The Great Patriotic War rallied and raised millions of Soviet citizens to defend the Motherland. There were also very young patriots among them. Not only Komsomol members, but also pioneers - teenagers of fifteen, fourteen, thirteen and even ten years old, participated in the resistance to the Nazi invaders, fought in the ranks of regular units as "sons of the regiment" and in partisan detachments. The little defenders of their country were especially indispensable as messengers and scouts operating behind enemy lines. Perhaps every Soviet city or rural area, once under occupation, had such young heroes. Some of them received all-Union fame, others remained in the memory only of their parents, friends and comrades in partisan detachments and underground groups.
After the beginning of the "democratic reforms" of the 1990s, accompanied by the devaluation of all previous values and ideals, which was most often carried out purposefully, through the appropriate efforts of the media, cinema, music, etc., anti-Soviet sources did not hesitate to start "debunking idols of the Soviet era”, to which not only party and state leaders or revolutionaries, but also the heroes of the Great Patriotic War were unambiguously attributed. They have repeatedly tried to discredit the bright names of young war heroes - pioneers and Komsomol members who fought in partisan detachments or the regular army.
Most often, anti-Soviet propaganda hoped that the exploits of these guys were fictitious, or that there were no guys at all - there were no war heroes. There were cases and representations of the heroes of the Soviet underground and the partisan movement by banal hooligans or arsonists. Say, they were guided not by patriotic considerations, but by hooligan or even criminal motives, or they committed their heroic deeds "out of stupidity." They repeatedly tried to discredit the names of Zoya Kosmodemyanskaya, Alexander Matrosov, Nikolai Gastello, Marat Kazei, this propaganda fad of post-perestroika times and the hero of our article touched upon. Nevertheless, all bad things pass away - and now, in the 2010s, the rise of patriotic sentiments in society is returning the good name and eternal memory to all the heroes who died and fought against the Nazi invaders. Shows interest in the heroic defenders of the Motherland and youth.
"Bloody week" of the first occupation of Rostov
In Soviet times, the song "Vitya Cherevichkin lived in Rostov …" spread throughout the country. She was known and listened to even by those people who had never been to Rostov-on-Don and were little aware of the very figure of the young hero, why he was awarded all-Union fame and respect. Until now, disputes do not subside - not only "in the kitchen", but also among quite respectable local historians, historians, journalists about the figure of Vitya Cherevichkin and the essence of his feat. One thing remains - Vitya, of course, really existed and was actually shot by the German invaders without trial or investigation during the first occupation of Rostov-on-Don in 1941. This is proved not only by photographs, but also by the memories of many eyewitnesses, and, most importantly, the existence of real relatives, acquaintances, neighbors of Vitya Cherevichkin, some of whom are still alive.
Vitya Cherevichkin has the status of a “pioneer - hero” in official Soviet history. In Rostov-on-Don, among teenage heroes, he is the most famous and popular, even more popular than the thirteen-year-old Sasha Chebanov, a thirteen-year-old intelligence officer of the Rostov Rifle Regiment of the People's Militia. Although Vitya was never awarded the posthumous title of Hero of the Soviet Union, a lot was done in the post-war period to perpetuate his name - they opened the park of the same name, renamed one of the streets of Nakhichevan, the area of the city where Vitya's family lived, in honor of the young hero., erected a monument. Every Rostov schoolchild and many residents of the country who had never been Rostovites knew about Vita Cherevichkin until the collapse of the Soviet system of patriotic education. And this despite the fact that information about what the sixteen-year-old Rostovite was actually doing during the battles for Rostov and the subsequent occupation is practically not available to historians and journalists.
On the night of November 21, 1941, units of the 56th Army under the command of Lieutenant General F. N. Remezov and militias from the Rostov Rifle Regiment of the People's Militia defended Rostov-on-Don from the Nazis and their allies. Ultimately, the Wehrmacht formations superior in technology and weapons managed to break through the defense line of Rostov and enter the city. Despite the heroic resistance of the military and the militia, the Nazis continued to press against the defenders of the city, who defended themselves on the barricades. Ultimately, parts of the 56th Army were forced to retreat to the left bank of the Don River, to the Bataysk region.
The Germans who seized the city began massacres of the local population. At the same time, they destroyed not only the discovered servicemen who were trying to hide from the occupiers, or party workers, but also ordinary citizens. In historical sources, the occupation of Rostov-on-Don in November 1941 was called "bloody week" - so cruel were the actions of the Nazis against the local population. Any Rostovite could become a victim of the invaders these days, who, as they say, "at the wrong time in the wrong place." The brutalized Germans killed people left and right, they could easily open fire at random passers-by or queues at the store. At the same time, the massacres have not yet acquired the centralization that took place in 1942, during the re-occupation of Rostov-on-Don, when tens of thousands of Soviet citizens (27 thousand people) were killed in Zmievskaya Balka. However, in the Frunze park, prisoners of the Red Army, and Rostov communists and Komsomol members, and simply residents of the city who fell under suspicion of cooperation with the Soviet army or anti-German activities were shot.
Rostov resident V. Varivoda recalls: “I was 23 years old. I had a small child, so I tried to go outside as little as possible. She lived mainly on rumors. Most of all I was shocked by the shooting of residents near the park named after Revolution. Someone killed a German officer, and at night they rounded up all the residents of the quarter and shot them at the corner. The Nazis wanted thereby to intimidate the population. Show how brutally they will act, establishing a “new order” (Smirnov V. V. Rostov under the shadow of a swastika. Rostov-on-Don, 2006)”.
Cherevichkin
At the time of the occupation, Vita Cherevichkin was 16 years old. He was born in 1925 into an ordinary Rostov family. Vitin's father Ivan Alekseevich worked as a blacksmith at the Rostselmash plant, his mother Fekla Vasilievna worked as a janitor. That is, the Cherevichkins lived poorly, especially since they had four children - sons Sasha and Vitya, daughters Anya and Galya. The family lived on the 28th line, not far from the intersection with 2nd Maiskaya Street (now Cherevichkina Street).
The area where the Cherevichkins lived - Nakhichevan - was originally a separate city from Rostov-on-Don, inhabited at the end of the 18th century by the Armenians resettled from the Crimea by Catherine II. After the merger with Rostov in Nakhichevan, the number of the Russian population began to grow, especially after the Rostselmash plant was built nearby. The workers of "Rostselmash" settled both in the workers' settlements of the plant - Chkalov, Ordzhonikidze, Mayakovsky, and in old Nakhichevan. The Cherevichkins lived in one room with six of them. They lived poorly and were often malnourished. When the war began, the head of the family - Ivan Alekseevich - went into the army. Before the beginning of the occupation, the 18-year-old eldest son Sasha was evacuated to neighboring Bataysk - he was soon to join the army, and the Soviet military command decided to evacuate the recruits so that they would not be destroyed or taken prisoner by the invaders. Mother Fekla Vasilievna, sixteen-year-old Vitya and two daughters - Anya, 12 years old and Galya, who was only three years old, remained in the city.
Young Vitya Cherevichkin studied at the 26th, then at the 15th school, and then transferred to a vocational school - he mastered the profession of a locksmith. He studied repairing aircraft engines at the 2nd school - in those years it was a good specialty that guaranteed decent and stable earnings, and most importantly - the prospects for further education, up to aviation - the dreams of all the boys of that time. The school was also fed, which was a significant help for a large family - after all, it was very difficult to feed four children for the salary of a worker and a janitor. In general, Vitya Cherevichkin was an ordinary Rostov boy with a completely ordinary fate and interests typical of that time. Both Vitya and his older brother Sasha were very fond of pigeons.
It is now only the surviving old people who are still in the era of mass enthusiasm for pigeons, and some rare enthusiasts, are engaged in pigeon breeding. In Soviet times, pigeon breeding was very popular, especially in Rostov-on-Don. Rostov was considered one of the capitals of the Soviet pigeon breeding and pigeon house back in the 1980s. met on almost every street in the city, especially in the private sector. Three Rostov breeds of pigeons are widely known: Rostov white-breasted, Rostov chiliks and Rostov colored. Although the fashion for pigeons among Rostov youth has long faded away, you can still find individual pigeon houses in the city, some of them are looked after by elderly Rostovites who have devoted their lives to this amazing hobby.
When Vitya Cherevichkin and his brother were teenagers, pigeon breeding was held in high esteem among Rostov adults and boys. Dovecotes constituted a special, as sociologists would say, subculture with its own "professional language", common interests and even a characteristic waddling gait. For many boys, a good pigeon in those years was the subject of real envy. In the Cherevichkin family, Victor was the most inveterate pigeon breeder.
War pigeons
Great importance was attached to pigeon breeding by OSOAVIAKHIM - the Society for Assistance to Defense, Aviation and Chemical Construction - the forerunner of DOSAAF (Voluntary Society for Assistance to the Army, Aviation and Navy). This was explained by the fact that until the end of the Second World War, in many armed forces of the world, carrier pigeons were used to deliver war mail. It was OSOAVIAKHIM that took upon itself the painstaking work of organizing scientific pigeon breeding in the Soviet Union. In 1925, a unified pigeon sports center was created under the Central Council of the OSOAVIAKHIM of the USSR, which was considered as a body for coordinating the activities of associations of pigeon sports lovers.
Three years later, Deputy People's Commissar for Military Affairs I. S. Unshlikht published a report on the need to introduce "military pigeon duty" in the Soviet Union:The People's Commissariat for Military Affairs considers it timely to establish military pigeon duty … [At the same time] the possibility of using carrier pigeons to the detriment of the interests of the USSR dictates the need to prohibit the keeping and breeding of carrier pigeons by institutions and persons not registered with the NKVM and Osoaviakhim bodies, as well as prohibiting everyone, with the exception of bodies NKVM, export of carrier pigeons from the USSR and their import from abroad”.
In particular, a nursery for carrier pigeons was created at Moscow State University. M. V. Lomonosov, military post pigeon stations appeared in several cities of the Soviet Union. Accordingly, the breeding of carrier pigeons was popularized among Soviet schoolchildren and students who were members of OSOAVIAKHIM. The young people brought out the pigeons were handed over to the military post stations, from where they were taken to the military units of the Red Army, which were responsible for postal communication between military units. The manual on combat training of the signal troops of the Red Army for military pigeon breeding units was published in 1930, military trainers-breeders engaged in breeding carrier pigeons received a separate military registration specialty and were on special account.
In the 1930s. there were two types of military pigeon stations - permanent and mobile. The permanent ones were part of the district signal troops, and the mobile ones were part of all army corps. The deployment of the mobile military pigeon station was given four days. Mobile military pigeon stations were transported by road or horse-drawn transport. The specialists of the military pigeon stations were trained in the Central educational and experimental nursery - the school of military and sport dogs, renamed in 1934 into the Central school of communication for dog breeding and pigeon breeding. In the same 1934, the restored Institute of military pigeon breeding of the Red Army was included in the Scientific and Experimental Institute of Military Dog Breeding. From 1934 to 1938 19 graduations of students of advanced training courses for the chiefs of stationary military pigeon stations were produced with the assignment of the rank of junior lieutenant to them. In 1938, 23 junior lieutenants were released - the chief of military pigeon stations. Thus, in the Soviet signal troops at that time there were military pigeon breeders, even with officer's shoulder straps and diplomas of the relevant specialists.
The Soviet military command took pigeon mail very seriously. So, with the outbreak of hostilities in order to prevent the possible use of carrier pigeons by enemy spies, individuals were ordered to hand over pigeons to police stations (with the exception of persons who were on special account at the People's Commissariat of Defense and OSOAVIAKHIM). The command of the German occupation forces also ordered the population of the occupied territories to immediately surrender the pigeons on pain of execution. In turn, the Soviet troops actively used pigeons to deliver front-line reports and the pigeons with the tasks assigned to them coped quite effectively.
During the Great Patriotic War, according to historians, pigeons delivered over 15 thousand letters. Until 1944, pigeons were used in the interests of military intelligence in most directions. The winged defenders of the Motherland suffered no less losses than the units manned by people. Every two months, up to 30% of carrier pigeons died - they became victims of shells and fragments, moreover, the Wehrmacht actively used specially trained falcons and hawks - "interceptors" to fight carrier pigeons. The use of pigeons as a means of operational communication of military units came to an end only after the end of World War II, due to the growth of technical progress and equipping the armed forces with modern means of communication.
Killed with a dove in his hands
When the Germans occupied Rostov-on-Don again, in July 1942, one of the first orders of the occupation authorities was a ban on the breeding of pigeons by city dwellers. But during the first occupation, which lasted only a week, the Wehrmacht command did not manage to issue a corresponding decree. Nevertheless, the attitude towards all pigeon breeders was very suspicious. The sixteen-year-old Rostov pedagogue Vitya Cherevichkin also fell "under the cap" of the invaders. Moreover, the German headquarters was located not far from the Cherevichkin house and the Nazis had every reason to suspect the young neighbor of working for Soviet military intelligence. After all, cases of arrests and executions of pigeon breeders in the occupied territories took place in other cities as well.
On November 28, 1941, as Vitya Cherevichkina's sister Anna Ivanovna recalls, her brother went to feed the pigeons at about two in the afternoon. Half an hour later, Vitya appeared in the courtyard of the house under the escort of an armed German soldier. The Nazi led Vitya to the shed where the dovecote was located. Eyewitnesses were sure that now the German would shoot the guy right in front of their eyes - for breeding pigeons. However, the German demanded that Vitia kill the pigeons. Vitya opened the entrance and the pigeons flew out into the street. The German escort took Cherevichkin to the headquarters. His relatives did not see him again. According to eyewitnesses, Vitya was captured by the Germans, noticing that he had thrown several pigeons into the sky just at the moment when a Soviet military plane was flying over the area. This turned out to be enough for the invaders to establish themselves in the opinion: Cherevichkin is either a reconnaissance officer, or an airborne operator of the Soviet troops.
In the evening of the same day, a neighbor of the Cherevichkins told Vitya's mother and sister that the Germans were escorting Vitya in the direction of the park. Frunze. In the first days of the occupation, this place had already become sadly famous among the Rostovites - there the Germans shot Red Army soldiers, militias and civilians who fell under suspicion. Vitya was beaten - apparently, they beat him at the headquarters, trying to knock out confessions about cooperation with the Soviet command.
The relatives started looking for my brother on the morning of November 29. On this day, shots and volleys of guns were heard throughout Rostov. Parts of the 56th Army and the people's militia advanced across the Don River, liberating the city from the invaders. Viti's mother Fekla Vasilievna and sister Anya searched the entire Frunze park, which was filled with the bodies of the executed Rostovites. But Viti was not among the corpses - only one teenager was found, but it was not Cherevichkin. In the evening of November 29, the eldest son of the Cherevichkin family, Sasha, returned with the Red Army. Soon his neighbor Tyutyunnikov came to him and told him that Viti Cherevichkin's body was lying in Frunze Park. The young man lay in the uniform jacket of the vocational school, with a dead dove in his hands. The hat and galoshes that were on Vitya on the day his relatives saw him for the last time in his life were not found on the corpse - apparently, one of the marauders removed good things from the shot guy.
Neighbors and older brother decided not to take Vitia's body home, so as not to traumatize Fekla Vasilyevna, who was already mad with grief. We turned to the military command with a request to bury Viktor Cherevichkin in Frunze Park together with the executed and dead servicemen. In the summer cinema, coffins were made, and in the center of the park in early December, the dead were buried in a large mass grave. However, Vitya Cherevichkin was not a member of the regular army. Therefore, his name never appeared on the slabs installed over the mass grave in Frunze Park after the war.
When in 1994 the city authorities decided to perpetuate the memory of the dead Red Army soldiers buried in Frunze Park and carve the names of all the people buried here on the "Grieving Mother" memorial, Anna Ivanovna - Viti Cherevichkin's sister - turned to the district military commissariat with a request to put on the memorial and the name of her brother, but she was refused, since Vitya was not a career soldier or a conscript. For a long time, the struggle to perpetuate the name of Vitya Cherevichkin at the memorial continued, it was even required to take testimony from people who were eyewitnesses of Vitya Cherevichkin's funeral after his murder in Frunze Park. Only in 2001, at the "Grieving Mother" memorial in the park named after Frunze, the name of Viktor Ivanovich Cherevichkin was inscribed on one of the gravestones.
When on November 29, 1941, Rostov-on-Don was liberated by Soviet troops for the first time, the mass media of the Soviet Union began to circulate reports about the atrocities of the occupiers during the occupation of Rostov, since Rostov-on-Don was the first large Soviet city liberated from German fascist invaders. The Soviet newspapers also published photographs of the dead Rostovites, among which was the famous photograph of the dead Viti Cherevichkin flying around the world with a dove in his hands. By the way, this photo was attached to the materials of the Nuremberg trials over the leaders of Hitlerite Germany as one of the proofs that the Nazis committed monstrous crimes against civilians on the territory of the Soviet Union.
Eyewitness A. Agafonov recalls: “When our people entered the city, on the very first day there appeared a note from the People's Commissariat for Foreign Affairs, signed by Molotov:“On the atrocities of the Nazi invaders in Rostov-on-Don”and leaflets. There, in particular, it was reported about the execution of a 14-year-old boy from a vocational school - Viti Cherevichkin. I saw the killed Vitya Cherevichkin, we ran there. Although he was not shot where it was stated in the leaflet. He was shot in the Frunze Park. And he was older. But I learned this later, when I was collecting materials about him for my story. And then we just saw: he was lying without a headdress, as if leaning against the wall. Bullets tore shreds from his quilted jacket. He was holding a decapitated dove in his hands. The carcasses of other pigeons lay nearby. Then he became legendary. The street was named after him, the song “Vitya Cherevichkin lived in Rostov” was composed. Films and photographic documents about him appeared at the Nuremberg trials”(Smirnov VV Rostov under the shadow of a swastika. Rostov-on-Don, 2006).
Vitya Cherevichkin was a hero anyway
After the end of the war, in honor of Viti Cherevichkin, 2-ya Mayskaya Street, where his family lived, was renamed in honor of the hero, a monument and a memorial plaque were erected. Aleksandrovskiy Sad - one of the parks on the former border of Rostov and Nakhichevan, after their unification appeared in the center of the city, was named a children's park named after Viti Cherevichkina. In 1961, a bronze bust of Viti Cherevichkin with a dove in his hands was erected in the park. The bust is adjoined by a memorial pylon with bas-reliefs of young heroes of the Soviet pioneers - Zina Portnova, Leni Golikov, Marat Kozei and other little soldiers.
The fate of Vitya's relatives developed in different ways. Viti's father - Ivan Alekseevich Cherevichkin, having gone through the whole war, returned home alive. But brother Alexander was not lucky - he was drafted in February 1942, and in August 1943 he died in the battles on the Mius-front. Fekla Vasilievna and her daughters, after the re-liberation of Rostov in 1943, returned from evacuation and lived for a long time in the village of Yasnaya Polyana - which is in Kiziterinovskaya gully, between Nakhichevan and the Cossack village of Alexandrovka, which later also became part of the city. The Cherevichkins' apartment on the 28th line was occupied by other people while Fekla Vasilievna and her daughters were evacuated. But the family was not very worried about this - the mother would still not be able to live in the house from where her youngest son Viktor was taken to death and where everything reminded of her sons taken from her by the war.
After ten years of work at the Krasny Aksai plant, Anna Ivanovna Aksenenko, the sister of Viti Cherevichkin, received her own apartment, also in the Proletarsky district of Rostov-on-Don. During the war, when she was still a teenager, she worked at Rostselmash, making mines. For a long time, while Vitya Cherevichkin's mother Fekla Vasilievna was alive, her and her sisters Anna Ivanovna Alekseenko and Galina Ivanovna Mironova were regularly invited to commemorative events in honor of Vitya Cherevichkin in a children's park, which still bears the name of the young hero, where they were honored by Rostov schoolchildren.
And yet, was Vitya Cherevichkin an underground member or was he not? There is still no direct evidence that Viktor collaborated with the Soviet military command in Bataisk and carried out intelligence missions while in German-occupied Rostov. Perhaps it is the lack of direct evidence of Viti's participation in underground activities that explains the fact that he was never posthumously awarded the title of Hero of the Soviet Union. However, according to the recollections of the sister of Anna Ivanovna, after the liberation of Rostov, a group of five Soviet officers came to the Cherevichkins' home and expressed condolences for the deceased son (the officers, as the hero's sister recalls, were dirty and wet - that is, they almost from the front line). It is unlikely that in wartime, when hundreds of civilians were killed in the city, the command would have sent several officers to express condolences to relatives if the victim had nothing to do with the defense of Rostov.
Another proof of Vitya Cherevichkin's participation in intelligence work is the mysterious disappearance of pigeons from his dovecote. On that unfortunate day, when Vitya released the birds in front of the German soldier, they flew out of the dovecote and sat on the roofs of the house and courtyard buildings. They were gone the next morning, although the pigeons always tend to return to the dovecote. This can be explained by the fact that the dovecote of these pigeons was actually located in Bataysk, where Vitya sent them with letters - reports.
However, many modern researchers and journalists doubt that young Vitya was really involved in supplying the Soviet troops on the left bank of the Don with intelligence data. So, A. Moroz in the article "White Wings" (Pioneer, 2007, No. 6) claims that in 1941, during the first occupation of Rostov, the pigeons used by Soviet military units in the Bataysk region could not get to Vita Cherevichkin (however, critics of the version about the "accidental shooting" of Vitya Cherevichkin argue that Vitya could have taken carrier pigeons even before the occupation from the Batai OSOAVIAKHIM, and then the pigeons could easily fly to his dovecote in Bataisk). However, even those authors who doubt the real involvement of Viti Cherevichkin in intelligence activities in the rear of the Germans during the occupation of Rostov cannot but agree that the Rostov boy, who raised pigeons and did not want to give them up even in the face of death, deserves every possible respect and recognition as a hero.
Whatever it was, but the feat of Viti Cherevichkin is undeniable. This young Rostovite acted like a real hero, not giving up his principles. Firstly, he refused to get rid of the pigeons after the occupation of the city, although he imagined how this could threaten him. Secondly, he did not begin to kill pigeons on the orders of a German soldier, but saved their lives by releasing them. Finally, Vitya did not ask for mercy, did not cooperate with the Germans, but courageously accepted death, remaining faithful to his homeland and his little feathered friends to the end. And the memory of Vita, as befits real heroes, was preserved in a folk song:
Vitya Cherevichkin lived in Rostov, At school, he did well.
And in a free hour it is always usual
He released his favorite pigeons.
Chorus:
Doves, my dear, Fly away to the sunny heights.
Doves, you are gray-winged, They flew into the blue sky.
Life was beautiful and happy
Oh my beloved country
Youth, you came with a sweet smile
But suddenly the war broke out.
Days will pass, victory is a red bird, Let's break the fascist black flurry.
I will study at school again! -
This is how Vitya usually hummed.
But one day past Viti's house
A detachment of animal invaders was walking.
The officer suddenly shouted: Take away
The boy has these pigeons!"
The boy resisted them for a long time, He scolded the fascists, cursed, But suddenly the voice cut off, And Vitya was killed on the spot.
Doves, my dear, Fly away into the cloudy heights.
Doves, you are gray-winged, Apparently, they were born orphans.
Doves, you are gray-winged, They flew into the blue sky …
