Tkachev Sergei, People's Artist of the USSR. Pictures he painted in cooperation with his brother Alexei Tkachev are part of major museum collections, such as the Tretyakov Gallery in Moscow, the Russian Museum in St.Petersburg, and museums and private collections
 abroad. Sergei Tkachev decided that he would be an artist before the war. He joined the army as volunteer and fought with a machine-gun battalion. A sketch-book was a necessary component of his duffle bag. A war through the eyes of an artist is how he has preserved the war in his memory.
SERGEI PETROVICH, JUNE 1941. WOULD YOU RECALL THE TIME?
I was in Vitebsk when the war broke out. For a third-year student of the Vitebsk Art School that I was it came right out of the blue. We were all very young, I was 18. We were in love and we were painting. We were the happiest people on the earth. Young people of call-up age, we rushed to the military enlistment and registration office as soon as the war started. We wanted to fight the enemy at the fronts. But as we arrived to get ourselves enlisted we were told to go back home.
Sergei and Alexei Tkachevs. 1936.
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I come from Bryansk. And where I came from the war hadn't arrived yet. So I went home and took three Belorussians with me. They had nowhere to go. Minsk was captured on June 24th. I brought them home and my father arranged for them to work at a plant. I went to work for the plant too. We all worked at the ammunition shop.
Eventually my hometown was hit by the war too. The Nazis were bombing plants, the railway station. We saw German planes shot down. The horror of it! I remember my mother grabbing the suitcases and running to hide in the potato patches when the alarm siren came. My father and uncle were used to the bombardments and stayed in the house. "If they kill us, - they said, - it'll be in our home". My brother, Alexei, was 15. He didn't work at the plant. During the bombardments he and his fellow chaps ran to the Desna River and plunged right into it. He still remembers how the low-flying enemy planes fired volleys at the youngsters. Many of the kids went down.
Our plant was then evacuated to "Uralmash" in Sverdlovsk and to Nizhny Tagil. Our family went to Sverdlovsk. On August 16th our train loaded with lathes, equipment, women, children and workers started for the east. The day was hot and the streets were roamed by stray cows that need milking, vegetable gardens abounded in ripe tomatoes and potatoes, apple trees bent under the burden of apples. All this was left to the enemy and we were leaving into the unknown.
When I heard that the Germans had captured Bryansk I resolved to go to the fronts at whatever the cost. Workers of the ammunition shop were exempt from a call-up but I concealed this fact and managed to get myself enlisted. I was well-educated and I was athletic, with three years of vocational training school behind. I was assigned to the Lvov infantry school that was evacuated to Kirov (now Vyatka). It was at this school that I tasted a real army service. We were trained on the "Maxim" machine-gun, so I knew the gun inside out and was equipped in all respects to go to the front.
WHEN DID YOU FIND YOURSELF AT THE FRONT?
Stalin issued his famous decree ¹227
, the decree said: "Not a step backward. The enemy is advancing on Stalingrad. Rostov taken without order from the commander-in-chief". Our entire school was sent to fight with the 21st Rifle Division of the Guards that had fought surrounded by the enemy for three months and was in the process of being formed anew in Zagorsk. We were not elevated to the rank of officer, we were to fight as privates. The gunners were dispatched to join the 5th Guards Breakthrough Battalion.
At the front I made friends with Mikhail Atamanov, with whom we covered hundreds of kilometers. A heroic fellow! He was five and a half years older than me. When we reached the frontline he said: "Serezha, hold on to me, or you'll get yourself killed".
Flashing in my memory are towns, stations, villages, rivers and lakes that we passed with battles. Ferocious battles under Rzhev, on Zapadnaya Dvina, in Velikiye Luki, in Nevel. So many trenches and dugouts that you might think we were doing nothing else but digging during the war. The backbreaking night marches, always unexpected, the impassable roads. On November 25th 1942 a rumour reached us that Marshal Zhukov had arrived. We knew Zhukov, a number 1 military star. That inspired us. My last battle was in Belorussia in 1944.
WERE YOU WOUNDED?
The most horrible episode in my life occurred after a night battle from November 26th to 27th when we retreated behind Yezhevitsa Village in the Pskov Region and I was seriously wounded in my right arm. We broke into the outskirts of the village where the German kitchens were. On seeing us the Germans opened a sporadic gun-fire and we had to step back. It was freezing cold, we took up defenses. In the morning the Germans launched a counter-offensive. It was a nightmare I will remember for the last of my days. A figure moving, arms flung forward, eyes unseeing. A step, a second step, then the collapse. That was Zhenya Mikryukov, a gunner. He died several hours after. The kitchen arrived. The cook, Megunko, was a burly Ukrainian of about 35. He was serving watery porridge into the pots when several mines, one after another, went off right by the kitchen cart. Megunko dropped dead.
Sergei at the evacuation hospital (on the rignt). 1943.
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Our company commander, Lieutenant Ognetov, a daring fellow and a man of high integrity, ordered me to find the battalion commander and ask him to give us several anti-tank riflemen. As I ran I was spotted by a German watch. I hear a mine whistle, a mine blows up behind, then on the right, on the left. The fourth reached me. I felt something hit me fiercely in my right shoulder. I took a sharp turn aside and thereby cheated the enemy. The battalion commander, Seniour Lieutenant Kuznetsov, later made Hero of the USSR, was killed in 1944. We met merely by chance. He asks: "Are you wounded?" I say: "No". And only after I said that did I notice that my white mitten was covered in blood. The sight of it made me shrivel and I hurried to a bathhouse packed with wounded soldiers. The bathhouse was run by Vera Yarchak. She was a paramedic from Belorussia, a remarkable lady, only 17, and naturally, we all were in love with her. In the bathhouse she dressed the soldiers' wounds. Wounded lay huddled everywhere on the straw-covered floor, mainly with serious wounds or wounded in the leg. A lamp was lit, it was made of a cartridge-case. Vera cut off my sleeve and dressed my wound. And I cried like a fool, not because of pain, but because I was afraid I would never become an artist, since the wounded arm was the right one. Everyone who could walk was told to go to serve on the home front. I walked in the company of a young fellow. He was wounded in the thigh. I took him under his arm. Though limping, he walked on. Then we came under random mortar fire and one mine grazed his cheek making his teeth visible. The impression was that he was laughing all the time. The episode of both of us leaving the battlefield would later underlie a picture that we called "Comrades-in-Arms".
THE THIRST FOR DRAWING NEVER LEFT YOU DURING THE WAR. WAS THERE TIME FOR IT?
Sergei Tkachev. A sketch. 1943.
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The sketch-book was always with me. Between battles the fellows would ask: "Come on, let's make a photo". And I quickly made sketches and they sent them home. My friend, Misha Atamanov, said later: "I carried your sketch with me throughout the whole of the war until it was all worn-out".
My brother Alexei studied at the Moscow Art School for Endowed Children. His school was in evacuation in Bashkiria. We exchanged letters. One of his letters was dated November 1942. That was the time of hardest battles and Alexei wrote me of the death of a great Russian artist, Nesterov. We normally read letters to one another at the front. And as I read the letter the guys ask me: "Who is Nesterov?" So I told them. I will never forget this moment. The fear that I might fail to become an artist haunted me, tormented me all the time in those days.
WHERE DID YOU TAKE THE SUBJECTS FOR YOUR PICTURES OF THE WAR?
Everything began with episodes I witnessed or went through in the war. That was how our first picture of the war, "The Difficult Years", was born. We were on our way to a medical battalion, me and a lieutenant, both wounded in the arm. We walked into a deserted log-hut. The air was still warm and the clock was ticking time. Tick, tick, tick. I looked into the stove and saw some baked potatoes there. All of a sudden there comes a black kitten from somewhere under the stove and jumps on my knee. I gave him a piece of dried bread and he started to munch it. This is a ready subject for a picture. Though, we didn't take it all as it was in the original. We portrayed wounded soldiers sleeping on the floor nestled to one another. One old soldier, who became a soldier because he had to, sits on the floor and offers a piece of bread to the kitten. The second soldier is writing a letter home. The picture was a success and it made us turn to the war subjects.
Sergei and Alexei Tkachevs.
"The Difficult Years". 1955-1957.
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Sergei and Alexei Tkachevs.
M.I. Atamanov. 1995.
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WHAT IMPRESSIONS ACCOMPANIED YOUR PICTURES OF THE SPRING 1945?
Again, it was an episode. In 1944 our forces liberated Bryank and I was allowed a three-day holiday. I went to see whether my house had survived. As I came I saw the railway station in ruins. Next I come across a war invalid who says: "I see you came for a holiday. Just look what the Germans have done! Only the toilets have survived". Indeed, all large buildings had been reduced to rubble by bombs but the toilets were there. I approached where my house should be but there was nothing in its place, only a charred stove and a few apple trees. There was even a fence left. As I stood there the tears were running down my cheeks. Everything had been destroyed. The episode served the basis for a whole series of pictures. A one-armed soldier returns home to find a charred stove. He is met by his wife and little son.
AND HOW WAS THE PICTURE "A FRONT SHOEMAKER" BORN?
Sergei Tkachev. A front shoemaker. 1944.
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This is a whole story. In 1944 our division got reinforcements, many old hands. By that time I had earned the reputation of an artist. The guys had somehow come by German paints. And I somehow had got into possession of a piece of pasteboard from a German package box. Our shoemaker mended my boots and I had him pose for me. The pleasure I experienced painting him! And the guys, the scouts, my critics, stood behind saying: "You draw the smoke rising". The sketch was small, the size of a copybook sheet. By a miracle, it has survived to our day. The front shoemaker served the main prototype for the picture "The Difficult Years". Look, the soldier with the kitten looks very much like the shoemaker.
WHEN DID YOU RETURN HOME?
I was demobilized in November 1945. Carrying a plywood suitcase and with a duffel bag behind my shoulders I arrived in Sverdlovsk. Winter arrives early to the Ural Region. So flakes of snow were swirling in the air. The railway station was deserted. At that time we did not receive as much as welcome as the first demobilized. A war invalid approached me on a sleigh and asked my destination. So I put my things into his transport and sleighed off in the direction of "Uralmash", where my parents live. The invalid was slouching behind me. At my apartment door I was met by my mum. Of course, we had a celebratory party. The neighbours all came to marvel at my medals, and the invalid was with us too, like an old friend. Hard times bring people together. We were all as one big family.
Sergei and Alexei Tkachevs. The motherland. The Heroes. 1968.
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