Post War Career and Family
After his return to the Soviet Union, he studied at the Air Force Academy, where he graduated in 1954. Around that same time, in Moscow, he met an art student - Yulya Alekseyevna. Soon they began dating and going together to the Bolshoy Theater and others. In 1956 he got his first command duty as deputy commander of a regiment placed in Machulishchi, Belarus. In 1957 he proposed marriage to Yulya, and she accepted. Already married, that same year Kramarenko received his second command assignment - the 167th IAP in Georgia. Soon other commissions followed all over the Soviet Union, and he was also blessed by the births of his son Aleksandr and his daughter Nadezhda.
In 1970 he received a new appointment, this time on foreign soil: the Iraqi Air Force had bought brand new MiG-21s, and Kramarenko helped Iraqi pilots and officers to learn to operate the Soviet aircraft and trained them in tactics. A similar duty followed in Algeria in the mid-1970s. Finally, already a Major-General of the Air Force, Kramarenko retired in 1977.
Today Sergei Kramarenko is the vice-president of the Rossiskaya Assotsiatsya Geroev (Russian Association of Heroes, the War Veteran Association, named that way because many of his members are Heroes of the Soviet Union), author of his autobiography and collaborator in many other books where Russian pilots have openly described his wartime experiences. Sergei Kramarenko lives currently in his flat in Moscow together with his wife, receiving the love of his daughter and four grandsons.
Read more about this topic: Sergei Kramarenko
Famous quotes containing the words post, war, career and/or family:
“I can forgive even that wrong of wrongs,
Those undreamt accidents that have made me
Seeing that Fame has perished this long while,
Being but a part of ancient ceremony
Notorious, till all my priceless things
Are but a post the passing dogs defile.”
—William Butler Yeats (1865–1939)
“This people must cease to hold slaves, and to make war on Mexico, though it cost them their existence as a people.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
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—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“Q: What would have made a family and career easier for you?
A: Being born a man.”
—Anonymous Mother, U.S. physician and mother of four. As quoted in Women and the Work Family Dilemma, by Deborah J. Swiss and Judith P. Walker, ch. 2 (1993)