Five years later there remained no unswept areas in the sea routes and my father was transferred from the minesweeper to a coastguard ship, again in charge of the diesel engine. The following year saw the end of his second term in the Navy service (because of the heavy losses in WWII, before new generations of draftees cropped up, the service term in the Soviet Army was doubled: 6 years in the Army, 8 in the Navy—yes, 2 years more and the only consolation that no other servicemen sport so spiffy breathtaking uniform, golden anchors and stuff) and they offered my father a job in a “mailbox”.
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At those times the USSR had lots of secret institutions, secret factories, and even secret cities, none of which had an ordinary postal address so as to fool enemy spies and leave them clueless about all those secret objects location. As a result, the addressee stopped living in any street or city, he lived in no region neither district and he was referred to in a pretty short way: “N. Ogoltsoff, Mail Box №***.”
Since on his last furlough before the demobilization Red Navy man Ogoltsoff N. M. registered his marriage with Citizen Vakimova G. J., she landed up at the same “mailbox” in the Carpathian mountains.
The “box” was not fixed up with a maternity hospital and for bringing me forth my mother had to visit the town of Nadveerna, thirty kilometers from the regional center, the city of Stanislavl (later renamed into Ivano-Frankivsk after the end-of-the-century Ukrainian poet Ivan Franko). Going out the "box" gave her the frightful jitters because vehicles on the roads were often shot at by the Bandera men.
(…for a long time I considered the Bandera men bloody bandits and Nazi accomplices. What else to think of them if a full-scale military division named “Galichina” was manned by Western Ukrainians to fight against the Red Army? Then, gradually, it dawned on me that two years before the German invasion it was the Red Army who occupied Western Ukraine and assisted the Soviet secret police, aka NKVD, in executions and deportation of potential opponents to the Soviet system. Killed just in case, as a preventive measure, in thousands.
Besides, what is a division when compared to an army? Among the German Wehrmacht’s comrades-in-arms, there also was the Russian Liberation Army (RLA) of almost one million servicemen fighting against the USSR.
And last but not least, the rank-and-file Red Army men, participants in the events of that period, let me know that the Bandera men fought fiercely against both Soviet and German troops. They were Carpathian guerrillas defending their land against successive liberators, aka enslavers.