During the battles, the children-heroes of the Great Patriotic War did not spare their own lives and walked with the same courage and courage as adult men. Their fate is not limited to exploits on the battlefield - they worked in the rear, promoted communism in the occupied territories, helped supply troops and much more.

There is an opinion that the victory over the Germans is the merit of adult men and women, but this is not entirely true. Children-heroes of the Great Patriotic War made no less contribution to the victory over the regime of the Third Reich and their names should not be forgotten either.

The young pioneer heroes of the Great Patriotic War also acted bravely, because they understood that not only their own lives were at stake, but also the fate of the entire state.

The article will focus on the children-heroes of the Great Patriotic War (1941-1945), more precisely, on the seven brave boys who received the right to be called heroes of the USSR.

The stories of child heroes of the Great Patriotic War of 1941-1945 are a valuable source of data for historians, even if the children did not take part in bloody battles with weapons in their hands. Below, in addition, it will be possible to get acquainted with the photos of the pioneer heroes of the Great Patriotic War of 1941-1945, learn about their brave deeds during the hostilities.

All stories about the children-heroes of the Great Patriotic War contain only verified information, their full names and the names of their loved ones have not changed. However, some data may not be true (for example, the exact dates of death, birth), since documentary evidence was lost during the conflict.

Probably the most child-hero of the Great Patriotic War is Valentin Alexandrovich Kotik. The future brave man and patriot was born on February 11, 1930 in a small settlement called Khmelevka, in the Shepetovsky district of the Khmelnytsky region, and studied at the Russian-language secondary school No. 4 of the same town. Being an eleven-year-old boy who was only obliged to study in the sixth grade and learn about life, from the first hours of the confrontation he decided for himself that he would fight the invaders.

When the autumn of 1941 came, Kotik, together with his close comrades, carefully organized an ambush for the policemen of the city of Shepetovka. In the course of a well-thought-out operation, the boy managed to eliminate the head of the policemen by throwing a live grenade under his car.

Around the beginning of 1942, a small saboteur joined a detachment of Soviet partisans who fought during the war deep behind enemy lines. Initially, young Valya was not sent into battle - he was assigned to work as a signalman - a rather important position. However, the young fighter insisted on his participation in the battles against the Nazi invaders, invaders and murderers.

In August 1943, the young patriot, having shown an extraordinary initiative, was accepted into a large and actively operating underground group named after Ustim Karmelyuk under the leadership of Lieutenant Ivan Muzalev. Throughout 1943, he regularly took part in battles, during which he received a bullet more than once, but even despite this, he returned to the front line again, not sparing his life. Valya was not shy about any work, and therefore he also often went on intelligence missions in his underground organization.

One famous feat the young fighter accomplished in October 1943. Quite by chance, Kotik discovered a well-hidden telephone cable, which was not deep underground and was extremely important for the Germans. This telephone cable provided a connection between the headquarters of the Supreme Commander (Adolf Hitler) and occupied Warsaw. This played an important role in the liberation of the Polish capital, since the headquarters of the Nazis had no connection with the high command. In the same year, Kotik helped blow up an enemy warehouse with ammunition for weapons, and also destroyed six railway trains with the equipment necessary for the Germans, and in which the Kievans were stolen, mining them and blowing them up without remorse.

At the end of October of the same year, the little patriot of the USSR Valya Kotik accomplished another feat. Being part of a partisan grouping, Valya stood on patrol and noticed how enemy soldiers surrounded his group. The cat did not lose his head and first of all killed the enemy officer who commanded the punitive operation, and then raised the alarm. Thanks to such a bold act of this brave pioneer, the partisans managed to react to the environment and were able to fight off the enemy, avoiding huge losses in their ranks.

Unfortunately, in the battle for the city of Izyaslav in mid-February of the following year, Valya was mortally wounded by a shot from a German rifle. The pioneer hero died of his wound the next morning at the age of some 14 years.

The young warrior was forever rested in his hometown. Despite the significance of the exploits of Vali Kotik, his merits were noticed only thirteen years later, when the boy was awarded the title of “Hero of the Soviet Union”, but already posthumously. In addition, Valya was also awarded the "Order of Lenin", the "Red Banner" and the "Patriotic War". Monuments were erected not only in the hero's native village, but throughout the entire territory of the USSR. Streets, orphanages, and so on were named after him.

Petr Sergeevich Klypa is one of those who can easily be called a rather controversial personality, who, being a hero Brest Fortress and possessing the "Order of the Patriotic War", was also known as a criminal.

The future defender of the Brest Fortress was born at the end of September 1926 in the Russian city of Bryansk. The boy spent his childhood almost without a father. He was a railway worker and died early - the boy was raised only by his mother.

In 1939, Peter was taken into the army by his older brother, Nikolai Klypa, who at that time had already reached the rank of lieutenant of the spacecraft, and under his command was a musical platoon of the 333rd regiment of the 6th rifle division. The young soldier became a pupil of this platoon.

After the Red Army captured the territory of Poland, he, along with the 6th Infantry Division, was sent to the area of ​​the city of Brest-Litovsk. The barracks of his regiment were located close to the famous Brest Fortress. On June 22, Petr Klypa woke up in the barracks already at the time when the Germans began to bomb the fortress and the barracks surrounding it. The soldiers of the 333rd Infantry Regiment, in spite of the panic, were able to give an organized rebuff to the first attack of the German infantry, and young Peter also actively participated in this battle.

From the first day, together with his friend Kolya Novikov, he began to go on reconnaissance in the dilapidated and surrounded fortress and carry out the instructions of his commanders. On June 23, during the next reconnaissance, the young fighters managed to find a whole ammunition depot that was not destroyed by explosions - this ammunition greatly helped the defenders of the fortress. For many more days, Soviet soldiers fought off enemy attacks using this find.

When senior lieutenant Alexander Potapov became the commander of 333-for the time being, he appointed the young and energetic Peter as his contact. He did a lot of good things. Once he brought to the medical unit a large supply of bandages and medicines, which were badly needed by the wounded. Every day, Peter also brought water to the soldiers, which was sorely lacking for the defenders of the fortress.

By the end of the month, the position of the Red Army soldiers in the fortress became catastrophically difficult. To save the lives of innocent people, the soldiers sent children, the elderly and women as prisoners to the Germans, giving them a chance to survive. The young intelligence officer was also offered to surrender, but he refused, deciding to continue participating in the battles against the Germans.

In early July, the defenders of the fortress almost ran out of ammunition, water and food. Then, by all means, it was decided to go for a breakthrough. It ended in complete failure for the soldiers of the Red Army - the Germans killed most of the soldiers, and captured the rest. Only a few managed to survive and break through the environment. One of them was Peter Klypa.

However, after a couple of days of exhausting pursuit, the Nazis seized and captured him and other survivors. Until 1945, Peter worked in Germany as a laborer for a fairly wealthy German farmer. He was liberated by the troops of the United States of America, after which he returned to the ranks of the Red Army. After demobilization, Petya became a bandit and robber. He even had murder on his hands. He spent a significant part of his life in prison, after which he returned to a normal life and started a family and two children. Peter Klypa died in 1983 at the age of 57. His early death was caused by a serious illness - cancer.

Among the children-heroes of the Great Patriotic War (WWII), the young partisan fighter VilorChekmak deserves special attention. The boy was born at the end of December 1925 in the glorious city of sailors Simferopol. Vilor had Greek roots. His father, a hero of many conflicts with the participation of the USSR, died during the defense of the capital of the USSR in 1941.

Vilor studied well at school, experienced extraordinary love and had artistic talent - he drew beautifully. When he grew up, he dreamed of painting expensive paintings, but the events of bloody June 1941 crossed out his dreams once and for all.

In August 1941, Vilor could no longer sit back while others bled for him. And then, taking his beloved shepherd dog, he went to the partisan detachment. The boy was a real defender of the Fatherland. His mother dissuaded him from going to an underground group, since the guy had a congenital heart defect, but he still decided to save his homeland. Like many other boys of his age, Vilor began to serve in a scout.

He served in the ranks of the partisan detachment for only a couple of months, but before his death he accomplished a real feat. November 10, 1941, he was on duty, covering his brothers. The Germans began to surround the partisan detachment and Vilor was the first to notice their approach. The guy risked everything and fired a rocket launcher to warn his fellows about the enemy, but by the same act he attracted the attention of a whole detachment of Nazis. Realizing that he could no longer leave, he decided to cover the retreat of his brothers in arms, and therefore opened fire on the Germans. The boy fought until the last shot, but even then he did not give up. He, like a real hero, rushed at the enemy with explosives, blew himself up and the Germans.

For his achievements, he received the medal "For Military Merit" and the medal "For the Defense of Sevastopol".

Medal "For the Defense of Sevastopol"

Among the famous children-heroes of the Great Patriotic War, it is also worth highlighting Kamanin Arkady Nakolaevich, who was born in early November 1928 in the family of the famous Soviet military leader and General of the Red Army Air Force Nikolai Kamanin. It is noteworthy that his father was one of the first citizens of the USSR, who received the highest title of Hero of the Soviet Union in the state.

Arkady spent his childhood on Far East, but then moved to Moscow, where he lived for a short time. As the son of a military pilot, Arkady could fly airplanes as a child. In the summer, the young hero always worked at the airport, and also briefly worked at a plant for the production of aircraft for various purposes as a mechanic. When did it start fighting against the Third Reich, the boy moved to the city of Tashkent, where his father was sent.

In 1943, Arkady Kamanin became one of the youngest military pilots in history, and the youngest pilot of the Great Patriotic War. Together with his father, he went to the Karelian front. He was enlisted in the 5th Guards Assault Air Corps. At first he worked as a mechanic - far from the most prestigious job on board an aircraft. But very soon he was appointed as a navigator-observer and a flight mechanic on an airplane to establish communication between separate parts called U-2. This plane had a pair control, and Arkasha himself flew the plane more than once. Already in July 1943, the young patriot was flying without anyone's help - completely on his own.

At the age of 14, Arkady officially became a pilot and was enrolled in the 423rd Separate Communications Squadron. Since June 1943, the hero fought against the enemies of the state as part of the 1st Ukrainian Front. Since the autumn of the victorious 1944, he became part of the 2nd Ukrainian Front.

Arkady took part in communication tasks to a greater extent. He flew over the front line more than once to help the partisans establish communications. At the age of 15, the guy was awarded the Order of the Red Star. He received this award for helping the Soviet pilot of the Il-2 attack aircraft, which crashed on the so-called no man's land. If the young patriot had not intervened, Polito would have perished. Then Arkady received another Order of the Red Star, and after that, the Order of the Red Banner. Thanks to his successful actions in the sky, the Red Army was able to plant a red flag in occupied Budapest and Vienna.

After defeating the enemy, Arkady went to continue his studies in high school, where he quickly caught up with the program. However, the guy was killed by meningitis, from which he died at the age of 18.

Lenya Golikov is a well-known invader killer, partisan and pioneer, who for his exploits and extraordinary devotion to the Fatherland, as well as dedication, earned the title of Hero of the Soviet Union, as well as the Medal "Partisan of the Patriotic War of the 1st degree". In addition, the homeland awarded him the Order of Lenin.

Lenya Golikov was born in a small village in the Parfinsky district, in the Novgorod region. Her parents were ordinary workers, and the boy could expect the same calm fate. At the time of the outbreak of hostilities, Lenya had completed seven classes and was already working at a local plywood factory. He began to actively participate in hostilities only in 1942, when the enemies of the state had already captured Ukraine and went to Russia.

In mid-August of the second year of the confrontation, being at that moment a young but already quite experienced intelligence officer of the 4th Leningrad underground brigade, he threw a combat grenade under an enemy car. In that car sat a German major general from the engineering troops - Richard von Wirtz. Previously, it was believed that Lenya decisively eliminated the German commander, but he miraculously managed to survive, although he was seriously injured. In 1945, American troops took this general prisoner. However, on that day, Golikov managed to steal the general's documents, which contained information about new enemy mines that could cause significant harm to the Red Army. For this achievement, he was presented to the country's highest title of "Hero of the Soviet Union".

In the period from 1942 to 1943, Lena Golikov managed to kill almost 80 German soldiers, blew up 12 highway bridges and 2 more railway ones. Destroyed a couple of food depots important to the Nazis and blew up 10 ammunition vehicles for the German army.

On January 24, 1943, the Leni detachment fell into a battle with the predominant forces of the enemy. Lenya Golikov died in a battle near a small settlement called Ostraya Luka, in the Pskov region, from an enemy bullet. Together with him, his brothers in arms died. Like many others, he was awarded the title of "Hero of the Soviet Union" posthumously.

One of the heroes of the children of the Great Patriotic War was also a boy named Vladimir Dubinin, who actively acted against the enemy in the Crimea.

The future partisan was born in Kerch on August 29, 1927. From childhood, the boy was extremely brave and stubborn, and therefore, from the first days of hostilities against the Reich, he wanted to defend his homeland. It was thanks to his perseverance that he ended up in a partisan detachment that operated near Kerch.

Volodya, as a member of the partisan detachment, conducted reconnaissance operations together with his close comrades and brothers in arms. The boy delivered extremely important information and information about the location of enemy units, the number of Wehrmacht fighters, which helped the partisans prepare their combat offensive operations. In December 1941, during another reconnaissance, Volodya Dubinin provided comprehensive information about the enemy, which made it possible for the partisans to completely defeat the Nazi punitive detachment. Volodya was not afraid to take part in the battles - at first he simply brought ammunition under heavy fire, and then stood in the place of a seriously wounded soldier.

Volodya had a trick to lead the enemy by the nose - he "helped" the Nazis find the partisans, but in fact led them into an ambush. The boy successfully completed all the tasks of the partisan detachment. After the successful liberation of the city of Kerch during the Kerch-Feodosiya landing operation of 1941-1942. a young partisan joined a detachment of sappers. On January 4, 1942, during the demining of one of the mines, Volodya died together with a Soviet sapper from a mine explosion. For his merits, the hero-pioneer was posthumously awarded the Order of the Red Banner.

Sasha Borodulin was born on the day of a famous holiday, namely March 8, 1926 in the hero city called Leningrad. His family was rather poor. Sasha also had two sisters, one older than the hero, and the other younger. The boy did not live long in Leningrad - his family moved to the Republic of Karelia, and then returned to the Leningrad region again - in the small village of Novinka, which was located 70 kilometers from Leningrad. In this village, the hero went to school. In the same place, he was elected chairman of the pioneer squad, which the boy dreamed about for a long time.

Sasha was fifteen years old when the fighting began. The hero graduated from the 7th grade and became a member of the Komsomol. In the early autumn of 1941, the boy joined a partisan detachment of his own free will. At first, he conducted exclusively reconnaissance activities for the partisan unit, but soon took up arms.

In the late autumn of 1941, he proved himself in the battle for the Chascha railway station in the ranks of a partisan detachment under the command of the famous partisan leader Ivan Boloznev. For his courage in the winter of 1941, Alexander was awarded another very honorable order of the Red Banner in the country.

Over the following months, Vanya repeatedly showed courage, went to reconnaissance and fought on the battlefield. On July 7, 1942, the young hero and partisan died. It happened near the village of Oredezh, which is in Leningrad region. Sasha remained to cover the retreat of his comrades. He sacrificed his life to let his brothers in arms get away. After his death, the young partisan was twice awarded the same Order of the Red Banner.

The above names are far, far from all the heroes of the Great Patriotic War. The children accomplished many feats that should not be forgotten.

No less than other child heroes of the Great Patriotic War, a boy named Marat Kazei committed. Despite the fact that his family was out of favor with the government, Marat still remained a patriot. At the beginning of the war, Marat and his mother Anna hid the partisans. Even when the arrests of the local population began in order to find those who harbor the partisans, his family did not give theirs to the Germans.

After that, he himself joined the ranks of the partisan detachment. Marat was actively eager to fight. He accomplished his first feat in January 1943. When there was another skirmish, he was slightly wounded, but he still raised his comrades and led them into battle. Being surrounded, the detachment under his command broke through the ring and was able to avoid death. For this feat, the guy received the medal "For Courage". Later, he was also given the medal "Partisan of the Patriotic War" 2nd class.

Marat died along with his commander during the battle in May 1944. When the cartridges ran out, the hero threw one grenade at the enemies, and the second one blew himself up so as not to be captured by the enemy.

However, not only the photos and names of the boys of the pioneer heroes of the Great Patriotic War now adorn the streets of large cities and textbooks. There were also young girls among them. It is worth mentioning the bright, but sadly cut short life of the Soviet partisan Zina Portnova.

After the war broke out in the summer of 1941, the thirteen-year-old girl ended up in the occupied territory and was forced to work in the canteen for German officers. Even then, she worked underground and, on the orders of the partisans, poisoned about a hundred Nazi officers. The fascist garrison in the city began to catch the girl, but she managed to escape, after which she joined the partisan detachment.

At the end of the summer of 1943, during the next task in which she participated as a scout, the Germans captured a young partisan. One of the local residents confirmed that it was Zina who then poisoned the officers. The girl was brutally tortured in order to find out information about the partisan detachment. However, the girl did not say a word. Once she managed to escape, she grabbed a pistol and killed three more Germans. She tried to escape, but she was taken prisoner again. After that, she was tortured for a very long time, practically depriving the girl of any desire to live. Zina still did not say a word, after which she was shot on the morning of January 10, 1944.

For her services, the seventeen-year-old girl received the title of Hero of the SRSR posthumously.

These stories, stories about the children-heroes of the Great Patriotic War should never be forgotten, but on the contrary, they will always be in the memory of posterity. It is worth remembering them at least once a year - on the day of the Great Victory.

More than a dozen years ago, Mikhail Efremov was born - a brilliant military leader who proved himself during the periods of two wars - Civil and Patriotic. However, the feats that he accomplished were not immediately appreciated. After his death, many years passed until he received a well-deserved title. What other heroes of the Great Patriotic War were forgotten?

Steel Commander

At the age of 17, Mikhail Efremov joined the army. He began his service as a volunteer in an infantry regiment. Two years later, with the rank of ensign, he participated in the famous breakthrough under the command of Brusilov. Mikhail joined the Red Army in 1918. The hero gained fame thanks to armored guns. Due to the fact that the Red Army did not have armored trains with good equipment, Mikhail decided to create them on his own, using improvised means.

Mikhail Efremov met the Great Patriotic War at the head of the 21st Army. Under his leadership, the soldiers held back the enemy troops on the Dnieper, defended Gomel. Not allowing the Nazis to go to the rear of the Southwestern Front. Mikhail Efremov met the beginning of the Patriotic War, leading the 33rd Army. At this time, he participated in the defense of Moscow and in the subsequent counteroffensive.

In early February, the strike group, commanded by Mikhail Efremov, made a hole in the enemy's defenses and went to Vyazma. However, the soldiers were cut off from the main forces and surrounded. For two months, the fighters carried out raids on the rear of the Germans, destroyed enemy soldiers and military equipment. And when the cartridges with food ran out, Mikhail Efremov decided to break through to his own, asking by radio to organize a corridor.

But the hero never did. The Germans noticed the movement and defeated Efremov's shock group. Mikhail himself, in order not to be captured, shot himself. He was buried by the Germans in the village of Slobodka with full military honors.

In 1996, persistent veterans and search engines ensured that Efremov was awarded the title of Hero of Russia.

In honor of Gastello's feat

What other heroes of the Great Patriotic War were forgotten? In 1941, a DB-3F bomber took off from the airfield near Smolensk. Alexander Maslov, and it was he who flew the combat aircraft, was given the task of eliminating the enemy column moving along the Molodechno-Radoshkovichi road. The plane was hit by enemy anti-aircraft guns, the crew was declared missing.

A few years later, namely in 1951, in order to honor the memory of the famous bomber Nikolai Gastello, who rammed on the same highway, it was decided to transfer the remains of the crew to the village of Radoshkovichi, to the central square. During the exhumation, they found a medallion that belonged to Sergeant Grigory Reutov, who was a gunner in Maslov's crew.

They did not change the historiography, however, the crew began to be listed not as missing, but as dead. Heroes of the Great Patriotic War and their exploits were recognized in 1996. It was in this year that the entire crew of Maslov received the corresponding title.

The pilot whose name has been forgotten

The exploits of the heroes of the Great Patriotic War will remain in our hearts forever. However, not all heroic deeds memory was preserved.

Pyotr Yeremeev was considered an experienced pilot. He received his for repulsing several German attacks in one night. Having shot down several Junkers, Peter was wounded. However, having bandaged the wound, a few minutes later he again took off on another plane to repel an enemy attack. And a month after this memorable night, he accomplished a feat.

On the night of July 28, Eremeev was assigned to patrol the airspace over Novo-Petrovsk. It was at this time that he noticed an enemy bomber that was heading for Moscow. Peter went into his tail and started shooting. The enemy went to the right, while the Soviet pilot lost him. However, he immediately noticed another bomber, which went to the West. Coming close to him, Eremeev pressed the trigger. But the shooting was never opened, as the cartridges ran out.

Without thinking for a long time, Peter cut his propeller into the tail of a German aircraft. The fighter turned over and began to fall apart. However, Eremeev escaped by jumping out with a parachute. For this feat they wanted to hand him over, but they did not have time to do this. On the night of August 7, the pod was repeated by Viktor Talalikhin. It was his name that was inscribed in the official chronicle.

But the heroes of the Great Patriotic War and their exploits will never be forgotten. This was proved by Alexei Tolstoy. He wrote an essay called "Battering Ram", in which he described the feat of Peter.

Only in 2010 he was recognized as a hero

In the Volgograd region there is a monument on which the names of the Red Army soldiers who died in these parts are written. All of them are heroes of the Great Patriotic War, and their exploits will forever remain in history. On that monument is the name Maxim Passar. The corresponding title was awarded to him only in 2010. And it should be noted that he fully deserved it.

He was born in the Khabarovsk Territory. Hereditary hunter has become one of the best among snipers. He showed himself back in By 1943, he destroyed about 237 Nazis. The Germans set a significant reward for the head of the well-aimed Nanai. He was hunted by enemy snipers.

He accomplished his feat at the very beginning of 1943. In order to liberate the village of Peschanka from enemy soldiers, it was first necessary to get rid of two German machine guns. They were well fortified on the flanks. And it was Maxim Passar who had to do it. 100 meters before the firing points, Maxim opened fire and destroyed the crews. However, he failed to survive. The hero was covered by enemy artillery fire.

Underage Heroes

All of the above heroes of the Great Patriotic War and their exploits were forgotten. However, all of them must be remembered. They did everything possible to bring the Victory Day closer. However, not only adults managed to prove themselves. There are some heroes who are not even 18 years old. And it is about them that we will talk further.

Along with adults, several tens of thousands of teenagers participated in the hostilities. They, like adults, died, received orders and medals. The images of some were taken for Soviet propaganda. All of them are heroes of the Great Patriotic War, and their exploits have been preserved in numerous stories. However, five teenagers should be singled out, who received the corresponding title.

Not wanting to surrender, he blew himself up along with enemy soldiers

Marat Kazei was born in 1929. It happened in the village of Stankovo. Before the war, he managed to finish only four classes. Parents were recognized as "enemies of the people." However, despite this, Marat's mother, back in 1941, began to hide partisans at home. For which she was killed by the Germans. Marat and his sister joined the partisans.

Marat Kazei constantly went to reconnaissance, took part in numerous raids, undermined the echelons. He received the medal "For Courage" in 1943. He managed to raise his comrades to attack and break through the ring of enemies. At the same time, Marat was wounded.

Talking about the exploits of the heroes of the Great Patriotic War, it is worth saying that a 14-year-old soldier died in 1944. It happened while doing another job. Returning from reconnaissance, he and his commander were fired upon by the Germans. The commander died immediately, and Marat began to shoot back. He had nowhere to go. And there was no opportunity as such, since he was wounded in the arm. Until the cartridges ran out, he held the defense. Then he took two grenades. He threw one immediately, and kept the second until the Germans approached. Marat blew himself up, killing several more opponents in this way.

Marat Kazei was recognized as a Hero in 1965. The underage heroes of the Great Patriotic War and their exploits, stories about which are widespread in a fairly large number, will remain in memory for a long time.

Heroic deeds of a 14-year-old boy

The partisan scout Valya was born in the village of Khmelevka. It happened in 1930. Before the capture of the village by the Germans, he graduated from only 5 classes. After that, he began to collect weapons and ammunition. He passed them on to the partisans.

Since 1942 he became a scout for the partisans. In the fall, he was given the task of destroying the head of the field gendarmerie. The task was completed. Valya, together with several of his peers, blew up two enemy vehicles, killing seven soldiers and the commander Franz Koenig himself. About 30 people were injured.

In 1943, he was engaged in reconnaissance of the location of an underground telephone cable, which was subsequently successfully blown up. Valya also took part in the destruction of several trains and warehouses. In the same year, while in office, young hero noticed punishers who decided to arrange a raid. Having destroyed the enemy officer, Valya raised the alarm. Thanks to this, the partisans prepared for battle.

He died in 1944 after the battle for the city of Izyaslav. In that battle, the young warrior was mortally wounded. He received the title of hero in 1958.

A little short of 17

What other heroes of the Great Patriotic War of 1941-1945 should be mentioned? Scout in the future Lenya Golikov was born in 1926. From the very beginning of the war, having obtained a rifle for himself, he joined the partisans. Under the guise of a beggar, the guy went around the villages, collecting data on the enemy. He passed all the information to the partisans.

The guy joined the detachment in 1942. During his entire military career, he took part in 27 operations, destroyed about 78 enemy soldiers, blew up several bridges (railway and highway), blew up about 9 vehicles with ammunition. It was Lenya Golikov who blew up the car in which Major General Richard Witz was driving. All his merits are fully listed in the award list.

These are the underage heroes of the Great Patriotic War and their exploits. Children sometimes performed such feats that even adults did not always have the courage. It was decided to award Lenya Golikov with the Gold Star medal and the title of Hero. However, he was never able to get them. In 1943, the combat detachment, which included Lenya, was surrounded. Only a few people got out of the encirclement. And Leni was not among them. He was killed on January 24, 1943. Until the age of 17, the guy never lived.

Killed by a traitor

The heroes of the Great Patriotic War rarely remembered themselves. And their exploits, photos, images remained in the memory of many people. Sasha Chekalin is one of those. He was born in 1925. He joined the partisan detachment in 1941. He served no more than a month.

In 1941, the partisan detachment inflicted significant damage on the enemy forces. Numerous warehouses were burning, cars were constantly undermined, trains went downhill, sentries and enemy patrols regularly disappeared. The fighter Sasha Chekalin took part in all this.

In November 1941, he caught a bad cold. The commissioner decided to leave him in the nearest village with a trusted person. However, there was a traitor in the village. It was he who betrayed the underage fighter. Sasha was captured by partisans at night. And finally, the constant torture was over. Sasha was hanged. For 20 days he was forbidden to be removed from the gallows. And only after the liberation of the village by the partisans, Sasha was buried with military honors.

The corresponding title of Hero was decided to be awarded to him in 1942.

Shot after prolonged torture

All of the above people are heroes of the Great Patriotic War. And their exploits for children are the best stories. Then we will talk about a girl who, in courage, was not inferior not only to her peers, but also to adult soldiers.

Zina Portnova was born in 1926. The war found her in the village of Zuya, where she came to rest with her relatives. Since 1942, she has been posting leaflets against the invaders.

In 1943 she joined a partisan detachment, becoming a scout. In the same year, she received her first assignment. She was supposed to uncover the reasons for the failure of the organization called "Young Avengers". She was also supposed to establish contact with the underground. However, at the moment of returning to the detachment, Zina was seized by German soldiers.

During the interrogation, the girl managed to grab a pistol lying on the table, shoot the investigator and two more soldiers. While trying to escape, she was captured. She was constantly tortured, trying to force her to answer questions. However, Zina remained silent. Eyewitnesses claimed that once, when she was taken out for another interrogation, she threw herself under a car. However, the car stopped. The girl was taken out from under the wheels and taken away for interrogation. But she was silent again. That's what the heroes of the Great Patriotic War were like.

The girl did not wait for 1945. In 1944 she was shot. Zina at that time was only 17 years old.

Conclusion

The heroic deeds of soldiers during the fighting numbered several tens of thousands. No one knows exactly how many brave and courageous deeds in the name of the motherland. AT this review some heroes of the Great Patriotic War and their exploits were described. Briefly, it is impossible to convey all the strength of character that they possessed. But there is simply not enough time for a full story about their heroic deeds.

We have collected for you the best stories about the Great Patriotic War of 1941-1945. First-person stories, not invented, living memories of front-line soldiers and witnesses of the war.

A story about the war from the book of the priest Alexander Dyachenko "Overcoming"

I was not always old and weak, I lived in a Belarusian village, I had a family, a very good husband. But the Germans came, my husband, like other men, went to the partisans, he was their commander. We women supported our men in any way we could. The Germans became aware of this. They arrived at the village early in the morning. They drove everyone out of their houses and, like cattle, drove to the station in a neighboring town. The wagons were already waiting for us there. People were stuffed into carts so that we could only stand. We drove with stops for two days, we were not given water or food. When we were finally unloaded from the wagons, some of us were no longer able to move. Then the guards began to drop them to the ground and finish them off with rifle butts. And then they showed us the direction to the gate and said: "Run." As soon as we ran half the distance, the dogs were released. The strongest ones ran to the gate. Then the dogs were driven away, all who remained were lined up in a column and led through the gate, on which it was written in German: "To each his own." Since then, boy, I can't look at the tall chimneys.

She bared her arm and showed me a tattoo of a row of numbers on the inside of the arm, closer to the elbow. I knew it was a tattoo, my dad had a tank inked on his chest because he was a tanker, but why inject numbers?

I remember that she also talked about how our tankers liberated them and how lucky she was to live to this day. About the camp itself and what happened in it, she did not tell me anything, probably, she felt sorry for my childish head.

I learned about Auschwitz only later. I learned and understood why my neighbor could not look at the pipes of our boiler room.

My father also ended up in the occupied territory during the war. They got it from the Germans, oh, how they got it. And when ours drove the Germans, those, realizing that the grown-up boys were tomorrow's soldiers, decided to shoot them. They gathered everyone and took them to the log, and then our plane saw a crowd of people and gave a queue nearby. The Germans are on the ground, and the boys are in all directions. My dad was lucky, he ran away, shot through his hand, but he ran away. Not everyone was lucky then.

My father entered Germany as a tanker. Their tank brigade distinguished itself near Berlin on the Seelow Heights. I saw pictures of these guys. Youth, and the whole chest in orders, several people -. Many, like my dad, were drafted into the army from the occupied lands, and many had something to avenge on the Germans. Therefore, perhaps, they fought so desperately bravely.

They marched across Europe, liberated the prisoners of concentration camps and beat the enemy, finishing off mercilessly. “We rushed into Germany itself, we dreamed of how we would smear it with the tracks of our tank tracks. We had a special part, even the uniform was black. We still laughed, no matter how they confused us with the SS men.

Immediately after the end of the war, my father's brigade was stationed in one of the small German towns. Or rather, in the ruins that were left of him. They themselves somehow settled in the basements of buildings, but there was no room for a dining room. And the commander of the brigade, a young colonel, ordered to knock down tables from shields and set up a temporary dining room right on the square of the town.

“And here is our first peaceful dinner. Field kitchens, cooks, everything is as usual, but the soldiers are not sitting on the ground or on the tank, but, as expected, at the tables. They had just begun to dine, and suddenly German children began to crawl out of all these ruins, cellars, cracks like cockroaches. Someone is standing, and someone is already unable to stand from hunger. They stand and look at us like dogs. And I don’t know how it happened, but I took the bread with my shot hand and put it in my pocket, I look quietly, and all our guys, without raising their eyes from each other, do the same.

And then they fed the German children, gave away everything that could somehow be hidden from dinner, the very children of yesterday, who quite recently, without flinching, were raped, burned, shot by the fathers of these German children on our land they captured.

The brigade commander, Hero of the Soviet Union, a Jew by nationality, whose parents, like all other Jews of a small Belarusian town, were buried alive by the punishers, had every right, both moral and military, to drive away the German "geeks" from their tankers with volleys. They ate his soldiers, lowered their combat effectiveness, many of these children were also sick and could spread the infection among the personnel.

But the colonel, instead of firing, ordered an increase in the rate of consumption of products. And German children, on the orders of a Jew, were fed along with his soldiers.

Do you think what kind of phenomenon is this - Russian Soldier? Where does such mercy come from? Why didn't they take revenge? It seems that it is beyond any strength to find out that all your relatives were buried alive, perhaps by the fathers of these same children, to see concentration camps with many bodies of tortured people. And instead of "breaking away" on the children and wives of the enemy, they, on the contrary, saved them, fed them, treated them.

Several years have passed since the events described, and my dad, having finished military school in the fifties, again passed military service in Germany, but already an officer. Once, on the street of one city, a young German called him. He ran up to my father, grabbed his hand and asked:

Don't you recognize me? Yes, of course, now it’s hard to recognize in me that hungry ragged boy. But I remember you, how you then fed us among the ruins. Believe us, we will never forget this.

This is how we made friends in the West, by force of arms and the all-conquering power of Christian love.

Alive. We will endure. We will win.

THE TRUTH ABOUT WAR

It should be noted that the speech of V. M. Molotov on the first day of the war did not make a convincing impression on everyone, and the final phrase aroused irony among some soldiers. When we, doctors, asked them how things were at the front, and we lived only for this, we often heard the answer: “We are draping. Victory is ours… that is, the Germans!”

I can't say that JV Stalin's speech had a positive effect on everyone, although the majority felt warm from him. But in the darkness of a long line for water in the basement of the house where the Yakovlevs lived, I once heard: “Here! Brothers, sisters became! I forgot how I was put in jail for being late. The rat squeaked when the tail was pressed! The people remained silent. I have heard similar statements many times.

Two other factors contributed to the rise of patriotism. Firstly, these are the atrocities of the Nazis on our territory. Newspaper reports that in Katyn near Smolensk the Germans shot tens of thousands of Poles captured by us, and not us during the retreat, as the Germans assured, were perceived without malice. Everything could be. “We couldn’t leave them to the Germans,” some argued. But the population could not forgive the murder of our people.

In February 1942, my senior operating nurse A.P. Pavlova received a letter from the liberated banks of Seliger, which told how, after the explosion of hand fans in the German headquarters hut, they hanged almost all the men, including Pavlova's brother. They hung him on a birch near his native hut, and he hung for almost two months in front of his wife and three children. The mood of this news in the entire hospital became formidable for the Germans: Pavlova was loved by both the staff and the wounded soldiers ... I made sure that the original letter was read in all the wards, and Pavlova's face, yellowed from tears, was in the dressing room before everyone's eyes ...

The second thing that made everyone happy was reconciliation with the church. The Orthodox Church showed true patriotism in its preparations for the war, and it was appreciated. On the patriarch and the clergy showered government awards. With these funds, air squadrons were created and tank divisions with the names "Alexander Nevsky" and "Dmitry Donskoy". They showed a film where a priest with the chairman of the district executive committee, a partisan, destroys atrocious fascists. The film ended with the old bell ringer climbing the bell tower and sounding the alarm, before that he crossed himself widely. It sounded directly: “Autumn yourself with the sign of the cross, Russian people!” The wounded spectators and the staff had tears in their eyes when the lights were turned on.

On the contrary, the huge sums of money contributed by the chairman of the collective farm, it seems, Ferapont Golovaty, evoked malicious smiles. “Look how he stole from hungry collective farmers,” said the wounded peasants.

The activities of the fifth column, that is, internal enemies, also caused enormous indignation among the population. I myself saw how many of them there were: German planes were signaled from the windows even with multi-colored rockets. In November 1941, in the hospital of the Neurosurgical Institute, they signaled from the window in Morse code. The doctor on duty, Malm, who was completely drunk and declassed, said that the alarm came from the window of the operating room where my wife was on duty. The head of the hospital, Bondarchuk, said at a five-minute morning meeting that he vouched for Kudrin, and two days later they took the signalmen, and Malm himself disappeared forever.

My violin teacher Yu. A. Alexandrov, a communist, although a secretly religious, consumptive person, worked as a fire chief of the Red Army House on the corner of Liteiny and Kirovskaya. He was chasing a rocket launcher, obviously an employee of the House of the Red Army, but he could not see him in the dark and did not catch up, but he threw the rocket launcher at Aleksandrov's feet.

Life at the institute gradually improved. The central heating began to work better, the electric light became almost constant, there was water in the plumbing. We went to the movies. Films such as "Two Soldiers", "Once upon a time there was a girl" and others were watched with an undisguised feeling.

At "Two Fighters" the nurse was able to get tickets to the cinema "October" for a session later than we expected. When we arrived at the next screening, we learned that a shell hit the courtyard of this cinema, where visitors from the previous screening were let out, and many were killed and wounded.

The summer of 1942 passed through the hearts of the townsfolk very sadly. The encirclement and defeat of our troops near Kharkov, which greatly increased the number of our prisoners in Germany, brought great despondency to everyone. The new offensive of the Germans to the Volga, to Stalingrad, was very hard for everyone to experience. The mortality of the population, especially increased in the spring months, despite some improvement in nutrition, as a result of dystrophy, as well as the death of people from air bombs and artillery shelling, was felt by everyone.

In mid-May, my wife and her ration cards were stolen from my wife, which is why we were again very hungry. And it was necessary to prepare for the winter.

We not only cultivated and planted kitchen gardens in Rybatsky and Murzinka, but received a fair amount of land in the garden near the Winter Palace, which was given to our hospital. It was excellent land. Other Leningraders cultivated other gardens, squares, the Field of Mars. We planted even a dozen or two potato eyes with an adjacent piece of husk, as well as cabbage, rutabaga, carrots, onion seedlings, and especially a lot of turnips. Planted wherever there was a piece of land.

The wife, fearing a lack of protein food, collected slugs from vegetables and pickled them in two large jars. However, they were not useful, and in the spring of 1943 they were thrown away.

The coming winter of 1942/43 was mild. Transport no longer stopped, all the wooden houses on the outskirts of Leningrad, including the houses in Murzinka, were demolished for fuel and stocked up for the winter. The rooms had electric lights. Soon, scientists were given special letter rations. As a candidate of sciences, I was given a letter ration of group B. It included 2 kg of sugar, 2 kg of cereals, 2 kg of meat, 2 kg of flour, 0.5 kg of butter and 10 packs of Belomorkanal cigarettes every month. It was luxurious and it saved us.

My fainting has stopped. I even easily kept watch with my wife all night, guarding the garden at the Winter Palace in turn, three times during the summer. However, despite the guards, every single head of cabbage was stolen.

Art was of great importance. We began to read more, to go to the cinema more often, to watch film programs in the hospital, to go to amateur concerts and to the artists who came to visit us. Once my wife and I were at a concert of D. Oistrakh and L. Oborin who arrived in Leningrad. When D. Oistrakh played and L. Oborin accompanied, it was cold in the hall. Suddenly a voice said softly, “Air raid, air raid! Those who wish can go down to the bomb shelter!” In the crowded hall, no one moved, Oistrakh smiled gratefully and understandingly at us all with his eyes alone and continued to play, not for a moment stumbling. Although the explosions pushed at my feet and I could hear their sounds and the yelping of anti-aircraft guns, the music absorbed everything. Since then, these two musicians have become my biggest favorites and fighting friends without knowing each other.

By the autumn of 1942, Leningrad was very empty, which also facilitated its supply. By the time the blockade began, up to 7 million cards were being issued in a city overflowing with refugees. In the spring of 1942, only 900 thousand of them were issued.

Many were evacuated, including part of the 2nd Medical Institute. All other universities left. But still, they believe that about two million people were able to leave Leningrad along the Road of Life. So about four million died (According to official data in besieged Leningrad about 600 thousand people died, according to others - about 1 million. - ed.) figure much higher than the official one. Not all the dead ended up in the cemetery. The huge ditch between the Saratov colony and the forest leading to Koltushi and Vsevolozhskaya took in hundreds of thousands of the dead and was leveled to the ground. Now there is a suburban vegetable garden, and there are no traces left. But the rustling tops and cheerful voices of the harvesters are no less happiness for the dead than the mournful music of the Piskarevsky cemetery.

A little about children. Their fate was terrible. Almost nothing was given on children's cards. I remember two cases particularly vividly.

In the most severe part of the winter of 1941/42, I wandered from Bekhterevka to Pestel Street to my hospital. Swollen legs almost did not go, his head was spinning, each cautious step pursued one goal: to move forward and not fall at the same time. On Staronevsky I wanted to go to the bakery to buy two of our cards and warm up at least a little. The frost cut to the bone. I stood in line and noticed that a boy of seven or eight years old was standing near the counter. He leaned over and seemed to shrink. Suddenly he snatched a piece of bread from the woman who had just received it, fell down, huddled up in a bag with his back up, like a hedgehog, and began to greedily tear the bread with his teeth. The woman who lost her bread screamed wildly: probably, a hungry family was waiting impatiently at home. The line got mixed up. Many rushed to beat and trample the boy, who continued to eat, a padded jacket and a hat protected him. "The male! If only you could help,” someone called out to me, apparently because I was the only man in the bakery. I was shaken, my head was spinning. “You beasts, beasts,” I croaked and, staggering, went out into the cold. I couldn't save the child. A slight push was enough, and I would certainly have been taken by angry people for an accomplice, and I would have fallen.

Yes, I am a layman. I did not rush to save this boy. “Do not turn into a werewolf, a beast,” our beloved Olga Berggolts wrote these days. Wonderful woman! She helped many to endure the blockade and preserved in us the necessary humanity.

On behalf of them, I will send a telegram abroad:

“Alive. We will endure. We'll win."

But the unwillingness to share the fate of a beaten child forever remained a notch on my conscience ...

The second incident happened later. We have just received, but already for the second time, a letter ration, and together with my wife we ​​carried it along Liteiny, heading home. Snowdrifts were quite high in the second blockade winter. Almost opposite the house of N. A. Nekrasov, from where he admired the front entrance, clinging to the grate immersed in snow, was a child of four or five years old. He moved his legs with difficulty, huge eyes on his withered old face peered in horror at the world. His legs were tangled. Tamara pulled out a large, double, lump of sugar and handed it to him. At first he did not understand and shrank all over, and then suddenly grabbed this sugar with a jerk, pressed it to his chest and froze in fear that everything that had happened was either a dream or not true ... We went on. Well, what more could barely wandering inhabitants do?

BREAKTHROUGH THE BLOCCADE

All Leningraders spoke daily about breaking the blockade, about the upcoming victory, peaceful life and the restoration of the country, the second front, that is, about the active inclusion of the allies in the war. On the allies, however, little hope. “The plan has already been drawn, but there are no Roosevelts,” the Leningraders joked. They also recalled the Indian wisdom: "I have three friends: the first is my friend, the second is the friend of my friend and the third is the enemy of my enemy." Everyone believed that the third degree of friendship only unites us with our allies. (So, by the way, it turned out that the second front appeared only when it became clear that we could liberate the whole of Europe alone.)

Rarely did anyone talk about other outcomes. There were people who believed that Leningrad after the war should become a free city. But everyone immediately cut them off, remembering both “Window on Europe”, and “The Bronze Horseman”, and historical meaning for Russia access to the Baltic Sea. But they talked about breaking the blockade every day and everywhere: at work, on duty on the roofs, when they “fought off planes with shovels”, extinguishing lighters, for meager food, getting into a cold bed and during unwise self-service in those days. Waiting, hoping. Long and hard. They talked either about Fedyuninsky and his mustache, then about Kulik, then about Meretskov.

In the draft commissions, almost everyone was taken to the front. I was sent there from the hospital. I remember that I gave liberation only to a two-armed man, surprised by the wonderful prostheses that hid his defect. “Don't be afraid, take it with a stomach ulcer, tuberculous. After all, all of them will have to be at the front for no more than a week. If they don’t kill them, they will wound them, and they will end up in the hospital,” the military commissar of the Dzerzhinsky district told us.

Indeed, the war went on with great bloodshed. When trying to break through to communication with the mainland, piles of bodies remained under Krasny Bor, especially along the embankments. "Nevsky Piglet" and Sinyavinsky swamps did not leave the tongue. Leningraders fought furiously. Everyone knew that behind his back his own family was dying of hunger. But all attempts to break the blockade did not lead to success, only our hospitals were filled with crippled and dying.

With horror, we learned about the death of an entire army and the betrayal of Vlasov. This had to be believed. After all, when they read to us about Pavlov and other executed generals of the Western Front, no one believed that they were traitors and "enemies of the people", as we were convinced of this. They remembered that the same was said about Yakir, Tukhachevsky, Uborevich, even Blucher.

The summer campaign of 1942 began, as I wrote, extremely unsuccessfully and depressingly, but already in the fall they began to talk a lot about our stubbornness at Stalingrad. The fighting dragged on, winter approached, and in it we hoped for our Russian strength and Russian endurance. The good news about the counter-offensive at Stalingrad, the encirclement of Paulus with his 6th Army, and Manstein's failure to break through this encirclement gave Leningraders new hope on New Year's Eve 1943.

I celebrated the New Year together with my wife, having returned by 11 o'clock to the closet where we lived at the hospital, from the bypass of the evacuation hospitals. There was a glass of diluted alcohol, two slices of bacon, a piece of bread 200 grams and hot tea with a piece of sugar! A whole feast!

Events were not long in coming. Almost all of the wounded were discharged: some were commissioned, some were sent to convalescent battalions, some were taken to mainland. But we did not long wander around the empty hospital after the bustle of unloading it. A stream of fresh wounded went straight from their positions, dirty, often bandaged with an individual bag over their overcoat, bleeding. We were both a medical battalion, a field hospital, and a front-line hospital. Some began to sort, others - to operating tables for permanent operation. There was no time to eat, and there was no time for food.

It was not the first time that such streams came to us, but this one was too painful and tiring. It took the hardest combination all the time physical work with mental, moral human experiences with the clarity of the surgeon's dry work.

On the third day, the men could no longer stand it. They were given 100 grams of diluted alcohol and sent to sleep for three hours, although the emergency room was littered with the wounded in need of urgent operations. Otherwise, they began to operate badly, half-asleep. Well done women! They are not only many times better than men endured the hardships of the blockade, died much less often from dystrophy, but also worked without complaining of fatigue and clearly fulfilling their duties.

In our operating room, they went on three tables: behind each - a doctor and a nurse, on all three tables - another sister, replacing the operating room. Personnel operating and dressing nurses all assisted in operations. The habit of working for many nights in a row in Bekhterevka, the hospital. On October 25, she helped me out on the ambulance. I passed this test, I can proudly say, like women.

On the night of January 18, a wounded woman was brought to us. On this day, her husband was killed, and she was seriously wounded in the brain, in the left temporal lobe. A shard with fragments of bones penetrated into the depths, completely paralyzing her both right limbs and depriving her of the ability to speak, but while maintaining an understanding of someone else's speech. Female fighters came to us, but not often. I took her on my table, laid her on my right, paralyzed side, anesthetized the skin and very successfully removed the metal fragment and bone fragments that had penetrated into the brain. “My dear,” I said, finishing the operation and getting ready for the next one, “everything will be fine. I took out the shard, and speech will return to you, and the paralysis will completely disappear. You will make a full recovery!"

Suddenly, my wounded free hand from above began to beckon me to her. I knew that she would not soon begin to speak, and I thought that she would whisper something to me, although it seemed incredible. And suddenly, wounded with her healthy naked, but strong hand of a fighter, she grabbed my neck, pressed my face to her lips and kissed me hard. I couldn't take it. I did not sleep for the fourth day, almost did not eat, and only occasionally, holding a cigarette with a forceps, smoked. Everything went haywire in my head, and, like a man possessed, I ran out into the corridor in order to at least for one minute come to my senses. After all, there is a terrible injustice in the fact that women - the successors of the family and softening the morals of the beginning in humanity, are also killed. And at that moment, our loudspeaker spoke, announcing the breaking of the blockade and the connection of the Leningrad Front with the Volkhovsky.

It was a deep night, but what started here! I stood bloodied after the operation, completely stunned by what I had experienced and heard, and sisters, nurses, soldiers ran towards me ... Some with a hand on an “airplane”, that is, on a splint that abducts a bent arm, some on crutches, some still bleeding through a recently applied bandage . And so began the endless kissing. Everyone kissed me, despite my frightening appearance from spilled blood. And I stood, missed 15 minutes of the precious time for operating on other wounded in need, enduring these countless hugs and kisses.

The story of the Great Patriotic War of a front-line soldier

1 year ago, on this day, a war began that divided the history of not only our country, but the whole world into before and after. The participant of the Great Patriotic War Mark Pavlovich Ivanikhin, chairman of the Council of Veterans of War, Labor, Armed Forces and Law Enforcement Agencies of the Eastern Administrative District, tells.

— is the day when our life was broken in half. It was a good, bright Sunday, and suddenly war was declared, the first bombings. Everyone understood that they would have to endure a lot, 280 divisions went to our country. I have a military family, my father was a lieutenant colonel. A car immediately came for him, he took his “alarming” suitcase (this is a suitcase in which the most necessary things were always ready), and together we went to the school, I as a cadet, and my father as a teacher.

Everything changed immediately, it became clear to everyone that this war would be for a long time. Disturbing news plunged into another life, they said that the Germans were constantly moving forward. That day was clear and sunny, and in the evening mobilization had already begun.

These are my memories, boys of 18 years old. My father was 43 years old, he worked as a senior teacher at the first Moscow Artillery School named after Krasin, where I also studied. It was the first school that released officers who fought on the Katyusha into the war. I fought in the Katyusha throughout the war.

- Young inexperienced guys went under the bullets. Was it certain death?

“We still did a lot. Even at school, we all needed to pass the standard for the TRP badge (ready for work and defense). They trained almost like in the army: they had to run, crawl, swim, and they also taught how to bandage wounds, apply splints for fractures, and so on. Although we were a little ready to defend our Motherland.

I fought at the front from October 6, 1941 to April 1945. I took part in the battles for Stalingrad, and from the Kursk Bulge through Ukraine and Poland reached Berlin.

War is a terrible ordeal. It is a constant death that is near you and threatens you. Shells are exploding at your feet, enemy tanks are coming at you, flocks of German aircraft are aiming at you from above, artillery is firing. It seems that the earth turns into a small place where you have nowhere to go.

I was a commander, I had 60 people under my command. All these people need to be held accountable. And, despite the planes and tanks that are looking for your death, you need to control yourself, and control the soldiers, sergeants and officers. This is difficult to do.

I can't forget the Majdanek concentration camp. We liberated this death camp, we saw emaciated people: skin and bones. And I especially remember the kids with cut hands, they took blood all the time. We saw bags of human scalps. We saw the chambers of torture and experiments. What to hide, it caused hatred for the enemy.

I still remember that we went into a recaptured village, saw a church, and the Germans set up a stable in it. I had soldiers from all the cities of the Soviet Union, even from Siberia, many of their fathers died in the war. And these guys said: “We will reach Germany, we will kill the Fritz families, and we will burn their houses.” And so we entered the first German city, the soldiers broke into the house of a German pilot, saw a Frau and four small children. Do you think someone touched them? None of the soldiers did anything bad to them. The Russian person is outgoing.

All the German cities that we passed remained intact, with the exception of Berlin, where there was strong resistance.

I have four orders. Order of Alexander Nevsky, which he received for Berlin; Order of the Patriotic War of the 1st degree, two Orders of the Patriotic War of the 2nd degree. Also a medal for military merit, a medal for the victory over Germany, for the defense of Moscow, for the defense of Stalingrad, for the liberation of Warsaw and for the capture of Berlin. These are the main medals, and there are about fifty of them in total. All of us who survived the war years want one thing - peace. And so that the people who won the victory were valuable.

Photo by Yulia Makoveychuk

During the Great Patriotic War, heroism was the norm of behavior Soviet people, the war revealed resilience and courage Soviet man. Thousands of soldiers and officers sacrificed their lives in the battles near Moscow, Kursk and Stalingrad, during the defense of Leningrad and Sevastopol, in the North Caucasus and the Dnieper, during the storming of Berlin and in other battles - and immortalized their names. Women and children fought alongside men. Home front workers played a big role. People who worked, exhausted, to provide the soldiers with food, clothing, and thus a bayonet and a projectile.
We will talk about those who gave their lives, strength and savings for the sake of the Victory. Here they are the great people of the Great Patriotic War 1941-1945.

Medical heroes. Zinaida Samsonova

During the war years, more than two hundred thousand doctors and half a million paramedical personnel worked at the front and in the rear. And half of them were women.
The working day of doctors and nurses of medical battalions and front-line hospitals often lasted several days. Sleepless nights, medical workers stood relentlessly near the operating tables, and some of them pulled the dead and wounded from the battlefield on their backs. Among the doctors there were many of their "sailors", who, saving the wounded, covered them with their bodies from bullets and shell fragments.
Not sparing, as they say, their belly, they raised the spirit of the soldiers, raised the wounded from the hospital bed and sent them back to battle to defend their country, their homeland, their people, their home from the enemy. Among the large army of doctors, I would like to name the Hero of the Soviet Union Zinaida Alexandrovna Samsonova, who went to the front when she was only seventeen years old. Zinaida, or, as her brother-soldiers cutely called her, Zinochka, was born in the village of Bobkovo, Yegoryevsky district, Moscow region.
Before the war, she went to study at the Yegorievsk Medical School. When the enemy entered her native land, and the country was in danger, Zina decided that she must go to the front. And she rushed there.
She has been in the army since 1942 and immediately finds herself at the forefront. Zina was a sanitary instructor in a rifle battalion. The soldiers loved her for her smile, for her selfless assistance to the wounded. With her fighters, Zina went through the most terrible battles, this is the Battle of Stalingrad. She fought on the Voronezh Front and on other fronts.

Zinaida Samsonova

In the autumn of 1943, she participated in a landing operation to seize a bridgehead on the right bank of the Dnieper near the village of Sushki, Kanevsky district, now Cherkasy region. Here she, together with her brother-soldiers, managed to capture this bridgehead.
Zina took out more than thirty wounded from the battlefield and transported them to the other side of the Dnieper. There were legends about this fragile nineteen-year-old girl. Zinochka was distinguished by courage and courage.
When the commander died near the village of Holm in 1944, Zina, without hesitation, took command of the battle and raised the fighters to attack. In this fight last time fellow soldiers heard her amazing, slightly hoarse voice: “Eagles, follow me!”
Zinochka Samsonova died in this battle on January 27, 1944 for the village of Kholm in Belarus. She was buried in a mass grave in Ozarichi, Kalinkovsky district, Gomel region.
Zinaida Alexandrovna Samsonova was posthumously awarded the title of Hero of the Soviet Union for her steadfastness, courage and bravery.
The school where Zina Samsonova once studied was named after her.

A special period in the activity of Soviet foreign intelligence officers is associated with the Great Patriotic War. Already at the end of June 1941, the newly created State Defense Committee of the USSR considered the issue of the work of foreign intelligence and clarified its tasks. They were subordinated to one goal - the speedy defeat of the enemy. For exemplary performance special assignments behind enemy lines, nine career foreign intelligence officers were awarded the high title of Hero of the Soviet Union. This is S.A. Vaupshasov, I.D. Kudrya, N.I. Kuznetsov, V.A. Lyagin, D.N. Medvedev, V.A. Molodtsov, K.P. Orlovsky, N.A. Prokopyuk, A.M. Rabtsevich. Here we will talk about one of the scout-hero - Nikolai Ivanovich Kuznetsov.

From the beginning of the Great Patriotic War, he was enrolled in the fourth department of the NKVD, whose main task was to organize reconnaissance and sabotage activities behind enemy lines. After numerous trainings and studying in the camp for prisoners of war the manners and life of the Germans, under the name of Paul Wilhelm Siebert, Nikolai Kuznetsov was sent behind enemy lines along the line of terror. First, the special agent led his covert activities in the Ukrainian city of Rivne, where the Reich Commissariat of Ukraine was located. Kuznetsov was in close contact with enemy officers of the special services and the Wehrmacht, as well as local officials. All information obtained was transferred to the partisan detachment. One of the remarkable feats of a secret agent of the USSR was the capture of the courier of the Reichskommissariat, Major Gahan, who carried a secret map in his briefcase. After interrogating Gahan and studying the map, it turned out that a bunker for Hitler was built eight kilometers from Ukrainian Vinnitsa.
In November 1943, Kuznetsov managed to organize the abduction of German Major General M. Ilgen, who was sent to Rovno to destroy partisan formations.
The last operation of the intelligence officer Siebert in this post was the elimination in November 1943 of the head of the legal department of the Reichskommissariat of Ukraine, Oberführer Alfred Funk. After interrogating Funk, the brilliant intelligence officer managed to obtain information about the preparations for the assassination of the heads of the "Big Three" of the Tehran Conference, as well as information about the enemy's offensive on the Kursk salient. In January 1944, Kuznetsov was ordered, along with the retreating fascist troops, to go to Lvov to continue his sabotage activities. Scouts Jan Kaminsky and Ivan Belov were sent to help agent Siebert. Under the leadership of Nikolai Kuznetsov, several invaders were destroyed in Lvov, for example, the head of the government office, Heinrich Schneider and Otto Bauer.

From the first days of the occupation, the boys and girls began to act decisively, a secret organization "young avengers" was created. The guys fought against the fascist invaders. They blew up a pumping station, which delayed the sending of ten fascist echelons to the front. Distracting the enemy, the Avengers destroyed bridges and highways, blew up a local power plant, and burned down a factory. Obtaining information about the actions of the Germans, they immediately passed them on to the partisans.
Zina Portnova was assigned more and more difficult tasks. According to one of them, the girl managed to get a job in a German canteen. After working there for a while, she carried out an effective operation - she poisoned food for German soldiers. More than 100 fascists suffered from her dinner. The Germans began to accuse Zina. Wanting to prove her innocence, the girl tried the poisoned soup and only miraculously survived.

Zina Portnova

In 1943, traitors appeared who revealed secret information and handed over our guys to the Nazis. Many were arrested and shot. Then the command of the partisan detachment instructed Portnova to establish contact with those who survived. The Nazis grabbed the young partisan when she was returning from a mission. Zina was terribly tortured. But the answer to the enemy was only her silence, contempt and hatred. The interrogations didn't stop.
“The Gestapo man went to the window. And Zina, rushing to the table, grabbed a pistol. Obviously sensing a rustle, the officer turned around impulsively, but the weapon was already in her hand. She pulled the trigger. For some reason I didn't hear the shot. I only saw how the German, clutching his chest with his hands, fell to the floor, and the second, who was sitting at the side table, jumped up from his chair and hastily unfastened the holster of his revolver. She pointed the gun at him as well. Again, almost without aiming, she pulled the trigger. Rushing to the exit, Zina yanked open the door, jumped out into the next room and from there onto the porch. There she almost point-blank shot at the sentry. Running out of the building of the commandant's office, Portnova rushed down the path in a whirlwind.
“If only I could run to the river,” thought the girl. But the sound of the chase was heard from behind ... "Why don't they shoot?" The surface of the water seemed to be quite near. And beyond the river was a forest. She heard the sound of machine gun fire, and something sharp pierced her leg. Zina fell on the river sand. She still had enough strength, slightly rising, to shoot ... She saved the last bullet for herself.
When the Germans ran up very close, she decided that it was all over, and pointed the gun to her chest and pulled the trigger. But the shot did not follow: a misfire. The fascist knocked the pistol out of her weakening hands.
Zina was sent to prison. For more than a month, the Germans brutally tortured the girl, they wanted her to betray her comrades. But having taken an oath of allegiance to the Motherland, Zina kept her.
On the morning of January 13, 1944, a gray-haired and blind girl was taken to be shot. She walked, stumbling barefoot, through the snow.
The girl withstood all the torture. She truly loved our Motherland and died for it, firmly believing in our victory.
Zinaida Portnova was posthumously awarded the title of Hero of the Soviet Union.

The Soviet people, realizing that the front needed their help, made every effort. Engineering geniuses simplified and improved production. Women who recently accompanied their husbands, brothers and sons to the front took their place at the machine tool, mastering professions unfamiliar to them. Everything for the front, everything for victory! Children, old people and women gave all their strength, gave themselves for the sake of victory.

This is how the call of collective farmers sounded in one of the regional newspapers: “... we must give the army and the working people more bread, meat, milk, vegetables and agricultural raw materials for industry. We, the workers of state farms, must hand over this together with the collective farm peasantry. Only by these lines can one judge how obsessed the home front workers were with thoughts of victory, and what sacrifices they were ready to make in order to bring this long-awaited day closer. Even when they received funerals, they did not stop working, knowing that this was the best way to take revenge on the hated fascists for the death of their loved ones.

On December 15, 1942, Ferapont Golovaty gave all his savings - 100 thousand rubles - to purchase an aircraft for the Red Army, and asked to transfer the aircraft to the pilot of the Stalingrad Front. In a letter addressed to the Supreme Commander-in-Chief, he wrote that, having escorted his two sons to the front, he himself wanted to contribute to the cause of victory. Stalin answered: “Thank you, Ferapont Petrovich, for your concern for the Red Army and its Air Force. The Red Army will not forget that you gave all your savings to build a combat aircraft. Please accept my regards." The initiative was given serious attention. The decision on who exactly will get the personalized aircraft was made by the Military Council of the Stalingrad Front. The combat vehicle was handed over to one of the best - the commander of the 31st Guards Fighter Aviation Regiment, Major Boris Nikolayevich Eremin. The fact that Eremin and Golovaty were countrymen also played a role.

The victory in the Great Patriotic War was obtained by inhuman efforts, both front-line soldiers and home front workers. And this must be remembered. Today's generation should not forget their feat.

The war demanded from the people the greatest exertion of strength and huge sacrifices on a national scale, revealed the steadfastness and courage of the Soviet man, the ability to sacrifice himself in the name of the freedom and independence of the Motherland. During the war years, heroism became widespread, became the norm for the behavior of Soviet people. Thousands of soldiers and officers immortalized their names during the defense of the Brest Fortress, Odessa, Sevastopol, Kyiv, Leningrad, Novorossiysk, in the battle of Moscow, Stalingrad, Kursk, in the North Caucasus, the Dnieper, in the foothills of the Carpathians, during the storming of Berlin and in other battles.

For heroic deeds in the Great Patriotic War, over 11 thousand people were awarded the title of Hero of the Soviet Union (some of them posthumously), 104 of them twice, three three times (G.K. Zhukov, I.N. Kozhedub and A.I. Pokryshkin ). The first during the war years this title was awarded to Soviet pilots M. P. Zhukov, S. I. Zdorovtsev and P. T. Kharitonov, who rammed Nazi planes on the outskirts of Leningrad.

Total in war time more than eight thousand heroes were trained in the ground forces, including 1800 artillerymen, 1142 tankmen, 650 engineering troops, over 290 signalmen, 93 air defense soldiers, 52 soldiers of the military rear, 44 doctors; in the Air Force - over 2400 people; in Navy– over 500 people; partisans, underground fighters and Soviet intelligence officers- about 400; border guards - over 150 people.

Among the Heroes of the Soviet Union are representatives of most of the nations and nationalities of the USSR

Representatives of the nations	Number of heroes
Russians	8160
Ukrainians	2069
Belarusians	309
Tatars	161
Jews	108
Kazakhs	96
Georgian	90
Armenians	90
Uzbeks	69
Mordovians	61
Chuvash	44
Azerbaijanis	43
Bashkirs	39
Ossetians	32
Tajiks	14
Turkmens	18
Lithokians	15
Latvians	13
Kyrgyz	12
Udmurts	10
Karelians	8
Estonians	8
Kalmyks	8
Kabardians	7
Adyghe	6
Abkhazians	5
Yakuts	3
Moldovans	2
results	11501

Among the military personnel awarded the title of Hero of the Soviet Union, privates, sergeants, foremen - over 35%, officers - about 60%, generals, admirals, marshals - over 380 people. There are 87 women among the Wartime Heroes of the Soviet Union. The first to receive this title was Z. A. Kosmodemyanskaya (posthumously).

About 35% of the Heroes of the Soviet Union at the time of awarding the title were under the age of 30, 28% - from 30 to 40 years old, 9% - over 40 years old.

Four Heroes of the Soviet Union: artilleryman A. V. Aleshin, pilot I. G. Drachenko, commander of a rifle platoon P. Kh. Dubinda, artilleryman N. I. Kuznetsov - were also awarded Orders of Glory of all three degrees for military exploits. full cavaliers Orders of Glory of three degrees became more than 2500 people, including 4 women. During the war, over 38 million orders and medals were awarded to the defenders of the Motherland for courage and heroism. The motherland highly appreciated the labor feat of the Soviet people in the rear. During the war years, the title of Hero Socialist Labor 201 people were awarded, about 200 thousand were awarded orders and medals.

Viktor Vasilievich Talalikhin

Born September 18, 1918 in the village. Teplovka, Volsky district Saratov region. Russian. After graduating from the factory school, he worked at the Moscow meat processing plant, at the same time he studied at the flying club. He graduated from the Borisoglebokoe military aviation school for pilots. He took part in the Soviet-Finnish war of 1939-1940. He made 47 sorties, shot down 4 Finnish aircraft, for which he was awarded the Order of the Red Star (1940).

In the battles of the Great Patriotic War since June 1941. Made more than 60 sorties. In the summer and autumn of 1941, he fought near Moscow. For military distinctions he was awarded the Order of the Red Banner (1941) and the Order of Lenin.

The title of Hero of the Soviet Union with the award of the Order of Lenin and the Gold Star medal was awarded to Viktor Vasilievich Talalikhin by the Decree of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet of the USSR of August 8, 1941 for the first night ramming of an enemy bomber in the history of aviation.

Soon Talalikhin was appointed squadron commander, he was awarded the rank of lieutenant. The glorious pilot participated in many air battles near Moscow, shot down five more enemy aircraft personally and one in a group. He died a heroic death in an unequal battle with Nazi fighters on October 27, 1941.

Buried V.V. Talalikhin with military honors on Novodevichy cemetery in Moscow. By order of the People's Commissar of Defense of the USSR dated August 30, 1948, he was forever enrolled in the lists of the first squadron of the fighter aviation regiment, in which he fought the enemy near Moscow.

Streets in Kaliningrad, Volgograd, Borisoglebsk were named after Talalikhin Voronezh region and other cities, a sea vessel, GPTU No. 100 in Moscow, a number of schools. An obelisk was erected on the 43rd kilometer of the Varshavskoye Highway, over which an unprecedented night duel took place. A monument was erected in Podolsk, in Moscow - a bust of the Hero.

Ivan Nikitovich Kozhedub

(1920-1991), air marshal (1985), Hero of the Soviet Union (1944 - twice; 1945). During the Great Patriotic War in fighter aviation, the squadron commander, deputy regiment commander, conducted 120 air battles; shot down 62 aircraft.

Three times Hero of the Soviet Union Ivan Nikitovich Kozhedub on La-7 shot down 17 enemy aircraft (including the Me-262 jet fighter) out of 62 shot down by him during the war on La fighters. One of the most memorable battles Kozhedub spent February 19, 1945 (sometimes the date February 24 is indicated).

On this day, he flew out on a free hunt paired with Dmitry Titarenko. On the traverse of the Oder, the pilots noticed an aircraft rapidly approaching from the direction of Frankfurt an der Oder. The plane was flying along the riverbed at an altitude of 3500 m at a speed much greater than the La-7 could develop. It was Me-262. Kozhedub instantly made a decision. The Me-262 pilot relied on the speed qualities of his car and did not control the airspace in the rear hemisphere and below. Kozhedub attacked from below on a head-on course, hoping to hit the jet in the belly. However, Titarenko opened fire before Kozhedub. To the considerable surprise of Kozhedub, the premature firing of the wingman was beneficial.

The German turned to the left, towards Kozhedub, the latter had only to catch the Messerschmitt in the sight and press the trigger. Me-262 turned into a fireball. In the cockpit of the Me 262 was non-commissioned officer Kurt-Lange from 1. / KG (J) -54.

On the evening of April 17, 1945, Kozhedub and Titarenko flew their fourth combat sortie to the Berlin area in a day. Immediately after crossing the front line north of Berlin, the hunters discovered a large group of FW-190s with suspended bombs. Kozhedub began to gain altitude for the attack and reported to the command post about establishing contact with a group of forty Focke-Vulvof with suspended bombs. German pilots clearly saw how a pair of Soviet fighters went into the clouds and did not expect that they would appear again. However, the hunters showed up.

Behind from the top, in the first attack, Kozhedub shot down the leader of the four fokkers that closed the group. The hunters sought to give the enemy the impression of the presence of a significant number of Soviet fighters in the air. Kozhedub threw his La-7 right into the thick of the enemy aircraft, turning Lavochkin left and right, the ace fired cannons in short bursts. The Germans succumbed to the trick - the Focke-Wulfs began to free them from bombs that prevented air combat. However, the Luftwaffe pilots soon established the presence of only two La-7s in the air and, taking advantage of the numerical advantage, took the guards into circulation. One FW-190 managed to get into the tail of the Kozhedub fighter, but Titarenko opened fire before the German pilot - the Focke-Wulf exploded in the air.

By this time, help had arrived - the La-7 group from the 176th regiment, Titarenko and Kozhedub were able to get out of the battle on the last remaining fuel. On the way back, Kozhedub saw a single FW-190, which was still trying to drop bombs on Soviet troops. Ace dived and shot down an enemy plane. It was the last, 62nd, German aircraft shot down by the best Allied fighter pilot.

Ivan Nikitovich Kozhedub also distinguished himself in the Battle of Kursk.

Kozhedub's total score does not include at least two aircraft - American R-51 Mustang fighters. In one of the battles in April, Kozhedub tried to drive off German fighters from the American Flying Fortress with cannon fire. US Air Force escort fighters misunderstood the intentions of the La-7 pilot and opened barrage fire from a long distance. Kozhedub, apparently, also mistook the Mustangs for Messers, left the fire with a coup and, in turn, attacked the “enemy”.

He damaged one Mustang (the plane, smoking, left the battlefield and, after flying a little, fell, the pilot jumped out with a parachute), the second R-51 exploded in the air. Only after a successful attack did Kozhedub notice the white stars of the US Air Force on the wings and fuselages of the planes he shot down. After landing, the regiment commander, Colonel Chupikov, advised Kozhedub to keep quiet about the incident and gave him the developed film of the photo-machine gun. The existence of a film with footage of burning Mustangs became known only after death. legendary pilot. Detailed biography of the hero on the website: www.warheroes.ru "Unknown Heroes"

Alexey Petrovich Maresyev

Maresyev Aleksey Petrovich fighter pilot, deputy squadron commander of the 63rd Guards Fighter Aviation Regiment, Guards Senior Lieutenant.

Born on May 20, 1916 in the city of Kamyshin, Volgograd Region, in a working class family. Russian. At the age of three, he was left without a father, who died shortly after returning from the First World War. After graduating from 8th grade high school Alexey entered the FZU, where he received the specialty of a locksmith. Then he applied to the Moscow aviation institute, but instead of an institute on a Komsomol ticket, he went to build Komsomolsk-on-Amur. There he sawed wood in the taiga, built barracks, and then the first residential quarters. At the same time he studied at the flying club. He was drafted into the Soviet army in 1937. He served in the 12th Aviation Border Detachment. But, according to Maresyev himself, he did not fly, but "wafted his tails" at the planes. He really took to the air already at the Bataysk Military Aviation Pilot School, which he graduated in 1940. He served as a flight instructor.

He made his first sortie on August 23, 1941 in the Krivoy Rog region. Lieutenant Maresyev opened a combat account at the beginning of 1942 - he shot down a Ju-52. By the end of March 1942, he brought the number of downed Nazi aircraft to four. On April 4, in an air battle over the Demyansky bridgehead (Novgorod region), Maresyev's fighter was shot down. He tried to land on the ice of a frozen lake, but released the landing gear early. The plane began to quickly lose altitude and fell into the forest.

Maresyev crawled to his own. He had frostbite on his feet and had to be amputated. However, the pilot decided not to give up. When he got the prostheses, he trained long and hard and got permission to return to duty. He learned to fly again in the 11th reserve aviation brigade in Ivanovo.

In June 1943, Maresyev returned to service. He fought on the Kursk Bulge as part of the 63rd Guards Fighter Aviation Regiment, was a deputy squadron commander. In August 1943, during one battle, Alexei Maresyev shot down three enemy FW-190 fighters at once.

On August 24, 1943, by the Decree of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet of the USSR, Senior Lieutenant Maresyev was awarded the title of Hero of the Soviet Union.

Later he fought in the Baltic States, became a regiment navigator. In 1944 he joined the CPSU. In total, he made 86 sorties, shot down 11 enemy aircraft: 4 before being wounded and seven with amputated legs. In June 1944, Major Maresyev of the Guards became an inspector-pilot of the Office of Higher educational institutions Air Force. The legendary fate of Alexei Petrovich Maresyev is the subject of Boris Polevoy's book "The Tale of a Real Man".

In July 1946, Maresyev was honorably discharged from the Air Force. In 1952 he graduated from the Higher Party School under the Central Committee of the CPSU, in 1956 - postgraduate studies at the Academy of Social Sciences under the Central Committee of the CPSU, received the title of candidate of historical sciences. In the same year, he became the executive secretary of the Soviet Committee of War Veterans, in 1983 - the first deputy chairman of the committee. In this position, he worked until last day own life.

Retired Colonel A.P. Maresyev was awarded two Orders of Lenin, Orders of the October Revolution, Red Banner, Patriotic War 1st degree, two Orders of the Red Banner of Labor, Orders of Friendship of Peoples, Red Star, Badge of Honor, "For Merit to the Fatherland" 3rd degree, medals, foreign orders. He was an honorary soldier of a military unit, an honorary citizen of the cities of Komsomolsk-on-Amur, Kamyshin, Orel. A small planet is named after him solar system, public fund, youth patriotic clubs. He was elected a deputy of the Supreme Soviet of the USSR. Author of the book "On the Kursk Bulge" (M., 1960).

Even during the war, Boris Polevoy's book "The Tale of a Real Man" was published, the prototype of which was Maresyev (the author changed only one letter in his last name). In 1948, director Alexander Stolper shot a film of the same name based on the book at Mosfilm. Maresyev was even offered to play himself leading role, but he refused and this role was played by a professional actor Pavel Kadochnikov.

He died suddenly on May 18, 2001. He was buried in Moscow at the Novodevichy Cemetery. May 18, 2001 at the Theater Russian army a gala evening was planned on the occasion of Maresyev's 85th birthday, but an hour before the start, Alexei Petrovich had a heart attack. He was taken to the intensive care unit of a Moscow clinic, where he died without regaining consciousness. The gala evening nevertheless took place, but it began with a moment of silence.

Krasnoperov Sergey Leonidovich

Krasnoperov Sergey Leonidovich was born on July 23, 1923 in the village of Pokrovka, Chernushinsky district. In May 1941, he volunteered for the ranks Soviet army. For a year he studied at the Balashov Aviation School of Pilots. In November 1942, attack pilot Sergei Krasnoperov arrived in the 765th assault aviation regiment, and in January 1943 he was appointed deputy squadron commander of the 502nd assault aviation regiment of the 214th assault air division of the North Caucasian Front. In this regiment in June 1943 he joined the ranks of the party. For military distinctions he was awarded the Orders of the Red Banner, the Red Star, the Order of the Patriotic War of the 2nd degree.

The title of Hero of the Soviet Union was awarded on February 4, 1944. Killed in action June 24, 1944. "March 14, 1943. Attack pilot Sergei Krasnoperov makes two sorties one after another to attack the port of Temrkzh. Leading six" silts ", he set fire to a boat at the pier of the port. In the second flight, an enemy shell hit the engine. A bright flame for a moment, like it seemed to Krasnoperov, the sun eclipsed and immediately disappeared in thick black smoke. Krasnoperov turned off the ignition, turned off the gas and tried to fly the plane to the front line. However, after a few minutes it became clear that it would not be possible to save the plane. And under the wing - a solid swamp. There is only one way out As soon as the burning car touched the swamp bumps with its fuselage, the pilot barely had time to jump out of it and run a little to the side, an explosion rumbled.

A few days later, Krasnoperov was back in the air, and in the combat log of the flight commander of the 502nd assault aviation regiment, junior lieutenant Krasnoperov Sergey Leonidovich, a brief entry appeared: "03/23/43". With two sorties, he destroyed a convoy in the area of ​​\u200b\u200bst. Crimean. Destroyed vehicles - 1, created fires - 2 ". On April 4, Krasnoperov stormed manpower and firepower in the region of a height of 204.3 meters. On the next flight, he stormed artillery and firing points in the area of ​​Krymskaya station. At the same time, he destroyed two tanks, one gun and mortar.

One day, a junior lieutenant received a task for a free flight in pairs. He was leading. Covertly, on a low-level flight, a pair of "silts" penetrated deep into the rear of the enemy. They noticed cars on the road - they attacked them. They discovered a concentration of troops - and suddenly brought down destructive fire on the heads of the Nazis. The Germans unloaded ammunition and weapons from a self-propelled barge. Combat entry - the barge flew into the air. The regiment commander, Lieutenant Colonel Smirnov, wrote about Sergei Krasnoperov: “Such heroic deeds of Comrade Krasnoperov are repeated in every sortie. The pilots of his flight became masters of the assault business. created for himself military glory, enjoys well-deserved military authority among the personnel of the regiment. And indeed. Sergei was only 19 years old, and for his exploits he had already been awarded the Order of the Red Star. He was only 20 years old, and his chest was adorned with the Golden Star of a Hero.

Seventy-four sorties were made by Sergei Krasnoperov during the days of fighting on the Taman Peninsula. As one of the best, he was entrusted 20 times to lead a group of "silts" to attack, and he always carried out a combat mission. He personally destroyed 6 tanks, 70 vehicles, 35 wagons with cargo, 10 guns, 3 mortars, 5 points of anti-aircraft artillery, 7 machine guns, 3 tractors, 5 bunkers, an ammunition depot, a boat, a self-propelled barge were sunk, two crossings across the Kuban were destroyed.

Matrosov Alexander Matveevich

Matrosov Alexander Matveyevich - rifleman of the 2nd battalion of the 91st separate rifle brigade (22nd Army, Kalinin Front), private. Born February 5, 1924 in the city of Yekaterinoslav (now Dnepropetrovsk). Russian. Member of the Komsomol. He lost his parents early. 5 years was brought up in the Ivanovo orphanage (Ulyanovsk region). Then he was brought up in the Ufa children's labor colony. At the end of the 7th grade, he remained to work in the colony as an assistant teacher. In the Red Army since September 1942. In October 1942 he entered the Krasnokholmsk Infantry School, but soon most of the cadets were sent to the Kalinin Front.

In the army since November 1942. He served in the 2nd Battalion of the 91st Separate Rifle Brigade. For some time the brigade was in reserve. Then she was transferred near Pskov to the area of ​​\u200b\u200bthe Big Lomovaty Bor. Right from the march, the brigade entered the battle.

On February 27, 1943, the 2nd battalion received the task of attacking a stronghold near the village of Chernushki (Loknyansky district, Pskov region). As soon as our soldiers passed through the forest and reached the edge of the forest, they came under heavy enemy machine gun fire - three enemy machine guns in bunkers covered the approaches to the village. One machine gun suppressed assault group submachine gunners and armor-piercers. The second bunker was destroyed by another group of armor-piercers. But the machine gun from the third bunker continued to shell the entire hollow in front of the village. Efforts to silence him were unsuccessful. Then, in the direction of the bunker, Private A.M. Matrosov crawled. He approached the embrasure from the flank and threw two grenades. The machine gun fell silent. But as soon as the fighters went on the attack, the machine gun came to life again. Then Matrosov got up, rushed to the bunker and closed the embrasure with his body. At the cost of his life, he contributed to the combat mission of the unit.

A few days later, the name of Matrosov became known throughout the country. The feat of Matrosov was used by a journalist who happened to be with the unit for a patriotic article. At the same time, the regiment commander learned about the feat from the newspapers. Moreover, the date of the death of the hero was moved to February 23, coinciding the feat with the day of the Soviet Army. Despite the fact that Matrosov was not the first to perform such an act of self-sacrifice, it was his name that was used to glorify the heroism of Soviet soldiers. Subsequently, over 300 people performed the same feat, but this was no longer widely reported. His feat has become a symbol of courage and military prowess, fearlessness and love for the Motherland.

The title of Hero of the Soviet Union Alexander Matveyevich Matrosov was posthumously awarded on June 19, 1943. He was buried in the city of Velikiye Luki. On September 8, 1943, by order of the People's Commissar of Defense of the USSR, the name of Matrosov was assigned to the 254th Guards Rifle Regiment, he himself was forever enrolled (one of the first in the Soviet Army) in the lists of the 1st company of this unit. Monuments to the Hero were erected in Ufa, Velikiye Luki, Ulyanovsk, etc. The Museum of Komsomol Glory in the city of Velikiye Luki, streets, schools, pioneer squads, motor ships, collective farms and state farms bore his name.

Ivan Vasilievich Panfilov

In the battles near Volokolamsk, the 316th Infantry Division of General I.V. Panfilov. Reflecting continuous enemy attacks for 6 days, they knocked out 80 tanks and destroyed several hundred soldiers and officers. Enemy attempts to capture the Volokolamsk region and open the way to Moscow from the west failed. For heroic actions, this unit was awarded the Order of the Red Banner and transformed into the 8th Guards, and its commander, General I.V. Panfilov was awarded the title of Hero of the Soviet Union. He was not lucky enough to witness the complete defeat of the enemy near Moscow: on November 18, near the village of Gusenevo, he died a heroic death.

Ivan Vasilyevich Panfilov, Major General of the Guards, commander of the 8th Guards Rifle Division of the Red Banner (former 316th) Division, was born on January 1, 1893 in the city of Petrovsk, Saratov Region. Russian. Member of the CPSU since 1920. From the age of 12 he worked for hire, in 1915 he was drafted into royal army. In the same year he was sent to the Russian-German front. Voluntarily joined the Red Army in 1918. He was enrolled in the 1st Saratov Infantry Regiment of the 25th Chapaev Division. Participated in the civil war, fought against Dutov, Kolchak, Denikin and the White Poles. After the war, he graduated from the two-year Kiev United Infantry School and was assigned to the Central Asian Military District. He took part in the fight against the Basmachi.

The Great Patriotic War found Major General Panfilov at the post of military commissar of the Kyrgyz Republic. Having formed the 316th rifle division, he went with it to the front and in October - November 1941 fought near Moscow. For military distinctions he was awarded two Orders of the Red Banner (1921, 1929) and the medal "XX Years of the Red Army".

The title of Hero of the Soviet Union Ivan Vasilyevich Panfilov was awarded posthumously on April 12, 1942 for his skillful leadership of division units in the battles on the outskirts of Moscow and his personal courage and heroism.

In the first half of October 1941, the 316th Division arrived in the 16th Army and took up defensive positions on a wide front on the outskirts of Volokolamsk. General Panfilov was the first to widely use the system of in-depth artillery anti-tank defense, created and skillfully used mobile barrier detachments in battle. Thanks to this, the stamina of our troops increased significantly, and all attempts by the 5th German Army Corps to break through the defenses were unsuccessful. Within seven days, the division, together with the cadet regiment S.I. Mladentseva and dedicated units of anti-tank artillery successfully repelled enemy attacks.

Attaching great importance to the capture of Volokolamsk, the Nazi command sent another motorized corps into the area. Only under pressure from superior enemy forces, parts of the division were forced to leave Volokolamsk at the end of October and take up defenses east of the city.

On November 16, fascist troops launched a second "general" offensive against Moscow. A fierce battle broke out near Volokolamsk again. On this day, at the Dubosekovo junction, 28 Panfilov soldiers under the command of political instructor V.G. Klochkov repelled the attack of enemy tanks, and held the occupied line. The enemy tanks also failed to break through in the direction of the villages of Mykanino and Strokovo. The division of General Panfilov firmly held its positions, its soldiers fought to the death.

For the exemplary performance of the combat missions of the command, the mass heroism of the personnel, the 316th division was awarded the Order of the Red Banner on November 17, 1941, and the next day it was transformed into the 8th Guards Rifle Division.

Nikolai Frantsevich Gastello

Nikolai Frantsevich was born on May 6, 1908 in Moscow, in a working-class family. Graduated from 5 classes. He worked as a mechanic at the Murom Locomotive Plant of Construction Machines. In the Soviet Army in May 1932. In 1933 he graduated from the Lugansk military pilot school in bomber units. In 1939 he participated in the battles on the river. Khalkhin - Gol and the Soviet-Finnish war of 1939-1940. In the army since June 1941, the squadron commander of the 207th long-range bomber aviation regiment (42nd bomber aviation division, 3rd bomber aviation corps DBA), Captain Gastello, on June 26, 1941, carried out another flight on a mission. His bomber was hit and caught fire. He directed the burning aircraft at a concentration of enemy troops. From the explosion of the bomber, the enemy suffered heavy losses. For the accomplished feat on July 26, 1941, he was posthumously awarded the title of Hero of the Soviet Union. Gastello's name is forever listed in the lists of military units. On the site of the feat on the Minsk-Vilnius highway, a memorial monument was erected in Moscow.

Zoya Anatolyevna Kosmodemyanskaya ("Tanya")

Zoya Anatolyevna ["Tanya" (09/13/1923 - 11/29/1941)] - Soviet partisan, Hero of the Soviet Union was born in Osino-Gai, Gavrilovsky district, Tambov region, in the family of an employee. In 1930 the family moved to Moscow. She graduated from 9 classes of school number 201. In October 1941, the Komsomol member Kosmodemyanskaya voluntarily joined a special partisan detachment, acting on instructions from the headquarters of the Western Front in the Mozhaisk direction.

Twice sent to the rear of the enemy. At the end of November 1941, while performing the second combat mission in the area of ​​​​the village of Petrishchevo (Russian district of the Moscow region), she was captured by the Nazis. In spite of cruel torture, did not give out military secrets, did not give her name.

On November 29, she was hanged by the Nazis. Her devotion to the Motherland, courage and selflessness have become an inspiring example in the fight against the enemy. On February 6, 1942, he was posthumously awarded the title of Hero of the Soviet Union.

Manshuk Zhiengalievna Mametova

Manshuk Mametova was born in 1922 in the Urdinsky district of the West Kazakhstan region. Manshuk's parents died early, and the five-year-old girl was adopted by her aunt Amina Mametova. Childhood Manshuk passed in Almaty.

When the Great Patriotic War began, Manshuk studied at the medical institute and at the same time worked in the secretariat of the Council of People's Commissars of the republic. In August 1942, she voluntarily joined the Red Army and went to the front. In the unit where Manshuk arrived, she was left as a clerk at the headquarters. But the young patriot decided to become a front line fighter, and a month later Senior Sergeant Mametova was transferred to the rifle battalion of the 21st Guards Rifle Division.

Short, but bright, like a flashing star, was her life. Manshuk died in the battle for the honor and freedom of her native country, when she was in her twenty-first year and had just joined the party. The short battle path of the glorious daughter of the Kazakh people ended with an immortal feat accomplished by her near the walls of the ancient Russian city of Nevel.

On October 16, 1943, the battalion in which Manshuk Mametova served was ordered to repulse the enemy's counterattack. As soon as the Nazis tried to repulse the attack, the machine gun of Senior Sergeant Mametova started working. The Nazis rolled back, leaving hundreds of corpses. Several violent attacks of the Nazis have already choked at the foot of the hill. Suddenly, the girl noticed that two neighboring machine guns fell silent - the machine gunners were killed. Then Manshuk, quickly crawling from one firing point to another, began to fire at the pressing enemies from three machine guns.

The enemy transferred mortar fire to the positions of the resourceful girl. A close explosion of a heavy mine overturned a machine gun, behind which lay Manshuk. Wounded in the head, the machine gunner lost consciousness for a while, but the triumphant cries of the approaching Nazis forced her to wake up. Instantly moving to a nearby machine gun, Manshuk lashed the chains of fascist warriors with a lead shower. And again the enemy attack choked. This ensured the successful advance of our units, but the girl from distant Urda remained lying on the hillside. Her fingers froze on the Maxim trigger.

On March 1, 1944, by the Decree of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet of the USSR, Senior Sergeant Manshuk Zhiengaliyevna Mametova was posthumously awarded the title of Hero of the Soviet Union.

Aliya Moldagulova

Aliya Moldagulova was born on April 20, 1924 in the village of Bulak, Khobdinsky district, Aktobe region. After the death of her parents, she was brought up by her uncle Aubakir Moldagulov. With his family, she moved from city to city. She studied at the 9th secondary school in Leningrad. In the fall of 1942, Aliya Moldagulova joined the army and was sent to a sniper school. In May 1943, Aliya submitted a report to the school command with a request to send her to the front. Aliya ended up in the 3rd company of the 4th battalion of the 54th rifle brigade under the command of Major Moiseev.

By the beginning of October, Aliya Moldagulova had 32 dead fascists on her account.

In December 1943, Moiseev's battalion was ordered to drive the enemy out of the village of Kazachikha. By seizing it locality the Soviet command expected to cut the railway line along which the Nazis were transferring reinforcements. The Nazis fiercely resisted, skillfully using the benefits of the area. The slightest advance of our companies came at a heavy price, and yet slowly but steadily our fighters approached the enemy's fortifications. Suddenly, a lone figure appeared ahead of the advancing chains.

Suddenly, a lone figure appeared ahead of the advancing chains. The Nazis noticed the brave warrior and opened fire from machine guns. Catching the moment when the fire weakened, the fighter rose to his full height and dragged the entire battalion with him.

After a fierce battle, our fighters took possession of the height. The daredevil lingered in the trench for some time. There were traces of pain on his pale face, and strands of black hair broke out from under his cap with earflaps. It was Aliya Moldagulova. She destroyed 10 fascists in this battle. The wound was light, and the girl remained in the ranks.

In an effort to restore the situation, the enemy rushed into counterattacks. On January 14, 1944, a group of enemy soldiers managed to break into our trenches. A hand-to-hand fight ensued. Aliya mowed down the Nazis with well-aimed bursts of the machine gun. Suddenly, she instinctively felt danger behind her back. She turned sharply, but it was too late: the German officer fired first. Gathering the last of her strength, Aliya threw up her machine gun and the Nazi officer fell to the frozen ground...

The wounded Aliya was carried out by her comrades from the battlefield. The fighters wanted to believe in a miracle, and they offered blood to save the girl. But the wound was fatal.

On June 4, 1944, Corporal Aliya Moldagulova was posthumously awarded the title of Hero of the Soviet Union.

Sevastyanov Alexey Tikhonovich

Sevastyanov Aleksey Tikhonovich, flight commander of the 26th Fighter Aviation Regiment (7th Fighter Aviation Corps, Leningrad Air Defense Zone), junior lieutenant. Born on February 16, 1917 in the village of Kholm, now the Likhoslavl district of the Tver (Kalinin) region. Russian. Graduated from the Kalinin Carriage Building College. In the Red Army since 1936. In 1939 he graduated from the Kachin Military Aviation School.

Member of the Great Patriotic War since June 1941. In total, during the war years, junior lieutenant Sevastyanov A.T. made more than 100 sorties, shot down 2 enemy aircraft personally (one of them by ramming), 2 - in a group and an observation balloon.

The title of Hero of the Soviet Union Alexei Tikhonovich Sevastyanov was awarded posthumously on June 6, 1942.

On November 4, 1941, junior lieutenant Sevastyanov on an Il-153 aircraft patrolled on the outskirts of Leningrad. At about 22.00, an enemy air raid on the city began. Despite the fire of anti-aircraft artillery, one He-111 bomber managed to break through to Leningrad. Sevastyanov attacked the enemy, but missed. He went on the attack a second time and opened fire at close range, but again missed. Sevastyanov attacked for the third time. Coming close, he pressed the trigger, but there were no shots - the cartridges ran out. In order not to miss the enemy, he decided to go for a ram. Approaching behind the "Heinkel", he chopped off his tail with a screw. Then he left the damaged fighter and landed by parachute. The bomber crashed in the Tauride Garden area. The crew members who jumped out on parachutes were taken prisoner. The fallen Sevastyanov fighter was found in Baskov lane and restored by specialists of the 1st Rembaza.

April 23, 1942 Sevastyanov A.T. died in an unequal air battle, defending the "Road of Life" across Ladoga (shot down 2.5 km from the village of Rakhya, Vsevolozhsk district; a monument was erected in this place). He was buried in Leningrad at the Chesme cemetery. Forever enrolled in the lists of the military unit. A street in St. Petersburg, the House of Culture in the village of Pervitino, Likhoslavl District, are named after him. The documentary "Heroes Don't Die" is dedicated to his feat.

Matveev Vladimir Ivanovich

Matveev Vladimir Ivanovich Squadron commander of the 154th Fighter Aviation Regiment (39th Fighter Aviation Division, Northern Front) - Captain. Born October 27, 1911 in St. Petersburg in a working class family. Russian Member of the CPSU(b) since 1938. Graduated from 5 classes. He worked as a mechanic at the factory "Red October". In the Red Army since 1930. In 1931 he graduated from the Leningrad military-theoretical school of pilots, in 1933 - Borisoglebsk military aviation school of pilots. Member of the Soviet-Finnish war of 1939-1940.

With the beginning of the Great Patriotic War at the front. Captain Matveev V.I. On July 8, 1941, when repelling an enemy air raid on Leningrad, having used up all the ammunition, he used a ram: he cut off the tail of a Nazi aircraft with the end of the plane of his MiG-3. An enemy plane crashed near the village of Malyutino. He successfully landed at his airport. The title of Hero of the Soviet Union with the award of the Order of Lenin and the Gold Star medal was awarded to Vladimir Ivanovich Matveev on July 22, 1941.

Killed in air combat January 1, 1942, covering the "Road of Life" on Ladoga. Buried in Leningrad.

Polyakov Sergey Nikolaevich

Sergei Polyakov was born in 1908 in Moscow into a working-class family. He graduated from 7 classes of incomplete secondary school. Since 1930 in the Red Army, he graduated from the military aviation school. Member of the Spanish Civil War 1936-1939. In air battles, he shot down 5 Franco aircraft. Member of the Soviet-Finnish war of 1939-1940. On the fronts of the Great Patriotic War from the first day. The commander of the 174th Assault Aviation Regiment, Major S.N. Polyakov, made 42 sorties, inflicting precise strikes on airfields, equipment and manpower of the enemy, while destroying 42 and damaging 35 aircraft.

On December 23, 1941, he died while performing the next combat mission. On February 10, 1943, for courage and courage shown in battles with enemies, Sergey Nikolaevich Polyakov was awarded the title of Hero of the Soviet Union (posthumously). For the period of service he was awarded the Orders of Lenin, the Red Banner (twice), the Red Star, and medals. He was buried in the village of Agalatovo, Vsevolozhsk district, Leningrad region.

Muravitsky Luka Zakharovich

Luka Muravitsky was born on December 31, 1916 in the village of Dolgoe, now the Soligorsk district of the Minsk region, into a peasant family. He graduated from 6 classes and school FZU. Worked on the subway in Moscow. Graduated from the Aeroclub. In the Soviet Army since 1937. He graduated from the Borisoglebsk military school for pilots in 1939. B.ZYu

Member of the Great Patriotic War since July 1941. Junior Lieutenant Muravitsky began his combat activity as part of the 29th IAP of the Moscow Military District. This regiment met the war on outdated I-153 fighters. Sufficiently maneuverable, they were inferior to enemy aircraft in speed and firepower. Analyzing the first air battles, the pilots came to the conclusion that they needed to abandon the pattern of straight-line attacks, and fight on turns, in dives, on a "hill" when their "Seagull" gained additional speed. At the same time, it was decided to switch to flights in twos, abandoning the link of three aircraft established by the official position.

The very first flights of "twos" showed their clear advantage. So, at the end of July, Alexander Popov, paired with Luka Muravitsky, returning after escorting the bombers, met with six Messers. Our pilots were the first to attack and shot down the leader of the enemy group. Stunned by the sudden blow, the Nazis hurried to get out.

On each of his planes, Luka Muravitsky painted the inscription “For Anya” on the fuselage with white paint. The pilots at first laughed at him, and the authorities ordered the inscription to be erased. But before each new flight on the fuselage of the aircraft on the starboard side again appeared - "For Anya" ... No one knew who this Anya was, whom Luka remembers even going into battle ...

Once, before a sortie, the regiment commander ordered Muravitsky to immediately erase the inscription and more so that it would not happen again! Then Luka told the commander that this was his beloved girl, who worked with him at the Metrostroy, studied at the flying club, that she loved him, they were going to get married, but ... She crashed jumping from an airplane. The parachute did not open... Even if she did not die in battle, Luka continued, but she was preparing to become an air fighter, to defend her Motherland. The commander relented.

Participating in the defense of Moscow, the commander of the 29th IAP, Luka Muravitsky, achieved excellent results. He was distinguished not only by sober calculation and courage, but also by his willingness to do anything to defeat the enemy. So on September 3, 1941, acting on the Western Front, he rammed an enemy He-111 reconnaissance aircraft and made a safe landing on the damaged aircraft. At the beginning of the war, we had few planes, and that day Muravitsky had to fly alone - to cover the railway station, where the ammunition echelon was being unloaded. Fighters, as a rule, flew in pairs, but here - one ...

At first everything went smoothly. The lieutenant vigilantly watched the air around the station, but as you can see, if there are multi-layered clouds overhead, rain. When Muravitsky was making a U-turn over the outskirts of the station, he saw a German reconnaissance aircraft in the gap between the tiers of clouds. Luka sharply increased the engine speed and rushed across the Heinkel-111. The Lieutenant's attack was unexpected, the "Heinkel" had not yet had time to open fire, as a machine-gun burst pierced the enemy, and he, descending steeply, began to flee. Muravitsky caught up with the Heinkel, opened fire on it again, and suddenly the machine gun fell silent. The pilot reloaded, but apparently ran out of ammunition. And then Muravitsky decided to ram the enemy.

He increased the speed of the plane - "Heinkel" is getting closer and closer. The Nazis are already visible in the cockpit ... Without reducing speed, Muravitsky approaches almost close to the Nazi aircraft and hits the tail with a propeller. The jerk and propeller of the fighter cut through the metal of the tail unit of the Non-111 ... The enemy plane crashed into the ground behind the railroad tracks in a wasteland. Luca also hit his head hard on the dashboard, aim and lost consciousness. I woke up - the plane falls to the ground in a tailspin. Gathering all his strength, the pilot with difficulty stopped the rotation of the machine and brought it out of a steep dive. He could not fly further and had to land the car at the station...

Having healed, Muravitsky returned to his regiment. And again fights. The flight commander flew into battle several times a day. He was eager to fight and again, as before the injury, the fuselage of his fighter was carefully displayed: "For Anya." By the end of September, the brave pilot already had about 40 air victories, won personally and as part of a group.

Soon one of the squadrons of the 29th IAP, which included Luka Muravitsky, was transferred to the Leningrad Front to reinforce the 127th IAP. The main task of this regiment was to escort transport aircraft along the Ladoga highway, cover their landing, loading and unloading. Acting as part of the 127th IAP, Senior Lieutenant Muravitsky shot down 3 more enemy aircraft. On October 22, 1941, Muravitsky was awarded the title of Hero of the Soviet Union for the exemplary performance of the combat missions of the command, for the courage and bravery shown in battle. By this time, 14 enemy aircraft were already downed on his personal account.

On November 30, 1941, the commander of the 127th IAP, Senior Lieutenant Maravitsky, died in an unequal air battle, defending Leningrad ... The total result of his combat activities, in various sources, is estimated differently. The most common figure is 47 (10 victories won personally and 37 as part of a group), less often - 49 (12 personally and 37 in a group). However, all these figures do not fit in with the figure of personal victories - 14, given above. Moreover, in one of the publications it is generally stated that Luka Muravitsky won his last victory in May 1945, over Berlin. Unfortunately, exact data is not yet available.

Luka Zakharovich Muravitsky was buried in the village of Kapitolovo, Vsevolozhsky District, Leningrad Region. A street in the village of Dolgoye is named after him.