The 75th anniversary of the complete lifting of the blockade of Leningrad was celebrated last year, but for the people of St. Petersburg this memorable date gives off pain every year. We will give five facts about the blockade: they are not unique, but are rarely found in the press, and are also very characteristic of the military life of the fortified city and its environs.
Putin at war
Let's start with our president. The mother of Vladimir Putin, Maria Ivanovna, spent absolutely all the days of the siege in Leningrad. Father, Vladimir Spiridonovich, found himself on the Nevsky Piglet, where, as in other places of the Leningrad region, quoting the poet Igor Rasteryaev, "man is the main wealth of the subsoil." Putin Sr. left for the war in 1941 from Peterhof, where he lived with his wife in a single room together … with another married couple. He ended up in the so-called NKVD fighter battalion. His task included sabotage in the German rear. Putin's first operation was near Kingisepp: there he, along with twenty-seven comrades, blew up an enemy ammunition depot. Then the food ran out, the Germans surrounded …
“We retreated to the front line,” Putin Jr. quotes his father's memoirs. - On the way, we decided to disperse … Father hid his head in the swamp, breathing through a reed tube. The dogs didn't smell. So saved
sya … Only four left the encirclement.
“And since September 1941, Vladimir Spiridonovich, as part of the 20th division of the NKVD, fought on the Nevsky Pyatachka,” says the St. Petersburg historian Vitaly Shtentsov. - In 1942, Putin was seriously wounded by a grenade fragment and lost a lot of blood. Interestingly, a housemate took him out of the battlefield, actually snatching him from the clutches of death. The wounded had to be urgently delivered to the city across the Neva, which was actively under fire by the Germans. A neighbor, whose name has not reached us, did it, having accomplished a real feat. Vladimir Pugin Sr. was treated in a hospital on the Petrograd side. There he was found by his wife Maria Ivanovna. She had a hard time, she almost died in the first hungry winter of the blockade. Nevertheless, she visited her husband every day until she was discharged.
Putin was no longer taken to the army. He began to work as a mechanic at the Leningrad Carriage Works. Egorov, who then fired shells and mines, and repaired damaged tanks. It was from this enterprise that in 1944 he was given a room of 24 sq. meters in Baskov Lane.
Promotional video:
Into battle under sail
This recollection to the Leningrad media in 1985 was provided by the blockade and front-line soldier F. Koleda. Unfortunately, he did not disclose his full name and patronymic. Here is a letter with abbreviations: “We, front-line soldiers, in the intervals between battles, discussed our new types of weapons (…) I was struck by ice sailing ships. They were the Flying Dutchmen, silently emerging from the darkness. Despite the unusual combat use of ice sailing ships, unfairly little is known about them (…) When, as a result of early frosts in November 1941, Lake Ladoga and the Gulf of Finland froze, the Baltic Fleet formed three icebreakers from sailors-yachtsmen - one for Ladoga, two for the Finnish … The village of Kokkarevo became the base of the Ladoga floaters, whose detachment included 75 sailors on 19 armed floats. On smooth ice, they developed great speed, carried patrol and reconnaissance services. On November 22, the Road of Life began to operate, hundreds of wounded were delivered along it on these floats, and fuel was returned. On the same day, our yachtsmen also took to the ice in the Gulf of Finland. One detachment of 18 floaters was part of the water area security forces, the other - of 19 floaters - was part of the Air Defense Corps. In a short time, the buers literally flew around the desired area, which skiers would not have gone through in a day (…) Suddenly appearing, flying at high speed, shooting buers stunned the enemy. Enemy aircraft were hunting them hard, but their good maneuverability made them almost invulnerable. Moreover, the buer fired at the Nazis even from machine guns, causing fire on themselves, to which our artillery was already aiming to respond. When at the end of November the enemy stealthily went out onto the ice of the bay with a large detachment of infantry,it was discovered by a patrol detachment of buoys and destroyed by the fire of the battleship "October Revolution" and coastal batteries. This story is another example of Russian military ingenuity and a feat of the Leningrad floaters."
And, perhaps, one more letter written in the late 1980s to the Leningrad newspapers by Major General of the Signal Corps of the Reserve V. Kanonyuk and retired Lieutenant Colonel-Engineer K. Danchenko:
“Already in August 1941, land communications linking Leningrad with the rest of the country were cut, telephone and telegraph communications were disrupted. It immediately began to be restored by radio operators headed by Major General N. N. Kovalev (…) Under bombing and shelling, he and his subordinates laid a field telephone cable through the stormy autumn Ladoga. But this was a purely temporary, unreliable connection. Soon the Military Council of the Leningrad Front decided: “To ensure stable communication with Moscow, the 54th Army and the Karelian Front, the chief of communications, Major General Comrade Kovalev by October 25, 1941, to lay an underwater cable through Lake Ladoga at the section Osinovets, Belozerka . For this, a 500-ton barge and a tug were allocated. And Ladoga was storming, it was impossible to approach it. Therefore, the cable laying began only on October 29th. The Bui tug crew headed by Captain A. Patrashkin acted selflessly. They were no less well-coordinated on the barge, the divers did an excellent job, and aviation covered the operation from the air. A total of 40 km of telephone lines were laid on the bottom”.
Naked young lady in the bath after the bomb
Russians don't win wars without their unique humor. Otherwise it is impossible to survive. And this is the story that the above-mentioned Petersburg historian Shtentsov unearthed:
“You know, veterans manage to remember some moments of the terrible nine hundred days with a smile. Recently the blockaders told me a truly tragicomic story. It so happened that the first bombing of Leningrad fell on the Petrograd side. The bombs were still exotic, they fell occasionally. And now one of them gets into the house, which now, of course, in a restored form, stands opposite the Chkalovskaya metro station. At that time, of course, this station did not exist yet. And it so happened that two walls collapsed and exposed the bath, which miraculously stayed on the third floor. In the bathtub, filled with water, as if on purpose there was a young lady who, of course, was screaming desperately. One can only imagine her condition, and even that is unlikely to work. Not only is it not every day that a bomb hits your house, but you also find yourself naked on public view of the street. Despite the fear of bombing, a lot of onlookers came to watch such a spectacle. They cheerfully pondered aloud how to rescue the unfortunate woman from her precarious situation. Firefighters helped, and quite quickly. They took them off and even gave them some kind of rag to hide behind.
In 1941 he returned … Chapay
And from propaganda, how could it be without it! In war, it is as significant as the coolest weapon. The legendary 1934 film "Chapaev", created by the Vasiliev brothers, was continued in 1941. This tape, and in modern terms, a propaganda video, was prepared under the direct supervision of Stalin. And they created Chapaeva-2 on the basis of Lenfilm.
Recall that the well-known first film was based on the novel by Dmitry Furmanov "Chapaev", in 1935 it received the first prize of the Moscow Film Festival. But another thing is more important - people's love. People in the 1930s sobbed at the end of the film where Chapay died. In the most difficult year of 1941, the political leadership of the USSR remembered the legendary red commander. The new 330-second film was named "Chapaev with Us". Vasily Ivanovich was again played by actor Boris Babochkin. The premiere took place on 31 ikels at once in several cities of the Soviet Union, and in Leningrad, of course.
In the video, Chapaev still swims across the river, he is met by two Red Army soldiers. Vasily Ivanovich in his charismatic menacing voice asks: “Well, what have you got here? Are the Germans climbing again? " The soldiers nod. And then Chapay makes a speech addressed to the Red Army as a whole: “Either they are us, or we are them! So always fight as we fought! Or not! Better yet, fight! Give no mercy to the enemy, but I curse him with Chapaev's curse. And remember, fighters, Chapaev is always with you! Forward!". According to eyewitnesses, after these words the soldiers of the Red Army jumped up from their seats at the sessions, shouting: “Chapay is alive! Crush the fascist bastard! " Many then evaluated cinema as the truth of life and said: “But I always believed that Chapay emerged then! Our commander cannot drown!"
People went to the front knowing that from Moscow to the British seas the Red Army was the strongest. This was a Soviet propaganda response to Goebbels. Very talentedly done. Stalin personally sighted and even supplemented the picture. At the end of the film, Chapaev speaks against the background of soldiers who are going to the front from Red Square on November 7, 1941. Under the third movement of Tchaikovsky's 6th symphony. Even now, when you watch these footage, goosebumps run through the body.