After the collapse of the Soviet Union, thousands of retired officers left for the States, Israel, and Germany. Most of them led a purely civilian life in emigration, but our story’s hero, the reserve colonel, continued to do his life's work, although in a slightly different role – as a military journalist.

Mark Steinberg – a reserve colonel, a famous Soviet and American journalist, military observer and historian. One day in the early 1990s happened to be in the same subway car as Mohammad ben Salah, an Arab, a former field commander of the Afghan mujahedeen. A bearded man in traditional Pashtun attire sat down opposite Steinberg. Both passengers recognized each other, although they did not show it. This meeting with ben Salah was the third in a row and peaceful – old acquaintances did not even speak to each other and went about their business.

Steinberg first encountered Mohammad ben Salah back in the early 1970s, when he inspected an army special school for cadets from Egypt, Syria, Iraq and other Arab states operating in the Turkmen regional center of Mary. Ben Salah was a cadet, the unofficial leader of Arab subversive training. For insolent behavior and unhealthy interest in the waitresses working in the canteen, the cadet and his curator had a conflict that immediately turned into a national one. Shouting “yahud, yahud, yahud!” – “Jew, Jew, Jew!” – ben Salah had to run out the window when Steinberg mechanically reached for the pistol. As a result, the conflict was hushed up and, to the unheard of joy of Mark, he was removed from control over the Mary special school. The second meeting was even less pleasant – at the Salang Pass in the Hindu Kush Mountains, where the former cadet ben Salah commanded the Afghan mujahedeen and, ironically, fell into the hands of Soviet soldiers.

In the capital of the Uzbek SSR, Mark spent a significant part of his life, although he was born in Ukraine, in the world famous center of Hasidism – Uman. On August 23, 1927, Mark, was born into the family of a local resident Feyga Gorokhod and the red commander Joseph Steinberg. Steinbregs have served in the army from generation to generation.

At the very beginning of the Great Patriotic War, Mark's father, a career military man, went to the front. In July 1941, he disappeared without a trace. As it turned out later, he died near Pryluki.

In the conditions of the rapid offensive of the Nazis, Feyga, together with her sons Isaac and Mark, was forced to flee from Tiraspol, where the family lived on the eve of the war. They decided to keep the path to their relatives in Uman, but the city was already surrounded by the Germans, and Feyga immediately decided to leave urgently. 14-year-old Mark ended up with his brother and mother in Tashkent. There he worked at a military factory, studied at an evening school and dreamed of getting into the ranks of the Red Army in order to take revenge on the invaders for the death of his father, uncle and thousands of Soviet citizens who died at the hands of Hitler's executioners.

When in 1945 Mark came to the recruiting station, the military commissar decided to send him to the Tashkent Military Engineering School, where the young man honed his literary talent. In between lectures, marches and chores, at a table in Lenin's room, cadet Steinberg wrote dozens of letters to the sweethearts of his colleagues.

However, along with literary talent, fighting skills had to be developed. Anti-Semitic escapades often occurred in the company. Despite the fact that many of Mark's commanders recently fought side by side with Jewish soldiers, Soviet propaganda was doing its job. Mark could not endure such injustice, constantly getting in a fight with an obviously stronger enemy. It was impossible to defeat the experienced sergeants who had been in hand-to-hand combat more than once, until one day a fellow countryman from Uman, a former front-line soldier Fima Galkin, came to the rescue. Fima took the guy under his wing, and then pulled Mark into sambo training and taught him to stand up for himself.

In December 1945, the military school was disbanded, and most of the cadets were sent to combat units to serve up the urgent service. In the fall of 1948, Mark graduated with honors from a military school and, with the rank of junior lieutenant, was assigned to Samarkand. But instead of one of the most beautiful and oldest cities in the world, he was sent to the southernmost point of the USSR, the city of Kushka, to the 5th Guards Mechanized Division.

The main entertainment of the officers of the Kushkin garrison was drunkenness. On this basis, the almost non-drinking Steinberg soon began to experience conflicts, which, as expected, acquired an anti-Semitic connotation. The honor of the Jewish people had to be defended with fists – other methods did not work in the southernmost garrison of the USSR. Soon, rumors circulated around Kushka about “Mark-Sambo”, who, in fact, was fond of not only sambo, but also shooting and fencing. A gym and books became a refuge from noisy companies for Officer Steinberg.

The main responsibility was the clearance of minefields at the ranges after the bombing, but at times it was necessary to tame the natural elements. According to his brother's recollections, Mark Steinberg took part, among other things, in the liquidation of the terrible Ashgabat earthquake of 1948 and in the dismantling of a huge blockage in the area of the Charvak reservoir.

During his stay in Kushka, Steinberg married a native Leningrad from a family of Petersburg intellectuals – Larisa Lyando, a graduate of the Herzen Institute of Foreign Languages, an English teacher.

Together with his wife, in the fall of 1954, they moved to Ashgabat, where Mark was transferred to the post of commander of a combat engineer battalion. In the capital of Turkmenistan, as in the distant Kushkin garrison, anti-Semitism flourished among the officers. To distract himself from everyday life as a soldier, Steinberg enthusiastically wrote for military newspapers and magazines.

However, journalism for him was still secondary. An officer of the engineering troops was professionally engaged in only one thing: risking his life. And not only in the Soviet Union. In 1963, Steinberg served in Algeria for seven months at the head of an engineering assault battalion. The French, leaving the country, left there two mine belts, which they themselves called “zones of death”. These zones in the west separated Algeria from Morocco, in the east – from Tunisia. During the demining work in the battalion, dozens of Soviet soldiers were wounded and killed.

After an African trip, around 1965, Mark became interested in a topic that was carefully hushed up by Soviet propaganda – the heroism of Soviet Jewish soldiers during the Great Patriotic War. Even as a cadet, he was indignant when he heard lies from fellow soldiers about the cowardice of the Jews. In addition, he, a capable and hardworking officer, was recommended three times by the commander of the district for admission to the Academy of the General Staff of the USSR and was refused three times without explanation. Although, of course, absolutely everyone knew the reason – the fifth point in the personal sheet on personnel records.