Marina Osipova is a multi-award-winning and a best-selling
author who writes with “emotional realism” and “taking on a subject that few
authors have touched.” A graduate from the Moscow State Institute of History
and Archives, she is dedicated to writing historical fiction, especially
related to WWII and the Eastern front.
I wasn’t born a story-teller. If twenty years ago somebody would tell me I’ll become a writer and by now will have six published books under my belt, I’d thought this person . . . fill the dots. I don’t know what bug had bitten me, but after my immigration to the United States, I started writing. So, it must have been an American bug. First, there were flash stories, then short stories, then a contemporary tale of my life in the Soviet Union during Perestroika, which, to my total astonishment, garnered some literary awards. When I was close to finishing the next contemporary romance, something happened: an insistent vision of a simple grave on the outskirts of a village 100 miles away from Moscow where my parents bought a peasant hut to spend summers would invade my mind. The grave was of eight local men who were shot and killed by the invading Germans in 1941. Repeatedly, this image distracted me from my work in progress; it squeezed all ideas that were to bring me to the desired fruition of my book in progress out of my head. Soon it became an obsession. The Cruel Romance was conceived. I think it was the first piece in my writing-related jigsaw puzzle.
I was born to a military family and, more to that, it took place in a military hospital thirty miles away from Berlin in the Eastern Germany. I consider it to be one of the keys to the puzzle.
Raised up in the then Soviet Union, inevitably, like every child since kindergarten, I was educated as belonging to a glorious nation, the one that came victorious in the Great Patriotic War as WWII was and still is called in modern Russia and on the post-Soviet territories. We grew up surrounded by portraits of the Communist Party leaders and war heroes, be it a general or a soldier.
The cult of war manifested itself everywhere. In my school, walls were decorated with nine portraits of its graduates—the Heroes of the Soviet Union (the highest distinction in the USSR). Of course, we knew their biographies by heart; we visited their parents or family members who showed us their pictures and tearfully but proudly told us stories about their perished loved ones. That was another important key.
We were brought up in an unshakable belief in “the heroic feat of the Soviet people, who saved humanity from the fascist plague.” In any school throughout the country, in history lessons and at special events, the concept about the war and the liberating mission of the Soviet people was embedded into the immature consciousness of pupils’ heads.
Books and movies about war—there were thousands of them! The war songs! We, children, and teenagers, sang them while marching along streets in columns during holidays, at the Young Pioneers gatherings and Komsomol meetings, adults at the table with a vodka bottle while coming together for whatever reason. The Katyusha song! Who doesn’t know it? The entire world knows!
In middle-school classes, we were trained to handle a grenade and a rifle, and, of course, how to pull up a gas mask quickly. I loved to go to a shooting range: in my brain, the idea of being prepared to “defend my country from the damned western capitalists and imperialists” took deep roots. In winter, we had “war-games” where we used snowballs for bullets and an opposing party was the enemy—another way to anchoring the idea of an imminent war in our immature consciousness.
Every year, Victory Day parades on the Red Square on 9 May—who didn’t see them on the news?
Every place, small and big, had its war museum, even if it was a tiny room or a corner of the classroom. Nowadays, it has become popular again! Travel around Russia, and you’ll see a T34, cannons, the Katyusha rocket launchers on pedestals in cities, villages, and along roadsides. As if calling: “Never forget it!”
As I’ve already mentioned, my father was in the active military. He was a child during the war, but his older brothers fought on the front, and the youngest of them perished at eighteen. He was pronounced missing. The family learned of the place where he perished and was buried only after the Soviet Union collapsed. There were no conversations about war experiences in the family. Many years ago, and it was only one time, one of my fathers’ brothers, while visiting us, told me embarrassingly about what the Soviet Army committed in Poland when it penetrated the country on its avalanche-like forced march toward the Hitler Germany. Don’t ask me what he divulged. I won’t tell you even under torture. It was a shock: the first sobering key.
After Perestroika, when archives were opened (they were quickly sealed again) tons of literary works and makeshift publications previously banned splashed out onto the streets and to the markets, freely changed hands. And what dreadful surprises they carried! About every aspect of our life. About the war. About the country’s leaders. The entire population read them avidly. Me included. And what an appalling revelation it was! In my desire to get to the truth, but still under the spell of the insidious propaganda, I hesitantly started digging deeper. Inevitably, the accumulated newly gained evidence about the war became that tipping point that allowed me to piece together all my personal experiences and the recent disclosures about the war. What didn’t change my mind, though, was and still is that the ordinary Soviet people sincerely defended their country without sparing their lives.
As I completed the jigsaw puzzle, it made me a historical fiction writer. I desperately want more people to learn about WWII from the perspective of the Soviet side and the Eastern front.
So, why do I write historical fiction? How could I not? It was destined.
Find out more about The Victims of Victory here.
Blog host Helena P. Schrader is an award-winning novelist and author of six non-fiction and twenty historical fiction books. Her current project in a three-part series about the Berlin Airlift.
The first two volumes of the Bridge to Tomorrow Trilogy are now available.
The first battle of the Cold War is about to begin....
Berlin 1948. In the ruins of
Hitler’s capital, former RAF officers, a woman pilot, and the victim of Russian
brutality form an air ambulance company. But the West is on a collision course
with Stalin’s aggression and Berlin is about to become a flashpoint. World War
Three is only a misstep away. Buy Now
Berlin is under siege. More than two million civilians must be supplied by air -- or surrender to Stalin's oppression.
USAF Captain J.B. Baronowsky and RAF Flight
Lieutenant Kit Moran once risked their lives to drop high explosives on Berlin.
They are about to deliver milk, flour and children’s shoes instead. Meanwhile,
two women pilots are flying an air ambulance that carries malnourished and
abandoned children to freedom in the West. Until General Winter deploys on the
side of Russia. Buy now!
Based on historical events, award-winning and best-selling novelist Helena P. Schrader delivers an insightful, exciting and moving tale about how former enemies became friends in the face of Russian aggression — and how close the Berlin Airlift came to failing.
Winning a war with milk, coal and candy!
A fresh perspective on the War. A nice change.
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