Our shared memory. Concert requiem "Every third" presented in the capital of Bashkortostan

The most resonant Belarusian project continues to reveal the history of military Belarus to the Russian audience. Earlier, the requiem concert “Every third” was shown twice in Moscow – in the Victory Museum and the Great Hall of the State Kremlin Palace. Later, the performance was appreciated by the public of Kazan, St. Petersburg and Nizhny Novgorod. A new item on the tour map of a musical work in Russia is the State Concert Hall "Bashkortostan" in Ufa.

The topic of war for the Bashkirs is not exotic at all, but the same story as for hundreds of peoples of the Soviet Union: only 46 thousand inhabitants went to the front from Ufa. In total, more than 710 thousand people left Bashkiria to fight, of which about 380 thousand were killed or missing. In the republic, 20 large military formations were created, including ten divisions, two brigades, four regiments and two armored divisions. 278 natives and residents of Bashkiria became Heroes of the Soviet Union. Many of them are connected by military fate with Belarus. Twice Hero, legendary attack pilot Musa Gareev in Operation Bagration fought on the 3rd Belarusian Front as a squadron commander of the 76th Guards Assault Aviation Regiment. Mahmut Gareev, later a general of the army, was wounded near Vitebsk in early 1944. Dayan Murzin, the “Black General”, Hitler’s personal enemy and hero of the partisan movement in the Czech Republic, fought in a partisan detachment on the territory of the BSSR. By the way, the researchers of Bashkortostan believe that the famous Alexander Matrosov, who covered the enemy embrasure with his chest, also came from the Bashkir lands. The capital of Soviet Bashkiria Ufa during the war became the most important rear center of the USSR, which made a significant contribution to the Victory: more than 104,000 people and about 40 large industrial enterprises were evacuated here, as well as the Academy of Sciences of the Ukrainian SSR and several theaters. During the war, tens of thousands of Belarusians also found shelter in Bashkiria, a number of enterprises of the BSSR moved and produced products here. For this reason, the premiere of the requiem concert “Every Third” in Ufa is not just another music program, but an appeal to the general history and a page of common memory.

The general producer of the project, the poet-songwriter Anna-Lukashenko says: We worked very carefully with the materials, with the documents, so as not to be mistaken, so as not to distort any fact. To reveal the subject as much as possible, to reveal and cover the entire period of the Great Patriotic War. And this is a huge array of facts, data and materials, selected in such a way that they are understandable and accessible to almost any category of viewers.

The organizers of the concert added several novels to the script: it has become a good tradition for each new city to improve the production. And new data, constantly received by the Prosecutor General’s Office in the case of genocide of the Belarusian people, make adjustments to the libretto.

And the basis of the concert remains unchanged: the pain of the Belarusian people, who lost every third during the war, in the works of Belarusian authors. Another tradition of staging trips to the Russian regions is the presence at the presentation of senior officials of the Republic of Belarus. Chairman of the Board of the National Bank Roman Golovchenko arrived in Ufa – on the eve of the performance he held a meeting of the Working Group on Cooperation between Belarus and Bashkortostan.

- For me, as a representative of the Republic of Belarus, it is very pleasant to welcome you from this stage and to precede the requiem concert, which we brought today to the beautiful Ufa. This is a national Belarusian project that united the best creative teams and performers of our country and absorbed, probably, all the pain and courage of the Belarusians who lived through the terrible three years of occupation, but did not bow down, did not surrender the country, but organized a truly national resistance to the invaders. For us, this concert is a historical shield, a shield of memory, an inoculation against everything they are trying to impose on us. And this is not passive contemplation of history: just remember little, we must fight against such phenomena, and I very much hope that our concert will be an important step in this direction and will reach the heart of everyone. If this happens, then our idea has been realized, Roman Golovchenko said from the stage of the Bashkortostan State Committee. I want to say special words of gratitude to the Belarusian people for the memory, for the gentle and warm preservation of everything connected with the Great Patriotic War. There are a lot of young people in the room. I believe that for young people and for us, for all adults, this will be a very bright, very significant event. It's not easy, it's not a fun concert. This is a concert in memory of very difficult years, of very difficult trials that fell to the lot of our ancestors, our relatives. Thank you very much. Thank you to our dear Belarusian brothers, the head of Bashkortostan Radiy Khabirov supported his Belarusian counterpart.

Again, according to the tradition that is developing before our eyes, before the premiere of the requiem concert in Ufa, publications of the Republic of Belarus on the Great Patriotic War were transferred to the libraries of Bashkortostan. The books were presented by the Ambassador of Belarus to Russia Yuri Seliverstov, and received by the head of Bashkortostan Radiy Khabirov.

Concert requiem "Every third" in Ufa is accompanied by Belarusian expositions. The interactive exhibition of the publishing house “Belarus Today” “Deeds and Destinies in Documents” presented natives of Bashkiria who fought in partisan detachments on the territory of the BSSR. And there are almost a thousand of them in the database of the portal partizany.by! Moreover: more than 30 Bashkir partisans are Belarusians by nationality!

It is interesting that just before the concert in Ufa presented the scientific publication “Bashkortostan and Belarus during the Great Patriotic War (1941-1945): combat and labor feats”. The book recalls the names of natives of Bashkiria who fought in the Belarusian lands. Among them is Nikolai Kiselev, who in 1942 led about 300 surviving Jewish residents from the Dolginov Forest across the front line. For this feat, in 2005 he posthumously received the title of “Righteous Among the Nations”. Or, for example, Yakov Yafarov, commander of the partisan brigade named after Stalin, awarded the Order of the Red Star. In the partisan detachment along with him were his wife Natalia Mikhailovna and a young son. Roman Golovchenko and Radiy Khabirov got acquainted with the exposition dedicated to the Bashkir partisans in the BSSR.

- One of the illustrative fates of natives of Bashkortostan, presented at the stands, is the military biography of Ivan Mavlyga, a native of the Alsheevsky district of Bashkortostan. He did not participate in partisan battles on the territory of the BSSR, but was awarded the medal "Partisan of the Patriotic War" II degree. The fact is that Ivan Mavlyga served as a navigator of the air squadron crew. And he broke 15 times across the front line, through the German air defenses, to deliver ammunition and necessary materials to the partisans. The navigator took more than 4 thousand wounded and representatives of the headquarters of the partisan movement to the big land, Pavel Sukhorukov, head of the advertising department of the publishing house Belarus Today, told the guests. “It’s great that the entire database of the guerrilla movement is on the Internet and everyone can find their ancestor online,” said the Chairman of the Board of the National Bank of Belarus.

In the hall of the State Concert Hall “Bashkortostan” there were also BelTA exhibitions “Fates folded into a triangle”, representing the history of the war through the letters of its participants, and Minskkhlebprom “Bread is the invisible power of Victory”, where you could try several types of “bread of war”, specially recreated by technologists. For the first time during the Russian tour of the requiem concert in the hall of the concert hall organized its presentations and the host party. The National Museum of the Republic of Bashkortostan and the Republican Museum of Combat Glory created expositions telling about the combat path of the Bashkir formations, as well as about the labor feat of the residents of Ufa. All this, complementing the music program, and created a synthesis of our common memory, directed to the common future. There will be no place for the horrors of war. If we learn the lessons of the previous war correctly.

korotkin@sb.by

Photo by Belt and Maxim Korotkin