In April of this year, Sergey Solodyankin, the head of the Expert and Criminalistic Center (ECC) of the Ministry of Internal Affairs of the Republic of Kazakhstan, went to the outskirts of the Novgorod region for the annual Memory Watch.
Photo from the personal archive of Sergei Solodyankin
I did not go out of duty - at the call of my heart, as I travel every year for many years in a row. The search engines raise the remains of the soldiers who died in this terrible place to the surface, return their names, and bury them.
This work has been going on since 1946, but it will still be enough for many, many years: in the Myasny Bor area, according to official data, only in the winter of 1941, in the spring and summer of 1942, more than 150 thousand soldiers of the Second Shock Army were killed. Although there is reason to believe that in fact there were much more deaths …
Myasnoy Bor is a strange name, eerie. At first, they say, this village was called Meat Fight, because there was a slaughterhouse. Then the name changed a little, becoming literally prophetic: the surroundings of this place were littered for many kilometers with the bodies of those who fell in the Great Patriotic War.
At the end of 1941, during the operation to break the blockade of Leningrad, the Red Army managed to break through the German defenses near Myasny Bor. The fighters of the Second Shock Army moved into the gap formed, they advanced to the strategically important settlement - Lyuban.
In the area of Myasnoy Bor, a corridor was formed, behind which fierce battles unfolded. During the operation, from December 1941 to June 1942, its width varied from 3-4 kilometers to a narrow space of 300 meters. On this "patch" both soldiers of the Second Shock Force, and local residents who were surrounded, fought and died. In June 1942, the survivors tried to break through the ring of German troops. During the breakthrough, most of the soldiers died, many were captured. Some managed to get out to the Soviet troops.
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Sergei Solodyankin can talk about the dead soldiers of the Second Shock for hours. He remembers everyone whom he raised from the earth by name, knows who died how. Once they came across a clearing, found the remains of a Red Army soldier on it. We dug next - another one. Then more and more … Only fifteen people, all with weapons. But only one has a rifle. The rest - some with a bayonet, some with a knife, some with a sapper's shovel. And it can be seen - they went on the attack. All one by one and mowed down by a German machine gunner.
Even the soldiers of the German army recall that in the Valley of Death the most terrible - more terrible than the winter frosts, and the bombing of aircraft - were precisely these insane Russian attacks. Emaciated, hungry soldiers almost empty-handed attacked machine guns and tanks, ready to kill and die …
Mysticism, and only …
They say that Myasnoy Bor has become a time zone. They say that the concentration of human suffering in this place was so dense that it changed the very structure of space and time. So one can hear in the Novgorod forests either German wartime music, or the roar of tanks, or the screams of attacking people and the groans of dying people. The villagers say that the ghosts of dead soldiers are knocking at their houses, asking for food. In the swamps, at night, they notice translucent figures that float inaudibly over the bog.
And also - birds do not sing here. Yes, and they are not in the Valley of Death, as if they are deliberately flying around a lost place.
Sergey Solodyankin is skeptical about mystical stories. In all the years I have not seen a single ghost. But the search engine admits: there is something strange in these places.
Once we came across a clearing where during the war there was a hospital for ours. After capturing a clearing, the Germans finished off the wounded soldiers and threw the corpses into the crater. In the same funnel, a pillow happened to be, apparently, one of the wounded was thrown along with the bed. When the search engines dug up the funnel, they could not believe their eyes. The bodies of the soldiers decayed, but blood flowed from the pillow when it was lifted. As if not seventy years have passed since that terrible massacre, but seven hours. Even with his current experience as an expert, S. Solodyankin cannot explain how this is possible.
Another time, the search engines found the remains of an officer in the swamp, and pulled out his boots. And in them - pieces of cardboard, which the soldiers put in instead of insoles. Naturally rotten, wet - honestly, it's just pieces of dirt. But Sergei Solodyankin put them in a bag, decided to investigate in Syktyvkar, suddenly he could find out something. After all, the officer could have hidden the documents in his boots so as not to lose them.
At home I forgot about the package, after a while I found this slimy lump, brought it to work, studied it, but achieved nothing - dirt, and nothing more! He threw the lump into the trash basket, went about his business. And after a while I heard a whisper: "I am here, I am here …" The sound was coming … from the waste basket.
When the shock was gone, the search engine took out the cardboard from the urn, looked it over, found nothing again and threw it back into the basket. For a few minutes I left the office to distract myself - maybe, they say, I was imagining exhaustion. He just returned and sat down, and from the basket it was already more insistent: "I'm here, look!"
S. Solodyankin admits: he is not a superstitious person, but at that time - his hair on end. He took apart the cardboard layer by layer, sorting it out almost “into molecules”. And miraculously found the surviving pieces of the receipt. And from them the name was formed - Aristarkh Kuziminsky. So another victim returned from oblivion - the officer of the Second Shock.