Zoya Kosmodemyanskaya is the first woman to receive the title of Hero of the Soviet Union during the war. Her feat is not forgotten. But we also remember other heroines who gave their lives for their Motherland.
“Don't cry, dear, I will return a hero or die a hero,” were the last words of Zoya Kosmodemyanskaya to her mother before leaving for the front. Now it is difficult to explain why young people dreamed of giving their lives for their homeland, but the fact remains: in the very first days of the war, military enlistment offices and Komsomol committees received thousands of applications with requests to send them to the active army. When in October there was a danger of the seizure of Moscow, four rifle divisions were drawn up from volunteers - this is almost 80 thousand people. Among those who wish there are a huge number of girls. Including Zoya.
Her fate is as simple as the fate of many of her peers: she was born, studied, joined the Komsomol, went to the front, and died. There were many such girls even in the part where Zoya served. Suffice it to recall Vera Voloshin, who went out with her on the same mission, was captured, died heroically, singing the Internationale before the execution, and for decades was considered missing. 16-year-old Larisa Vasilyeva from the same unit was taken prisoner in the village of Popovka in January 1942, raped, brutally tortured, and left to die naked in the cold. Her last words were: "You will kill me, but not a single fascist reptile will leave our land alive!" After the war, the villagers called their daughters Larissa in her honor, but who in Russia knows about her? There were a lot of them, such girls. Lucky only Zoya.
Yes, lucky. If the correspondent of the newspaper "Pravda" Pyotr Lidov, a talented and meticulous journalist, had not heard about her execution, Zoya could also have remained missing. But he heard and went to Petrishchevo. Together with him there was a correspondent of "Komsomolskaya Pravda" Sergei Lyubimov, who also wrote about the partisan Tanya. Lyubimov's essay is full of such pathos that the modern reader finds it funny. It would have passed unnoticed if it had not been for another essay in Pravda. Lidov's essay is structured in such a way that the Great Patriotic War is associated with all the wars that have ever occurred on the Russian land, and Zoya herself - "the daughter of the great Russian people" - becomes a saint.
SAINT ZOYA
The family of Zoya numbered many priests, the surname itself indicates Saints Cosmas and Damian. Grandfather, Pyotr Ivanovich Kosmodemyansky, was the rector of the Aspen-Gai church and died tragically in 1918: he refused to give horses to the bandits, and after cruel torture he was drowned in a pond. In Osino-Gai, he is now revered as a saint. In 2000, documents were being prepared for his canonization by the Russian Orthodox Church, but the results are unknown. After the death of his father, the eldest son Anatoly left his studies at the seminary and took on the responsibility of taking care of the family: in addition to his mother, he had to feed three underage brothers. While working in a combat suit, he became close to Lyubov Churikova and married her. Soon they had children, and after a while the young family ended up in Siberia. Did you send the Kosmodemyanskys to the distant village of Shitkino, or did they go of their own accord? Were you afraid of dispossession or anti-religious persecution? There is no answer to this day.
Zoe's passport. In the column "On the basis of which documents the passport was issued" is written the date of issue of the birth certificate
After the departure of Anatoly with his family to Siberia, the traces of his mother and brothers are lost. It is only known that none of the brothers married again and left no children.
Did Zoe know about the martyrdom of her grandfather? The girl spent almost every summer in Osino-Gai, and the stories of her fellow villagers, who for many years passed from mouth to mouth the story of a local saint, hardly passed her. It is also doubtful that Anatoly, the son of a priest and a seminary student, would decide not to baptize his children. However, accurate information has not been preserved, and Zoya died with words about Stalin, and not about God, leaving no evidence of her faith. This fact is decisive in the Church's refusal to rank the Soviet martyr among the saints.
BIRTHDAY
Zoya was born in the Tambov region in 1923, two years later, brother Alexander was born. Sasha's birthday is July 27, 1925. But Zoe's date of birth still raises questions: was the heroine born on September 8 or 13? Metric books from the local Church of the Sign were withdrawn even before her birth, but in the passport it is clearly distinguishable - September 13, 1923. Some historians claim that the real date of birth is September 8, and the 13th is the date of registration of the newborn in the registry office.
The director of the Osino-Gaysky Museum of the Kosmodemyansky, Sergei Polyansky, who was friends with Zoya's mother, declares that the real date is the 8th, but the 13th was a landmark for the family, so the daughter's birth was recorded on September 13th. What exactly was the sign, Zoe's mother did not tell. Perhaps this was baptism? However, these are only assumptions.
LIFE IN MOSCOW
The Kosmodemyanskys lived in Siberian Shitkin for only a year, and then moved to the capital. Most likely, this was facilitated by the sister of Lyubov Timofeevna Olga, who worked in the People's Commissariat for Education. Anatoly Petrovich got a job as an accountant at the Timiryazev Academy and got a room in one of the wooden houses on the Old Highway (now Vuchetich Street), and then in Aleksandrovsky Proezd (now Zoya and Alexander Kosmodemyanskikh Street). None of these houses have survived, like the real houses of the Kosmodemyanskiy and Churikovs in Osino-Gai or the original building of the 201st Moscow school, where Zoya and Sasha studied. For about 10 years it stood abandoned, then a fire broke out there, now it is being reconstructed, practically rebuilding it. Back in the 1950s, the Kuntsevo houses were demolished on Partizanskaya Street, where Zoya's unit was based. Time destroys the traces of heroes …
In 1933, Anatoly Petrovich died of volvulus, he was buried at the Kalitnikovskoye cemetery. In 1937, all the archival books burned down, and after the death of Lyubov Timofeevna in 1978, no one visited the grave, so it is not possible to find it. According to fellow soldier Zoya Klavdia Miloradova, the grave was located right next to the entrance to the cemetery. Now there is a monument to the soldiers who died in the Great Patriotic War. Most likely, the abandoned grave of Anatoly Petrovich was demolished to install the monument.
In order to feed young children, Lyubov Timofeevna, who has worked as a teacher all her life, decides to radically change her occupation: she goes to work as a compressor at a factory - they paid much more for working professions. She returned to teaching only four years later, when due to her health she could not do difficult work: in 1939 she got a job teaching at an adult school at the Borets plant. Around the same time, the children began to help financially. Zoya and Sasha copied drawings and maps for the All-Union Geological Fund. Lyubov Timofeevna's brother Sergei worked in this institution, and he helped his nephews with work, because in addition to everyday small expenses, one rather large one arose: education in the senior classes became paid, and the Kosmodemyanskiy family, despite the loss of the breadwinner, was not released from the payment.
By the way, the only surviving Moscow address that remembers the heroic brother and sister is the address of their uncle Sergei: 15 Bolshaya Polyanka Street.
SCHOOL AND DISEASE
Best of all, Zoya was given literature at school, she was very fond of reading, wrote excellent essays, and learned the conditions for admission to the Literary Institute. Sasha was fond of mathematics and painting, not only the walls of the Kosmodemyanskys' apartment, but also the school were decorated with his drawings: illustrations for Gogol's "Dead Souls" were hung in the literary class. He couldn't decide whether to become an engineer or an artist.
In fact, this picture turned out to be not so rosy: Zoe's often-mentioned "nervous illness", which began in the eighth grade, was caused by misunderstanding on the part of classmates, the girl's disappointment in friends. Not all Komsomol members completed the work of educating illiterate housewives - this was the initiative of Zoya's grouporg. Not everyone was serious about their studies, and she also took this to heart. After she was not re-elected by the grouporg, Zoya closed herself off and began to move away from her classmates. She later suffered from meningitis. Both times she was treated at the Botkin hospital, where people with mental illness were also observed at that time. This is what gave rise to unscrupulous historians in the 1990s to attribute schizophrenia to her. The certificate issued for the school refutes such speculation: "For health reasons, a sick [patient] can start school, but without fatigue and overload." A mentally ill person would simply not be allowed to attend regular school.
WAR
Since the beginning of the war, Zoya tried many activities: she sewed duffel bags and buttonholes for raincoats, together with the class she collected potatoes on the labor front. For several days she worked as a stamping clerk at the Borets plant, and entered a nursing course. However, all this seemed to her to be too small a contribution to the cause of victory. She decides to go to the front and for the sake of this, along with other volunteers, she stands for hours in line for an appointment with the secretary of the Moscow City Komsomol Committee, Alexander Shelepin. He approved her candidacy and sent to the reconnaissance and sabotage unit No. 9903. True, the unit commander Arthur Sprogis at first refused to accept her. She looked too beautiful and noticeable for a scout. Zoya sat near his office until late at night and was nevertheless admitted to the unit. This happened on October 30, 1941.
Further events are also known: at 9 am the next day, Zoya's mother escorted Zoya to the tram stop, on which she got to the Sokol metro station, and from there to Chistye Prudy. On a truck carrying a group of scouts from the Coliseum cinema (now the Sovremennik theater building), she arrived in Kuntsevo (at first the detachment was based in Zhavoronki, in a kindergarten building, but as the Germans approached Moscow, they close and safe Kuntsevo). Several days of training in mining and shooting, which Zoya was engaged not only in her group, but at her personal request also with other groups, and on November 4, having taken the oath and henceforth being considered the Red Army, a group of scouts went into the rear of the enemy. Their task included reconnaissance and mining of roads. The first raid in the Volokolamsk region was successful; on November 8, the group returned to the base. Despite the fact that Zoya fell into the river and caught a bad cold, she did not agree to go to the hospital, and the doctor of military unit No. 9903 treated her there, at the base.
It is known that all fighters who left the front line were entitled to a one-day vacation to Moscow. According to the testimony of Klavdia Miloradova, who had no relatives in the capital, Zoya invited her to visit, but neither mother nor brother was at home, apparently, they worked late. Zoya left a note to her relatives, and the girls went back to the unit in a truck waiting for them at the Colosseum. After the war, Lyubov Timofeevna never mentioned that note.
SECOND RIDE
On November 19 (according to other sources, on the night of November 22), two groups went to the rear of the Germans - Pavel Provorov, which included Zoya and Vera Voloshin, and Boris Krainov. They walked together, intending to split up in the rear. Immediately after crossing the front line, the general group was fired upon, and it split in two. The soldiers ran in different directions and spontaneously united in the forest. Zoya found herself in one group, Vera - in another, which left in the direction of Golovkov. There, the detachment again came under fire, and Vera, who was in the lead reconnaissance, remained lying in the field. It was not possible to return for her - the Germans arrived too quickly to the place of the battle, and in the morning the comrades did not find her body … Many years later, the fate of Vera Voloshina will be determined by the Moscow journalist Georgy Frolov.
Boris Krainov's group, in which Zoya was, moved to Petrishchev, where it was required to damage the German communications center - a counteroffensive was planned. On the way, many soldiers caught a cold, and the commander decided to send them back to the base. So five people remained in the group: Boris himself, Zoya, Klava Miloradova, Lydia Bulgina (a day later, Klava and Lida, having gone out on reconnaissance, got lost in the forest and went out to the location of their units, bringing valuable documents, repulsed from a German officer), and Vasily Klubkov, which is worth mentioning especially.
VASILY KLUBKOV
This man was indeed on the list of soldiers of military unit No. 9903, he existed. The version about the probable betrayal sounded right after his return "from captivity". He passed a check in the intelligence department of the front, but on February 28, 1942, he was arrested by officers of the Special Department of the NKVD, and on April 3, a military tribunal of the Western Front sentenced him to death. During interrogations, he confessed that he was captured in Petrishchev, he chickened out and betrayed Zoya and Krainov to the Germans, with whom he came to the village.
“At 3-4 o'clock in the morning, these soldiers brought me to the headquarters of the German unit located in the village. Ashes, and handed over to a German officer … he pointed a revolver at me and demanded that I give out who came with me to set fire to the village. At the same time, I showed cowardice and told the officer that only three of us had come, named Boris Krainov and Zoya Kosmodemyanskaya. The officer immediately gave some order in German to the German soldiers present there, they quickly left the house and a few minutes later brought Zoya Kosmodemyanskaya. Whether they detained Krainov, I do not know."
Thus, from the interrogation protocol of March 11-12, 1942, it follows that Klubkov was seized at 3-4 o'clock in the morning on November 27 in the village of Pepelishche, Zoya was brought in a few minutes later, then she was stripped and beaten, and then taken away in an unknown direction …
We get completely different information from the testimony of Maria Sedova, a resident of the village of Petrishchevo, on February 11: “They brought her in the evening, at 7 or 7.30 am. The Germans who lived at home with us shouted: "Partisan, partisan!" I don't know what color the trousers are, they are dark … They threw down the comforter, and it was lying around all the time. The German cook took the mittens. She had a khaki raincoat and was stained in the ground. I have a raincoat tent now. They kept her with us for about 20 minutes."
What is this, if not an initial short search, after which the girl was taken away for interrogation? Although there is no other Russian intelligence officer in the certificate.
Not a word about Klubkov and in the testimony of other villagers. And in the records of Peter Lidov there is a mention of him: “July 9, 1942. Today, in the tribunal of the NKVD troops of the Moscow district, I read the case of Sviridov, who betrayed Tanya and was sentenced to death on July 4. That he participated in the capture of Zoya and was the first to notice her, I was told in Petrishchev back on January 26th. I was with him, and he behaved very suspiciously. I was not at all surprised that my suspicions were justified. The Sviridov case completely refutes the version that Zoya was betrayed by her squadmate Klubkov. Klubkov is a traitor, but he didn’t betray Zoya”.
Klubkov was caught on November 27, and Zoya was taken on the evening before the execution. Two years later, the exact number will be revealed, and then the inhabitants of the occupied territories did not receive newspapers and did not listen to the radio, so the dates were named approximate, hence the "first days of December" mentioned in all documents. The exact date - November 29 - became known only in 1943 from the captured Karl Bauerlein, a non-commissioned officer of the 10th company of the 332nd infantry regiment (this particular regiment was stationed in Petrishchev in the fall and winter of 1941). Later, the date of November 29 was confirmed by other captured soldiers and officers of this regiment. They did not mention Klubkov: either this information is still classified, or Klubkov was captured in another place and did not betray Zoya.
The further fate of the captured girl is known and practically does not differ from that written in the textbook essay of Peter Lidov "Tanya".
Zoe was identified several times. At first, local residents chose her Komsomol ticket with a photo from a pile of other tickets; then schoolteacher Vera Novoselova and classmate Viktor Belokun, one of the few who was in Moscow at that time, and not at the front or in evacuation, identified Zoina's body dug from the grave, then comrades and, finally, brother Alexander and mother Lyubov Timofeevna. They first had a conversation with the latter and showed photographs of the executed girl, taken by a Pravda photojournalist - they both recognized Zoya in Tanya. The case was responsible, representatives of the Moscow and Central Committees of the Komsomol were present at all identifications. Remained with the possibility of at least some mistake, Zoya Kosmodemyanskaya would not have received the title of Hero, and the search for the relatives of the deceased "Tanya" would have continued further.
In the 1990s, many people appeared who wanted to expose the official version: starting with the fact that Zoya was betrayed by her brother-soldier Vasily Klubkov, and ending with the fact that she was not at all killed in Petrishchev. Historians of the new wave presented semi-mythical versions as a sensation and completely ignored the fact that all this was discussed in the 1960s and was happily forgotten in the absence of evidence.
Ninth grade. Zoya is the fourth from the right in the second row, Sasha is the first from the left in the first row. 1941 year
LIE ABOUT LIE
For example, it was argued that for years information about women victims of fire who mocked the captive Zoya had been classified. It is not true. Pavel Nilin wrote about their trial in detail in his essay "Meanness". Information about Klubkov was published not only in the army periodicals (article by Jan Miletsky "Who betrayed Tanya", published in the newspaper "Krasnaya Zvezda" on April 22, 1942), it is also in the popular children's story "Don't be afraid of death" by Vyacheslav Kovalevsky, published in 1961 -m.
In the same story, a partisan detachment was described in detail: training of volunteers, a base, actions behind enemy lines. Even the names of the fighters and commanders were called, the latter in a slightly modified form: Sprogis became Progis, and Commissar Dronov became Commissar Klenov.
The only innovation that the 1990s brought to this story was the designation of the detachment's activities: in literature and journalism, it began to be called sabotage unit No. 9903. In fact, it was so.
Information about unit no. 9903 was not available to anyone, but about the arson of houses in which the Germans were quartered, they wrote in the newspapers of the wartime. The most curious is the cycle of essays by Karl Nepomniachtchi, who told in detail about the raid of a similar squad of saboteurs behind enemy lines, about the defeat of the German headquarters and the burning of houses with sleeping Germans in the village of Ugodsky Zavod. Essays were published throughout December 1941. It is unlikely that any of the readers of "MK" at that time came to mind to be indignant: "Barbarism!" Everyone understood that the war was going "not for the sake of glory, for the sake of life on earth."
The attempts to defame Zoe's brother and mother look just as groundless. Alexander Kosmodemyansky received his Hero Star, among other things, for the fact that during the attack on Koenigsberg he volunteered to be the first to cross the canal to the side occupied by the Germans. The bridge, built by sappers, collapsed immediately behind him, the Germans - they had five guns - opened fire. Sasha managed to suppress the entire battery with heavy fire. As his comrade Alexander Rubtsov recalled, “the self-propelled gun remained in that position for three days and held the battle. Then our tanks approached, restored the crossing, and Sasha returned to his regiment. A week later, having freed Firbruderkrug, Sasha was killed by shell fragments. Initially, he was buried in the center of Konigsberg, on Bismarck Square, but his mother asked to be reburied next to Zoya, and she herself transported the body to Moscow.
The mother of the heroes of the Great Patriotic War until the end of her days lived on a small teacher's pension, transferring to the Soviet Peace Fund all fees for speeches and publications about her children. When she died, she was buried next to Sasha - these are the rules of the Novodevichy cemetery: cremated bodies are buried on one side, non-cremated bodies on the other. Only Zoya was cremated from the family.
LEILY AZOLINA
Zoya Kosmodemyanskaya became a symbol of the country, the personification of a feat. Leyli Azolina has been missing for many years. The only memory of her is the name on the list of dead students on a memorial plaque on the old building of the Geological Prospecting Institute near the Kremlin. But, even for the officials to be allowed to put her name on the blackboard, the staff of the institute had to deliberately enter erroneous data into the Book of Memory of Moscow: “She was buried in the village. Petrishchevo, Ruzsky district, Moscow region. Needless to say, there is no grave in Petrishchev and never was?
The name of Leyli Azolina was first mentioned in the 1960s, when the article by L. Belaya "On the Roads of Heroes" was published in Moskovsky Komsomolets on November 29, 1967: "A few days after that 24-hour military leave that Lilya Azolina spent mother and sisters, the postman did not bring the newspaper to mother, to Oktyabrskaya Street, to house 2/12, to the 6th apartment: on that day, an essay by Pyotr Lidov about the partisan Tanya hanged by the Germans and a photograph was printed in the issue. The face of the hanged partisan looked terribly like Lilino."
This careless phrase gave impetus to numerous speculations that arose in the wake of the 1990s: some historians quite seriously stated that it was not Zoya who died in Petrishchev. They were not convinced by either the facts, or eyewitness accounts, or even the forensic examination of the photographs of the executed girl, carried out in 1992 and once again confirming that the photo was Zoya Kosmodemyanskaya. Some truth lovers debunked the Soviet myth not just in the press, but also in the society of those who knew for sure that it was not Lilya who died in Petrishchev. There were hunters once again to inform an alternative version of her sisters Lydia and Tatiana, who are still alive. Mother Valentina Viktorovna died in 1996, having lived 96 years, but never received news of her eldest daughter. After her death, the archive disappeared without a trace, which she had been collecting all these years and in which, according to the testimony of the sisters, letters from Lily's colleagues, her photographs and documents that would help to finally clarify the fate of the girl were kept.
“Mom used all her connections and acquaintances (and she was from Tiflis, she knew Beria), got a pass to the newly liberated Zvenigorodsky district, and for two months looked for Lilya in all parts and hospitals. Why there? She probably knew something, but she didn't tell us. But Lily was nowhere to be found,”says Lydia. She remembers well her older sister, unlike Tatyana, who was only four years old in July 1941.
After the war, in the archives of the Central Committee of the Komsomol, they could not find a statement by the popular heroine Zoya with a request to send her to the front. It is still unknown what words she used to explain her desire to defend her homeland. Lily's statement was probably not looked for. However, a wanted list for the missing soldier has been preserved. It is known from him that she was drafted by the Krasnopresnensky district military registration and enlistment office in October 1941, that she came home on a visit on December 7 and that, according to her comrades, she died a few days after that. A little more clarity in the fate of the missing girl was brought by the historian Alexander Sokolov, who found Lily's photos in the archives next to a soldier of the Special Forces of the Western Front *. The photo was signed by the then living UNPF veterans: "Scout Azolina Lilya". This fact gives historians the right to include the girl in the list of UNPF fighters. The Azolina sisters confirm that the picture shows Lilya, exactly the same photo was kept in the family. It turns out that Lilya never served with Zoya in military unit No. 9903, as some unscrupulous journalists said.
At the moment, it is impossible to accurately establish Lily's combat path: witnesses have died, the archives are classified, the memory of the aged sisters cannot reproduce the details. According to fragmentary information, it is known that Lilya joined the Krasnopresnensky volunteer battalion at the most difficult time for Moscow - October 16, 1941. She studied at a communications school with some classmates at the Geological Prospecting Institute and died on the eve of her 19th birthday - December 11 or 12 (no documents have survived, and her sisters remember Lily's date of birth only approximately - either December 12 or December 13). Much needs clarification and addition, although, based on the numerous coincidences and fragmentary memories of Lily's sisters and colleagues, one can roughly imagine what kind of work she did and how she died.
Probably, for the first time, Lilya went to the rear of the enemy on November 12 as part of a newly created detachment, commanded by Colonel Sergei Iovlev. The raid took place in the area of the Ugodsky Zavod, Black Mud and Vysokinichy. Its main task was technical reconnaissance: imperceptibly connecting to the German cable, Lilya, who spoke German perfectly, collected data on the movement of enemy troops, their weapons and offensive plans. Her work, like the work of many other intelligence officers, ensured an early counteroffensive by Soviet troops near Moscow.
The first campaign went well, the detachment returned to the base with almost no losses. After him, two more raids took place, and just during a short rest between them on December 7, Leela managed to visit her mother and sisters. There were no more dates.
The decree on awarding Zoya Kosmodemyanskaya the title of Hero of the Soviet Union was published by all central newspapers on February 16, 1942. Together with her, this title was received by the commissar of the partisan detachment Mikhail Guryanov, who was hanged by the Germans on November 27 in the village of Ugodsky Zavod. Guryanov took part in the famous operation to defeat the German headquarters in this village. He was captured and executed after brutal torture. Karl Nepomniachtchi, mentioned above, took part in the same operation. He was assigned by the editors to the Special Purpose Unit, walked with him all the way - about 250 km through the forests of the Moscow region - and returned to the base only on November 26. His first essay was published in "Komsomolskaya Pravda" on December 3, 1941 and was accompanied by a photograph of the commander Nikolai Sitnikov: a dozen people walk in a line along the edge of the forest.
The third figure is a female, warmly wrapped in a scarf - Lilya. According to the testimony of her sisters, it was this newspaper that the girl brought home on the day of her visit. The number was kept in the family for a long time, but over the years it was lost.
Thus, on the day of Zoya's heroic death (on the evening of November 27, fires began in Petrishchev, on November 28, Zoya was captured, on the 29th, they executed) Leyli Azolina had just returned to Moscow, to the Tushino airfield. It was there that the detachment was based, there later Lily's mother went to look for her daughter. But even if we admit the completely untenable idea that Lilya did not return from the very first raid of the UNPF, then she should have perished in the Kaluga region, and at least 60 km from Petrishchev. However, these are only assumptions that have no right to life: in addition to the newspaper, the Azolin family kept a letter from a colleague for a long time, who had witnessed Lily's death with his own eyes. According to him, during the third raid behind enemy lines, the conductor led the detachment to reconnaissance of the enemy, a firefight ensued, Lily waved her hand and fell into the snow. This happened after December 11 - on that day, the detachment left the base. Further history is shrouded in the darkness of obscurity: a colleague himself in that battle was wounded and was listed as missing for a long time. The commander of the detachment, Georgy Yesin, recalled after the war: “On the 11th of December in the village. Hawk. In the area, I was given intelligence and a guide. But the guide led my detachment to the advanced units of the enemy, and he himself managed to escape. In general, it seemed strange to me where the guide was leading us … In fact, the detachment was aimed at the enemy's defenses, which the forward units of the Fifth Army could not break through. We got involved in the battle, suffered losses and retreated."
This happened during the counter-offensive of our troops. In the heat of battle, no one began to look for traces of the missing signalman, and such an opportunity was not provided. There is also no information about post-war mass graves in that area, and, most likely, Lily's ashes, like hundreds of other missing fighters, are still located near the village of Yastrebki, Zvenigorodsky district. However, even this information is enough to put an end to the ridiculous speculation that the girl who died in Petrishchev was Lilya.
No matter how trite the phrase may sound that the war is not over until the last soldier is buried, it is true. We did not start the war, however, we must end it: seek, bury, remember.
* In the second floor. October 1941, at the direction of the commander of the Western Front, General of the Army Georgy Zhukov, on the basis of the reserve of the Military Council, they began to form a special airborne battalion, transformed into the Special Purpose Detachment of the Western Front (UNZF). In contrast to the small (up to 100 people) numbered Special Purpose Detachments of the Western Front, this was actually the Special Purpose Detachment of the Military Council of the Western Front, numbering 600 people.
The Special Purpose Detachment was formed from fighters and commanders who had previously taken part in hostilities. Recruitment is completely voluntary, after study and verification. The unit being formed included fighters and commanders from the reserve of the Military Council of the Western Front, airfield service units, the political administration and the front intelligence department. The tasks of the detachment included, in particular, reconnaissance, sabotage on the roads and in settlements, the destruction of manpower, equipment and enemy headquarters, the capture and holding of bridges and crossings until our troops approached, the capture of airfield support systems.
