Winners

In the morning, Moscow is talking about this game only. Dynamo vs CDKA! Red and blue against white and blue! Fedotov vs Kartsev! And already from three days people began to move there, to Leningradka, to the gray bowl of the famous stadium. An hour before...

In the morning, Moscow is talking about this game only. Dynamo vs CDKA! Red and blue against white and blue! Fedotov vs Kartsev! And already from three days people began to move there, to Leningradka, to the gray bowl of the famous stadium.

An hour before the start of the game, a crowd thickens at the Dynamo stadium. Young officers with orders on their chests go to football, having escaped a hundred deaths at twenty-five, modest accountants go to football, now sitting in armlets with scores, and a year ago punching holes in the German defenses as part of assault engineer-sapper battalions, go a turner and a locksmith from the Krasny Proletarian factory, who recently ate porridge from the same pot in the trenches, go to football for an intelligent philology student in round glasses, who knows perfectly well how to kill in hand-to-hand combat, generals with golden epaulettes go to football, just a year ago, with deafening swearing, they dispersed tank traffic jams on military roads. It’s not just people who go to football, it’s those who survived, who weren’t killed, who weren’t burned, who didn’t starve to death, who didn’t burn out in a tank, who didn’t crash into the ground in a fighter plane, who didn’t die in the operating room, who go to football a table in a front-line hospital, under the scalpel of a surgeon who has not slept for the third day in a gauze mask and a bloody leather apron.

And because all these people survived and won, the air in the oval bowl of the stadium shines with happiness.

CDKA or Dynamo? Fedotov or Kartsev? Fedotov, of course, is not the same as before the war, he plays more in the pull, gives out passes, but he can also rush forward and put him in the "nine" from the rise. Kartsev is faster than ever, he flies across the field rapidly, the defense does not keep up with his jerks. And now all these cheerful men with the experience of life and death have already sat in the stands and, waiting for the start, discuss the chances of the teams and poison each other with stories. And suddenly a muffled respect rolls through the stands: look ... look over there ... look who has come to football!

Pilot Ivan Kozhedub, three times Hero of the Soviet Union, never shot down, himself shot down 19 Junkers and 16 Messerschmitts in air battles, walks along the podium to his place. The last time he shot down in April over Berlin. This is the same pilot who was on fire, but managed to throw the flame off the wing with a stream of air. This is the same Kozhedub who called his La-5 fighter a “stallion” and had among the sights of his 176th regiment a bear Zorka and a dog Button. This is the same famous pilot who, contrary to all instructions, drove his orderly, the son of the regiment and the Riga boy David Hait, from the airfield to the airfield in the fuselage of the aircraft. And this is the same Kozhedub who furtively kissed his fighter on the wing after the plane carried him out of terrible troubles in the sky.

Now he and his wife Veronica live in a cramped communal apartment in Monino. To get into their room, you have to go through another one, in which another pilot lives. There is no shower, you have to go to the sanitary inspection room of the military unit to take a shower. But the stove smelling of kerosene in the kitchen, and the shower in the sanitary inspection room, and fried potatoes in the pan, and a couple of bottles of vodka drunk with fellow soldiers under the rustle of Monino limes, and evening football at Dynamo - in all this now there is such a wonderful peaceful comfort and such a happy joy of the post-war life that has finally come.

And if the next morning after an evening with fellow soldiers, the young wife gently reproaches him, then the pilot just as gently explains the situation to her: “Three tankmen drank three hundred each - the proud falcon drank nine hundred.” And in the family again peace and love.

Look at the fighter pilot Ivan Kozhedub, you have never seen such a hero! All the shine of the winner in this photo. So he put on a tunic, heavy from stars and orders, and went by train from Monino to Moscow. A cap with Air Force wings slightly on one side, broken in the middle of the "Belomorin" in the mouth. The strong-willed face of a dashing ace pilot is clean-shaven, and the firm collar of an officer's tunic props up a firm chin and hugs a strong neck. And the hero Kozhedub sits three times not in an honorary box, but simply on the podium.