L. MEDVEDKO

Doctor of Historical Sciences

The dedication of former front-line soldiers and those who were demobilized after the end of the Patriotic War, but did not have time to get to it, was remembered by me, the eldest of the authors, for the rest of my life.

INTRODUCTION TO THE EAST ON THE YAUZA RIVER

The Moscow Institute of Oriental Studies (MIV) was then located in Sokolniki, almost on the bank of the Yauza River. More than half of those who entered it in 1947 immediately began to be called "young students". But all of them were already experienced people. Some of them still have the front behind them. Others had a hard working childhood. My "tender age" then fell on the years of the Great Patriotic War.

Subsequent initiations to Orientalists of new generations took place on Mokhovaya Street in the center of Moscow*. Here, in 1956, the Institute of Oriental Languages (IVL) at Moscow State University was opened, later renamed, in 1970, the Institute of Asian and African Countries (ISAA), which opened the way for both my son and my grandson to get acquainted with the East.

There were still quite a few "hot spots"in the East since the war. We, children of "tender age", who put on cadet shoulder straps before the end of the war, did not have a chance to get to the front.

I remember well the first parting words of the director of the Institute in the assembly hall, crowded with first-year students. Among them there were students: once or twice and there were no more. There was almost no free time for romances with them during the "storming of the bastions of science". Besides, it wasn't encouraged. The director warned " girls from Japanese or Indian not to marry students from Arabic or Turkish." If both of them do not justify the state money spent on them, next year, it is unknown to whom he threatened, girls will not be admitted to the institute at all. And so it happened. In the next year after us, there was only one student.

The warning didn't seem to work. From the appearance in the Institute of "mixed couples", who entered, for example, in the last year in the "Indo-Turkish marriage", of course, not for convenience, then began to appear "unplanned" children. So was my son Sergey. In the Medvedko-Kalinnikova family, orientalists soon appeared not only in the second, but also in the third generations.

I remember the first lesson of the Turkish language. The teacher asked each of them what motivated them to learn Turkish. When it came to my turn, I honestly confessed my love for Nazim Hikmet's poetry. I got acquainted with his poems when I was still a cadet at a military school, at one of the poetry evenings. My answer intrigued the teacher. He asked me to recite something if I could remember it. I recited the introduction to Hikmet's poem "Pierre Loti"with pathos:

  
  
 Here is the East of European 
 Poems and novels! 
 Thousands of books coming out 
 within a minute! 
 But neither yesterday, nor today, 
 nor late, nor early - 
 not, is not, and will not be 
 such an East! 
  
 

- How do you see the East in the future? Vladimir Dmitrievich Arakin interrupted my impassioned speech.

Remembering the final words of the poem: "The rising East is waving a bloody handkerchief before you, "addressed to the" sans culottes of Europe, " I blurted out without thinking:

- Of course, red! Vladimir Dmitrievich asked with a smile:

- What is the current national flag of Turkey?

"Red with a crescent moon!" I answered after a short pause.

"Would you like to replace the crescent moon with a hammer and sickle?" But you should know that the crescent moon in the sky is a symbol of Islam, the Muslim faith, it is in its own way related to all Muslims, and our hammer and sickle is a symbol of loyalty to the teachings of Marxism-Leninism. It unites the working people of the whole world, all the workers and peasants. Replacing one with another will not be so easy. Orientalists, in addition to Eastern languages, must also know the religion of the countries of the East, if you are going to fight it. To do this, you will be taught a course in Islamic studies. You will have to master many other knowledge. Some came to the East from the West, and some of this knowledge came to the West much earlier ...

At that time, we somehow did not think about the words of our teacher that the "union of workers and peasants" could somehow be opposed by the union of any other co-religionists or religious nationalists.

After graduation svya-

* The MIV was closed in 1954. Students were transferred to MGIMO and some other institutes. ed.).

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Our family's ties to the Middle East have been strengthened and multiplied. I would describe myself as "the same age as the Middle East conflict", and my son Sergey took over the journalistic baton in the Middle East after the October 1973 war. At the same time, we can say that this "Ramadan" war for the Arabs and the "Yom Kippur" war for Israel opened a new band of "unknown generation"wars. They became the prelude to the "global anti-terrorist war". It was hard to imagine that the resonance of this conflict in the form of "Islamist terrorism" would reach Western Europe, southern Russia and the shores of America.

Student military camp near Minsk. In the second row, the far right is L. Medvedko.

Even before the release of the movie "White Sun of the Desert", we had the opportunity to make sure that " The East is not only a delicate matter, but also a difficult one." For Orientalists, the knowledge of the Orient was still almost incomprehensible. Apart from Marxism-Leninism, it was perhaps the only recognized interdisciplinary science with no end in sight. In some ways, it managed to avoid the obstacles created by Marxism-Leninism. Perhaps that is why Oriental studies was classified as a "bourgeois science"in the year of my graduation from the Moscow Institute of Oriental Studies (1952). And soon the MIV itself was closed. After the opening of the IVY at Moscow State University, it remained the only multidisciplinary institute where the training program included not the study of "scientific atheism", but the comprehension of the depth of Eastern religions. For Middle Easterners, it was Islamic studies. However, the religions related to Islam-Christianity and Judaism-remained "terra incognita". They were in a kind of"restricted area". One could only guess at the real processes taking place behind its "barbed wire" in the world of different religions.

Everything that happened there was related to the anti-colonial or liberation movement. As an unexpected surprise, therefore, the Palestinian War that broke out in 1947 was perceived. It did not fit into the usual format of an anti - colonial war, in which the "liberating peoples" themselves - Palestinian Arabs and Jews-began to kill each other. No one could have predicted that this war would turn into the" longest conflict of the century " in the Middle East. Moreover, it did not occur to anyone that in the new century it could still result in a global confrontation of terror and anti-terror.

Our teacher Arakin often liked to talk: "In the East, history is measured not by time in decades and centuries, but by the handshakes of the people you meet. Many of them do this story."

I soon had the opportunity to shake hands with one of these people. It was the writer Ilya Ehrenburg. It goes without saying that at that time we were not aware of Stalin's ambivalent attitude towards him. The leader saw in him for some reason an "international spy" and a person who " sympathized with the Zionists." Before us, he appeared quite different. Shortly before visiting our Institute, he prepared an article for the newspaper Pravda on behalf of the leader about the attitude of Soviet Jews to Israel and Zionism. It clearly expressed the attitude that Soviet Jews should have had towards Israel and Zionism.

The resolution of the" Jewish question", the article said, depends not on the military success of the Jews in Palestine, but on the victory of socialism over capitalism. All Jewish workers, therefore, associate their fate not with the fate of the Jewish state, but with socialism. They are far from the mysticism of the Zionists and look not so much to the Middle East as to the future, "to the north - to the Soviet Union, which is ahead of humanity to a better future."

So Ehrenburg tried to clarify his true attitude to Zionism. But such a pointed warning to Soviet Jews did not prevent many of them from leaving for Israel soon. Following his son, our beloved political economy teacher Enoch Yakovlevich Bretel was also among them. Before leaving, he expressed his conviction that Israel could become "the fulcrum of socialism in the Middle East." Soon even some of our former Jewish front-line soldiers followed us there.

I, who was then responsible for cultural work in the Komsomol committee of the Institute, was instructed to invite Ehrenburg to a readers ' conference. We wanted to hear from him what he thought of the new storm in the Middle East. Moscow's Middle East policy, as they later liked to joke, even then began to " waver along with the general party line." These fluctuations were felt everywhere - in the ideological and political struggle, in the media, in foreign policy. This was also reflected in the military sphere, on the battlefields of the Palestinian War, and then in all subsequent Arab-Israeli wars. This was also felt in the walls of our institute. The study itself was so politicized that even the study of

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The event was held in the light of J. V. Stalin's" brilliant work ""Marxism and Questions of Linguistics". The two ends didn't always meet in this study.

In the struggle that began then, first at the United Nations and then in the Holy Land itself, the Soviet Union initially supported the idea of creating a Jewish state in Palestine. Moscow very quickly abandoned the project of a bi-national Arab-Jewish state that it had initially promoted. It was later revealed that the Kremlin had simultaneously informed Soviet representatives at the UN in strict secrecy of its true intentions regarding the creation of a Jewish state. It was seen as the future and most reliable bulwark in the struggle against colonialism and imperialism. Even during Stalin's lifetime, the Kremlin soon became convinced of the reorientation of Tel Aviv to Washington. Then he began to rely in the general struggle "against imperialism and Zionism" on the Arab liberation movement.

Almost all Eastern languages were taught and studied at the Moscow Institute of International Relations. But about the future state language of Israel - Hebrew, students and even teachers had a very vague idea. Ehrenburg was extremely surprised by this discrimination. On the way back, in a conversation with me, he asked why Hebrew was excluded from the list of studies at the Institute of Oriental Languages. When I didn't give him a clear explanation, he said, " I don't know.:

- I think your teachers exclude Hebrew from the Eastern languages. They are making the same mistake as the Zionists. In contrast to the Arab East, they openly offer their services to the West. Whatever the reason, it would create a storm stronger than the Second World War in Europe.

His forecast began to come true before we graduated from the institute. Priority in the distribution of graduates was given primarily to applications from the military and other closed departments. In my final year, I already combined my studies with the work of the head of the lecture group of the Moscow Komsomol Committee.

I received three applications: one from the Komsomol Central Committee, one from the KGB, and one from the General Staff. At my first interview with the KGB, when I learned that some of my relatives had stayed in German-occupied territory during the war, I was fortunately rejected. Representatives of the General Staff showed me great leniency as a former cadet of the artillery school and also" without five minutes " a responsible employee of the Komsomol.

Three months later, almost the very first graduate of the Institute, I was sent abroad to work as an interpreter for the Military Attache's Office (WAT) at the USSR Embassy in Turkey. There I had to work first in Ankara, and then at the Consulate General in Istanbul.

FROM RUSSIAN TO TURKISH EURASIA

When my wife and I were given MIV diplomas with the indication that one of us was a "country specialist (Turkey)" and the other was a " country specialist (India)", we could not have imagined that we would be the first of all graduates who were destined to move so quickly from Moscow to Moscow.Stalin's Russia " to "Kemalist Turkey". It was very hard to believe that we would go from one "era" to another. In a few months, the "Stalin era" was ending, and in Turkey, the rule of the Republican People's Party created by Kemal Ataturk, which in recent years was headed by his successor Ismet Inenyu, was ending.

Before leaving for Turkey, I had to go through several rounds of briefings. The instructions were different. At the General Staff, Colonel Nikolai Ponomarev, a former front-line journalist who fought together and was friends with the writer Emil Kazakevich, gave me a kind of exam at the final conversation. "To fill in", he asked a question that I remember for the rest of my life, not so much "What is the most important thing in military intelligence, which you as an interpreter will have to provide?", but rather the answer formulated by him.

Remembering all the previous instructions, I began to list:

"Vigilance. Loyalty to the Motherland. Conspiracy theory...After patiently listening to all these enumerations, he summarized:: "That's all true. But the main thing is different. You need to be able to distinguish between an oral report and a written one. Verbally lay out everything, as in the spirit, and when you make it out in writing-you need to leave something on your mind. So you should always write wisely, " the intellectual colonel apparently punned out of journalistic habit.

Although I was not a party member at the time, I also had to go to the Central Committee's foreign department and deposit my Komsomol ticket. I even had a chance to appear personally before the eyes of L. I. Brezhnev. At that time, he held the position of curator of all, as they now say, law enforcement agencies. The conversation was short, limited to calls to be especially vigilant... The final parting words - "Take care of the child and hold on tightly to each other" - were expressed to my wife and me in a joking way just before we left.

Then they had to be recalled on the second night on the train, shortly after crossing the Bulgarian-Turkish border.

We got to Ankara in a roundabout way, as they say, on the crossbar. First - by train to Sofia and Svilengrad. Then-by car of Bulgarian border guards to the Turkish border.

On the Edirne-Istanbul train in the middle of the night, an insistent knock made me open the compartment. Several policemen and gendarmes were standing in the doorway. They excitedly tried to explain something, pointing to our things, which they immediately began to collect themselves, without waiting for our reaction. Of all the words that came rushing at me, I could only make out "kaza," which could mean either an accident or a disaster.

We had to follow the uniformed men who had unloaded all our belongings and offered to take the crying baby with them. But here the wife, remembering the instructions of Leonid Ilyich, acted strictly according to the instructions: do not entrust the child to anyone.

We made quite a long journey from our derailed train to another one. Employees of our department who met us in Istanbul

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the consulates told us about a certain railway accident that had occurred, and we also unwittingly suffered from it.

The next morning, the military attache, Colonel I. N. Kondratov, introduced me to our Ambassador in Ankara. A. N. Lavrishchev, a veteran Soviet diplomat, was holding the latest issue of a Turkish newspaper. Pointing to its front page, he probably decided to test my knowledge of Turkish right off the bat. "Why did you start terrorism and sabotage before you got there? Read this!". Across the front page of the newspaper in red letters was written: "Disaster on the railway". The subtitle "Russian spies"caught my eye. Pointing a finger at him, the ambassador softened his stern face and gave him a small smile of encouragement.: "Read from here."

From this note I learned that the Turks had promoted me from translator to assistant military attache: "It is noteworthy that Russian diplomats have recently become more frequent on the Edirne-Istanbul route. So, on the night preceding this train accident, assistant military attache Leonid Medvedko and his wife Elena passed along this road."

A few days later, from articles about this incident, I learned about other possible versions of it. Among them, it was suggested that this could also be the work of "Kurdish terrorists".

In those days, when I read reports regularly published in the press about the "machinations of communists", the" sabotage "of separatist Kurds, or" snowfalls and a cruel winter coming from Russian Siberia", I often recalled the conversation I had with Nazim Hikmet before I left for Turkey. "Keep in mind," he warned me, " whatever bad things happen in Turkey, Moscow, the Communists and the Kurds will be blamed for everything. But that wasn't always the case. Still alive there are those people who remembered other times. In all the wars, Russia and Turkey were on opposite sides of the fronts. But after the revolution, we remained together, although some were called "communists" and others "Kemalists", some, however, recognize themselves as "internationalists", while others were and still are "nationalists"...

Already at our last meeting, Nazim Hikmet fixed his parting words in the form of an autograph on the novel in verse "Human Panorama" presented to me - " To Comrade Medvedko with love for loving my Turkish language and my Turkey like a true communist. Nazym". These words and the autograph of the most famous Turkish poet in the world are very dear to me.No matter how much he treated his own and Russian communists, he valued above all in them internationalism, which is inextricably linked with love for his language and for his homeland...

Communication, friendly and creative meetings with Nazim Hikmet (we sometimes worked together on translations of some of his poems from Turkish to Russian) they became an event in my life. At that time, I did not expect that in a few months I would be able to meet in Turkey itself with the people who made its new history.

FROM AN AVENUE IN FRONT OF A PORTRAIT OF STALIN

The event that brought me together with Ismet Pasha two months after my arrival in Ankara was indeed historic. All the morning editions of Turkish newspapers on March 5, 1953, came out with screaming headlines: "Stalin stretched out his legs!", "Russian dictator died!", " Stalin passed away or was he helped to leave?". All employees of the embassy, having heard this news on the Moscow radio, immediately rushed to work. What was my surprise when I saw a fairly large group of foreign diplomats and Turkish officials dressed all in black outside the closed doors of our mission? The first to arrive was the leader of the newly formed opposition Republican People's Party, former President of Turkey, General Ismet Pasha Ineniu.

As the embassy's interpreter, I was assigned to meet the guests. Of these, I was able to talk to Ismet Inenyu the longest at that time. It was my first encounter in a foreign land with a man who personified the history of his country and at the same time seemed to connect different epochs of its history - the First and Second World Wars, the Kemalist Revolution and the formation of the Turkish Republic itself - which I had previously studied at the Institute only from textbooks. In addition, he was a direct participant in all these historical events, and later became a living history himself.

In Stalin, he probably saw, first of all, the leader of a great state, a statesman on a global scale. He came to the embassy at the crack of dawn to express his feelings in words that he later wrote in his own hand on the first page of the book of condolences: "There was no man who personified the era, whom I personally knew and, not always agreeing with him, highly revered!"

With the name of Stalin, "he later developed his idea in the ensuing conversation with me," this era was equally connected with your and our history. In wars, our countries often fought with each other, and in the years of revolutions and immediately after them, we were together and helped each other. But you don't have to make revolutions to do this. Perhaps it is better to preserve the legacy of the leaders of our revolutions. With them, we built bridges of our common history together, which, unfortunately, we later destroyed ourselves...

After that, either to reinforce his words or express his condolences, Inenyu shook my hand firmly. In that hour, I think, for the first time, the deep meaning of the Eastern wisdom that our teacher often uttered was revealed to me: "History is measured not by time, but by the handshake of people."

Before that, I had never had to shake hands with the" creators of history " and leaders.

In March 1953. Ismet Inenyu

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he was not just a foreign leader who, according to him, personally saw and talked with Stalin. He was one of the direct participants in a story that seemed very distant to me before. Inenyu could probably go down in history as the "Turkish Stalin". He, too, was the successor of the "leader of the revolution" and, like Stalin, was considered one of the heroes of the Turkish Civil War. The only difference between them was that a number of other cities in the country were named after Stalin after Tsaritsyn, and Ismet Pasha himself was given a surname in honor of the victory he won and the liberation of the Turkish city of Inenyu. Then it was perceived by some as the namesake city of Kemal Ataturk's successor.

Inen managed to lay the foundations of a democratic system that allowed him to hand over power peacefully to his successors during his lifetime.

In Turkey, the army, or rather its generals, was the guarantor of a relatively peaceful transfer of power.

The Turkish authorities, which changed after each military coup, switched to a two-party and then multi-party system soon after the war ended, and managed to preserve two main tenets from the legacy of the Kemalist revolution. Religion remained separate from the State. But it was not opposed to either the authorities or the people. The army was declared out of politics. The command, or rather its top leadership, declared itself the guarantor of the"Kemalist course". Therefore, the army has always kept a close eye on politicians. Periodically, during the transition periods after military coups, it usually pushed its own people to the top. Thanks in large part to Inenyu's skilful maneuvering, Turkey remained neutral throughout World War II.

"The fact that Turkey preserved its integrity and sovereignty was a great achievement of our Ismet Pasha, the successor of Kemal Ataturk," Kasim Gulek, Inenyu's successor and the new leader of the opposition Republican People's Party, told me in one of the conversations...

Colonel Ponomarev's last admonition before we parted was useful not only in Turkey, but also in all my subsequent travels, including journalistic ones. His joking advice "The main thing in intelligence in the East is not to sing everything you see and hear" was useful, one might say, for life. Then I reported the contents of my conversation with Inenyu and his successor Gulek in full detail to my direct superior, Colonel I. N. Kondrashov. The latter, after listening to me, reasoned quite sensibly: "In the report, reflect the political moments, and leave the history for later-for posterity," the military attache punned.

Now the 20th century has already gone down in history. However, some of its pages are often soiled or tightly glued to the still unsolved secrets of politics. Perhaps it is time, without putting off any more "for later", together with descendants, to begin to understand the legacy of both. Not so much in the rapidly dying sensations, but in the knowledge of living history.

Excerpts from the 1st chapter of the forthcoming memoir-historical narrative " The East is near, Jerusalem is Holy "(Moscow, Griffon-M., 2007)

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