Valentin Pikul

Valentin Pikul was born in Leningrad. Sometimes his place of birth is erroneously given as the village of Kagarlyk (Ukraine), but in fact it was not Pikul himself, but his father, who was born there. In childhood Valentin also visited this village, where many of his father’s relatives lived.

In his youth Savva Mikhailovich Pikul was drafted into the Baltic Fleet, where he served as a sailor on the destroyer Friedrich Engels. After his service he remained in Leningrad, worked at the Skorokhod factory, graduated from an economics institute and became a military ship engineer at a shipbuilding plant. The writer’s mother, Maria Konstantinovna (née Karenina), came from peasants of Pskov Governorate.

In 1940, the family moved from Leningrad to the city of Molotovsk (now Severodvinsk), where V. S. Pikul’s father was assigned to work. There Valentin Pikul attended the Young Sailor club at the Pioneer House.

In 1941, Valentin Pikul passed the fifth-grade examination and went to spend his school holiday with his grandmother in Leningrad. Because the war had begun, he was unable to return until autumn. Mother and son had to endure the first blockade winter in Leningrad.

His father, from December 1941, became battalion commissar of the White Sea Military Flotilla and moved to Arkhangelsk.

In 1942, Valentin and his mother managed to leave Leningrad via the Road of Life for Molotovsk on one of the echelons. From there Valentin Pikul escaped to the naval school for young cadets on the Solovetsky Islands. His mother died the same year. His father transferred to the naval infantry and a year later was killed in the fighting near Stalingrad.

In 1943, Pikul graduated from school as a helmsman-signalman and was assigned to the destroyer Grozny of the Northern Fleet, where he served until the end of the war. After the victory he was sent to the Leningrad Preparatory Naval School, but in 1946 he was expelled “for lack of knowledge.”

He worked as head of a department in a