Journalist and writer Vasily Sarychev has been writing down the memoirs of old-timers for fifteen years, fixing the history of the western region of Belarus through their destinies. His new story, written especially for TUT.BY, is dedicated to Soviet women, who in 1941 were left to fend for themselves by the Soviet authorities. During the occupation, they were forced to survive, including with the help of the Germans.

Vasily Sarychev is working on a series of books "In Search of Lost Time". As the author notes, this is “the history of Europe in the mirror of a Western Belarusian city, which was told by old people who survived six authorities” (Russian Empire, German occupation during the First World War, the period when Western Belarus was part of Poland, Soviet power, German occupation during the Second World War wars and again Soviet power).

Fundraising for the publication of a new book by Sarychev from the series “In Search of Lost Time” ends on the crowdfunding platform “Beehive”. On the page of this project, you can get acquainted with the content, study the list of gifts and participate in the publication of the book. Participants will receive a book as a gift for the New Year holidays.

TUT.BY has already published Vasily about the incredible fate of an ordinary person who fell into the millstones of big politics, “polite people” from 1939, and about escaping naked from prison. New story dedicated to the wives of Soviet commanders.

When Western Belarus was annexed to the USSR, they came to our country as winners. But then, when their husbands retreated to the east with the active army, no one needed them. How did they survive under the new government?

I'm on you like in a war. Abandoned

“Let your Stalin feed you!”

Many years ago, in the sixties, there was an incident at the checkpoint of a Brest factory. The enterprise is more female, after the change of workers, an avalanche hurried home, and conflicts occurred in the crush. They did not look at faces: whether it was an editorial or a deputy, they applied it with proletarian frankness.

At the turnstile, as in a bath, everyone is equal, and the wife of the commander from the Brest Fortress, who headed the factory trade union - not yet old, twenty years had not passed since the war, having survived the occupation - was pushing on a common basis. Maybe she hit someone - with her elbow or during distribution - and the young weaver, who heard from her friends such things that they don’t write about in the newspapers, whipped backhand: “German prostitute!” - and she grabbed her breasts and croaked: “If you have small children ...”

So in one phrase - the whole truth about the war, with many shades, from which we were carefully taken away.

In conversations with people who survived the occupation, at first I could not understand when they made the remark “this is already after the war” and began to talk about the Germans. For the inhabitant of Brest, hostilities flashed in one morning, and then another power, three and a half years of deep German rear. Different categories of citizens - locals, Easterners, Poles, Jews, Ukrainians, party workers who got out from behind the wire of prisoners, commander's wives, soltyses, policemen - each had their own war. Some survived the misfortune at home, where neighbors, relatives, where the walls help. It was very bad for those whom hard times caught in a foreign land.

Before the war, they arrived in the “liberated” western region as mistresses - yesterday's girls from the Russian hinterland, who pulled out a lucky ticket (we are talking about the events of 1939, when Western Belarus was annexed to the USSR. - TUT.BY). To marry a lieutenant from a stationed regiment meant to take off in status. And here - the "liberation campaign" and in general a different world, where people, when they meet, raise the brim of their hats and turn to "pan", where in the store without an appointment there are bicycles with wonderfully curved handlebars, and private traders smoke a dozen varieties of sausages, and for a penny you can take at least five cuts on the dress ... And all these people look at them with their husband with caution - they look right ...

Nina Vasilievna Petruchik - by the way, the cousin of Fyodor Maslievich, whose fate was already in the chapter “Polite People of 1939”, recalled that autumn in the town of Volchin: “The wives of the commanders were in boots, printed cotton dresses with flowers, black velvet jackets and huge white scarves. At the market, they began to buy embroidered nightgowns and, out of ignorance, put them on instead of dresses ... "

Maybe the weather was like this - I'm talking about boots, but they are met by clothes. This is how an eleven-year-old girl saw them: very poor people came. People, chuckling, sold nightgowns, but laughter with laughter, and the newcomers became the masters of life in a year and a half before the war.

But life calculates for random happiness. It was these women, perceived with hostility, with children in their arms, with the outbreak of war, who were left alone in an alien world. From a privileged caste they suddenly turned into pariahs, thrown out of the queues with the words: “Let your Stalin feed you!”.

It was not so with everyone, but it was, and it is not for us now to judge the ways of survival that young women chose. The easiest thing was to find a guardian who would warm and feed the children, and protect them somewhere.

“Limousines with German officers drove up to the building and took away young women, the inhabitants of this house”

Vasily Prokopuk, a boy from the time of the occupation, who was snooping around the city with his friends, recalled that on the former Moskovskaya (we are talking about one of the Brest streets. - TUT.BY) one could see young women with soldiers walking in the direction of the fortress. The narrator is convinced that it was not local girls who “spasted” under the arm, for whom it is more difficult to accept such courtship: there were parents, neighbors, in whose eyes the church grew, finally. Maybe polkas are more relaxed? - “What are you, the Poles have ambition! my respondents answered. “There was a case, a panenka was seen flirting with an occupier - the priest screwed this into his sermon ...”

"The war is walking around Russia, and we are so young ..." - three and a half years is a long time in a short Indian century. But this was not the main motive - the children, their eternally hungry eyes. The troubled boys did not delve into the subtleties, they muttered contemptuously about women from the former houses of the officers: “They found themselves ...”

“In the center of the courtyard,” writes the author, “there was a rather exotic wing in which lived a German major, our present chief, along with a beautiful young woman and her little child. We soon learned that this ex-wife Soviet officer, left to the mercy of fate in the tragic days of the Red Army in June 1941. In the corner of the barracks yard stood a three-story brick building inhabited by the abandoned families of Soviet officers. In the evenings, limousines with German officers drove up to the building and took away the young women who lived in this house.”

The situation allowed options. For example, weren't the commander's wives forcibly taken away? According to Ivan Petrovich, “it was a small barracks, converted into a residential building, with several apartments per floor. Young women lived here, mostly with small children. It is possible that even before the war it was the house of the command staff, where the families found the war: I did not see guards or any signs of forced detention.

More than once or twice, I witnessed how the Germans drove up here in the evening: our camp was across the parade ground from this house. Sometimes they dropped in on the commandant, other times straight. It was not a trip to a brothel - they were going to the ladies. They knew about the visit, smiled like good friends. Usually the Germans came in the evening, went upstairs, or the women themselves went out dressed up, and the cavaliers took them away, one might assume, to a theater or a restaurant. I didn’t have to catch the return, with whom the children were, I can’t know. But everyone in the camp knew that these were the wives of the commanders. They understood that for women it was a means of survival.”

Here's how it turned out. IN last days before the war, commanders and party workers who wanted to take their families out of the city were accused of alarmism and expelled from the party - and now women have been left for the use of Wehrmacht officers.

The son's name was Albert, the Germans came - he became Adolf

It would be wrong to say that the women left behind were looking for such support, it was just one of the ways to survive. Unpopular, stepping over the line, beyond which - gossip and piercing glances.

Women who came to Western Belarus from the east often lived in twos, threes, it was easier to survive. They went to distant (they didn’t give them to the neighbors) villages, but you can’t live on alms alone, they settled down to wash wagons, barracks, and soldiers’ dormitories. The German once gave the wife of a political worker from the artillery regiment big postcard, and she hung it on the wall to decorate the room. Many years have passed since the war, and the baboons remembered the picture - they vigilantly looked at each other during the war.

The wife of the battalion commander of the rifle regiment, who stood in the fortress before the war, at the beginning of the occupation rewrote little son from Albert to Adolf, she came up with such a move, and after the release she again made Albert. Other widows moved away from her, turned away, but for the mother this was not the main thing.

Someone will be closer to her truth, someone to the heroic Vera Khoruzhey, who insisted on going to the occupied Vitebsk at the head of an underground group, leaving a baby and a little daughter in Moscow.

Life is multifaceted, and those who survived the occupation remembered different things. And a romantic-minded person who left the terrible building of the SD was clearly not after torture, and the German’s love for a Jewish girl, whom he hid to the last and went to a penal company for her, and a city plantation worker who hastily appeased a Wehrmacht soldier nearby in the park until she was shot by a client who caught a bad disease. In each case, it was different: where is the food, where is the physiology, and somewhere - a feeling, love.

Outside of service, the Germans became gallant wealthy males. Bright in her youth, the beauty N. said: at least don’t go beyond the threshold - they stuck like ticks.

Statistics will not answer how many red-haired babies were born during the war and after the expulsion of the Germans from the temporarily occupied territory, as well as with the Slavic appearance in Germany at the beginning of the 46th ... This is a delicate topic to take deeply, and we went somewhere then to the side...

Maybe in vain in general about commander's wives - there were enough restless women of all statuses and categories, and they all behaved differently. Someone tried to hide their beauty, while someone, on the contrary, turned it to good. The wife of the commander of the reconnaissance battalion Anastasia Kudinova, older, shared shelter with young partners who also lost their husbands in the fortress. All three with children - such a kindergarten-day nursery. As soon as the Germans appeared, she smeared her friends with soot and kept her away from the window. I was not afraid for myself, my friends joked, our old maid ... They pulled their mother's strap and survived without the enemy's shoulder, then they joined the fight.

They were not alone, many remained faithful, waiting for their husbands throughout the war and later. However, the opposition - arrived, local - is not entirely true. Everywhere there are cultured and not very cultured people, with principles and creeping, pure and vicious. And there are depths in any person where it is better not to look, the nature of all sorts of things mixed up, and what will manifest itself with greater force depends largely on the circumstances. It so happened that since June 22, 1941, the most destitute, stunned by these circumstances, were the “easterners”.

Another would not be missed - the reason. How did it happen that you had to flee to Smolensk and further, leaving weapons, warehouses, the entire army of personnel, and in the border areas - also wives to the delight of Wehrmacht officers?

Then there was a noble rage, the science of hatred in a journalistic performance and a real one, which increased tenfold strength in battle. This hatred helped to carry out combat missions, but in a surprising way it was not transferred to the direct culprits of many sufferings.

I went to the site for a completely different purpose and suddenly saw this topic, which I could not pass by. So - I am the daughter of an officer, and my mother (she is no longer there), respectively, is the wife of an officer. In the distant 50s, my dad didn’t have to particularly choose a profession - he had to get on his feet as soon as possible, since there were parents and two little sisters behind him. In addition, my father's uncles were already in the military at that time, one even fought. That's how it's been since then. None of us have any regrets. Dad gave everything to the service, including health. He went from Kushka to Moscow (the so-called central office) - without any patronage and "shaggy hand". My parents and, in particular, my mother went through everything. In Kushka, for example, where I was born, we lived in the former dressing room of the tsarist officers (refurbished, but still...). When you turn on the light in the room in the evenings, my mother first of all examined the walls for the presence of phalanges (scalpug) and so on. spidery filth. Several times I found scorpions in my diapers. And there were also small mosquitoes, from the bite of which there were wounds that healed for a long time and left behind a trace for life - the so-called pendinki (I also have this "seal", but in an inconspicuous place and small). With all this, there were many domestic inconveniences. But on the other hand, there were excellent human relations when everyone was together - both on weekdays and on holidays. Then there were Kyiv (where dad studied) and Orenburg (where he was sent by distribution). There were many difficulties, the main of which was that I did not have my own apartment. I even remember how the three of us walked around and asked in the yards if anyone was renting out housing ... Naturally, I had to pay for an apartment - and not so little money. In addition, I had to get along with the hostess and her family, because sometimes they lived with the owners in the same apartment. And you know - my mother always succeeded! Only now I understand how much she had to endure! Our family was strong. Friendship was struck up, if not for life (after all, distances did their job), then at least for years. The day before yesterday we buried our neighbor - who also went through this difficult path. And also a wonderful family! They also noted that the wife went through all the difficulties with her husband (she even fell under the bombing when there was a conflict between Egypt and Israel), while not losing patience, not being capricious, but, on the contrary, supporting and accompanying her husband in everything, creating comfort out of nothing and warm). I'm not exaggerating anything. My fate was different. Didn't get married at all. Apparently, this "caste" also affected. I didn’t find “her” one, because during the years when I "married" with light hand of our rulers, the collapse of the army began, but did not want to go lower. And I don't regret anything either. There must be harmony in the soul. I understood and felt that a "simple" locksmith or driver is not mine. I don’t want to offend anyone, but that’s how I felt and understood it personally for myself. In general, we, the daughters of military personnel, had a problem with marriage. Most of us represented our family by the example of our parents. Therefore, not every boy who started trying to court met these criteria. Of course, there were exceptions. Some of us began to smoke, to behave more freely - they immediately began to succeed in their personal lives ... But I don’t know with what result as a result of many years of life, because. connections are lost. I don’t want to say that everything is so bad now in terms of the life of the military and everything connected with it. But quite recently I had a colleague - the wife of a serviceman. So, against the background of all her outpourings on the topic of how she loves her husband and cannot live without him, she did not go with him when his academy was taken out of Moscow to ... No, not to Kushka, but only to Kostroma with a return to Moscow in ... no, not 10-20 years, but only in a year or two ... She only whined: well, when will this damn academy return her husband to her? Like this...

"Astrakhan World", No. 36 (707), dated 09/12/2013

Tatyana Leukhina, Znamensk

I remember it was in 1972. Early March. It was as if we had specially guessed so that we would come to Kapustin Yar for
a few days before the women's holiday in order to have time to prepare for the first joint family celebration. Husband
decided to invite colleagues and introduce them to his wife. The young lieutenants who came together to serve on
the famous training ground, there was an unspoken rule: if you bring your wife, show your friends the newly minted lieutenant. Sometimes it happened that after such gatherings between young families a friendship was struck up that lasted for years, according to
at least as long as the officers remained to serve at their training ground. I was looking forward to how I would prepare for such an important event, especially since before that I had not had to either set tables on my own or take a large number of guests. In a word, I had a test.

Of course, I was afraid that I might not be able to cope. One hope was for the help of her husband. And if he is not a master in terms of cooking? During the time of our acquaintance before the wedding, there was no chance to find out about this - on romantic dates, as a rule, about
they don't say things like that. The Vilnius plane landed at the airport in Volgograd with a big delay - they made an emergency landing in Kharkov and stayed there for several hours. So now from the hero city to Kapyar could only be reached by taxi. Fortunately, the lieutenant's salary at that time allowed me to do this. It got cold by night, but the dashing taxi driver, having learned that he was taking the newlyweds, drove at full speed, so sometimes it was even breathtaking, especially on that part of the highway where certain sections of the highway were covered with a crust of ice, as if
it rained during the day. But these icings were caused by completely different reasons. Only after living for some time in the edge of the steppes and
semi-deserts, I found out: in these places there is no rain in March, not like in the Baltic states, and frosts in the first decade of March are worse than in January. It was impossible to talk inside the car. Even being close by (we sat in the back seat hugging all the way), we did not hear each other's voices - everything was roaring, ringing and rattling inside the car, and rubber was also squealing outside. Closer to midnight, the taxi stopped at the Volgograd checkpoint. To be honest, our
the young family was already two months old by this time, but we were still real newlyweds: immediately after the wedding, my husband left and returned for me only after he was given a room for our joint residence.
True, there was no warrant in hand yet, but the order had already been signed. Here he is to celebrate on a day off, asking the commander to visit him for two more days, and flew to Vilnius for me. He warned in advance that we might not be able to immediately move into our first joint housing. The GZHCh, where warrants were issued, worked during the hours when the officers were on duty. But could reasons so trifling as it seemed to me at the time have prevented me from going? Yes, and the parents were convinced that the young from the very beginning should live together. “After all, you are not going to a remote village,” he reassured
father, - there is probably a hotel there - at first you can live there. The main thing - the apartment is allocated. When we arrived in Vilnius, at first we also had only rented housing. In the end, as they say, with a sweet paradise and in a hut.
Loaded with suitcases, we immediately set off along the deserted streets to the Uyut Hotel, the only one in the town. They say the first impression is the strongest. So, my first impression of the military town, where I
had to live, as it turns out, the rest of his life, was very ambiguous. Not only were there no people on the streets at all, but in the houses we passed, no matter how hard I looked, I did not see a single luminous window. And the lighting on the streets themselves seemed insufficient to me. After Vilnius, where nightlife
illuminated by bright colorful illumination, everything here immediately seemed dull and gloomy to me.
In the few minutes that we spent on the road to the hotel (it was only two blocks from the checkpoint), what thoughts just came to mind - one more disturbing than the other. In these very moments in my hometown people are returning home from theaters, from cafes and restaurants, couples in love are walking along the streets at night - after all, spring has come, trolleybuses are moving smoothly along the roadway, cars are scurrying about, taxis are sparkling with green lights ... Here, while we are walking, we are not not a single car overtook And I, stupid, also wanted to offer my husband to catch a taxi. The best transport for those who have a travel bag in each hand, even if it is as small as mine, cannot be found. As it turned out, she did well that she didn’t mention a taxi - there simply weren’t any in the town. This first night in Capjar promised me a lot of surprises and a lot of different impressions. I'll start with the hotel. What I didn’t expect at all was that, given the availability of rooms, we could not be accommodated in any of them without special instructions. And to the question
where we should spend the night, in response I heard a categorical: “Wherever you want, spend the night there. It's your problems". Even in the foyer they were not allowed to sit to warm up. So we, with our luggage, again found ourselves on a dank night street. While she was sitting on the steps of the porch, spreading the first warm thing pulled out of her bag, her husband returned to the hotel. I thought he would persuade the angry duty officer to let us at least spend the night, but she only allowed to call the military
part of the attendant. When, joyful and smiling, my husband flew out of the hotel doors, I felt completely numb. The only thing that could warm me at that moment was the good news about the lodging for the night. news, with
with which my husband approached me, were really about an overnight stay, only in fact it was oh so far from him!
As the duty officer told him, after consulting with one of the authorities, we could be temporarily settled in the dormitory of the unit, on the territory of the town, but for this we still had to get to the 30-ku and take a referral from the duty officer. Alas, getting there at night was out of the realm of fantasy. My lieutenant, seeing that I was literally falling off my feet, managed to take all four bags and led me to the cinema "Youth" - the most illuminated place in the city, where there were benches. There he left me and ran for permission to move in right along the roadway. God! How far did he have to run! Only I didn’t know it then, but he knew - and he ran anyway. Only those who have ever served in the thirty can understand that such a march on a frosty March night in wedding shoes on a thin leather sole and in a short jacket with fish fur is akin to a small feat.
Night, silence, not a soul around. I feel so alone in a world that is still alien to me, as if I accidentally ended up on a distant planet, on which it is possible to settle down only after going through enormous difficulties. I involuntarily raise my head to the sky, as if trying to find my native planet, abandoned, it seems, forever. That's truly
a game of imagination: I try to find with my eyes the familiar constellations, which I have often admired on quiet, gentle nights in Lithuania, but I can’t find them. With my mind I understand that both there and here the same sky of the northern hemisphere, but why am I
I don’t recognize him, why does it seem so distant and alien to me? And why the glow of the stars here strikes with its piercing
coldness? Why do I feel so uncomfortable under this sky? ..

Two hours later, to me, lined on all sides travel bags, a policeman came up. I was so happy with him, for some reason deciding that he would certainly take me to the duty unit, because I didn’t have any documents with me. My husband took my passport with him. After listening to my story, the policeman,
that’s what she didn’t expect at all, without waiting for my consent, she picked up the bags and, without any preludes, offered to spend the night with him. Apparently, noticing that I was literally dumbfounded by such a proposal, he reassured me: “What did you think about,
cute girl? Get up, otherwise you are completely frozen to the bench. I live nearby, on Lenin Street. Now we'll come, we'll wake up my wife, she'll give you hot tea to drink. Maybe he’ll pour something hotter, and then put him to bed. I'll come back here and wait for your lieutenant. Do you have any idea how long it will take him to turn back and forth?” I
and in fact I was so cold that I was afraid that I wouldn’t sit in the frost for more than ten minutes. I just started to rise, I look, and along the road, wide open, my Volodenka runs, waving his hand, in which the necessary piece of paper is clutched, which even in the darkness of the night street turned white for me with the long-awaited light of a lighthouse in the raging sea. True, the adventures of our first night on Kapyar land were not over yet.

The dormitory attendant, a woman of pre-retirement age, apparently long forgotten what it is to feel like a newlywed, dissatisfied with the fact that she was woken up in the middle of the night, looked for glasses for a long time, and then just as long studied the contents of a small piece of paper, on which only a few words. She did not even invite us to sit down, however, it seems that there were no chairs there. Well, what she said, after examining the paper, she said, as if she had pronounced a sentence: “Follow me, woman. I will take you to a spare room. And you, young man, go to your thirty. Are you registered there?" Volodya followed us with things. Only when he was in the room where there were two iron beds, he dared to ask the duty officer to allow him to stay here for the night, but he was refused: “The direction says only about your wife,
See for yourself, - and she handed us a piece of paper that had had time to pretty wrinkled, - there is not a word about you, as you can see.
And only after I burst into tears, trying through tears to tell about the misadventures of the day and the night steadily moving towards morning, the woman took pity on us, grumbling in the end: “I’ll just ask the second bed not
enjoy. I put fresh linen in the evening. What if in the morning they send some more tenant? We didn't have dinner.
although both were deadly hungry, and, needless to say, not in the mood for lovemaking. We had one desire for two: to fall on a narrow bed, to snuggle up to each other, rather in order not to fall than in order to warm up,
although both were chilled, and plunged into sleep. But the young lieutenant had only two hours to sleep - that was how much time was left before the departure of the car that was supposed to take him to the service ...

In modern society, interest has grown in the study of small groups acting as a social microenvironment that has a direct impact on the individual. A small group is a kind of community in which certain social relations are realized, and which, at the same time, are mediated joint activities. Consideration of such communities allows us to most fully reveal the picture of everyday life, to consider the life of an ordinary person.

One example of a closed community is one in which a person's behavior strategy is built in accordance with ideas about the people around him. These representations form knowledge about daily practices and their temporal distribution among the residents of the town during the day, work features, preferences and interests, values ​​inherent in one or another category of people living here.

The limited space, "life in plain sight", close relationships in a military camp leads, on the one hand, to the cohesion of the inhabitants, and on the other, to the formation of separate communities in the military environment, for example, women's. In Soviet times, women, having the opportunity to make a career on an equal basis with men, to participate in public life, faced a difficult choice between family priorities and their own needs for self-realization. The wife of an officer, being a civilian, nevertheless, experienced all the "hardships and hardships of military service", which often expressed for her in the absence of the possibility of growth in professional and culturally and general dissatisfaction with life. Since on the territory of the military camp the position of women as a whole initially depended on the attitude towards their husbands-officers, and within the residential part of the town, women formed a relatively independent community with their own hierarchy and organization of life. This determined the research interest of the authors in the study and analysis of this problem using the biographical method. The study was conducted in April-October 2011 (the sample consisted of 10 women from 45 to 84 years old) and made it possible to identify the features of the life stories of wives. No other male profession has such an impact on the position of women in society as the military profession. On the one hand, the phrase “military wife” itself is just a definition of the marital status of a woman, and more is said about the husband than about the woman herself.

But on the other hand, behind this definition there is a whole layer of specific ideas, the wife of a military man is an independent female status not only within the military community, but also civil. The definition of "officer's wife" is self-sufficient, enshrined in the language as an independent formula, and behind it is a whole layer of ideas related to a certain generalized image. In the course of the study, we covered a fairly large period of time, in connection with which one can notice certain changes that have occurred in the daily routine of military camps and in the minds of people. All respondents who participated in the study had an education and a profession, and during the survey there was such a tendency that predominantly all women had a pedagogical, medical or economic education. “It has always been interesting for me to observe the pattern “the work of the husband is the work of the wife”.

I even compiled some rough statistics. It turns out that more than 50% of officer wives work as teachers, medical workers or chefs. Another 40% are housewives, trade workers, and only 10% are engaged in completely different things. Sometimes, it seems that God specially creates such couples for a strong union” (N.V., aged 51). The dating stories were quite similar. They took place at dance parties that were held in schools and institutes, as well as among friends.

So, for example, several respondents in their youth went to dances in military schools, and some, on the contrary, tell how festive events were held in their educational institutions, to which young people from military schools were invited. Short and rare, due to barracks life, meetings of the cadet, as a rule, ended with a marriage proposal. Graduation at the school, golden shoulder straps, wedding and departure to the place of service. This is where the romance ended, and the harsh everyday life began. “Beyond the walls of the military camp there was a different life ... It was an army, the service may be inconspicuous, without shoulder straps and titles, but just as difficult, and maybe even harder, than that of her husband. Not everyone survived” (E.S., 47 y.). A military camp is related to a military unit as a women's space is to a man's. Women are mainly engaged in the organization of everyday life, and men are engaged in military service.

Women's and men's perceptions of the appropriateness of space occupied in the town are determined according to relatively different value systems. The identity of an officer's wife is initially formed through the awareness of self-affirmation, primarily through the achievements of her husband. The service hierarchy directly affects the relationship of their wives, defining the boundaries of communication between them. And this is clearly seen in the stories of the respondents themselves. The key moments in the life of an officer's wife are: early (most often) marriage, the birth of children (in the very first years of marriage), constant moving from one military camp to another, everyday overcoming of difficulties associated with the remoteness of towns from administrative centers, lack of work, therefore , in most cases a life-long profession of a housewife. Since, on average, the family of a serviceman moves 3-5 times during the service of an officer. For a civilian, moving is always an event, and a turning point in his personal destiny. For members of military families, this is a completely predictable and inevitable fact. Within the framework of the “common destiny”, a change of residence, on the one hand, is a common phenomenon, one might even say, “routine”.

"Life on suitcases", temporary housing, lack of own " hearth”- all these topics make up the idea of ​​​​the general fate of the military. At the same time, undoubtedly, the fact of changing the place of service of an officer is an event in the life of the whole family, but an event that does not go beyond the usual course of things. In general, moving does not entail a change in the living environment. There is a certain "knowledge" about the types of military camps, the hierarchy of its inhabitants, the conditions of relationships between people, the usual types of everyday practices that are formed in the process of living in a military camp. Therefore, the development of events is predicted in accordance with this knowledge. An important place in a woman's life is how she distributes time during the day. A military wife lives the life of her husband: her daily routine is entirely focused on the departure / arrival of her husband.

In his absence, she takes care of household chores; violations in a clear schedule are always associated with the service of an officer, and the wife is able to "explain" any delays of her husband at work or his absence for a certain time ("urgent business trip", "exercises", "barracks position", after all, "something It happened at work." This is expressed in phrases such as: "our service." Regardless of whether a woman works or not, her main “profession” is the duties of a “military wife”. “The regime was certain, it was normal, sometimes they went to the exercises, To the exercises ... for three days, in general, not for long, but the fact that you yourself are always there is unequivocal. The only thing he left at eight, from two to four break, as it should be at this time, I have to feed, drink and put him to bed, he had to rest, as expected, and he left until eight in the evening. And you're alone all day, that's for sure. These are household chores, girlfriends, you will go, take a walk. On weekends he is in a dress or somewhere else ”(E.P., 48 years old). An important place in the life of any woman is occupied by a child, but in the life of a military camp, a child is important condition the involvement of a woman in a social circle consisting of neighbors and other women with children - "mommies", which are the majority in a military camp. “You quickly get to know each other there, everyone walks with strollers, the neighbors help each other out a lot, at least they lived very friendly.

The specifics of the garrison, they are rocket men, they went on duty for weeks. They went on weekly duty, i.e. I haven't had my husband for a week, as they say, do it yourself” (S.S., aged 47). In general, a characteristic feature of the composition of the population of a military town has always been complete families, which consisted of a husband, wife and children. Unmarried girls in the towns are, as a rule, only the eldest daughters in officer families. There were almost no other unmarried women in military camps, because the only way to become its resident was to marry a military man. As a rule, everyone in the unit knew single women living without a husband, in this case we are talking, first of all, about divorced women, who most often remained in the unit after a divorce. On the territory of the military camp, they became the object of increased attention and evaluation.

Single women are associated with such everyday plots as pandering and sexual relations with married officers. “... we shared our thoughts with each other that husbands should not be left, because there are many divorced and all of them, as a rule, remain in the same town, the husbands leave further according to distribution. Therefore, one must protect one's own, vigilant. She gave birth to children and did not go to her mother, we only went on vacation together once a year, for two months with the children” (S.S., aged 47). All conflicts that arose in the women's society were resolved with the participation of the Women's Council. Very often, in the context of the interview, such a character as the “commander's wife” (“chief's wife”) appeared - an older woman who is the wife of an officer commanding a separate unit. The fact that the wives of the military, who are subordinate to the senior officer, recognize the seniority of his wife, calling her "the wife of the commander", this indicates that women form a separate part of the community of the military camp, the relationship between members of which is built in accordance with the hierarchy , according to the position of the husband.

The perception of the life of that time, the difficulties that one had to face: poor living conditions, constant moving, staying in places remote from the city's "benefits" - material and spiritual - are always present in stories about a past life, but most often they were overlapped by the fact that that "but it was friendly and fun," were young. Therefore, to the question “How can you evaluate your decision to marry an officer today?”, They answered positively: “Why not, love does great miracles, you will follow him anywhere, and you won’t have anything in the military - this is unequivocal, except for their state salary, they have no left money, ... therefore, one must be prepared for anything. At that moment, the officer's salary was enough to support me, my children, and save something else” (I.V., aged 45). Thus, our study shows that the study of small groups, the disclosure of internal connections, norms, and attributes specific to these groups is an important and promising area of ​​modern social research. Such studies make it possible to look into another "world", to look at a different reality through the eyes of its direct participants.

V.N. Rakachev, Ya.V. Rakacheva