On the Internet you can find a poignant statement on the topic of memory of the war, attributed to the famous director and writer. We checked whether Vasily Shukshin said this.

The full phrase, allegedly uttered by Shukshin in the early 1970s, reads like this: “When I was a kid, I determined who was a front-line soldier and who was a rat. They didn’t wear the first awards, they drank in silence on the 8th and 9th [of May]... And the rats in schools wore orders, and wrote about their exploits in the newspapers. Nowadays you rarely see a front-line soldier..."

This statement gained great popularity on social networks. In particular, two publications on Facebook in the group "Turn around, we're alive"in total received more than 8,000 reposts, and on the project page "Immortal barracks" - more than 800. Tweet from the account "Perzident Roissi" was shared by more than 900 users, and the channel's publication "Russian noname” on Telegram was read by about 143,000 people. One of them was the daughter of film director Maria Shukshina, who shared fasting in your channel. The quote can be found both in online collections of aphorisms (“Aphorisms", "Quotes.info") and on meme aggregators ("AyDaPrikol"). In recent years, this statement has often been used to illustrate the attitude of a person towards the solemn and pathetic celebration of war-related dates.

Soviet writer, film director and actor Vasily Shukshin was born in 1929 in the village of Srostki in Altai. The boy was not yet three years old when he was left without a father, who was arrested on trumped-up charges and soon shot. In 1942, my stepfather also died in the war. Two years later, 15-year-old Vasily, having graduated from the seventh grade, entered a technical school, but quickly dropped out of school to go to work and somehow feed his family, so the future director was faced with adult life quite early. This to a certain extent contradicts the words about the boy, because even on the first anniversary of the Victory, in May 1946, Shukshin was almost 17.

In addition, the mention of May 8 is puzzling. Yes, on this day in many European countries noted anniversary of the victory over Nazi Germany, since at the moment its surrender came into force the clock showed 23:01 Central European Time. By that time, May 9 had already arrived in the USSR, and decree, signed the day before, declared this particular day a holiday. So no May 8th was subsequently officially celebrated in the USSR; There is no information about the unofficial traditions of the celebration.

Finally, by the time of Shukshin’s death in 1974, the bulk of war veterans were aged 50–60 years, that is, these people were actively involved in public life and worked in different fields, and the front-line soldier Brezhnev led the country at that time. Therefore, the words “nowadays you rarely see a front-line soldier anywhere” sound at least strange for that time.

Nevertheless, all this does not mean that Vasily Shukshin, in theory, could not utter such a phrase. However, “Verified” did not find it in the six-volume collected works writer, nor memories other people about Shukshin, not a few biographical books, nor in individual interview. The quotation is missing from publications digitized by the project “Google Books"

The earliest mentions of the quote on the Internet were in the spring of 2016. The most notable case can be considered article Soviet dissident German Obukhov, broadcast on Radio Liberty on May 8. Even earlier, on the night of April 30 (apparently, in the process of preparing the article), Obukhov published a quote in his Facebook. That same night they started spreading it other users, and the next evening she was already on the site “Quotes.info" In response to the question “Verified” where Obukhov got this quote from, the former political prisoner found it difficult to name the source, answering only: “I also took it from the Internet, perhaps a day earlier.” At least today, Obukhov’s publication on social networks is the very first known case of the use of this phrase.

At the same time, at least from two interview Vasily Shukshin on the set of the film “They Fought for the Motherland” shows that he treated the memory of the war not only with reverence, but even with some moderate pathos. Shukshin himself once noted Victory Day at the same table with a real Bryansk partisan and listened with interest to his stories about the war. At the same time the writer told, that in his native village May 9 was celebrated quietly, like a day of sorrow, and the hero of one of his works, although a war veteran, really liked to brag about exploits that never happened. Therefore, it is difficult to draw an unambiguous conclusion about Shukshin’s attitude to the bright celebration of Victory Day.

Considering the above, the attribution of the popular quote about front-line soldiers to Vasily Shukshin seems unfounded - apparently, the phrase appeared in 2016. It is interesting that five years later, his daughter Maria Shukshina, many popular media attributed another quote - the actress allegedly refused to celebrate May 9, “because all this turned out to be a farce for our state.” However, later it turned outthat this was just a comment from one of her subscribers, which Shukshina reported in her Telegram channel.

Cover photo: social networks