We arrived in Novgorod. All the houses in it were destroyed and only their frames remained. One wall was signed in white chalk: ‘The house is cleared’ and the other: ‘Careful, mines’. There wasn’t a single person on the streets. The bridge was destroyed, so we drove over a pontoon bridge. From our shore we saw the Kremlin and even from this far we saw that it was in terrible condition. On the left was the Kremlin wall with a huge hole, in the middle was an old belfry of the 15th century with an empty dome. Behind the wall we saw the Cathedral of St. Sophia with its central dome stripped of gold by the Germans.

We went around the Kremlin. It was deserted and in ruins; bent iron and remnants of German equipment everywhere. At the entrance to the Kremlin, a terrible sight was revealed, at first even incomprehensible. Figures of giant stiff black people were lying in various poses in the snow. It turned out that they were from the Millenium of Russia Monument — the Nazis dismantled the monument and didn’t have the time to pack it up and take it to Germany. There were 20 large, and 108 small ones — each with a unique number. The former included Peter I, Vladimir, an angel and a defeated Teuton; the latter had Alexander Pushkin, Mikhail Lermontov, Nikolai Gogol, Vissarion Belinsky, Alexander Suvorov and Ivan Krylov.

Stunned by what we had just seen, we took out our sketchbooks and sat down to draw sketches from different sides. At the same time, we came up with an idea to create a painting with this tragic site as the background. Subsequently, these sketches helped us a lot when we were working on our painting “Fascists Retreating from Novgorod”, which depicts the fascist invaders fleeing cowardly like rats against the background of the damaged, but firmly standing cathedral.

After creating two study sketches, we went to inspect the Kremlin. Continuing to get acquainted with Novgorod, we were convinced that it was almost completely destroyed. All its cathedrals had been ruined or ravaged. Wonderful frescoes were lost. A huge unique library was looted by the fascists, in the upper rooms of Cathedral of St. Sophia we saw only puny scraps of soaked sheets of individual books…