Kharkov

By the time they left Voronezh in August 1943, the 586th had helped to liberate Kharkov and had shot down ten German aircraft—and they weren’t even fighting at the front.

The legal reckoning with the Holocaust began early, even before the war ended, with the Soviet trials of perpetrators of mass murder in Krasnodar and Kharkov in 1943.

The only alternative route for them involved driving to the eastern Ukrainian city of Kharkov north of rebel-controlled territories and then driving south through Russia.

He was elected to parliament for Kharkov, northern Ukraine, in 1989, and espoused worthy causes: women’s rights, the ecological threat to Lake Baikal, the need for a monument to Stalin’s victims opposite the Lubyanka.

Kharkov’s streets were filled with flags and continuous announcements of our city meeting and/or exceeding agricultural and industrial production benchmarks set by the Communist Party.