Our interviewee will turn 94 this August - but despite his hard life, Ivan Kabakov feels excellent.
“I was born in the Stavropol region. I do not remember my parents - they died when I was very small, and I was brought up at an orphanage.
“When the first amateur flying club opened in Stavropol in 1938, I joined it without hesitation - so famous was the pilot Valeri Chkalov’s name then. After graduating it in 1939, I decided to become a bomber pilot and left for Yeisk to enter the naval flying school.
“In July 1941, our military detachment was defending Leningrad. We were suffering grave losses. My first operational flight was to bomb a naval base at Helsinki.
“It was not at all easy in Leningrad then. I remember how one day we were sent to bomb a small section of the Neva River. We were being led by the commander of the regiment. His flight of aircraft had thrown bombs a little bit earlier, and the bombs hit our troops - the others were bombing with a little delay, and the bombs blew up at German positions. It looked like the commander got it really hot - for he was ousted from the place and sent somewhere.
“It was my 76th operational flight [when I was taken prisoner]. Before the flight, the commander told me: “After this flight, I’m going to recommend you for the title of the Hero [of the Soviet Union].” We finished the bombing, when my plane was shot down. However hard I was trying, I did not managed to reach the front line.
“We landed in a forest. In a while, we were smelled by the German soldiers’ dogs. After a short fight, we had to surrender. Suddenly one of the Germans shot at me - four bullets went right through without touching a bone, but the fifth one got stuck in my foot.
“When my wounds closed up, I was forwarded to a prisoners of war camp - to Pskov, then to Riga, and a Luftwaffe camp in Lodź.
“On May 8, 1945, some junior lieutenant from Siberia unlocked the gate of our camp. How glad we were then, indeed! We followed the division that had liberated us - to Warsaw, and then to Moscow. Then I was summoned to a prisoners of war camp in Bashkiria and put there behind the barbed wire.
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