This year marks the 75th anniversary of WWII. Victory Day, commemorates the surrender of Nazi Germany 1945. It was first inaugurated, following the signing of the German Instrument of Surrender late in the evening on 8 May 1945 (after midnight, thus on 9 May Moscow Time). V-E Day was observed on May 8, 1945, in Great Britain, Western Europe, the United States and Australia, and on May 9 in the Soviet Union and New Zealand.
Regardless of the day that the world acknowledges victory over Nazism, CRA recognizes the many lives lost throughout the world, no where more than the Soviet Union, with over 24 million military and civilian lives lost there alone, and salutes all of our veterans for their heroic courage under fire, who gave the ultimate sacrifice – their lives.
For many years, Congress of Russian Americans collected data of Russian-American veterans in the US. This “Golden list of Russian-American veterans” was collected by one of CRA’s founding members and US Army Colonel Oleg Olegovich Pantukhoff, son of Oleg Ivanovich Pantukhoff, founder of ORUR, Russian Scouts St.George Pathfinders and himself a colonel in the Life guards of the Russian Imperial army and published in various issues of CRA’s “Russian American” magazine and CRA’s Biographical Dictionary, compiled by Prof. Eugene A. Alexandrov.
During the war some 16 million Americans served in the United States Armed Forces, with 405, 399 killed and 671,278 wounded. Colonel Pantiukhov listed 159 Russian-American WWII veterans in the US military, which included 39 who gave their lives on the front. Photos and biographical data (both in English and Russian) of those were featured in CRA’s “Russian American”, as well as the Biographical Dictionary of Russians of North America (including those Russian-Americans who gave their lives in WWII, were kamikaze suicide flier, Vladimir Klochkov, Lieutenant Commander Nicholas Elin, Seargent Paratrooper John Lukashevich Jr., Lieutenant Georges Koushnareff, commanding a mine-throwing mission, wounded flying over Algiers, where he subsequently died, Lieutenant with the tank division of the US Army, Victor Staradoub, Army Air Force Lieutenant Alexander Rusecky, Private Marine Corp. Walter Valaskov, Peter Kisel with the Infantry Division, who participated in the Invasion of France, Sergeant 1st Class Special Agent CIC, Michael Varenik, who had already been a veteran of the Russian Civil War before serving in counterintelligence in WWII and many more).
Famous Los Angeles historian, A.Dolgopolov (himself a veteran of WWI & Russia’s Civil War) gathered lists of Russian veterans in America, his list included more than 2399 names. All three (Pantukhoff, Dolgopolov, Alexandrov) continued to state that this work has not been completed and we must continue the work of gathering these names. To further complicate finding many of these people from the 2nd and 3rd generations of Russians in America, many changed their names. such as Evgenyi Kiaschenko who Americanized his name as Eugene Kayes.
The main logo: DOD, DVIDS and Graphics by Lynn Kaczenski.
