It would seem that time travelers can only be found on the pages of science fiction works. But no: one such traveler from the future, who became a prisoner of the present, lived in the last century. His name was Yevgeny Iosifovich Gaiduchok.
Well-known researcher Vadim Chernobrov and journalist Ekaterina Golovina even conducted a journalistic investigation about him.
Fatal adventure
Evgeny Iosifovich came to our troubled times from the distant XXIII century. While still quite a boy, he once decided to hijack a time machine and take a ride in some exotic antiquity. Taking with him his girlfriend, for the sake of whose sympathy, in fact, he started this adventure, he rushed through the worlds and centuries.
But it was not possible to fly far. In the 30s of the XX century, the time machine crashed. The teenagers were seized with horror, because they soon realized that the damaged machine was capable of lifting only one of them, and whether it had enough energy to fly back to the XXIII century was completely impossible to foresee.
The choice was not rich, and therefore the twelve-year-old boy pushed the roaring girl into the miraculous unit and, having ordered to return with help, sent her back to the future. If there was another accident, it would at least be closer to its time and away from our barbaric era.
Zhenya did not wait for help. But he was lucky: soon the young wanderer was adopted by good people, and he began to master a new life - which, in his own words, he first hated. Only for the first time in his life, having ridden a bicycle, the captive of our time realized that there can be little joys here too.
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At the age of fifteen, Eugene entered the book apprenticeship school at the Leningrad House of Books, worked as a seller in the department of literature of exact sciences and technology. Despite this specialization, he happened to meet Boris Oleinik, Yuri Lebedinsky, Boris Korneev, Yuri Olesha, Mikhail Bulgakov, Mark Bernes, Klavdia Shulzhenko. He knew Samuel Marshak well, and once, ironically, he even talked to the author of The Time Machine, Herbert Wells.
Predictor
It is quite possible that it was these acquaintances that pushed him to a further choice - Eugene entered the directing department of the theater school. However, a couple of years later, he went straight to Siberia: what Stalinism was, Zhenya remembered perfectly from his school history course, but he never learned to keep his mouth shut.
There were many political prisoners in the camp cell, but the main contingent was made up of illiterate men, and soon the smart guy found a way to salvation. Every evening the overseer brought a whole heap of newspaper scraps to the cell on a roll-up, and the inmates patiently waited for the student to compose a full-fledged picture from this mosaic and begin "political information".
Eugene, after a couple of months, already understood what was happening in the country, and together with the camp people he was smoking cigarettes like a steam locomotive.
Knowledge of history served a good service to the time traveler - remembering the true goals of Stalin and Hitler, he could read a lot "between the lines." The artist's skills also helped - almost everyone could draw more or less decently in his century.
Gaiduchk was entrusted to head the camp editorial board, and he began to issue slogans, posters and wall newspapers with ideologically correct content. Thanks to this, two years later, the former “anti-Soviet” who realized, recovered his sight and redeemed by labor was released.
Soon, however, the winter war with Finland began, and the former prisoner was drafted into the army. The first place of service for him was an aviation service battalion stationed near Baku. The Soviets seriously feared that the British would start bombing the Caucasian oil fields, but Gaiduchok, remembering that Great Britain was an ally of the USSR in World War II, reasonably argued that “Churchill would not dare, but Stalin would not allow it,” putting an appropriate ideological basis under this.
Knowledge from the future helped to orientate themselves on the fateful Sunday of 1941: on the morning of June 22, when the entire officer corps was still in a state of shock, Sergeant Gaiduchok was already lecturing the soldiers about "German bestial fascism." Thanks to this, he became a political instructor.
In his new position, Eugene was known as an excellent analyst - the school history course continued to help, and the "calculation" of the further moves of the warring parties became his crown number.
After the Great Patriotic War, our hero settled in one of the towns in the area known for its anomalous phenomena of the Medveditskaya ridge, on the border of the Saratov and Volgograd regions. There he worked for a long time as the director of a house of culture, created and headed the local history museum, at which even foreigners came to see a unique collection.
It is interesting that in the 1970s-1980s, in one of the halls of the museum, there was a so-called Timeline - a multi-meter paper scroll depicting the main events of world history from the Stone Age to … the 21st century inclusive.
Evgeny Iosifovich died in 1991. It is strange to realize this paradox, but he passed away two centuries before his birth.
Memories of the future
Naturally, every reader has a question about the evidence in favor of the reality of this strange story. Of course, going on a trip in a time machine, Gaiduchok did not plan to get stuck in the past and did not take any holographic phone or photon grinder to prove his case.
About the technical features of the device on which he got into our century, he also did not spread - "everything has its time!" Nevertheless, some details that surfaced in conversations with his relatives and friends, as well as information received not so long ago, suggest that this story could have taken place in reality.
So, Chernobrov and Golovina met with fellow soldier Gaiduchka, who recalled several episodes where their political instructor acted as a real clairvoyant. For example, a couple of days before the start of the war, he told his friends who had gathered to be fired that "they will not have time for this on Sunday." Just a few days later, when one of them, considering Eugene something like a fortune-teller, literally got him by asking about the date of the victory, he also named this cherished number.
After that, he immediately lost his reputation as a prophet - everyone was too confident in our lightning victory. His brother-soldier also confirmed Gaiduchka's phenomenal analytical abilities.
With a family
Gaiduchok showed a similar sagacity when he “predicted” Yeltsin's presidency, the collapse of the USSR, the Armenian-Azerbaijani conflict in Nagorno-Karabakh, and the tragic events in Georgia, Chechnya and Yugoslavia. This was back in the days when the word "perestroika" was associated with everyone only with repair and construction work. However, no one believed these strange prophecies for that time either.
Yevgeny Iosifovich's daughter showed Ekaterina Golovina her father's curious work - about 20 posters made in the style of "ROSTA Windows", that is, drawings with verses. Gaiduchok compiled them into one album and eloquently titled: "Our city in the XXI century." Some of the illustrated predictions are already starting to come true.
The woman also remembered the strange fairy tales that her father sometimes told her as a child. The plots of these fairy tales were like science fiction. One of his memories is a dwarf wearing a spacesuit. This tale was told in the late 1940s, when in practice there was no question of any spacesuits.
Friends recalled that Gaiduchka sometimes “found”, and he started to tell stories about how the Earth looks from space, how the perception of an astronaut plowing through the Universe changes, how aliens adapt to our conditions, and much more. Someone, because of this, considered him a dreamer, someone an eccentric, but perhaps these were just memories of the future.
Once Yevgeny Iosifovich also mentioned why after the war he decided to settle in a small town on the Medveditskaya ridge. According to him, this sparsely populated town by the XXIII century will become a large metropolis-spaceport with an emphasis on time travel. This city will become the site of a new St. Petersburg: the old one will go under water in the future and will be evacuated to these steppe regions.
Victor BUMAGIN