Ivan Ivantsov took the military oath in August 1941 as an 18-year-old boy after completing courses for driver mechanics. It was then that he felt like a real soldier. 7th Guards Tank Brigade ... For five long years it became the family and home of a young soldier. The bubbling maelstrom of war carried him to one of the most cruel and bloody areas - the Leningrad Front. Here he received his first baptism of fire. The tragedy and feat of Leningrad is terrible to remember even now, after so many years. Leningrad was an impregnable stronghold. Tankers repelled enemy attacks several times a day. Sometimes the temperature in the tank reached 60 degrees, and the swampy terrain with ravines and bumps demanded extreme stress from the driver. Here, near Leningrad, Ivantsov's tank came under fire: a German Faust cartridge smashed the left side of the vehicle. Wounded, half-blind tankers tried to leave it. But from the second shell, the tank caught fire and flared up like a match. Choking smoke filled the insides, the car lost its maneuverability. The Nazis immediately began to surround him. They walked calmly, confidently, impudently, hoping to take the crew alive. He looked at the approaching Fritzes through broken triplexes, and a single thought was beating in his head like an alarming alarm bell: “Really, everything? Is it a prisoner? " In the next second, in front of the astonished Nazis' eyes, a 35-ton steel colossus with a huge flaming torch rushed through the enemy's advancing human chain to its positions. For this battle, Senior Sergeant Ivantsov was awarded the Order of the Red Star. And the front roads led the tanker Ivantsov further, to the west. The enemy was still strong. But he no longer had the main thing - confidence in his victory. And the rumble of the approaching Soviet guns echoed for him with a terrible echo. After the liberation of Novgorod, the tank battalion of Ivan Ivantsov was transferred to Nizhny Tagil. Here, deep in the rear, a victory over the enemy was forged. At the tank factory, right from the conveyor line, the soldiers received brand-new T-34s smelling of fresh paint, loaded them onto platforms, and military echelons rushed them through the night and fog into the very lair of the enemy - to Berlin. And so the soldier's roads brought him to Germany. Here, in a foreign land, in hot battles, tanker Ivantsov burned twice in a tank in the spring of 1945. The storming of Berlin. This assault was attended by three Soviet fronts, over two million people, six thousand tanks. And among these tanks was the famous "thirty-four" of the guard of senior sergeant Ivan Ivantsov. He burst into Berlin on it and raced through its streets and squares as a liberator and hero - a modest Russian soldier from distant Bashkiria. For the Berlin operation on his chest, two orders of the Patriotic War, 1 and 11 degrees, shone. After the war, in 1946, he returned to his native land, married a simple girl, also a front-line soldier, the beautiful Zoechka. In 1976, the Council of Veterans of the Leningrad Front invited the Ivantsovs' husband to a meeting of veterans of the 58th Army. They traveled to Novgorod, walked through the places of past battles, laid wreaths on the graves of their military friends who died here. And in 1978 the same meeting of fellow soldiers took place in Leningrad ... I like to be in their modest cozy apartment. They are always glad to have guests. Ivan Fyodorovich opens the front-line album, gets military awards, and the memory of a disturbing bird again returns him to his distant fighting youth. Tatiana Masyagutova, member of the writing organization of Kumertau.