Where All Roads End
A dazzling father-daughter memoir of Soviet times by an award-winning writer
In this beautifully-written memoir, Sana Valiulina interweaves her own childhood experiences with a reconstruction of the dramatic period of her father’s life he kept secret. Her Tatar father (1922-1999) was an enigmatic figure, a leonine man with a temper who adored culture but used silence as a shield. He was one of the millions of Soviet men with an ostensibly unheroic World War II story.
Forced into the Red Army’s Volga Tatar Battalion at the age of eighteen, he was soon wounded and taken prisoner by the Germans and forced to enlist in their army instead. At the end of the war he escaped and became an interpreter for the Americans, only to be accused of collaboration upon his return to Russia and sent to a forced labour camp for ten years.
Chancing upon a photograph of her father in a Cherbourg museum, a ‘small corporal’ in German uniform, the author retraces her father’s fourteen year odyssey from western Russia to northern France and, via England, back to his homeland. She visits the location of the labour camp in the Ural mountains and studies military archives. Her father’s silence starts to make sense when she considers the limited opportunities and scrutiny of life under the Soviet system and the political propaganda during her own youth. Her father tried to carve out a space for independent thought for his family through culture and foreign radio broadcasts.
A picture of a complex intellectual emerges, before the story takes a surprising turn into wartime espionage and counter-espionage.
On the lasting impact of family trauma and the legacies of political oppression
Up to 6 million Russian soldiers were taken prisoner by the Germans, 3.5 million died
In the late 1930s, Stalin had almost the entire army leadership executed. And once the war had begun, entire regiments were put to death. Retreat was punishable by death » Reveals details of the (abandoned) clandestine MAMBA operation involving Russians and Brits
“Sana Valiulina drags us into the past with the speed of an express train thundering along the winding track of history. […] 'Where All Roads End is true (his)story, styled like a literary novel – a lively narrative structure, an arsenal of rhetorical fire – yet without fictionalisation.”
“If we want to understand what is happening now on Europe’s eastern border and not descend into political provincialism, we will have to delve into the memories of our Eastern European allies. Valiulina’s book is rich, human and very timely.”
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