To look at them, the elderly group that met in Moscow to reminisce Tuesday could have been World War II vets anywhere in the world except that these veterans were children when they fought on Russia's front lines.
Known as "the children of regiments", the veterans were among an estimated 60, 000 children who served in the Soviet Army from Stalingrad to Berlin during the war.
Never officially mobilized, they were granted veteran's status only in 1991. Several dozen met for the first time Tuesday at the Central Museum of the Armed Forces.
According to the conference organizers, the Moscow Veterans Association, many of the children ended up fighting on the front lines either through patriotic fervor or through accident of circumstance amid the chaos that engulfed the Soviet Union in the war years.
Efforts were made to protect them from combat at first, but as the war progressed and the entire Soviet Union was geared toward a total war effort, able-bodied children fought as equals alongside adult recruits.
Many of the veterans who met Tuesday wore "Son of the Regiment" medals, along with many other ribbons commemorating the battles in which they fought.
Leonid Petersky, a Russian journalist who has spent years researching and documenting the subject of child soldiers, estimates that over 25, 000 of them were orphans - like Yelena Pavlova, a Moscow girl who at the age of 12 joined the war effort when her mother died in 1943. She served on the Kalininsky front as a nurse throughout the rest of the war.
Others, like Spartak Rodionov, now 65, had a mother in hospital and a father on the front.
"I wanted to fight", he said. "So I ran away when I was 15. They kept sending me back, but I kept running away again".
Finally he was accepted into the 17th Moskvaretsky division, and served from Smolensk all the way to the storming of Berlin. Rodionov is now hunchbacked as a result of his sixth war wound, which he received in May 1945.
Some served alongside their parents, like Vera Belyakova, who started helping in the hospitals of Stalingrad in November 1941, with her mother, during the appalling siege of the city. She was 10 years old.
Belyakova followed the troops all the way to Budapest.
A tiny figure of a woman, she says she was even smaller when she was given her first pistol at the age of 13. She shot her first German soldier shortly afterward.
"On one side, I had a medical kit", said Belyakova, "on the other, my pistol; and on my back, my doll".
Known as "the children of regiments", the veterans were among an estimated 60, 000 children who served in the Soviet Army from Stalingrad to Berlin during the war.
Never officially mobilized, they were granted veteran's status only in 1991. Several dozen met for the first time Tuesday at the Central Museum of the Armed Forces.
According to the conference organizers, the Moscow Veterans Association, many of the children ended up fighting on the front lines either through patriotic fervor or through accident of circumstance amid the chaos that engulfed the Soviet Union in the war years.
Efforts were made to protect them from combat at first, but as the war progressed and the entire Soviet Union was geared toward a total war effort, able-bodied children fought as equals alongside adult recruits.
Many of the veterans who met Tuesday wore "Son of the Regiment" medals, along with many other ribbons commemorating the battles in which they fought.
Leonid Petersky, a Russian journalist who has spent years researching and documenting the subject of child soldiers, estimates that over 25, 000 of them were orphans - like Yelena Pavlova, a Moscow girl who at the age of 12 joined the war effort when her mother died in 1943. She served on the Kalininsky front as a nurse throughout the rest of the war.
Others, like Spartak Rodionov, now 65, had a mother in hospital and a father on the front.
"I wanted to fight", he said. "So I ran away when I was 15. They kept sending me back, but I kept running away again".
Finally he was accepted into the 17th Moskvaretsky division, and served from Smolensk all the way to the storming of Berlin. Rodionov is now hunchbacked as a result of his sixth war wound, which he received in May 1945.
Some served alongside their parents, like Vera Belyakova, who started helping in the hospitals of Stalingrad in November 1941, with her mother, during the appalling siege of the city. She was 10 years old.
Belyakova followed the troops all the way to Budapest.
A tiny figure of a woman, she says she was even smaller when she was given her first pistol at the age of 13. She shot her first German soldier shortly afterward.
"On one side, I had a medical kit", said Belyakova, "on the other, my pistol; and on my back, my doll".