Ivan Petrovich Fedotov: Before Meeting Christ
FROM THE AUTHOR
I thank God that today I have the boldness, looking back on the path I have traveled, to say with full assurance after the holy Apostle Paul: “I have fought the good fight, I have finished the race, I have kept the faith; henceforth there is laid up for me the crown of righteousness, which the Lord, the righteous judge, will award to me on that day, and not only to me but also to all who have loved his appearing” (2 Tim. 4:7-8).
The purpose of this book is not to exalt human personality, but now, as always, let the Lord be magnified through my life or my death. Many generations of Christians have walked the path of faithfulness to God and the path of sorrows. Good memories remain of many, and of some nothing is known. But their names are written in the Book of Life. Their testimonies will be revealed on the last day to the whole world.
For a long time many brothers and sisters have asked me to give a more detailed account of the path of suffering and faithfulness to God I have traveled. Earlier, based on materials I provided, the book “18 Years of the GULAG” was published, but it was not written in the first person. In the book “Stand! The Court Is in Session!” I recall certain milestones and events from my life and ministry, so that not only will it provide edification to readers and bear witness to my Lord, whom I have faithfully served and whose power I have experienced and continue to experience in my life; this book is my testament to the coming generations of ministers of the evangelical Christian faith: “Join in imitating me, brothers, and keep your eyes on those who walk according to the example you have in us” (Phil. 3:17).
I invoke God’s blessing, that every reader of this book may be inspired by the thought that it is possible and worthwhile to live by the gospel truth.
“And now I commend you, brothers, to God and to the word of his grace, which is able to build you up and to give you the inheritance among all those who are sanctified” (Acts 20:32).
Introduction
Evening. Rain is tapping against the window pane. In the room, a man sits at the table and moves a pen across the paper. He gathers little letters and forms them into words. Over the years of life, many words have accumulated in his soul, and all of them need to be put down on paper to make a book that will be useful and edifying to read.
Rain gives way to snow, and after the snow, buds appear on the trees. The seasons change, and the stack of filled paper grows thicker and thicker. A lamp hanging from the ceiling lights up a gray head and a sheet of paper with even lines. The one writing these lines — Ivan Petrovich Fedotov — longs to tell how the Almighty led him through this life, and to tell it so that the whole world would hear, so that this book might be translated into foreign languages.
He has now passed seventy-six full years, having survived two heart attacks, and Ivan Petrovich is writing this book to give glory to God and to leave a memory of himself for posterity. Where to begin? Perhaps like this?
“Spring 1934. Streams ran along the street past our house. In the next house lived a boy, Kolya, with whom I was friends and played together. For some reason I decided that this was my water, and I dammed the stream so that all the water went under our house, leaving Kolya without water. I was very pleased, but when my water flooded everything that was in the cellar, I got a good scolding from a loving father. Father removed the dam, and my friend was again able to use what belongs to everyone equally. For rain falls on the righteous and the unrighteous alike. This incident has forever remained in my memory as a lesson that doing good is much better than evil.”
No, not like that, Ivan Petrovich thinks — I should start from the very beginning, like this: “I was born on September 13, 1929, in the village of Yesypovo, Staro-Yuryevsky District, Tambov Region, to the family of Pyotr Denisovich and Alexandra Nikolayevna Fedotov (my mother’s maiden name was Davydova).”
He wrote and pondered: “This is my birthday, but there was also something before that, when I had not yet been born, which my mother later told me about.” And finally, his hand confidently rests on a clean sheet of paper to describe everything from the beginning of beginnings.
The Beginning of Beginnings
My mother was born into the family of a peasant, Nikolai Astakhovich Davydov. The surname Davydov and the name David are of Hebrew origin – and perhaps indeed our family tree stretches its roots back to King David himself. I do not know, God knows. Grandfather had sixteen children; eight of them died from various illnesses, and eight remained alive – four boys and four girls. There were almost no doctors in the villages then, and medicines were scarce. Shura, my future mother, also survived. The most wonderful and best woman in the world, and there is no one more beautiful on the whole white earth. The Russian name Shura is very interesting. A little girl is called Shura, Shurochka. A young girl for some reason is called Sasha, Sashenka. And when she grew up and became a maiden, they styled her Alexandra. And when mother grew old, she became Alexandra Nikolaevna. A beautiful name my mother had. My father’s name was Petya or Pet’enka, and then simply Pyotr, and nothing more could be done with that name. I saw the wedding photograph of my parents hanging on the wall in a frame, but I barely know how and when they met. Papa and mama lived in harmony. He called her Shurochka, and she called him Pet’enka. She worked two jobs, while he worked in the fields in summer and in winter went to earn money in the Donbass, which is why their family had enough. Mother received a secondary education and worked as head of the post office, and also part-time as a tax agent. Her parents apparently tried very hard to be able to give their daughter an education. Materially my parents lived well, while famine reigned all around, and there was never a case when mother did not feed a beggar. She always brought something out: a crust of bread, a couple of eggs, or a mug of milk. Little Vanya saw his mother’s good deeds and, seeing and hearing how beggars thanked and blessed her in the name of God, preserved in his little heart the memory that there is no greater joy than to do good and to see the brightened face of an unfortunate person and the tears that welled up in his eyes. And it happened that a woman with small children would come in, especially when dekulakization was taking place, turning the rich into beggars and lawlessness reigned throughout the country of the Soviets. In 1933, in the Volga region and in Ukraine, people were perishing from hunger by whole villages. It was then that little brother Lenya appeared, an interesting little boy: he kept trying to free his little hands and grasp the finger of his older brother, who was by then five years old. Father, as already mentioned, worked in the fields in summer, and in winter traveled to the Donbass to earn, dug coal in the mine and brought it to the surface. The country needed a lot of coal; Stalin was building up heavy industry. The hardest labor was given to prisoners, and anyone in those days could become a prisoner. You looked the wrong way, said the wrong thing, failed to deliver two hundred grams of butter to the quota, or really they simply forgot to put you on a list – and there you got five years in the camps. Miners, one might say, were not touched then. They were already like prisoners, driven underground not by a stick or a guard with a dog, but by the wretched ruble. Without that ruble, you’d go begging with a sack. And the family wants to eat; well, we’ll talk about that later. Everything in its own time. Returning from his earnings, father would bring home gifts: a length of fabric for a dress for mother, and some toy for the little one. I remember that he once gave me a pair of children’s boots with galoshes, and I went into the garden wearing them in spring and sank into the ground – and the Tambov soil is black earth – so my father had to pull me out of the mud. Papa loved us very much – mama, me, and the recently born little brother Leonid. Forced collectivization was underway. People were being forcibly driven into collective farms, and the disobedient were sent to Siberia *. Misfortune and grief were all around. At that time, misfortune touched our family with its wing. In the winter of 1934, father was brought from the Donbass on a sleigh with a broken rib cage. He had been on the edge when the roof of the mine collapsed. Not many survived then. It was a good thing that there was no gas explosion. Had the gas exploded, no one would have survived. And the socialist competition was to blame for it all: they had to fulfill and overfulfill the plan at any cost *. * The collectivization of agriculture in the USSR – the mass creation of collective farms (kolkhozes), carried out in the late 1920s and early 1930s, accompanied by the liquidation of individual farms. Collectivization was carried out at a forced pace, while violent methods of dekulakization and repressions against the peasantry were widely used. Prosperous peasants, strong farming toilers, were declared kulaks, all their property was confiscated, and they themselves were repressed. However, under the banner of the “struggle against the kulaks” any undesirable peasant could be repressed. Collectivization led to a significant destruction of productive forces, a reduction in agricultural production, and the mass famine of 1932–1933 in Ukraine, the Volga region, the North Caucasus, and other regions. Father did not live long; he was not yet thirty. A healthy heart, a young and strong body resisted death as best it could. The summoned doctor could provide no substantial help. The broken bones had penetrated his internal organs, and the body was perishing. Father predicted his death to the minute: at four-fifteen in the morning he would depart from life. Everyone present saw how he bade farewell to us, instructing us to obey mother. He spoke slowly and heavily. He knew all too well what awaited a widow with small children.
- I leave you to God, – he said. He asked them to let him embrace me, and, saying goodbye, he held me so tightly that the men had to take me from the arms of the dying father. * Socialist competition – a movement for raising labor productivity and better use of technology, it was imposed from above. In 1935, the Stakhanovite movement arose in the coal industry of the Donbass, which was then introduced in other industries, transport, and agriculture. It was named after its initiator – A.T. Stakhanov, a cutter in the mine. The party organization chose him as a person who could speak eloquently, and moreover he was young, married, had a pleasant appearance, which was important for photographs, and most importantly – he was a communist. There were other candidates, but the commission settled on him. They selected a good drift with a thick coal seam and assembled a whole team of physically strong professional miners. Stakhanov himself, working with a pneumatic pickaxe in the sweat of his brow and without rest, was supposed to cut coal the entire working day. Other miners cleared away and loaded the coal into the mine cars. He also did not install the timber supports; all of that was done by auxiliary workers. Stakhanov was freed from all auxiliary tasks that were part of a miner’s ordinary working day. So, with the help of this team, he achieved 300% of the coal-cutting quota. Meanwhile, on the surface, a flat had been prepared for him in advance, into which his wife was moved, and furniture was brought in, so that after work he could go to his new flat. But that was not to be! As he came out of the mine, a whole line of correspondents and photographers was waiting for him to capture how the party and government were caring for the front-rank production workers. He never worked as a miner again. Meetings and speeches before the working collectives of the Donbass, a trip to Moscow and other cities of the Union, newspaper articles, magazine sketches – all this was arranged on a large scale and with great fanfare. The country hailed front-rank workers and encouraged competition. Work to the point of total exhaustion, to the limit, to collapse… Output norms increased, while wages decreased. Not a single word was written about the team that had been assigned to Stakhanov to fulfil the record-breaking plan. They did not sleep all night. And when the clock on the wall showed four-fifteen, he took his last breath, looked around the room with his eyes at everyone who was there, and fell silent. We were left: a widowed mother and orphaned children. We did not know then what the Bible says: God is a husband to widows and a father to orphans! A widow with small children could not survive in those days. She absolutely had to go to work, but there was no one to leave the children with. If you were left without work, you’d go begging through the world, so mother married for a second time. Not far from our Esypovo there was the village of Goretovo, where the Popov family lived, Pyotr Ivanovich and his wife Anna. They had four sons, the eldest of whom was called Pavel. The father was, as people say, a jack of all trades. By labor and skill, he and his children built a windmill, an oil press, a grain mill; they also built houses for people. Pyotr was a man of broad heart and sound mind. When the campaign of dekulakization began in the country, he himself voluntarily handed over all his property to the authorities, gave everything he had to the collective farm, and therefore all his fellow villagers spoke in his defense. So he remained alive and was not even prosecuted. But there were also enemies who killed his wife Anna with a shot through the window. He became a widower. No one prosecuted the murderers; it was all legal – they were wiping out kulaks and kulak helpers, the revolution was continuing. The persecution of his sons began. Pavel decided to run wherever his eyes took him, just to stay alive. To die because their family, through persistent labor, had become slightly richer than their fellow villagers would have been senseless. The mercy of his fellow villagers extended only to his father, not to him and not to mother Anna, whom they were not even allowed to weep over. At night, Pavel was laid in a cart, covered with sacks of grain, and secretly taken out of the village. That is how he ended up in Esypovo, where he met the destitute widow Alexandra. In 1935 they married, and we gained a stepfather, Pavel. Mother was comforted after father’s death and was now under the protection of a husband. But since the villages of Esypovo and Goretovo were not far from each other, there was no guarantee that he was fully safe here. By chance or by searching for him, the murderers might learn of his whereabouts and come here, to Esypovo. So he and mother, hiding from persecution, left for Moscow, leaving us in the care of grandfather and grandmother. Pavel found work as a joiner on the railroad and got a room in a barracks at Vostryakovo station. In 1936, my mother’s father, Nikolai Astakhovich Davydov, brought us to them. The family was restored again, and we children came to love Pavel like our own father. He deserved it – he was a man of beautiful soul. There was an Orthodox church in Vostryakovo, and mother began to seek God and wished to have us baptized. Perhaps the fear of being killed together with her husband, or maybe life in exile prompted her to do this. I do not know why, but I was very afraid of this baptism and resisted it, but my resistance was in vain; I was baptized all the same. After some time, my stepfather was transferred to another job, in Biryulyovo, and they gave him a room in a barracks, not a bit better than the previous one. But it was still shelter, a roof over your head, a significant factor at a time when dekulakization was still going on and whole families with children were driven out into the streets in the literal sense of the word. They were condemned to free dying out or survival, however it might turn out for each. I was a shy and timid boy, and not without reason. When we still lived in the village and I was about three or a little more, once while mother was away I decided to climb onto the window to look at the street. I put a stool there, climbed up on it, and suddenly before my eyes appeared a terrifying old woman’s face. In fright I fell, and from that moment I became severely tongue-tied; my lips long closed to clear speech. But later the hand of Jesus Christ touched me, and I began to speak clearly, because He chose me and appointed me to ministry. He knew that many sermons and instructions would be spoken with these lips, and so He healed me. In Biryulyovo I went to the first grade and studied at that school until the war with the Germans began. I remember mother would give me sandwiches, and they would be taken from me or begged from me. People lived poorly in those days. At that time mother bought me exercise books; I brought them to school and gave them all away there. For this virtue I was pulled by the ear at home, but it did not help me, because this character trait was given to me by the Lord Himself, and I remained like that until old age, until my hair turned gray. When mother came to faith in God, she recalled this incident, repented before me and asked forgiveness, and she herself became the same. Virtue is a great gift for gaining friends. Jesus Christ never took anything from anyone, but only gave, gave, and gave. The disciples of Jesus Christ acted in exactly the same way: they took nothing for themselves, but only gave. For example, Barnabas, a follower of Jesus Christ, laid all his possessions at the feet of the apostles. What are my exercise books in comparison! Soon, during the war, even those were gone; we wrote on whatever came to hand, sometimes on newspaper margins and between the lines. The year was 1938. In school the teachers eloquently and skillfully instilled in us that we were marching toward communism and our leaders, Grandpa Vladimir Ilyich Lenin and his comrade-in-arms Iosif Vissarionovich Stalin, were giving children a happy future. Children’s hearts are like wax – whatever you press into them is imprinted; they easily yield to the influence of ideological upbringing. The ideologues of atheism strove to eradicate God and everything connected with Him from the consciousness of adults, and to inculcate in children a love for Grandpa Stalin and adoration of him. They took us to Moscow, put red flags in our hands, and for us this was boundless happiness. When we “lifted our eyes to the heavens,” we saw airplanes carrying huge portraits of Lenin and Stalin, and our ears heard a song about two bright falcons and their conversation: “Gray-winged falcon, the hour to part has come, All labors and cares fall upon you.” And the other answered: “Forget your worries, We swear to you: we will not turn from the path!” Or they carried his name written in the sky by the planes: “Glory to Stalin!” And for this glory one had to pay dearly. When classes ended and the summer holidays began, they gave us vouchers to Pioneer camps. And there, on the days of communist holidays, real wonders happened: waking up in the morning, we would find a chocolate bar near our pillow, and then our delight and joy knew no end. But, to my chagrin, when we played the game of blues and reds, for some reason I always ended up in the blue group, and the reds would immediately find me, tear off my armband, and lead me into captivity. When the time came and the holy Gospel miraculously ended up in my hands, I read there about how Jesus sent two disciples, saying to them: “Go into the village opposite you; and immediately you will find a donkey tied and a colt with her; untie them and bring them to Me.” Looking back upon my childhood, I saw myself like that young colt, upon which the “two bright falcons” were then seating themselves. And they prodded us and drove us, and with the years they settled in ever more heavily, and they convoyed us and killed us. From them came the reward. And only now I am happy, having offered my back to Jesus Christ for service to Him; from Him I will receive the reward. But I had to throw off the former riders, those “two bright falcons,” and together with them their helpers. True, they did not want to get off for a long time, but that is a story ahead. Oh, how happy are children who have believing parents; they are sanctified already from their mother’s womb and at their birth. And how important it is that parents raise them in the teaching and instruction of the Lord, so that from childhood they belong to Christ and are filled with Him – His meekness, love, mercy, and purity. But I, in childhood, still did not know God and did not believe in Him. Before people could see His light even through me, I still had to grow physically and spiritually. But He already knew me and was working upon me, upon my character and mind. In 1938, our little sister Valya was born, whom Lenya and I loved very much. That was a terrifying time for our country, when hundreds of thousands of people were annihilated, sent to prisons, camps, exile on false charges. The open show trials of the top party and Soviet leadership, former participants of the revolution and of socialist construction, had just passed. The wives of many high-ranking figures and members of their families were also repressed. Almost the entire high command of the army was also exterminated. Among the repressed was the prominent political figure and diplomat F.F. Raskolnikov, who had the courage, in an open letter to Stalin published abroad, to give his assessment of his policies. In those days, people lived by the principle: “I’ll put my own mother in jail so that I won’t have to go there myself.” As early as 1939, Fyodor Raskolnikov foresaw, or rather had already calculated the options, that there would be a war, and in his letter to Stalin he wrote about it. If Comrade Stalin had paid attention then, there would have been no war.
War
Meanwhile, from the West a black cloud was advancing, a deadly cloud. There are no words to fully express, to speak out, to pour out all the pain it caused. No matter how much you pour it out, it still remains in the heart. Perhaps it eases a little, but you will remember it all your life. Enough to last until the end of your days.
In 1941, the war with Germany began—not with the Germans as a people, but with the fascist structure of that country, which had its own plan for humanity, for who should live and how on earth. For Jews, for example—categorically not to live.
The Great Patriotic War lasted for Russia five years (for Germany itself—seven years) and claimed 50 million human lives in various countries. Those are the estimates, but in reality the victims were far more.
Wailing and cries filled the streets: the mobilization of men to the front, to defend the Fatherland, was underway. My stepfather was sent to the front in the very first days of the war, and my mother and I were left alone. On that lawn where we had once played football, one could see soldiers marching, undergoing accelerated military training.
When the war began, I was thirteen. To somehow feed ourselves, I went to work at the Moscow bread factory, from which my stepfather had gone to the front. He was a good worker and had made a good name for himself, so the director hired me as well. Such was God’s providence for us: thanks to His care, we did not go hungry even at that time; we had bread, and the director also gave us flour. And when it became very difficult and the Germans were approaching Moscow, we evacuated to the Tambov region to our relatives.
Soon a notice came—my stepfather Pavel, who had become a true father to me, was missing in action. As I understand it, those missing in action can be divided into two categories: provisionally missing in action and eternally missing in action. The provisionally missing are people who perished and, due to some circumstances, have not been found to this day. Perhaps their bodies still lie somewhere in a trench, buried under earth after a bomb explosion, or in a swamp, swallowed by bog mire. Sometimes, after many years, search teams find their bones. The body and clothing have decayed, there is no identification case or medallion, but forensic medical examination can determine from the bones whether it is a man or a woman, a teenager or a child, and DNA can reveal even more. Thus, by jaw and teeth, the remains of Tsar Nicholas II and his children were identified, and scholars assert that the search for the tsar’s ashes was successful. Forensic medical examination is capable of answering a great many questions. And if today they could not determine the surname of the deceased, then tomorrow—who knows—perhaps they will be able to. After all, if a skeleton or at least part of it has been preserved, that already says that a person existed, only his surname is unknown. That kind of person I call provisionally missing in action.
But there are people who are eternally missing, from whom nothing remains but dust, ashes. These are those who perished in fascist concentration camps and were burned in the furnaces of camp crematoria. Here, no forensic medical examination can help. How I wish my stepfather were not among them!
Youth
May 1945 brought great joy to everyone—victory over Nazi Germany. Some time later we returned to Moscow, to Biryulyovo-Tovarnoye, but now without Papa. Our mama was a widow again, and so at sixteen I became the family breadwinner in place of my father.
The war ended, leaving the entire west of Russia in ruins, and our Mother Russia had once again to heal her wounds. For a teenager, my labor was heavy and exhausting, and they demanded from me as from a grown man, so I had to be physically strong and resilient beyond my years.
At that time men were drafted into the army at nineteen. In 1949 I was called up into the navy and became the property of the Soviet Union. They sent me to serve in the city of Kronstadt. In regular forces they served three years then, but in the Navy it was five. There I finished a specialist school, received a military specialty, and was assigned to ChIS (the Intendant Service Unit), where I supplied a division of torpedo boats. The service began very simply, especially the induction into the Komsomol. They brought us to the unit and took us to the bathhouse. There they changed our clothes, and we emerged from the bathhouse already as sailors; then they placed a Komsomol card into the hand of every seaman.
The Beginning of My Working Life.
This was no longer a Pioneer camp; here everything had already been decided for you. You had to become what your superior comrades wanted to see. You were a pawn in a great mechanism—they gave you a card, and there you were, a Komsomol member. You were not supposed to think— the Party thought for you. You were not supposed to decide—the Party had decided for you. And what the Party actually was, you didn’t really know; it was something great and at the same time indefinite. They could bring you closer to it or push you away; everything depended on how they looked at you.
Then came the agitation for a two-year course at the Party school. That meant drawing near to the Party, a chance soon to taste privileges and advantages and to become like one of them. Had it not been for the Lord and His choosing me from my mother’s womb, I would have turned out a Party functionary, an atheist, a fighter against God, and I would have done people much harm. But by the Lord’s will it happened that my mama fell gravely ill, and no doctors could help her. At that same time a young woman came from Siberia to live in the neighboring apartment. Mama got to know the neighbor, and they began to talk. The new neighbor proved to be a virtuous woman; she began helping with everything, even preparing food for my sick mama, who had two more children in her care, so it was very hard for her.
The neighbor was a Baptist, and she showed Mama the way to the living God. Soon, at a prayer gathering, the Lord touched Mama’s heart, and she sincerely repented of her sins. She prayed there so fervently, so loudly, that they had to start playing the organ to drown out the cry of my repentant mother’s soul.
I knew nothing about this, absorbed as I was in sports—football and Greco-Roman wrestling. By that time I had become confident in my strength, and from a shy, tongue-tied boy I was turning into a hardy, strong young man. Putting on a gas mask and lifting a barbell overhead, I would do squats until I dropped, and then I would repeat a series of wrestling moves against an imaginary opponent. I ran sometimes on my heels, sometimes on tiptoe; I made a multitude of seemingly useless movements, but in the end I acquired strength and endurance. Our sailors were afraid to train with me, so I allowed two of them to wrestle against me at once. The training sessions were tough and demanded complete dedication. Wrestling gave me pleasure, so I wrestled with zeal and, as they say, worked myself into a frenzy, pinning one opponent after another without distinction. Particularly stubborn opponents I had to single out for myself. My prestige rested on this, and it gave me authority—everyone knew me by then. At that time that suited me; my life was in it, and I liked it. It suited my command as well and, naturally, our Party. I had no suspicion of the changes awaiting me in life, of the complete upheaval that would take place. But man proposes, God disposes.
Having won the Baltic Fleet championship, I was sent with the team to the championship of the USSR Navy in Sevastopol. I remember my wrestling bout with a Master of Sport in Sevastopol. I was a Starshina Second Class then and came to those competitions to defend the honor of the navy, having previously overcome strongmen from different ships. I think it was in the summer of 1953.
My opponent, a Master of Sport, studied the unknown wrestler standing before him—an athletically built, tall, robust fellow. From his coach he knew that this was a sailor, and sailors are brave and reckless men. The naval infantry, taken from the ships, went into the attack in their sailor caps, throwing away their helmets, and instead of “Hurrah!” they shouted “Polundra!”, gripping the ribbons with the embroidered anchors in their teeth, and charged with bayonets. Woe to the Germans who failed to flee. And if the forces were uneven, they lay down in their black pea coats forever on the Russian soil, strewing it together with their enemies, yet not taking a single step back. The Master of Sport understood that this sailor named Ivan would sooner die than retreat; he was not molded from that kind of dough. And for the first time he felt a lack of confidence in himself…
The first round—a reconnaissance in force. He, the renowned wrestler whom the hall applauded, to whom they shouted “Bravo!” and “Encore!”, against some sailor who had received only a few welcoming claps, which were hushed and fell silent. Having executed several successful holds and throws and having felt the opponent’s strength, he realized that he would win this fight. After all, this was not Ivan Poddubny, the world champion, nor Ivan Krechet, the famous strongman, but some Ivan Fedotov—he could be thrown.
My wrestling shirt soaked through almost at once; I felt it beginning to cling to my body. And the harder the opponent resisted, the more I wanted to defeat him. I understood that you couldn’t take him by strength alone; you had to think and wait for a favorable moment to win, because the opponent, as I had grasped, was very strong. “Strong and technically skilled,” I thought, “he has a perfect command of his holds; how deftly he threw me—I barely managed to roll over! Well, let them applaud him and stamp their feet; right now the whole fleet is watching me, and I need only victory!”
End of the round. The referee spread his hands, ordering us to go to opposite corners for a brief rest. My experienced trainer, wiping my face with a towel, said:
“Vanya, in the second round wear down the opponent’s strength and save your own for the third round. Let him score points now—you will win. I believe in you, Vanyusha!” And for some reason that gave me strength.
Again the strike of the gong. The second round was the hardest. Holds alternated with trips, sweeps, and throws. Sometimes we froze motionless like a sculptural group, firmly clasping each other. The veins on our necks and arms swelled; our vision grew dark. Then the referee intervened, pulling us apart. Attack followed attack. Here I noticed that my opponent was breathing with his mouth open, faint with weariness. To the spectators it seemed that a little more and I would fall defeated on the mat while fighting a defensive battle—but in tenths, hundredths of a second I managed to avoid being pinned to the floor for the several seconds after which the referee would declare defeat. Yes, it was a very hard fight! And then came the end of the round again—a short rest.
During that short time my opponent was unable to recover well and gather strength; though his mouth was shut, his chest rose and fell deeply—he was tired. This time the bout was not prolonged, but it was very intense and energetic. After several unsuccessful moves, I went for my signature technique. Every athlete, every wrestler, has such moves. Unexpectedly for my opponent, bracing my whole body against the wrestling mats, using the weight of my body, I pushed him hard and, hooking his leg, threw him onto his back. All that remained was to hold him. But this time he took a step that was too short—perhaps from weariness his center of gravity shifted beyond his supporting leg. Grabbing my opponent’s left arm, I pulled him toward me, leaning to the side and increasing his speed. The result was a first-class hip throw—just like in the sambo textbook! That technique is used in every kind of wrestling. In the next instant my legs lay across the chest of my opponent, who had fallen on his back. The opponent’s both shoulder blades touched the floor, and his left hand was caught at the wrist by both of my hands. It was a submission hold. His arm lay on my thigh, and had I pressed it down five or six centimeters, a pain shock could have followed. But that did not happen, and after three seconds the referee raised his hand and stopped the bout.
Probably the whole Navy saw how the referee raised the sailor’s hand in the air—in sign of victory! The Master of Sport shook my hand sincerely and then embraced me in gratitude for the humane gesture, for not causing him sharp pain. After all, we were not enemies, only temporary rivals. He had tested me and knew that if any aggressors or other enemies were to attack us now, he would stand shoulder to shoulder with me, knowing that I would not let him down.
On the way to Moscow I stopped at home, and Mama told me that she had believed in the living Lord and very much asked me to come home again on my way back. After the victory, the team captain allowed me to stay at home for two weeks.
Soon after that, Mama Shura—whom I could lift with one hand—invited me to go with her to a Christian service in order to help one ailing sister carry a sack of flour home. I agreed gladly—just give me a weight on my shoulders, and the heavier the better! And there, at the gathering, I became acquainted with my heavenly Father—the God who created me—and I trusted Him and gave myself to Him entirely, without reserve. Yes! I will defend my homeland, but now the heavenly Fatherland—the Kingdom of my Father!
Afterwards I went with Mama to the prayer house in Malovuzovsky Lane. From the very first meeting I said in my heart: “This is my people, this is my place in life!” I returned to my unit turned toward the Lord. I came back from leave to the Navy as a believer.
So, when did the desire to help unfortunate people arise in me? It seems to me that this desire was always there.
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