There’s war in his eyes. Victory, too

There’s nothing special about this simple flat, lacking new furniture and repair for years, located in one of the apartment blocks of the beautiful city of Lviv. There are hundreds flats like this one here. However, there are only few people like its owner. He is a silver-haired old man with sad, weary, yet gentle eyes...

His name is Andriy Kalyonov. Little do the tenants of this house know about the greatest honour of our times – they are neighbours with and have an opportunity to give daily greetings to a full Cavalier of the Order of Glory. Does anybody try to make most of a unique opportunity to visit the veteran, to give him something that elderly people value most – attention – and to learn in return some captivating, true, sad and facetious stories from his life? There’s quite little time left... Andriy Kalyonov (may God hive him many years of life) already turned 89. So many different events occurred over those years that it’s hard to believe that it’s the life of a single person we are talking about.

Andriy Kalyonov was born October 14, 1921 in a large family living in Kuzhendeevo village, Ardat region, Gorky oblast (Russia).

Andriy’s family moved to Kulebaki, Gorky oblst in 1932. It was there where he finished 10 classes of the middle school in 1939. Wishing to be helpful to his family, Andriy foung job at a local metallurgical plant. 18-year-old Andriy enlisted into the Red Army that very September. Kalyonov is then assigned to the Far East (Talov crossing), where he undergoes training at the regimental reconnaissance school. Upon completing his training, Kalyonov is appointed deputy reconnaissance platoon leader.
This is what Andriy Kalyonov tells about those years: “My father gave me my bag, saw me off to the train, and off to the Far East I went. A year passed, I was a cadet at regimental school when the war began. I was assigned a small unit. We first fought there, in the Far East but soon we were redeployed to the 3rd Belarus Front. We participated in the Konigsberg assault in 1945. We approached the fortress, but the artillery was unable to proceed because of the wall which was additionally fortified by the Germans. My boys and I were sent forward to see what was going on. We installed some wood sticks with our helmets on top in the trenches and crawled on our bellies right under the fortress. It turned out that there was a moat around the fortress just like in ancient times. We spent a long time trying to figure out how we could approach that wall and finally we’ve got an idea. Several soldiers dived over to the other side of the moat dragging a rope which we then used for carrying several bags of dynamite under the wall of the Konigsberg fortress. We then shot the explosive with a field gun and so part of the wall collapsed. In such a way we have cleared the road for our infantry and artillery...”

After the German troops were defeated at Konigsberg, Kalyonov’s regiment was once again redeployed to the Far East with the 5th army. It was there where he celebrated the Victory Day. However, the war continued for these boys, this time with Japan.

“We were fighting Japanese at that time – Andriy Kalyonov remembers – they attacked us in a tricky manner: they excavated a tunnel in the mountain and were running an artillery train which was keeping our battalion under fire. We were firing back with a 203-mm howitzer. I directed our fire using binoculars to observe where each round fell. That’s when I saw that one of our rounds did not explode. I jumped out of my observation point to see what went wrong. Bullets were whistling past my ears, battalion commander was yelling “Andriy, where are you going?!” while I dashed to the place, fixed the detonator and hardly managed to get away before the round exploded. The blast wave threw me over some distance and I can’t remember what happened next. I regained consciousness on a hospital bed lying with a broken spine. But we did manage to destroy the Japanese train. And that was our objective!”

Kalyonov stayed in the hospital for nearly a year. After the recovery, on July 22, 1946 he was demobilized in accordance with the Decree of the Supreme Council Presidium.

After his demobilization, the Cavalier of the Order of Glory of every degree returned to his native town of Kulebaki to be greeted by his happy mother. He was soon assigned to Lviv to begin his work as an industrial complex accountant.



But the Motherland needed his priceless reconnaissance experience gained during the Great Patriotic War, so in 1948 he was offered a job at the Ministry of the Interior. Andriy Kalyonov worked there till his very retirement.


Answering a question about what would he want to wish to his brothers in arms and future generations on the occasion of the 65th anniversary of the Great Victory, Colonel of Militia, ret. Andriy Kalyonov says: “I wish that those who does not know what war is never found out. And I wish those who knows it, those who went through its every toil never be forgotten.”