The great inner spirituality of this family amazed me, and I realized that all this was put into their soul by Pyotr Sergeevich. I, who was raised by my mother and even before the war, at the age of 23, had read a number of works by John Chrysostom, Basil the Great, the biographies and letters of the Optina Elders, John Climacus, the notes of Motovilov, and many others, did not have even a part of the inner spirituality and faith that this family carried within itself. I realized that my mother, whom I considered and honored as a deeply religious person, who taught me to love God, believe and pray, and who was a Candidate of Philological Sciences, could not only be compared in the depth of faith with Pyotr Sergeyevich and Marfa Pavlovna, a simple peasant woman who had a seventh-grade education, but in some ways they surpassed her, not to mention me.

I will return to the settlements by the time I left for the front in 1942. I hugged Pyotr Sergeyevich and Marfa Pavlovna and thanked them for everything they had done: for their care, treatment, care, for everything, for everything. I bowed at my feet, and Maryushka, bidding me farewell and weeping, said: "I will wait for you, Alyosha, until the end of my life, if only the Lord will preserve us." They blessed me once more and left that very night. I won't tell you much about how we managed to pass through the territory occupied by the Germans, danger lurked everywhere on the roads, in the forest, in an abandoned collective farm shed: I bypassed destroyed villages, concentrations of German troops, somehow managed to elude enemy patrols, the Lord and the Mother of God kept it. Once, in the woods at night, he unexpectedly ran into a German unit, left for a long time, chased with dogs, but left. I got to the front, there were German units everywhere, but still managed to crawl through a deep ravine to our troops at night, somewhere in the area of Gzhatsk. He met our combat guards, rushed joyfully, I said wounded near Smolensk, good people helped, no one listened, tied their hands and took them to a special department. They interrogated me for three days, day and night, without food or water. The questions are the same: where did he surrender, by whom was he abandoned, what school did the Abwehr attend, passwords, safe houses, who is the radio operator? I'm trying to say: wounded, look, the legs don't believe anything. The German Walther pistol, which I took for protection when moving through enemy territory, was one of the main proofs for the special agents that I was an agent abandoned by the Germans. Of course, this happened not to me alone, but to many hundreds of thousands of soldiers and officers who were in captivity and went over to the front to their own.

Having achieved nothing, he was sent to a filtration camp, somewhere near Ryazan, he stayed there for four months, lost two molars, was interrogated every other day, the questions were the same as those of the special agents; Especially zealous was the young investigator with merry eyes, blond and handsome, who beat laughing, cursing merrily, furiously, and the farther he struck, the more cheerful it became before the eyes of the person being questioned. There were a lot of investigators, but Smirnov remembered his name for the rest of his life, and his name was the same as me, Alexei, and for some reason this amused him especially, and he often repeated, as it seemed to him, a wonderful joke: Alexei Smirnov will finish off Alyoshka's enemy. I knew that I was threatened with execution, but the sentence was not read, but sent to the Gulag for a period of ten years. I got to the logging site, the work was hard, hungry, but easier than in the filtration one, at least because there were no interrogations and no beatings, but only the production rate was required by cubic meters and cubic meters of felled wood.

After spending five months at a logging site, suddenly prisoners, former officers (commanders) were urgently gathered, put into a wagon and taken to who knows where, but from the windows of the teplushkas they soon saw broken military equipment, mangled wagons, stations, echelons with troops being taken to the front. We arrived, disembarked from the wagons, led us under escort, lined us up and announced that we were soldiers of a marching battalion and that tomorrow we would be brought into the first line of defense in the trenches. There was a huge battalion of convicts, all of whom held the rank of officer from junior lieutenant to colonel; Probably more than a thousand people gathered a battalion for a regiment in terms of numbers. They distributed weapons, brought them into the trenches at night, and in the morning they distributed cartridges, three grenades each, and gave the order to knock the Germans out of the first line of defense, to entrench, warning them not to retreat, a barrage detachment with machine guns behind, only forward.

We got up and went to the front line of the German defenses, we could see the wire obstacles, the high earthen roll. We ran about two hundred meters, the Germans opened heavy fire from machine guns, machine guns, grenade launchers, and cannons. I ran forward with everyone, mentally repeating: Lord Jesus, Son of God, have mercy on me, a sinner! He repeated it incessantly, he could not keep any other prayers in his thoughts, for this prayer was brief, but it contained the meaning and arrangement of all prayers to God, and while praying, he understood that at any moment he could be killed, and from this inquiry he became even more deeply immersed in prayer and at the same time saw what was happening around him.

In the first minutes of the German bombardment, half of the battalion fell dead and wounded, and those who managed to survive and run and tried to overcome the wire barriers were left hanging dead on the barbed wire. Nevertheless, some of the survivors, including myself, broke into the German trenches and in fierce hand-to-hand combat destroyed the Germans and occupied a large section of the defense.

As soon as we occupied the German trenches and suppressed the German firing points, the army units marched in, and we, the prisoners, were quickly rounded up, our weapons were taken away, searched and taken to the rear under heavy guard. Probably no more than two hundred people survived. We were led back, I noticed that the dead prisoners were lying with their heads towards the Germans, it was impossible to retreat, machine-gun fire from the barrage detachment was waiting for us. The battle of the marching battalion, consisting of a thousand prisoners, former officers, was nothing but the shooting of prisoners. Having given the order to advance (there was no preliminary artillery bombardment and bombing of the German defenses), we were sent to certain death, we were considered not people, but garbage.

Ten days later, the convicts, former officers (commanders), were brought in again; We, who were left over from the first offensive, were merged into a new marching battalion, transferred to another sector of the front, where we tried to occupy the German trenches and suppress the firing points, but failed, and almost all died, I was seriously wounded, ended up in the hospital, spent months in a hospital bed, and, most importantly for me, I had an X-ray of my legs and healed multiple fractures. When I told the surgeons how my grandmother Anna treated me, they laughed and did not believe me. An X-ray of my legs later helped me to check my biography in the NKVD.

He was treated, sent to a penal battalion, thrown into battle three times, remained unharmed twice, received a bullet and shrapnel wound the third time, spent three and a half months in the hospital, and was simply sent to the army. He fought like everyone else, was demobilized from the army as a lieutenant in July 1945, came to Moscow to his mother, where he had lived before, was registered not without difficulty, and began to look for a job. I will come and fill out a questionnaire: in the columns whether I was in captivity, on enemy territory, in prison, in camps, I write that I was. They will look at it when politely, and sometimes rudely, they refuse. He got a job in industrial cooperation as an accountant. Of course, he left the army and as soon as he was demobilized, he wrote letters to Marfa Pavlovna, Maryushka, Pyotr Sergeyevich and with all his heart longed for them, but he could not go right away.

A friend of mine, with whom I studied, worked in a defense box near Moscow, as the head of the computational mathematics department, invited me to work with him. I came to the HR department (there was an application for me), filled out a questionnaire, wrote a long autobiography, they asked me for a long time and, imagine, sympathetically, they told me to come back in three months, I decided that the number was empty, they just politely refused and I would not be able to get a job, then only my friend found out several times asked the head of the enterprise about me. A month passed, I was summoned to the military registration and enlistment office, to room number 13; I went to the information desk and asked where the thirteenth was. The captain looked at me and somehow pitifully showed me where to go. I found the door and knocked. Log. Two soldiers in the uniform of the NKVD were sitting, they invited me to sit down, took out two huge folders and began to ask where I was born, studied, the army, the unit, when my legs were broken, and I saw an X-ray; where he crossed the front, the camps, the assault battalion, the penal battalion, in general, he told everything, even about grandmother Anna and about the Vyropayev family. They asked me and looked at each of my answers, apparently the documents in the folders. They interrogated me for four hours, sometimes they asked me to leave the room, I think they called me on the phone.

At the end of the interrogation, one of them said: Everything coincides with the documents. A month later, I received a letter to report to the personnel department, and I was hired, where I worked until nineteen hundred and eighty-seven. Without any troubles or difficulties, and in this was the great mercy of the Lord to me, a sinner.

While they were applying for a job, I went to Smolensk, to the villages, to Maryushka, picked up food in a backpack and two bags, there was only one thought: to meet as soon as possible. When I got there, the settlements suffered little, only eight of the forty yards burned down. Marfa Pavlovna's house was not damaged, but it was dilapidated and (so it seemed to me) smaller. The door is propped up with a stick, the owners are not at home. I was worried, there was no one to ask, not even the children on the street. I sat down on the logs, worried, waiting, it was already evening. I saw two women coming, and I rushed to them and saw Marfa Pavlovna; hugging, kissing, crying both and the first question, where is Maryushka? Where is Pyotr Sergeyevich?

We entered the house, dragged a backpack and bags and rushed to ask questions. Marfa Pavlovna said: There will be conversations afterwards, let us thank the Lord and our Lady the Mother of God, under whose protection she entrusted you and Maryushka, who has preserved you, and we began to pray. When they were finished, Marfa Pavlovna began to tell me, and I was all waiting for Maryushka, what had become of her during these years. She was sixteen years old, and now she is twenty-one years old, anything could have happened. As if reading my thoughts, Marfa Pavlovna said: "Don't worry, Alexei Maryushka has only been thinking about you, she has been waiting all these years. I heard footsteps, the door creaked, and my Maryushka came in, and I hid behind the curtain, and her first words were: "Mother, have you brought any letters from Alyosha?"

She washed her face and hands at the washstand, pulled and shook her dress, and with an eternal feminine gesture began to straighten her hair, which was braided into braids. He came up quietly, embraced Maryushka, shuddered, frightened, and angrily began to break out, turned around, clasped my arms around me, squeezed my head painfully, and whispered one phrase: Alyosha! Alyosha! Baby, it's back, it's back! Thank You, Lord! Thank you, Mother of God!