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“The War Like Hurricane Came to Our Land …”

On June 22, 1941, 78 years ago, the Great Patriotic War began. This date is one of the saddest for our country.

The news about the beginning of the war reached Vyoshenskaya before noon on June 22, 1941.

L.Y.Ushakova, a history teacher of Stanitsa Vyoshenskaya, wrote in her article: “Danger looming over the country”: “The war like hurricane came to our land, it burst with howling bombs and mines into our homes, into the peaceful life of our country…

On June 21, Saturday evening, the Vyoshensky District Communist Party Committee held a bureau meeting. There were discussed questions of weeding cereal and row crops,preparation for the grain harvest.

The theatre of Cossack collective farm youth showed the performance “Virgin Soil Upturned”.

Two days before the Great Patriotic War the pedagogical school of Vyoshenskaya held a grand graduate meeting. Mikhail Alexandrovich Sholokhov gave his bright and warm speech fatherly admonishing the would-be teachers for their difficult but noble work on upbringing and educating children – our hope.

And on Sunday, June 22, 1941, a terrible misfortune struck our country”.

By the evening of June 22, the district military registration and enlistment office had received 280 volunteer applications with a request to send them to the front.

With all his heart M.A.Sholokhov responded to the tragedy of the country. The writer sent an urgent telegram: “To the People's Commissar of Defence Timoshenko. Dear comrade Timoshenko! I ask you to enroll the Stalin Prize of the first degree awarded to me in the USSR Defence Foundation. By your call, at any moment I am ready to join the ranks of the Workers’ and Peasants’ Army and to defend our Motherland to the last drop of blood… Reserve Regiment Commissar of the Workers’ and Peasants’ Army Mikhail Sholokhov”.

L.Y.Ushakova writes: “On those days, the people were especially beneficially influenced by the articles, speeches,appeals and the whole work of our countryman writer M.A.Sholokhov.

M.A.Sholokhov wrote an article for the district newspaper passionately calling the Don Cossacks for defending the borders of our native country and expressing his hope that the enemy would be defeated just as the great-grandfathers smashed the troops of the Entente. This appeal helped many of the people to feel the danger hanging over the Motherland, everyone’s responsibility for its fate and the great desire to fulfill with honour the sacred duty to protect their native Fatherland”.

On June 23, there was a meeting in Stanitsa Vyoshenskaya. M.A.Sholokhov gave a warm speech for the countrymen going to the front: “We are waiting for messages about victory only from you. Don Cossacks were always in the forefront of the defenders of the sacred borders of our country. We are sure that you will continue the glorious martial traditions of the ancestors…”

Late in June 1941, the writer left for the front. Like other Soviet writers during the war years he became a war correspondent for the Sovinformbureau, the newspapers “Pravda” and “Krasnaya Zvezda”.

The Great Patriotic War was a big tragedy for M.A.Sholokhov as well as for all the people of our country.

Natalya Kirsanova

Yekaterina Karbysheva