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 had rather be shut up in a very modest cottage, with my books, my family and a few old friends, dining on simple bacon, and letting the world roll on as it liked, than to occupy the most splendid post which any human power can give.”
—Thomas Jefferson (1743–1826)
“The trumpets sound, the banners fly,
The glittering spears are ranked ready;
The shouts o’ war are heard afar,
The battle closes thick and bloody;
But it’s no the roar o’ sea or shore
Wad mak me langer wish to tarry;
Nor shout o’ war that’s heard afar,
Its leaving thee, my bonnie Mary.”
—Robert Burns (1759–1796)
“Each of the professions means a prejudice. The necessity for a career forces every one to take sides. We live in the age of the overworked, and the under-educated; the age in which people are so industrious that they become absolutely stupid.”
—Oscar Wilde (1854–1900)
“For most women who are considering it, single motherhood is not their first choice, but it’s not their last one either. They would prefer a husband in their family, but they’d rather have a family without one than no family at all.”
—Anne Cassidy. “Every Child Should Have a Father But....,” McCall’s (March 1985)