There are still many unknown pages in the history of the war, which ended more than 65 years ago. The search engines of the Pskov region found and raised a Soviet reconnaissance aircraft from the swamp, which, apparently, was flying behind enemy lines and was shot down by the Nazis. The name of one of the fallen heroes has already been established.
Work in the rain in a swamp, waist-deep in water, at the site of the crash of the R-5 military aircraft, has been temporarily suspended. The reason is good. A search party from Pskov found human remains, clothing and weapons. And the tattered tablet - the last thing they noticed - contained well-preserved documents.
Here are the captain's shoulder straps, his card from the military registration and enlistment office - called by the Belotserkovsky military registration and enlistment office of the city of Kiev, letters - the names of Kubikov and Konev are barely distinguishable. Nearby are the remains of 2 more people. Litvinenko was the only one who had an ID with him, and most likely a woman was among the dead.
Litvinenko's personal file was found in the archives of the Ministry of Defense. Avram Yakovlevich was born in 1917 in Ukraine, in the village of Lisovka, Karnensky district, Zhytomyr region. Married. The death certificate states: "Killed at the end of March 1944 in a burning plane while performing a combat mission."
This detail was especially interesting for search engines. They believe that one of the pilots, and perhaps both, nevertheless escaped. Moreover, the remains of the pilots have not yet been found. And there was no one besides them to inform their own about Litvinenko's death.
Mikhail Romanov, head of the search expedition: "The pilots jumped out and, apparently, reported that the plane had burned down, about which there is such a message in the documents."
The locals reported the fallen biplane to the search engines, and identified it by the rust-eaten chassis.
The engine weighing half a ton is the heaviest part of the aircraft to lift. When hitting the ground, the power plant went to a depth of 5-6 meters. It has to be lifted from the swampy soil with the help of a powerful winch. In fact, manually. Technique can't get here. The place where the shot down P-5 fell in 1944 is a dense forest today.
Near the wreckage of the plane, the search engines found German bullets of large caliber. The weakly protected and low-speed biplane R-5 was made almost entirely of wood, as historians assume, was attacked by an enemy fighter. And the Soviet plane became easy prey for the enemy.
Today the R-5 is a rarity. In Russia there is only a single copy - in the Central Air Force Museum in Monino, Moscow Region. It was collected bit by bit - from the surviving units of crashed aircraft. But this sample, as experts say, is unsuitable for flights. The goal of the search engines and historians from the Winged Memory of Victory project is not just to restore the R-5 biplane, but to put the rarity on the wing.
Alexey Soldatkin, senior researcher at the Central Museum of the Air Force: "In order for an aircraft to fly, it is necessary to restore and create a new engine of the same designer, only to restore and create one. It is necessary to completely make a new aircraft, all power structures."
Ahead is a difficult archival work. It is necessary to establish the names of all crew members of the raised aircraft. And also to find the relatives of Avram Litvinenko and give them the Order of the Red Star. During his lifetime, the captain himself did not have time to receive this award.
