

“Until 1957, the press did not say a word about the heroism of the defenders of the Brest Fortress,2 which later, in the history of the war, became a symbol of the Resistance. A photo of heads pressed against each other, weeping leaders of the defense of the Brest Fortress, who met in Moscow on the way from the Siberian camps - this stunning photograph, reproduced by " literary newspaper"in Khrushchev's times, became an irrefutable document of the vile cruelty of Stalin's time. "We have no prisoners of war," Stalin said, as you know, "there are traitors." Who needs traitors?.. The Soviet Information Bureau reported on the tragedy of the time with a fake headline: "How German generals fabricate Soviet prisoners of war."

In the mid-sixties, the history of the defense of the Brest Fortress and its heroes, who fell into German captivity(and later in Soviet camps), said Sergey Smirnov - in the documentary book "Brest Fortress" (awarded with the Lenin Prize in 1965). The book is prefaced with "An Open Letter to the Heroes of the Brest Fortress," in which the author writes: "Ten years ago, the Brest Fortress lay in forgotten and abandoned ruins, and you, its hero-defenders, were not only unknown, but, as people who, for the most part, went through Hitler's captivity, met an insulting misfortune self-confidence, and sometimes experienced direct injustice. Our party and its 20th Congress, having put an end to the lawlessness and mistakes of the period of Stalin's cult of personality, have opened up for you, as well as for the whole country, a new streak of life."

“Direct injustices”, “lawlessness and mistakes”, “offensive distrust” - all these euphemisms mean that the heroes who bravely fought in the fortress, which found themselves in the deep rear of the German troops, were arrested by Soviet security authorities only because of the prisoners of war, and that these heroes of the war held the post -war years in the camps. They sang "their chronicler, writer S.S. Smirnov, could not tell the whole truth about them without resorting to shameful, deceitful substitutions: "concentration camp" is replaced by the phrase "direct injustice", the words "crimes" and "terror" - by the words "lawlessness" and "mistakes", the words "Stalin's despotism" - by the stereotype "the period of Stalin's personality cult" "(Svirsky G. S. On the frontal place. Literature of moral resistance. M., 1998. S. 471-472).

The work of the writer S.S. Smirnov ended with the rehabilitation of A. Fil, the release of P. Klyp, the removal of all suspicions from Majors P. Gavrilov and S. Matevosyan and other surviving defenders of the Brest Fortress. Those expelled from the party were reinstated and properly employed (Viktorov B.A. Without the stamp “secret”. Notes of the military prosecutor. Issue 3. M., 1990. P. 286).

Son of S.S. Smirnova - Konstantin Smirnov (b. 1952) in many ways continues the work of his father. He is the host of the Sunday TV show "Big Parents", which has a steady high rating. In one of the interviews, to the question "What main idea did you get great parents out of communicating with children? he replied: “I realized that the Soviet government was so anti-human that even its beloved children, those who served it not out of fear, but out of conscience, she ate like a pig eats its piglets. IN own life or in the lives of loved ones they must have had some kind of tragedy, which often no one knows at all ”(NTV: hunting for children / / Arguments and Facts. 2000. No. 9. P. 8). The eldest son of S.S. Smirnova - Andrey Smirnov (b. 1941) - film director, author of the films "Belorussky Station" (1971), "Autumn" (1975), etc.

Notes

1) These data are taken from the reference book "Scriptwriters of Soviet Artistic Cinema" (M., 1972, p. 336). In a different

A source about the war period in the life of S.S. Smirnov says otherwise: “Since 1941, he worked at a defense plant. In the autumn of 1942, he voluntarily went to the front and until the end of the war he fought in the Guards as a private of the 8th Guards rifle division them. I.V. Panfilov on many fronts "(Who was who in the Great Patriotic War 1941-1945. M 1995 P. 228).

2) From the first minutes of the war, the garrison of the Brest Fortress found itself in an exceptionally difficult situation. Colonel-General L. Sandalov recalls: “At 4 am on June 22, heavy fire was opened on the barracks in the central part of the fortress, as well as on bridges and entrance gates and houses of command personnel. This raid caused confusion among the Red Army, while the command staff was partially destroyed. The surviving part of the commanders could not penetrate the barracks due to strong barrage fire ... As a result, the Red Army soldiers and junior command personnel, deprived of leadership and control, dressed and undressed, in groups and individually left the fortress, overcoming the bypass canal, the Mukhavets River and the rampart of the fortress under artillery, mortar and machine-gun fire. It was impossible to take into account the losses, since the personnel of the 6th division mixed with the personnel of the 42nd divisions ... To this it should be added that the "fifth column" began to actively operate. Lights suddenly went out in the city and fortress. Telephone communication with the city was cut off... Some commanders still managed to get to their units and subunits in the fortress, but they could not withdraw the subunits. As a result, the surviving personnel of the units of the 6th and 42nd divisions remained in the fortress as its garrison, not because they were given tasks to defend the fortress, but because it was impossible to leave it. The material part of the artillery of the garrison of the fortress was in open artillery parks and therefore most of the guns were destroyed. Almost all the horses of the artillery and mortar units were in the courtyard of the fortress near the hitching posts and were almost completely destroyed. The vehicles of the autobattalions of both divisions burned down during a raid by German aviation ”(Sandalov L.M., Experienced. M., 1966. S. 99-100).

Smirnov S - Brest Fortress (negative from the book read by the author)

And now the ruins of the Brest Fortress rise above the Bug, ruins covered with military glory, every year thousands of people from all over our country come here to lay flowers on the graves of fallen soldiers, to pay tribute to their deep respect for the selfless masculinity and stamina of its defenders.
The defense of the Brest Fortress, as well as the defense of Sevastopol and Leningrad, became a symbol of the resilience and fearlessness of Soviet soldiers, forever entered the annals of the Great Patriotic War.
Who can remain indifferent, having heard today about the heroes of the Brest defense, who will not be touched by the greatness of their feat?!
Sergei Smirnov first heard about the heroic defense of the Brest Fortress in 1953. Then it was believed that all participants in this defense died.
Who are they, these unknown, nameless people who have shown unparalleled resilience? Perhaps one of them is alive? These are the questions that worried the writer. The painstaking work of collecting materials began, requiring a lot of strength and energy. I had to unravel the most complex interweaving of destinies and circumstances in order to restore the picture of heroic days. The writer overcomes difficulties step by step, unraveling the threads of this tangle, looking for eyewitnesses, participants in the defense.
Thus, originally conceived as a series of essays, The Brest Fortress turned into a grandiose historical and literary epic in terms of coverage of events. The novel combines two time planes... Days gone by and modernity stood side by side, revealing all the beauty and grandeur of the Soviet man. The heroes of the defense pass before the reader: Major Gavrilov, amazing in his perseverance and stamina, who fought to the last bullet; full of bright optimism and fierce fearlessness, Private Matevosyan; little trumpeter Petya Klypa is a fearless and selfless boy. And next to these heroes, miraculously surviving, the images of the dead pass before the readers - nameless fighters and commanders, women and teenagers who took part in battles with enemies. Very little is known about them, but even these meager facts make one marvel at the resilience of the Brest people, their selfless devotion to the Motherland.
The strength of the work of Sergei Smirnov lies in the rigor and simplicity with which the writer recounts dramatic events. His harsh, restrained manner of narration further emphasizes the significance of the feat accomplished by the defenders of the Brest Fortress. In every line of this work one can feel the deep respect of the writer for these simple and at the same time extraordinary people admiration for their courage and bravery.
“I was a participant in the war and saw a lot in those memorable years,” he writes in an essay prefixed to the novel, “but it was the feat of the defenders of the Brest Fortress that, as if with a new light, illuminated everything I saw, revealed to me the strength and breadth of the soul of our man, made me experience with particular acuteness the happiness and pride of the consciousness of belonging to a great, noble and selfless people ... "
The memory of the feat of the heroes of Brest will never die. Book S.S. Smirnova, awarded the Lenin Prize in 1965, returned to the country the names of many dead heroes, helped restore justice, reward the courage of people who gave their lives for the Motherland.
Each historical era creates works that reflect the spirit of his time. Heroic Events civil war found their embodiment in Furmanov's Chapaev, in Ostrovsky's crystal clear novel How the Steel Was Tempered. Much has been written about the Great Patriotic War wonderful books. And among them, a worthy place belongs to the strong and courageous book of S. S. Smirnov. The heroes of the "Brest Fortress" will stand next to the immortal images created by D. Furmanov and N. Ostrovsky, as a symbol of unparalleled devotion to the Motherland.

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Current page: 1 (total book has 30 pages) [accessible reading excerpt: 20 pages]

Sergei Sergeevich Smirnov
Brest Fortress

Return of fate

Sometimes, probably, everyone sadly feels the imperfection of human memory. I'm not talking about sclerosis, which we all approach with the passing years. Sad is the imperfection of the mechanism itself, its inaccurate selectivity...

When you are small and clean, like a white sheet of paper, the memory is just getting ready for future work - some hardly noticeable events pass by the consciousness, due to their familiarity, but then you suddenly realize with bitterness that they were significant, important, and even the most important. And you will be tormented by this incompleteness, the impossibility of returning, restoring the day, the hour, resurrecting a living human face.

And it's doubly insulting when we are talking O close person- about his father, about those who surrounded him. Unfortunately, I am almost deprived of the childhood memories of him that are common in normal families: childhood left few clues, and when the memory mechanism worked, we rarely saw each other - either the door to the office was closed and his silhouette at the table darkened through the corrugated glass, or a long-distance call crushed the peace of the apartment that had quieted down in his absence and the impassive voice of the telephone lady told us where, from which corner of the country or world the hoarse fathers would now come baritone…

However, it happened later, after the Lenin Prize for the Brest Fortress, after the incredible popularity of his television Tales of Heroism. It was later...

And at first there was a small apartment in Maryina Roshcha, where in the mid-fifties - at the time of my childhood - some unattractive personalities came every day and nightly, with their very appearance arousing suspicion among the neighbors. Some in a quilted jacket, some in a darned greatcoat with torn insignia, in dirty boots or knocked down tarpaulin boots, with shredded fiber suitcases, official-looking duffel bags, or simply with a bundle, they appeared in the hall with an expression of submissive hopelessness on their earthy faces, hiding their rough, rough hands. Many of these men were crying, which did not fit in with my then ideas about masculinity and decency. They used to stay overnight on the fake velvet green couch where I actually slept, and then they would throw me onto a cot.

And after a while they reappeared, sometimes even managing to replace the tunic with a Boston suit, and the quilted jacket with a gabardine coat to the heels. Both of them sat badly on them - it was felt that they were not used to such outfits. But, despite this, their appearance subtly changed: stooped shoulders and bowed heads suddenly rose for some reason, their figures straightened. Everything was explained very quickly: under the coat, on the ironed jacket, the orders and medals that found them or returned to their owners burned and tinkled. And, it seems, as far as I could judge then, my father played some kind of important role.

It turns out that these uncles Lesha, uncle Petya, uncle Sasha were wonderful people who did incredible, inhuman feats, but for some reason - which did not seem surprising to anyone at that time - were punished for this. And now the father explained everything to someone, somewhere “above”, and they were forgiven.

…These people entered my life forever. And not just as permanent friends at home. Their fates became for me fragments of a mirror that reflected that terrible, black era, whose name is Stalin. And then there's the war...

She stood behind their shoulders, having collapsed with all her monstrous mass, with all the load of blood and death, the burnt roof of her native home. And then another and captivity ...

Uncle Lesha, who carved for me a luxurious pistol with a patterned handle from a lime block of wood, and could make a whistle from any knot, is Alexey Danilovich Romanov. I will never forget this living embodiment of kindness, spiritual meekness, mercy towards people. The war found him in the Brest Fortress, from where he ended up - neither more nor less - in a concentration camp in Hamburg. His story about escaping from captivity was perceived as fantastic: together with a friend, miraculously escaping from the guards, spending two days in icy water, and then jumping from the pier onto a Swedish cargo ship standing five meters away, they buried themselves in coke and swam to neutral Sweden! Jumping then, he hit his chest against the side of the ship and appeared after the war in our apartment as a thin, transparent tuberculosis patient, breathing heavily. And where could the forces to fight tuberculosis come from, if all these post-war years they told him in the eye that, while others were fighting, he “sat out” in captivity, and then rested in Sweden, from where, by the way, Alexandra Kollontai, the then soviet ambassador. It was he who "rested" - a half-dead man, pulled out of the hold along with a dead man in the same camp clothes! .. He was not reinstated in the party, he was not given work, there was practically nowhere to live - and this was in his homeland, on his own land ... But then there was a telegram from my father ...

Petka - that's what he was called in our house, and needless to say, what kind of bosom friend he was to me. Peter Klypa is the youngest among the defenders of the fortress, during the defense a twelve-year-old pupil of the music platoon - he appeared to us as a thirty-year-old man with a timid, suffering smile of a martyr. Of the 25 years (!) assigned to him by the authorities, he served seven in Kolyma for a fault incommensurable with the punishment - he did not inform on a friend who committed a crime. Not to mention the imperfection of this criminal code on non-information, let's ask ourselves a question: the boy, yesterday's kid, but who had the Brest citadel behind him, should be hidden for half his life for such an offense ?! Is it his, about whom experienced soldiers almost told legends? .. Many years later, in the seventies, when Pyotr Klypa (whose name was given to pioneer squads throughout the country and who lived in Bryansk and, as it was said then, worked hard at a factory) encountered in some unkind way with former secretary Buyvolov, the Bryansk regional committee of the CPSU, again began to recall his "criminal" past, again began to wag his nerves. I don’t know what he didn’t please, and there’s no one to know: this whole campaign was not in vain for Petya - he died only in his sixties ...

Uncle Sasha - Alexander Mitrofanovich Fil. He was one of the first to appear on Oktyabrskaya, although he traveled the longest. From the Nazi concentration camp, he went by direct message along the stage to the Stalinist, to Far North. After serving 6 years for nothing, Fil remained on Aldan, believing that with the stigma of "Vlasov" on the mainland he would not live. This "Vlasovite" was casually hung on him by an investigator at a filtration checkpoint for prisoners, forcing him to sign the protocol without reading it.

... The details of these three and many other no less dramatic destinies are recreated on the pages of my father's main book, Sergei Sergeevich Smirnov, "The Brest Fortress". The main one, not only because she was awarded the Lenin Prize in the memorable year of the 20th anniversary of the Victory, and not even because he devoted most of his life to literature to work on the Brest Fortress. As far as I can tell, it was during the period of work on this book that he formed as a person and as a documentary writer, laid the foundations of his somewhat unique creative method who returned from oblivion the names and destinies of the living and the dead. Nevertheless, for nearly two decades, "Brest Fortress" was not reprinted. A book that, like no other, spoke of a feat Soviet soldier, Soviet power seemed to be harmful. As I learned much later, the military doctrine of the communists, who were preparing the population for a war with the Americans, did not converge in any way with the main moral content Brest epic - the need for the rehabilitation of prisoners. So Dzhugashvili's catchphrase "We have no prisoners - there are traitors and traitors" was still in service with the party apparatus in the late 80s ...

"Manuscripts don't burn," but they die without a reader. And until the beginning of the 90s, the book "Brest Fortress" was in a dying state.

In the early 70s, one of the most prominent defenders of the Brest Fortress, Samvel Matevosyan, was expelled from the party and stripped of the title of Hero. Socialist Labor. He was charged with administrative and economic abuses, such as abuse of authority and use of his official position - Matevosyan served as the manager of the Armenzoloto trust of the geological exploration department of non-ferrous metallurgy of the Council of Ministers of Armenia. I do not undertake here to discuss the degree of violation of the norms of party ethics by him, but one thing was surprising: law enforcement their charges were dropped "for lack of corpus delicti". Nevertheless, I remember very well how a year before his death, my father came home with a gray, suddenly aged face - from Gorky they reported that the Volga-Vyatka publishing house had scattered the Brest Fortress set, and the printed edition was put under the knife - any mention of the allegedly guilty S. Matevosyan was demanded to be removed from the book. As it happens with us to this day, then, in the years of the "heyday of stagnation", the wild absurdity of Stalinism made itself felt - from slander, no matter how monstrous and illegal it may be, a person cannot be washed off. Moreover, his whole life before and after the incident was called into question. And no evidence of eyewitnesses, fellow soldiers, comrades in the service was taken into account - the work went along the knurled rails of a biased selection of "facts" and facts, at least somehow able to prove the unprovable.

Sixteen years studded this deep old man, in addition to everything else and a disabled war, the thresholds of various instances in the stubborn hope of achieving justice; sixteen years book awarded the highest literary prize our country, lay under the shadow of a departmental ban. And it was impossible to get through to the officials, to explain to them that the composition and literary work do not give in to administrative shouting and simply fall apart.

In the era of Brezhnev's stagnation, all attempts to revive the book ran into an impenetrable " layered cake» various authorities. At first, on the upper floors there were sweet assurances of the need to republish, to return the "Brest Fortress" to the circle of literature. Then the middle "layer" - harder and with bitterness - nibbled on the book: it was no longer only about the "seizure" of S. Matevosyan, but also Petr Klypa and Alexander Fil; until, finally, the case ran into an absolutely impenetrable wall, or rather, into cotton wool, where all efforts were silently extinguished. And our letters, regular requests for meetings - like pebbles in water, however, there weren’t even circles ... And information was already being pulled out that somewhere some official Central Committee lecturer publicly declared that “Smirnov’s heroes are fake”, and similar delights.

Fortunately, times are changing - "Brest Fortress" has returned to readers. She returned to tell people once again how amazing Man is, what high moral standards his spirit can achieve ...

And yet, the past years of the ban do not come from my memory, and when I think about this sad story with dull pain, a strange feature of my father’s fate suddenly opens up to me - after death, he seemed to repeat the path of the people he brought back to life, doomed to experience its unevenness with his own soul, contained in the book “Brest Fortress”. If he knew all this then, in the fifties ...

But no! .. This sad foresight was not needed then, at the end of the fifties. Then his living labor, visibly embodied in these early aged people, proudly walked along the Moscow streets. Our neighbors no longer feared for the safety of their apartments, but smiled happily when they saw one of them - now they were known by sight. Passers-by recognized in the crowd, shook hands, politely and respectfully patted on the shoulders. Sometimes, I walked with them, in a glimpse of popular recognition, which happened to fall on me too, because I was childishly vain. For me, they were all nothing. famous heroes, but close friends, almost relatives, who easily spent the night on my couch. And this, you see, warms the soul.

But father! .. Father really reveled in what was happening. It was the work of his hands, a tangible result of his energy, which drove him thousands of kilometers into the back of nowhere, confronted him with the impenetrable soullessness of the reigning system.

After all, it was he who read dozens, then hundreds, and then thousands of letters in the kitchen at night, filling up the apartment - opening a window in the summer became a problem: first it was necessary to move the thick piles of envelopes that covered the window sills. It was he who studied thousands of documents in various archives - from the military to the prosecutor's office. It was he who, after Rodion Semenyuk, was the first to touch in the 55th the fragile fabric of the regimental banner, buried in the casemate of the fortress during the days of defense and dug out by the same hands. There was something to admire - everything now materialized in the people around him.

But still main reason his delight became clear to me much later, over the years. He returned to these people Faith in justice, and this, if you like, is faith in life itself.

He returned these people to the country, to the people, without which they could not imagine their lives. There, in deadly Brest, and later, in the death camps, they are mutilated, having gone through all degrees of hunger, having forgotten the taste of human food and clean water rotting alive, dying, it seems, a hundred times a day - they still survived, saved by their incredible, implausible faith ...

I think it was the most joyful for my father then to be convinced of the far from indisputable fact of the existence of justice. He promised it to them who had lost their faith, he was its unwitting arbiter. And my God, how grateful he was to everyone who helped even the smallest bit, who shared this heavy burden with him.

Father and his numerous and selfless assistants, such as, say, Gennady Afanasyevich Terekhov, an investigator for special important matters, during perestroika, known to the whole country, who, unfortunately, is no longer alive - who has since become a long-term friend of his father, and many other people, made, in my opinion, a process of rehabilitation of the country, the people, our very history, unique in the history of mankind, in the eyes of those who had to go through all the circles of hell - Hitler's and Stalin's ...

And then there was a trip to Brest - a real triumph for the heroes of the fortress. Yes, it was, it was ... And we also had a holiday, but especially, of course, with my father, when the fortresses were given the Star, and May 9 was declared a day off and a parade was scheduled on Red Square!

Then it seemed to him that everything had been achieved. No, not in the sense of work - his road just rolled ahead. Achieved in the sense of the moral support of the title "Veteran of War". In those days of the early sixties, a man with a number of order strips on his jacket did not need, blushing, to reach into his pocket for a certificate of a participant or, moreover, a war invalid - the line parted by itself.

Yes, we have experienced a long period of erosion since then. public morality. But there are, cannot but exist among the enlightened peoples, to which we include ourselves, saints, values ​​that cannot be shaken by time or by people, without which a people is not a people. Today we cannot devalue the huge spiritual potential that is contained in the words “Veteran of War”. After all, they are few. There are very few of them, and every day this number is decreasing. And - somehow painful to imagine - the day is not far off when the earth will accept the last. The last Veteran of the Great War...

They do not need to be compared with anyone or anything. They are simply incomparable. My father somehow struck me by saying that it is unfair for us to have the same status of Hero of Socialist Labor and Hero of the Soviet Union, since the first sheds sweat, and the second - blood ...

Let it not seem to you, reading these lines, that he was a man without a hitch without a hitch. The father is inextricably linked with his difficult, terrible time. Like most of those who grew up and lived then, he was not always able to distinguish between white and black, did not live in harmony with himself in everything, and did not always have enough civil courage. Unfortunately, in his life there were actions that he did not like to remember, admitting, however, openly committed mistakes and carrying this cross to the very grave. And this, I think, is not a very common quality.

However, it is not for me to judge my father and his generation. It only seems to me that the cause he served with such amazing conviction and mental strength, the work he did reconciled him with life and with time. And as far as I can judge about this, he himself understood this, understood and acutely felt the tragic unevenness of the time in which he had to live his life. In any case, the following lines, written by his hand, suggest this conclusion.

Once, after my father's death, I found in his desk a draft letter to Alexander Trifonovich Tvardovsky. Tvardovsky, whose father was his deputy in the first composition of the New World, was sixty years old in those days. By the hero of the day, the father retained a reverent love for the rest of his life and bowed before his personality. This letter, I remember, struck me. Here is an excerpt from it.

"Peredelkino, 20.6.70.

Dear Alexander Trifonovich!

For some reason, I don't feel like sending you a congratulatory telegram, but I'm tempted to write something non-telegraphic with my own hand. You have played such an important role in my life that I involuntarily feel the day of your sixtieth birthday as significant date in your own destiny.

These are not red anniversary words. I have often thought about how lucky I am to have met you and had the happy opportunity to work with you and be your close friend for a while (I hope this is not insolence on my part). It happened at a very critical time, probably crucial moment my life, when energy and thirst for activity were bursting, and the era in which we lived at that time could, after all, direct all this along different channels. And although, I believe that even then I was not capable of conscious meanness, still God knows how the circumstances and difficulties of those times could have affected, if I didn’t meet you, with your great sense of truth and justice, with your talent and charm. And in everything that I did after parting with you, there was always a share of your influence, the impact of your personality on me. Believe me, I am very far from exaggerating my capabilities and what I have done, but still I sometimes had to do good human deeds, which in old age bring a feeling of inner satisfaction. I don't know whether I could have done them or not, if there hadn't been a meeting with you and your never-ceasing influence behind my soul. Probably not! And for this, my heartfelt thanks to you and my low bow from the student to the teacher ... "

It's a pity, a mortal pity that my father did not live to see the day when the "Brest Fortress" saw the light of day for the first time after a long ban. It is a pity that he was not destined to find out the posthumous fate of his main book, to hold in his hands a signal copy smelling of printing ink, to touch the cover with the embossed words "Brest Fortress". He left with a heavy heart, without illusions about the main work of his life ...

And in conclusion, a few words about this publication. In post-Soviet times, the book was published several times. Of course, over the past period, many new facts, evidence, and documents have appeared in the historical science of the Great Patriotic War. In some cases, they correct some inaccuracies or mistakes made by documentary historians in well-known works on the history of the war. To a certain extent, this also applies to the "Brest Fortress", since during its creation historical science did not have a modern completeness of view on initial period war.

Nevertheless, given the insignificance of discrepancies between the lifetime author's edition of the book and the current position of historians, we will refrain from alterations. This is obviously a task for future publications that need more extensive scientific tools.

Of course, there are ideological overlaps in this narrative as well. But do not judge strictly: no matter how we, today, may relate to the realities of the time when this book was created, the sincerity of the author should not be questioned. Like every significant creation, the Brest Fortress belongs to its era, but no matter how many years separate us from the events described in it, it is impossible to read it with a calm heart.

K. Smirnov

An open letter to the heroes of the Brest Fortress

Dear my friends!

This book is the fruit of ten years of work on the history of the defense of the Brest Fortress: many trips and long reflections, searches for documents and people, meetings and conversations with you. It is the final result of this work.

About you, about your tragic and glorious struggle, stories and novels, poems and historical research will create plays and films. Let others do it. Perhaps the material I have collected will help the authors of these future works. IN big deal it is worth being one step if this step leads up.

Ten years ago, the Brest Fortress lay in forgotten, abandoned ruins, and you, its hero-defenders, were not only unknown, but, as people who, for the most part, went through Hitler's captivity, met insulting distrust of yourself, and sometimes experienced direct injustice. Our Party and its 20th Congress, having put an end to the lawlessness and mistakes of the period of Stalin's cult of personality, have opened a new phase of life for you, as well as for the whole country.

Now Brest defense- one of the pages of the history of the Great Patriotic War dear to the heart of Soviet people. The ruins of the old fortress above the Bug are revered as a military relic, and you yourself have become the favorite heroes of your people and are surrounded by respect and care everywhere. Many of you have already been awarded high state awards, but those who do not yet have them are not offended, because the title “defender of the Brest Fortress” alone is equivalent to the word “hero” and is worth an order or medal.

Now the fortress has good museum, where your feat is fully and interestingly reflected. A whole team of enthusiastic researchers is studying the struggle of your legendary garrison, revealing new details of it, looking for more unknown heroes. It only remains for me to respectfully make way for this group, to wish them success in a friendly manner, and to turn to other material. In the history of the Patriotic War, there are still many unexplored "blank spots", unrevealed exploits, unknown heroes who are waiting for their intelligence officers, and even one writer, journalist, historian can do something here.

With the publication of this book, I handed over to the museum of the fortress all the material collected over ten years and said goodbye to the theme of the defense of Brest. But you Dear friends, I want to say not “goodbye”, but “goodbye”. We will have many more friendly meetings, and I hope to always be your guest at those exciting traditional celebrations that are now held in the fortress every five years.

Until the end of my days, I will be proud that my modest work has played some role in your destinies. But I owe you more. Meetings with you, acquaintance with your feat determined the direction of the work that I will conduct all my life - the search for the unknown heroes of our four-year struggle against German fascism. I was a participant in the war and saw a lot in those memorable years. But it was the feat of the defenders of the Brest Fortress that, as it were, illuminated everything I saw with a new light, revealed to me the strength and breadth of the soul of our man, made me experience with particular acuteness the happiness and pride of belonging to a great, noble and selfless people, capable of doing even the impossible. For this priceless gift for a writer, I bow low to you, dear friends. And if in your literary work I will be able to convey to people at least a particle of all this, I will think that it was not in vain that I walked the earth.

Goodbye, see you again, my dear Brest residents!

Always yours S. S. Smirnov. 1964

Sometimes, probably, everyone sadly feels the imperfection of human memory. I'm not talking about sclerosis, which we all approach with the passing years. Sad is the imperfection of the mechanism itself, its inaccurate selectivity...

When you are small and clean, like a white sheet of paper, the memory is just getting ready for future work - some hardly noticeable events pass by the consciousness, due to their familiarity, but then you suddenly realize with bitterness that they were significant, important, and even the most important. And you will be tormented by this incompleteness, the impossibility of returning, restoring the day, the hour, resurrecting a living human face.

And it is doubly insulting when it comes to a loved one - about his father, about those who surrounded him. Unfortunately, I am almost deprived of the childhood memories of him that are common in normal families: childhood left few clues, and when the memory mechanism worked, we rarely saw each other - either the door to the office was closed and his silhouette at the table darkened through the corrugated glass, or a long-distance call crushed the peace of the apartment that had quieted down in his absence and the impassive voice of the telephone lady told us where, from which corner of the country or world the hoarse fathers would now come baritone…

However, it happened later, after the Lenin Prize for the Brest Fortress, after the incredible popularity of his television Tales of Heroism. It was later...

And at first there was a small apartment in Maryina Roshcha, where in the mid-fifties - at the time of my childhood - some unattractive personalities came every day and nightly, with their very appearance arousing suspicion among the neighbors. Some in a quilted jacket, some in a darned greatcoat with torn insignia, in dirty boots or knocked down tarpaulin boots, with shredded fiber suitcases, official-looking duffel bags, or simply with a bundle, they appeared in the hall with an expression of submissive hopelessness on their earthy faces, hiding their rough, rough hands. Many of these men were crying, which did not fit in with my then ideas about masculinity and decency. They used to stay overnight on the fake velvet green couch where I actually slept, and then they would throw me onto a cot.

And after a while they reappeared, sometimes even managing to replace the tunic with a Boston suit, and the quilted jacket with a gabardine coat to the heels. Both of them sat badly on them - it was felt that they were not used to such outfits. But, despite this, their appearance subtly changed: stooped shoulders and bowed heads suddenly rose for some reason, their figures straightened. Everything was explained very quickly: under the coat, on the ironed jacket, the orders and medals that found them or returned to their owners burned and tinkled. And, it seems, as far as I could judge then, my father played some important role in this.

It turns out that these uncles Lesha, uncle Petya, uncle Sasha were wonderful people who did incredible, inhuman feats, but for some reason - which did not seem surprising to anyone at that time - were punished for this. And now the father explained everything to someone, somewhere “above”, and they were forgiven.

…These people entered my life forever. And not just as permanent friends at home. Their fates became for me fragments of a mirror that reflected that terrible, black era, whose name is Stalin. And then there's the war...

She stood behind their shoulders, having collapsed with all her monstrous mass, with all the load of blood and death, the burnt roof of her native home. And then another and captivity ...

Uncle Lesha, who carved for me a luxurious pistol with a patterned handle from a lime block of wood, and could make a whistle from any knot, is Alexey Danilovich Romanov. I will never forget this living embodiment of kindness, spiritual meekness, mercy towards people. The war found him in the Brest Fortress, from where he ended up - neither more nor less - in a concentration camp in Hamburg. His story about escaping from captivity was perceived as fantastic: together with a friend, miraculously escaping from the guards, spending two days in icy water, and then jumping from the pier onto a Swedish cargo ship standing five meters away, they buried themselves in coke and swam to neutral Sweden! Jumping then, he hit his chest against the side of the ship and appeared after the war in our apartment as a thin, transparent tuberculosis patient, breathing heavily. And where could the forces to fight tuberculosis come from, if all these post-war years they told him in the face that, while others were fighting, he “sat out” in captivity, and then rested in Sweden, from where, by the way, Alexandra Kollontai, the then Soviet ambassador, did not let him go to the front. It was he who “rested” - a half-dead man, pulled out of the hold along with a dead man in the same camp clothes! .. He was not reinstated in the party, he was not given a job, there was practically nowhere to live - and this was in his homeland, on his own land ... But then there was a telegram from my father ...

Petka - that's what he was called in our house, and needless to say, what kind of bosom friend he was to me. Peter Klypa is the youngest among the defenders of the fortress, during the defense a twelve-year-old pupil of the music platoon - he appeared to us as a thirty-year-old man with a timid, suffering smile of a martyr. Of the 25 years (!) assigned to him by the authorities, he served seven in Kolyma for a fault incommensurable with the punishment - he did not inform on a friend who committed a crime. Not to mention the imperfection of this criminal code on non-information, let's ask ourselves a question: the boy, yesterday's kid, but who had the Brest citadel behind him, should be hidden for half his life for such an offense ?! This is him, about which experienced soldiers almost told legends? .. Many years later, in the seventies, when Peter Klypa (by whose name the pioneer squads were called throughout the country and who lived in Bryansk and, as they said, worked at the factory) in some unkind manner with the former secretary of the Bryansk regional committee of the CPSU Buyvolov, began to recall him again. , again began to flutter the nerves. I don’t know what he didn’t please, and there’s no one to know: this whole campaign was not in vain for Petya - he died only in his sixties ...

Uncle Sasha - Alexander Mitrofanovich Fil. He was one of the first to appear on Oktyabrskaya, although he traveled the longest. From the Nazi concentration camp, he went by direct message along the stage to the Stalinist one, to the Far North. After serving 6 years for nothing, Fil remained on Aldan, believing that with the stigma of "Vlasov" on the mainland he would not live. This "Vlasovite" was casually hung on him by an investigator at a filtration checkpoint for prisoners, forcing him to sign the protocol without reading it.

... The details of these three and many other no less dramatic destinies are recreated on the pages of my father's main book, Sergei Sergeevich Smirnov, "The Brest Fortress". The main one, not only because she was awarded the Lenin Prize in the memorable year of the 20th anniversary of the Victory, and not even because he devoted most of his life to literature to work on the Brest Fortress. As far as I can judge, it was during the period of work on this book that he formed as a personality and as a documentary writer, laid the foundations of his somewhat unique creative method, which brought back from oblivion the names and destinies of the living and the dead. Nevertheless, for nearly two decades, "Brest Fortress" was not reprinted. The book, which, like no other, spoke of the feat of the Soviet soldier, seemed harmful to the Soviet authorities. As I learned much later, the military doctrine of the communists, who prepared the population for war with the Americans, did not agree with the main moral content of the Brest epic - the need to rehabilitate prisoners. So Dzhugashvili's catchphrase "We have no prisoners - there are traitors and traitors" was still in service with the party apparatus in the late 80s ...

"Manuscripts don't burn," but they die without a reader. And until the beginning of the 90s, the book "Brest Fortress" was in a dying state.

There are writers of “one book”, and Sergei Sergeevich Smirnov was a writer of one topic: in literature, in cinema, on television and on the radio, he spoke about people who died heroically in the Great Patriotic War, and after that - forgotten. Few people know that May 9 became a holiday only in 1965, 20 years after the Victory. This was achieved by the writer Sergei Smirnov. His speeches on radio and television made the victorious country remember those to whom it owed both peace and life.

Sergei Sergeevich Smirnov (1915 - 1976) - prose writer, playwright, journalist, public figure. Born in Petrograd, in the family of an engineer. He spent his childhood in Kharkov. He began his career at the Kharkov Electromechanical Plant. In 1932-1937. studied at the Moscow Power Engineering Institute. Since 1937 - an employee of the newspaper "Gudok" and at the same time a student of the Literary Institute. A.M. Gorky.

With the beginning of the Great Patriotic War, S. Smirnov joined the ranks of the fighter battalion, graduated from the school of snipers. In September 1941, a group of graduate students from the Literary Institute were demobilized in order for them to pass the state exam. In the summer of 1942, Sergei Smirnov was drafted into the army and sent to an artillery school. After graduating from college, he received the rank of lieutenant, became the commander of a machine-gun platoon.

He began to write to the army newspaper "Courage", after some time he was seconded to serve in its editorial office. Captain Smirnov met the end of the war in Austria. He was awarded two Orders of the Red Star and a medal "For the Victory over Germany in the Great Patriotic War of 1941-1945".

After the war, he worked for some time in the same newspaper, and then returned to Moscow and became the editor of the Military Publishing House of the Ministry of Defense. Until 1954, he worked for the Novy Mir magazine.

S. Smirnov said: “I had already begun to think about writing a book dedicated to the defense of the hero cities of Odessa and Sevastopol, when suddenly one random conversation forced me to change my plans.

One day my friend, the writer German Nagaev, came to me. He asked me what I was going to work on in the future, and suddenly said:

– If only you could write a book about the defense of the Brest Fortress. It was an unusually interesting episode of the war.

And then I remembered that a year or two ago I came across an essay by the writer M.L. Zlatogorov about the heroic defense of the Brest Fortress. It was published in Ogonyok, and then placed in one collection published by the Military Publishing House of the USSR Ministry of Defense. After a conversation with Nagaev, I found this collection and re-read Zlatogorov's essay again.

I must say that the theme of the Brest Fortress somehow immediately captured me. It felt the presence of a large and not yet revealed secret, opened up a huge field for research, for difficult, but exciting research work. It was felt that this theme was thoroughly imbued with high human heroism, that the heroic spirit of our people, our army was somehow especially clearly manifested in it. And I started working."

First visit to the Brest Fortress, 1954

S. Smirnov conducted painstaking research work to establish the fate of the participants in the defense and the events of 1941 in the citadel over the Bug for about 10 years. The writer came to Brest, met with the defenders. He was one of the initiators of the creation of the fortress defense museum; the materials collected by him (more than 50 folders with letters, 60 notebooks and notepads with records of conversations with the defenders of the fortress, hundreds of photographs, etc.) were transferred to the museum. A stand is dedicated to him in the fortress museum.

S. Smirnov recalled: “Our enemies spoke with amazement about the exceptional courage, stamina and perseverance of the defenders of this stronghold. And we consigned all this to oblivion ... In Moscow, in the Museum of the Armed Forces, there is no stand, no photograph, nothing about the defense of the Brest Fortress. Museum workers shrugged their shoulders: “We have a museum of the history of exploits ... What heroism could be on the western border. The German crossed the border without hindrance and reached Moscow under a green traffic light. Don't you know that?"

S. Smirnov's speeches in the press, on radio and television, in the TV almanac "Feat", contributed huge contribution in search of those who disappeared during the war and its unknown heroes. His books are devoted to the topic of war: "On the fields of Hungary" (1954), "Stalingrad on the Dnieper" (1958), "In Search of the Heroes of the Brest Fortress" (1959), "Were great war» (1966), "Family"(1968) and others.

S. Smirnov did not claim to create artwork. He worked as a documentary filmmaker with purely documentary material. According to the correct statement of Nyota Thun, in his "Brest Fortress" most clearly reflected "a characteristic trend of the late 60s ... towards documentary accuracy."

Speaking later about the method of his work, S. Smirnov wrote: “I may be rigoristic about the documentary basis of a work of art. I strive to ensure that not a single fact cited in a documentary book written by me could be disputed by an eyewitness and participant. Artistic work, in my opinion, here lies in understanding, in highlighting these facts. And here the documentary writer must rise above petty factography, so that the real facts cited by him are comprehended and illuminated in such a way that even the participants and eyewitnesses of these events suddenly see themselves in the right light and in that understanding, which, perhaps, they themselves did not expect ... In my book "Brest Fortress", I, as you know, retained the real names of the characters. I adhered strictly to the facts even in detail, and none of the facts set forth in the book can possibly be disputed by the defenders of the fortress, but none of them in their stories showed me the defense of the fortress as it appears in my book. And it's completely natural. Everyone saw only a piece of this picture, and even saw it subjectively, through the prism of their experiences, through the layers of their subsequent fate with all the complexities and surprises. My job as a researcher, as a writer, was to collect all the scattered pieces of the mosaic, arrange them correctly so that they give a broad picture of the struggle, remove subjective layers, illuminate this mosaic with the right light so that it appears as a wide panel of an amazing national feat.

The book is prefaced with an “Open Letter to the Heroes of the Brest Fortress”, in which the author writes: “Ten years ago, the Brest Fortress lay in forgotten and abandoned ruins, and you, its hero-defenders, were not only unknown, but, as people who for the most part went through Hitler’s captivity, met offensive distrust of yourself, and sometimes experienced direct injustice. Our party and its 20th Congress, having put an end to the lawlessness and mistakes of the period of Stalin's personality cult, have opened a new era of life for you, as well as for the whole country.

For a documentary story - a book "Brest Fortress", published twice (1957, 1964), - S. Smirnov received the Lenin Prize in Literature. On the basis of the award materials prepared by him, about 70 defenders of the Brest Fortress were awarded state awards.