VTsIOM claims that since 2016, readership in Russia has increased by 1.5 times and reached 66 percent. What can I say, positive! According to brand analytics, the number of paper books in the media has reached 800 thousand annually, and despite the convenience of electronic counterparts, they play a special role: they become elements of home comfort and loyal companions during the holidays.
The book “Children of War – Journalists” has a subtitle: “Young witnesses of a terrible event of the twentieth century.” If you think about the deep essence of this phrase, you will feel uncomfortable. Ultimately, what is a child’s memory supposed to store? Memories of a young woman, the most beautiful mother in the world, a strong father, a favorite toy, flowers in the field… But other images remained in the memory of the generation of war children. The book collected the war memories of those who devoted their entire lives to journalism.
For many graduates of the Faculty of Journalism of Moscow State University, the book will cause a bout of nostalgia: the memoirs of Mikhail Vasilievich Shkondin and Galina Viktorovna Lazutina will reveal a new side of their teachers-graduates…
— During the first war period, in the evening, when dusk was gathering, along the Garden Ring, of which Valovaya Street is a part, they carried barrage balloons resembling large sausages (at that time everything was compared to something edible) in order to release them into the sky at the right time and in the right place. Sometimes the soldiers held them with ropes, sometimes by the great aunts, as it seemed to me then. “The aunts were 15-16 years old at that time,” recalls Valentin Nesterkin.
Now, when I find myself in Valovaya, I will always remember the balloons he described. The artist Evgeny Petrovich Revyakov, whose cartoons were also published in “Moscow Evening,” recalls how, on June 22, 1941, he, a five-year-old boy who did not understand anything, was very worried because he “never received the promised ice cream: I asked my mother to buy it the day before, and she said that when Sunday comes, we will go with the whole family to the park, and there I will have a treat. Now I grumble: “Mom, yesterday I didn’t buy ice cream, and today there War…” Here you will involuntarily smile at this childish naivety…
An astonishing and honest book of priceless testimonies, easily written and read in one sitting. It would be nice to include it in the list of required literature, at least for graduates of journalism departments – so that they know the names of the former and realize the depth of what they lived.
About this topic
The book is part of the project of the Moscow Union of Journalists. The book includes 30 personal memoirs of journalists born before the war and at the beginning of the war.