The northernmost vineyard in Russia
... Even -30 ° С is quite tolerable here, moreover, it is somewhat pleasant.
And the point is not only that those who received us in the Bashkir village of Kushnarenkovo did not hesitate to whisper: they say, after climbing this chill to Maiden Mountain (and we, as it will become clear later, absolutely had to climb it!) Below everyone expects a pile of vodka.
A glass of vodka with a triangle pie, and then tea with fragrant Bashkir honey?
Wonderful!
The Russian co-author did not begin to tell in this case that the urban classes in Russia had switched to a glass of good red.
The English co-author complied.
Eh, it's a pity that you can't put a smiley in books.
What else is pleasant in such-and-such frost?
Well, in the end, if not Celsius, but Fahrenheit, then the temperature is not so low: after all, -30 ° C is only -22 ° F.
But, to be honest, converting Celsius to Fahrenheit, we certainly come up with a comfort: after all, even after Brexit, Britain will not return to the F-scale.
However, what has Britain and such and such depths of Eurasia to do with it ?!
So after all, as we have already said, when Fahrenheit was still in use in Britain, it was from here, from the Bashkir village of Kushnarenkovo, that several Soviet "illegal" scouts from among the "ice axes" began their journey through Great Britain to the European continent.
And in order to understand in detail how and what happened then, we have to figure out how they were connected with each other on Soviet soil, and find out what they were taught before being sent to the rear of the enemy.
Coordinates
Why is it so easy to endure even the fiercest, burning frost in Bashkiria?
Why does the snow in Kushnarenkovo crunch so invigoratingly, and why the lungs are filled with crystal clear air?
Because here the geographical degrees converge in an amazing way, adding up to the formula "55/55": at this point 55 ° north latitude and 55 ° east longitude intersect.
These are the true depths of the continent.
And, accordingly, the kingdom of the continental
climate
.
It is dry in this area, and therefore it is so easy to breathe in winter.
Summer, on the other hand, is so sultry here that one of the northernmost vineyards on our planet was planted in Kushnarenkovo (as far as we know, there is only Norway to the north).
We went along this wonderful Bashkir vineyard, realizing that we were repeating the path of several personalities at once, significant for world politics and intelligence.
As old-timers told us, during the war he loved to wander between the vines (obviously, remembering his native southern lands) such is by no means the last person in history like Georgy Dimitrov.
Then everyone knew his name: the future leader of the People's Republic of Bulgaria was the General Secretary of the World Communist Party - the Comintern.
Together with Dimitrov, no less iconic personalities walked along this, if officially, "experimental fruit and berry station" of the local agricultural technical school - for example, the future co-founder of the Second Austrian Republic Johann Koplenig, the future President of the GDR Wilhelm Pieck, the chairman of its State Council Walter Ulbricht, etc. ...
No matter how you relate to their views, the figures are truly iconic.
But what else, besides exercise, did they do in this distance?
Teachers
In Soviet times, here, in the then Bashkir Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic, a book was published by the local ethnographer Yu. Uzikov, who wrote that in Kushnarenkov the evacuated Cominternists “worked, studied, wrote books, prepared for the construction of a new life in their countries”.
From all of the above, let us single out the word "studied" (especially since the Soviet censorship nevertheless allowed Yu. Uzikov, at least in passing, to mention that the training course also included military training).
The above-mentioned first persons of the Communist International are, as they will say today, the top lecturers of the special military-political and reconnaissance-sabotage school of the Comintern, located at that time on the basis of the Kushnarenkovsky agricultural technical school.
In some sections of this special school (German, Polish, Austrian, etc.), difficult people taught.
These are Paul Wendel (after the war - Minister of Public Education of the GDR), and Jacob Berman (future Deputy Chairman of the Council of Ministers of the Polish People's Republic), and Rudolf Dölling (future Ambassador of the GDR to the USSR), and Franz Honner (after the war - Minister of Internal Affairs of Austria) ...
Let's name several graduates of this amazing special school at once.
The palette will be very variegated.
Graduates
First of all, let's say about those who were noted already in the ensuing Cold War: among them, for example, the future head of intelligence of the GDR Markus Wolf and the Stasi representative in Cuba in 1971-1974.
Herbert Hentschke.
Among the graduates there is also such, in theory, apolitical person, like the two-time USSR Cup winner in football, Agustin Gomez.
How did he get here?
ABOUT!
We will have a separate chapter about him!
Among the graduates of the special school in Kushnarenkov is the heroine of our first book Francine Fromont, whose name is not without reason that a college and a street in France are named.
And also the future communist deputy of the National Assembly of Czechoslovakia Rudolf Vetishka and a prominent critic of communism Wolfgang Leonhard.
The latter, having said goodbye to the social bloc, moved to West Germany.
And, not being shackled by censorship restrictions, he left perhaps the most extensive memories of studying at Kunsharenkov.
The first head of the special school was Vylko Chervenkov;
he was replaced in this post by another Bulgarian - Ruben Avramov Levi ("Mikhailov").
The latter had the following conversation with Leonhard:
“- As you know, this is the school of the Comintern.
We will train personnel for different countries.
Are you ready to work in Germany?
- In Germany?
- All this was somehow new to me, and I did not know what he meant by that.
Underground work?
Work among German prisoners of war?
Political work after the defeat of Nazi Germany? "
Indeed, the school leadership also looked into the post-war future.
But while preparing cadets for the current work.
For example, back in Soviet times it was known that the same Czechoslovak deputy R. Vetishka landed in his country in the winter of 1943 from a Soviet plane.
And the same F. Fromont, as we have already shown in detail in our first book, is not just the first woman parachutist of the French Resistance.
Even before the war, it was related to the most delicate missions of the Comintern (for example, to the supply of weapons to republican Spain), and during World War II it was physically transferred through Britain to France not by the Comintern, but by the forces of the NKVD and SOE (within the framework of the same scheme “Ice ax ").