There's a national flag in his room, and the shelves are bursting with historical books. And the display in the Bundestag, that made so much noise, looks even stranger next to this.
Nikolai Desyatnichenko, student: "The soldier I was talking about, George Johan Rau, was a priest. One letter survived, in which he wrote that he wasn't killing anyone."
The teenagers who spoke in the Bundestag are studying at a special school in Novy Urengoy. It's the only gymnasium in the city with an in-depth study of history and foreign languages. The students learn about Russia's past here for 4 hours a week.
Denis Davydov, the reporter: "The regular program is two times shorter. But it still explains both about the Battle of Stalingrad, and about the encirclement of the 300,000-strong group of Germans, the Stalingrad Cauldron, which the student for some reason calls the "so-called". "So-called," this phrase, as a rule, has a negative connotation, you don't understand that phrase".
Nikolai Desyatnichenko: "I do, in fact, but I wrote that simply as a flourish, 'the so-called' sounds more beautiful".
The awkward phrases upset many. The Internet exploded. The police were assigned to protect him, and the parents are agitated. They didn't go to Germany with him. But they know there was a large delegation from Russia in the Bundestag, who could tell the children the correct wording.
The student's parents: "Representatives of the embassy and of the Ministry of Defence were there". "I'm ashamed that this happened since it's my child. If he offended someone's feelings, as a mother I apologize for him in front of those people".
Ekaterina Kashnikova, Gymnasium Director: "Any child has the right to make mistakes, we adults probably don't have the right to make mistakes, the responsibility is with us, and I don't absolve myself of it".
One commission after another went to the school. Check after check. It's known that the German side paid for the trip to Berlin for the Day of Sorrow. They gave the kids the Wehrmacht soldiers' biographies to prepare reports on.
Nikolai Desyatnichenko: "They sent us all biographies, we read them all, looked at them, thought it all over. We wrote one story at first and sent it, they told us that "you don’t have enough empathy, not enough about the Germans." We rewrote it and sent it again".
Now he knows what the power of words are. He repeats himself several times: if he could change the past and the trip, no one would be embarrassed because of him. Working on mistakes and the German teacher. It was she who was in contact with Germany and took the children to Berlin. For the presentation, they published brochures with photos of soldiers and appeasing student speeches, which for some reason didn't embarrass the adults.
Lyudmila Kononenko, a teacher: "Emotions overwhelmed us, probably because the beginning was good, and the ending, that this is brought to an end, the children really wanted peace".
Almost a hundred years ago 2 hamlets stood here, Big and Small Rossoschki. They stood here until 1942, until the Germans wiped them from the face of the earth. Now there’s a memorial complex. With burial places of Wehrmacht soldiers and on these blocks are the lists of Germans missing in the Battle of Stalingrad. The name of George Johan Rau is also here, a 20-year-old fascist, about whom the Russian student spoke in the Bundestag.
120,000 German soldiers appear on the lists of missing persons. Another 50,000 lie here in mass graves. The first burials were made in 1993. Literally across the road, are the mass graves of the Soviet soldiers. With the same date of death for all of them, 1942, the Battle of Stalingrad. Identifying the dead Soviet soldiers is not easy. Superstitious people rarely took the special capsules with them into battle, that had their name and date of birth. So frequently there are only combinations of initials on tombstones. These are the letters the soldiers marked their spoons, cups, and cigarette cases with.
About 2,000 soldiers lie in the Russian cemetery. The main monument here is the grieving mother who is holding a bell over her head, which will never ring since there is no clapper. A silent reminder.
A female student: "When you walk through the school you feel that a hospital and the wounded and bombings were here".
In Volgograd on Mira St. is their lyceum, a mathematical one, but, like 2+2, they know well who the motherland fought, at what price, and who won.
Larissa Tropkina, Director of Lyceum #5: "We don't just teach them how to pass the USE exam or enter a prestigious university, what's important is that we make sure that none of them will ever believe anything else about what happened. That's what's important. Children need to be taught about history".
Veterans come to visit the students. They don't ask to write reports, they just speak from the heart in a school museum, where from the black-and-white photos the same 16-year olds look at them, from 10B of the same school, who after graduating in 1941 left to defend the country. None of them returned.
The veteran: "Just imagine, suddenly someone shouts "in the air", and everyone drops to the ground. The sisters are asking something and she's moaning, imagine, a child who spoke before became speechless from fright".
In 1943, Tamara Suhoverhova was 6 years old. Her father died on the front, and the mother with 3 girls in her hands was left. Nearby on their street in the Beketovka village, was a camp for German prisoners of war.
Tamara Suhoverhova: "Here they dug trenches and lived in them, we also lived in trenches, the houses were destroyed. We couldn't, and there was nothing to keep warm with. And we didn't feel that we were cold, but we were hungry, we asked our mom, "Mom, we want to eat," she would look at us and cry".
On top of this, the captives had to be fed. And they were fed. 92,000 surrendered Germans. Sick with typhus, with dystrophy, and lice. The soldiers contracted the diseases while encircled. Paulus, their commander, didn't give the order to surrender.
Vladimir Galitskiy, War Historian: "We received these prisoners, and after 3 or 4 months, our medics healed them, we put them back on their feet".
A fragment of a documentary account: "What struck me was that Soviet soldiers didn't have better food, the defeaters and the defeated had the same food. This went against what I was told before about Russian inhumanity".
"Russian Soul," a painting about the mysterious Russian soul and the surrendered German soldiers, was kept in the USSR for several years after the victory. This is how in Stalingrad they rebuilt the houses destroyed by the Nazi bombings.
Oleg Firstkov, Deputy Head of the "Memory" museum: "A special emphasis was placed on anti-fascist work and cultural and mass media work, newspapers were printed directly in the camps, there were musical groups, here we see sheet music written by the prisoners of war".
Desyatnichenko shows us photos from a family album. Sons are regularly taken to historical places: Prokhorovka, Novorossiysk, a Moscow museum.
Oksana Desyatnichenko: "For us, Victory Day is a great day, these aren't just empty words, for us it's an emotional holiday".
The family had its own front-line hero. Stepan Arsentievich fought on the North-Western Front. He earned a medal for military service. 75 years later, his great-grandson took a photo next to the Reichstag with the main victory symbol.
Nikolai Desyatnichenko: "I always wanted to go and see the Reichstag, which was stormed by our great Soviet soldiers, I didn't forget this accomplishment".
He decided he will read more about the war. While on vacation he's going to Volgograd. Many people have internalized his story. There's hope that those who are teaching, and those who are learning, may finally grasp the difficult material.
Denis Davydov, Vladimir Overin, Sergey Shlikov, Victoria Filatova, Tatiana Koroleva, Ilkis Hakimov, and Natalia Ivanova. Vesti — News of the Week
