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Selling is a 1944 magazine article about: Liberated Ukraine Title: Liberated UkraineAuthor: Eddy GilmoreThis is a report of the authors visit to the Ukraine during the latter part of WWII. The German’s have left, and left a mess. Lots of information on the sights and people. Quoting the 1st page “The room was big and bare. Light from 4 fat candles tried to fight its way through the gloom, but could get no farther than the little mellow circle around Leonid Lebedev and his 3 associates, who sat about a plain pine desk, the room's only piece of furniture. Outside there was a constant low rumble as truck after truck rolled west of Kiev, capital of the Ukraine, toward the front. Every few minutes this rumble would be broken by the high-pitched roar of a tank rumbling by. And then there would be the slug, slug, slug of the hard boots of the soldiers trudging off to fight and die for liberation of the Ukraine. Lebedev, chairman of Kiev's new City Soviet, a blond, smiling young man who looked surprisingly like Jack Benny, stopped what he was saying and listened. From down the road came those unmistakable minor tones of Russian song, tones that always seem so Slavic and melancholy to me. This was a song of soldiers, and out there in the cold night they were singing as they marched off to battle. I stepped to the window and peeped from behind the blackout. The night was dark, but there was a faint moon, its rays highlighting the tips and sharp edges of the soldiers' bayonets as they swung by in song. I turned back to Lebedev. He raised his eyes and smiled a proud smile. "You say that sounds sad," he said. "Well, it isn't. Those soldiers are happy. Why, it's even a happy song! Those soldiers are happy because they're liberating the Ukraine." It's their land of romance, of southern skies, guitars, soft music, and girls with honey-colored hair and bright-blue eyes. But the Ukraine is more than that. It has much of the richest agricultural land in the Soviet Union. It has fine cattle and hogs, and its mineral wealth is far from being fully explored. Lebedev and his comrades, Zinovy Serdiuk, Alexei Davidov, and Vasili Chervonov, were all young men. While their army fought on up ahead, they stayed here and built as others liberated. There is work to be done in the Ukraine - millions of man-hours. Kiev once had close to a million people. Now it has about 70,000. Throughout the other parts of the Ukraine which the Red Army has freed in its brilliant autumn and winter campaign, it is almost the same story. Hundreds of the Ukraine's pretty little villages have been burned or blasted from its rich earth. Thousands of head of cattle have been removed to Germany. Enough hens to stock the farmyards of a State in our Midwest have been shipped west by the invaders. Factories have been smashed, set fire to, or blown sky-high with dynamite. All of the fine bridges that spanned the great Dnieper - water artery of the Ukraine - have been torn down or scattered in its waters by explosives. The mighty Dnieper Dam in the Dnepropetrovsk sector is ruined. The apartment houses and the once stately public buildings of its cities have been wrecked. What was once a land of proud beauty has become 1 of the most desolate places in all of vast Russia. Thousands of collective farms have been robbed of their tractors and of the mechanized farming equipment installed at such terrific price, labor, and sacrifice by the Soviets. I have been into farmhouses…" 7” x 10”, 12 double-sided pages, 22 B&W pictures plus map. These are pages from an actual 1944 magazine. No reprints or copies. 44E1 Powered by eBay Turbo Lister
