At the moment when a parade takes place on Red Square in Moscow, in the village of Chudskoy Bor, Leningrad Region, the remains of those who brought Victory Day closer will be placed in coffins. Why, 68 years after the end of the Great Patriotic War, they are still not buried?

“I ask myself this question every time we find another soldier. The soldiers lie almost on the surface: only under a thin layer of foliage or moss, many of them with weapons in their hands,” says Fail Ibragimov, commander of the voluntary search detachment “Duty”

Every year on the battlefields of World War II
find the remains of about a thousand soldiers

“And 25 years ago, when we just started working on the battlefields, the remains generally lay on the surface. On my first expedition, we went to a clearing in the forest - and there are dozens of skulls. I still can’t forget this picture,” adds Oleg Arbuzov from the "Reconnaissance" detachment.

According to historians, about 5 million people are still missing during the Great Patriotic War.

Most of the work to search for and bury the remains of the missing soldiers is carried out by volunteer detachments.

"Eliminating Traces"

"We saw bones when we plowed, yes. But we were already accustomed to this. From childhood, they met everywhere. And in the forest, and in the garden, and in the field" - Ivan, a resident of the village of Sinyavino

In the forest, 60 km from St. Petersburg, I stumble over something and realize that it is not a snag. A human bone protrudes from the ground. Nearby lies about a dozen mortar shells, under a thin layer of moss - an anti-personnel mine in working condition.

The mine detector roars even when you bring it to old trees - their trunks are riddled with bullets and shrapnel.

In the ground - unexploded shells and grenades. On the stumps are the helmets of the dead. In the thicket and in the clearings, the lines of trenches and trenches are clearly visible.

Sometimes it seems that almost nothing has changed here since the war. But it's not.

We begin to dig in the remains that have emerged from the ground, and we see that the dead soldier is divided in two by a furrow. Christmas trees are growing in it now.

“A few years after the end of the Great Patriotic War, the Supreme Soviet of the USSR decided to eliminate the traces of the war. They began to plow, build, and plant forests on the battlefields,” explains Ilya Prokofiev, an employee of the All-Russian Information and Search Center “Fatherland”.

"On the one hand, this is a step towards the restoration of a war-torn country, but on the other hand, it is an attempt to forget about the colossal losses of the Soviet Union," he says.

Bag of medallions

There was neither the strength nor the time to properly bury the dead soldiers in the first post-war years, say the residents of the villages near which the fighting took place.

"How many skulls they brought, so many workdays were counted. They are already dead anyway, and we had to feed our family"

Mikhail Smirnov, resident of the village of Pogostye

Women and children dragged the corpses into the nearest ditches or shell holes and covered them with earth. Some tried to mark such caches, but their efforts were soon nullified.

Shortly after the appearance of the decree on the elimination of traces of the war, plowing and land reclamation began on the fields.

In the Novgorod region, a power line was built on the site of the most difficult battles.

Part of the land, on which, judging by the combat reports, thousands of soldiers died and were hastily buried, was planted with fir trees.

The plow constantly touched and turned out of the ground unexploded shells and the remains of the dead, but the work did not stop.

“We saw bones when we plowed, yes. But we were already used to it. Since childhood, they met everywhere. And in the forest, and in the garden, and in the field, you understand?” Grandfather Ivan tells me.

In the 1960s, he worked as a tractor driver near Sinyavino. During the war there were bloody battles for breaking the blockade of Leningrad.

“We didn’t have the strength to collect every bone. But after work we went through the arable land, collected the mortal medallions of soldiers. After all, their data is recorded there, the addresses of relatives. Our neighbor Mikhalych somehow scored a whole helmet. He took them to the Tosnensky draft board. , opened the box, grabbed all the medallions there and sent it home," adds the tractor driver.

It is interesting that during the large-scale renovation of the Tosno recruiting office in 1995, a large package with medallions was found behind one of the safes.

Some of them had papers with notes attached to them, others were covered with a layer of dried dirt.

Skulls and workdays

Thousands of mines and shells lying in the ground are in working order

During the war years, funeral teams were created for the burial of the dead at military units.

After the war, this was done mainly by the local population.

At the same time, the provisions and instructions issued in Moscow were sometimes carried out in a peculiar way.

"The village council came to our village to collect the remains. The head of the village council said that he would count the skulls. So we went and collected a bag of skulls. Everything lay on the surface," says Mikhail Smirnov from the village of Pogostye.

“How many heads they brought, so many workdays were counted. And for each workday, either a day off, or food, or a penny dropped. They are already dead anyway, and we had to feed our family,” he continues.

The forest, unlike the fields, was almost never cleared of mines, so for a long time after the war, local residents went to the thicket only when absolutely necessary.

“When it was completely hungry, ten people gathered and went into the forest to look for food from the dead. The Germans had canned bread. It was very tasty. And ours sometimes had something in duffel bags. "- recalls Alexander Noskov, who worked on the railway near Pogostya.

"The whole forest was full of shells and grenades. I was already older. And the boys played war games with real pistols and sawn-off shotguns. And I brought a grenade to school."

The dead soldiers helped those who survived for a long time. Quilted jackets and overcoats were removed from the dead in order to sew clothes for themselves.

Found weapons, orders and medals were hidden in attics or sold. Later, when there was a demand for German helmets and insignia, they began to pull them out as well.

But the remains of the former owners of all these things continued to lie in the forests.

Beautiful signs

After the war, some trees were planted on top of dead soldiers.

In the late 1950s, a program to expand military burials began.

According to the plan, all graves and sanitary burials, small and remote from settlements, were to be opened, the remains exhumed and transferred to large memorials, which are easier to care for.

But often this only turned into rewriting the names of the dead from one tablet to another.

“Every year we find such mass graves. Soldiers lie with personal belongings, with medallions. We start checking against the database, and they are allegedly buried. Only at memorials tens of kilometers from here,” says Alexander Konoplev, head of the All-Russian Information and Search Center “Fatherland "

"Their names are carved on beautiful granite slabs. But in fact, our defenders are still lying in funnels and sanitary pits. It doesn't look so beautiful anymore, does it?" he asks sadly.

And this problem has not been solved yet. The draft federal target program for the reconstruction and preservation of military graves wandered between the three ministries for several years, but was never adopted.

money for coffins

Most of the work to search for the remains of soldiers is carried out by volunteers at their own expense.

On the eve of the solemn burial of the remains, the guard of honor rehearses the formation.

Their ironed uniforms, polished boots and buttons contrast sharply with the dirty berets and frayed jackets of the searchers.

They stand nearby.

Men dig a mass grave. Women carefully lay out the remains in the coffins.

The administration has little money for coffins, so they are asked to pack them more tightly. On the day of the burial, they will also give a bus, an excavator and a wreath.

On the way home, Prokofiev, who has been looking for missing soldiers for more than 25 years, wearily lights a cigarette and turns to me: “But when these boys went to the front, they were told, fight bravely and the Motherland will not forget you. And where is this Motherland? Who is it? Is it just a handful of searchers?"

Many decades have passed since the war swept across a huge part of our country, first from west to east, then from east to west, leaving fields of silence behind it. But until now, in the swampy bog and under the turf, in the swollen trenches and funnels, the memory of fierce battles and the fate of hundreds of thousands of defenders of the Motherland is hidden.

Treasures of military archeology Findings of search engines most often have no scientific value, their main goal is to return from non-existence the names of those who, it would seem, have disappeared into eternity.

Oleg Makarov

Many people have probably heard about the activities of search teams that have been working on the fields of the former battles of the Great Patriotic War for many years, but not everyone can imagine both the scale of the problem of the unburied remains of Soviet soldiers and the real content of the work of the search engines. In almost every locality of our country (especially where the war took place) you can see a small pointed obelisk with a red star. These small monuments to fellow countrymen who died at the fronts, as it were, testified that the last honors were given to all the fallen heroes. Among them are nameless, but not forgotten. However, this turned out to be only a carefully crafted illusion. In reality, the remains of hundreds of thousands of Soviet soldiers still lie where they died. There are several reasons for this, and they are both objective and subjective.

One of the main reasons is the catastrophic defeats of the Red Army in the initial period of the war. During the war, 40 times large groupings of our troops fell into German "cauldrons", from which few managed to get out to their own. In 1941, the battlefield over and over again remained in the hands of the enemy. For the Germans, the "blitzkrieg" was also not an easy walk, and in almost every village in the occupied territories they created their own field cemeteries with nominal graves. As for the killed Soviet soldiers, the Nazis only cared about the fact that along the roads, as well as in the places of deployment of their units, there was no putrid smell and epidemics did not develop. To this end, the Germans mobilized the local population and arranged a local collection of dead bodies with their subsequent burial in quarries, ravines, swamps. The commanders of the Wehrmacht did not pay attention at all to the corpses lying in sparsely populated places or in the deep rear of the German troops.

The finds of search engines most often do not have scientific significance, their main goal is to return from non-existence the names of those who, it would seem, have disappeared into eternity.

Whether it was caused by the shock of large-scale defeats or the specific attitude of a number of Soviet commanders towards the personnel - living or dead, but there were problems with the burial of the dead Red Army soldiers in the territories controlled by our army. There are a number of eloquent documents on this score. It is enough to quote the text of the directive sent to the troops by the Stalinist commissar, head of the GlavPUR Lev Mekhlis: “The Main Political Directorate of the Red Army has facts when many commanders and commissars of active units do not care about organizing the collection and burial of the corpses of dead Red Army soldiers, commanders and political workers. Often the corpses of soldiers who died in battles with the enemy for our Motherland are not removed from the battlefield for several days, and no one takes care to bury their comrades with military honors, even when there is a full opportunity. As participants in the war testify, the sight of the bodies of dead soldiers abandoned to the mercy of fate made a very depressing impression on the Red Army soldiers, who were soon to go into battle.

The war died down, and in the heavily deserted territories that were occupied and were the scene of battles, it was necessary to restore housing, plow fields, and sow bread. The living again had no time for the dead. In hard-to-reach places (for example, in dense forests), the unburied bodies of the dead, weapons, bowlers, helmets continued to lie on the ground.

The "forerunner" of the search movement in the Russian Federation can be considered the movement of the Red Pathfinders of the 50s - 70s, and the All-Union action "Chronicle of the Great Patriotic War", and joint campaigns of war veterans and youth to places of military glory. The nationwide search movement took shape already at the end of the existence of the USSR - in 1988. Then, at the 2nd All-Union gathering of search engines, it was decided to create the Association of Search Associations (ASPO) of the USSR.

Two front lines

The efforts of the search engines today are concentrated mainly in the areas of the "cauldrons" of 1941 and where fierce positional battles took place in 1942 (Tver, Leningrad regions). The complex of search works includes three main stages: firstly, these are archival studies, the study of memoirs, secondly, the collection of memories of the inhabitants of the territories that found themselves in the war zone during the Great Patriotic War, and, finally, thirdly, field military-archaeological expeditions.

The task is complicated by the fact that for a number of military events, especially in 1941, there may not be any documents at all. For example, for four combined arms armies that fell into the “cauldron” near Vyazma, there are documents that precede the encirclement, and there are documents of the subsequent time, when only numbers remained from these armies and they were formed anew. And the whole history of the encirclement remained in place there - in an effort to escape from the "cauldron", our troops usually dumped everything heavy and unnecessary. Safes with documents were buried and drowned. By the way, several of these safes were found during search operations, in particular near Vyazma.

Sometimes you can turn to the documents of the opposite side, especially when you consider that the Germans have always shown great pedantry and scrupulousness in relation to papers. Comparison of enemy documents with ours sometimes brings surprises: it turns out that at the same time in the same sector the front line is shown differently. Who, for what purpose and to what extent was cunning, is now very difficult to establish.

Disappearing traces

Excavations in field expeditions begin with the identification of external signs that may indicate the presence of the remains of soldiers in the ground. One of these signs is, for example, a large amount of scattered rusty iron. On the ground, searchers also try to find traces of trenches, dugouts, craters from bombs and shells covered with earth. In the areas of villages, old silo pits, cellars, cellars of former houses are examined - all these recesses were probably used as shelters and lines of defense.

From the recommendations: if explosive objects are found, it is necessary to suspend work, protect the place of detection, and do not continue work in this place until the EP is removed by sappers. It is strictly forbidden to discharge and throw explosive objects, hit them. It is forbidden to pull off and dismantle wire fences with your hands, touch the wire and twine found on the ground, in grass or bushes, because. mines of tension action can be installed near them.

Of course, the area is studied with the help of metal detectors, including those that detect the presence of metal at great depths. If the metal detector does not show anything, and suspicions of the presence of remains remain, special metal probes are used in the form of a sharpened metal rod with a T-shaped handle. An experienced searcher is able to determine the material of which the object consists by the grinding of the tip on the object at a depth. For example, recognize a bone. Next, shovels are used - ordinary bayonet, as well as small sappers, metal scoops are also used. Quite often, when excavating in clayey and swampy soil, water interferes, and it has to be pumped out with a motor pump or taken out with buckets.

Talking bowler hat

The legends about “black diggers” circulated in entertainment publications carry with them many myths about search work, and at the same time they are absolutely unfounded. Everyone who is familiar with this work firsthand knows very well that there is no abundance of valuable artifacts, as they sometimes write about it, on the battlefields. What has come down to us? The remains of military equipment to this day can only be preserved at the bottom of swamps and lakes, where a tank, car or armored personnel carrier once fell through and were forgotten. If, say, a wrecked tank remained on the surface, even during the war years it was either sent for repair, or, if the vehicle could not be restored, it was dismantled for spare parts. After the war, a mass campaign was carried out to clear the battlefields of scrap metal, and then basically all the large "iron" was collected, cut with autogenous and sent for remelting.

Personal medallions of soldiers - ebonite cases for storing a leaflet with personal data - one of the most important sources of information for search engines. Unfortunately, after decades of lying in the ground, they often fill with water. In order to decipher the corrupted records and restore the name of the deceased, search centers have to contact the Bureau of Expertise under the Ministry of Justice.

If we talk about the objective world of the Soviet soldier, then he was extremely scarce. The warrior was shod, dressed, carried with him weapons, ammunition, a flask of water and ... in general, everything. Finding the locket is a great success, but that's only half the battle, as the demographic information about its owner is written on a paper insert, and it still needs to be read. Often, by the time of the discovery, this cannot be done due to the fact that water has managed to seep into the ebonite medallion capsule for more than half a century, which turned the paper insert into porridge, or it simply rotted ... Unfortunately, the vast majority of the discovered soldier remains cannot be identified, they are buried nameless. In some cases, however, the name of a soldier can be established from preserved personal items, since usually bowlers, flasks, spoons, combs and other household items were signed by their owners. For example, on one of the spoons found in the sanitary burial place of our soldiers in the Smolensk region, it was scratched: “Sadlinsky, Voronezh”, and on the crumpled bowler hat of the other - “Plisov”.

Of course, during the excavations, both weapons and ammunition come across. Most of the found samples of small arms are worthless pieces of rusty metal. If there is a suspicion that the unearthed pistol or machine gun can still be used for its intended purpose, the weapons are confiscated by law enforcement officers on duty at the excavations. Potentially dangerous ammunition such as grenades and shells are dealt with by representatives of the Ministry of Emergency Situations.

Memory watch

At the end of hostilities in the territories through which the war took place, the living were not up to the dead. A plow passed over unmarked graves, dugouts and trenches, as well as over German cemeteries. The number of missing fighters turned out to be so huge that the Soviet state was in no hurry to identify the dead. Indeed, for each soldier who moved from the category of missing to the category of the dead, relatives were entitled to compensation. For example, cases of "mysterious" disappearances of identification medallions found at the battlefields and even the facts of the targeted destruction of the remains of Soviet soldiers are known.

No more dangerous than a metropolis

In connection with explosives, we can recall one case that occurred in the 1990s. Then the search engines came across the abandoned camp of those same marauders - "black diggers". What he saw shocked the experienced and those who had already seen a lot of people. Not far from the place where the tent used to stand, a hill of 152-mm artillery shells was laid out. The projectile heads, with oblique chisel marks, were unscrewed and dumped side by side. Tol was not in the shells, and a soaked chisel and a no less "injured" hammer with an iron handle lay nearby. A pile of empty shells of a smaller caliber and shells from RGD-33 grenades lying around right there did not impress anyone by comparison. Some kind of “kamikaze”, who mined tol for criminal purposes, was very lucky: after all, any blow to the head of the projectile could end in an explosion. But are conventional search engines at risk?

There is always a risk, but it is small, and it can be said that excavations in battlefields are unlikely to contain more potential dangers than just living in a metropolis. For military archaeologists, special techniques have been developed to distinguish a safe object from a dangerous one. If there is a suspicion that ammunition has been found, the main thing is not to try to physically influence it or, what’s good, disassemble it. Spontaneous detonation will not occur.

public affair

The search engines would welcome any help from the state, but the main thing for them is that those in power refrain from excessive administration. An extremely negative example of state interference in search work can be considered the decision of the leadership of Belarus to actually ban the activities of public organizations in this area and transfer search functions to units of the Ministry of Defense, consisting of untrained and poorly motivated conscripts. In Belarus, this was ultimately abandoned, but the experience that did not justify itself was almost transferred to Russia, where, in violation of the current legislation, the 90th separate special search battalion of the Ministry of Defense was created. A unit that did more harm than good.

There are only very inaccurate estimates on the scale of exploration work in Russia. The number of search engines is estimated at 15-60 thousand people. If we talk about buried soldiers, then every year the last shelter is found by about 10,000 remains (the figure is very approximate). Is it a lot or a little? On the one hand, the number is impressive. On the other hand, we can recall that in just one day the war claimed an average of about 14,000 of our fellow citizens (there are still heated debates about the number of victims among the military and civilians). More than 2.4 million Soviet soldiers are among the missing, and this figure is very approximate due to the imperfection of military statistics. So there will be enough work for search engines for another decade. And, as the poet said, "it is not necessary for the dead - it is necessary for the living."

The editors would like to thank the Obelisk Historical and Cultural Search Center (www.obelisk-mos.ru) for their help in preparing this material.

A native of Chuvashia is building a monument to a girl who died in the war in the Moscow region

People go to search engines in different ways. Alexander Konstantinov, a native of Vurnar, did not even think in his youth that he would conduct excavations at the sites of past battles.
One course studied at the construction department of the Chuvash State University, then he tried to do business. He says that, on the one hand, he developed an entrepreneurial streak, but on the other hand, he realized how fragile human life is. In the gangster 90s, he had few options: to be killed, to end up in prison, to be mired in debt. At not the most beautiful moment, he lost his job and family and risked starting life anew. He went to his place in Vurnary. There, again, according to him, devastation reigned, half of the population sold Chinese consumer goods to the other half. He went to the draft board and went to serve under the contract. First Dushanbe, then Chechnya. He served in the special forces detachment of the Ministry of Internal Affairs of the Russian Federation "Rus". I saw everything, I saw the death of comrades. With his father, a front-line soldier, who before retirement worked as a crane operator at the Vurnar chemical plant, he often talked about the fact that the living are always indebted to the fallen.
After leaving the service, he again looked for himself. Became a lawyer, now works at the Federal Migration Service in the Moscow region. But one day I saw a report on search operations at the battlefields of the Great Patriotic War and realized that I should be there. I contacted like-minded people on the Internet, since then I regularly travel to the Tver region. Their detachment is excavating near the village of Verigino, not far from the regional center of Zubtsovo. The remains of tens of thousands of unburied soldiers still lie in the forests there.
This hard work was described on the portal “Opinions. RU". We contacted Alexander. He willingly allowed the materials of the site to be used for publication in Sovetskaya Chuvashia, and provided additional details.

A. BELOV.

NOT A LINE, NOT A WORD

“In the fall of 2011, I picked up the remains of a nurse from a funnel,” says Alexander. – I don’t know what brought me to that field on the road to the village of Mosalskaya, but the metal detector was beeping, so I started digging. He pulled out several helmets, shoulder blades, hoses from a gas mask, and then I saw the bones. These were large bones - a man, a soldier. I tried to identify him, find the locket.
At a depth of 170 centimeters, I came across a decayed medical bag, where there were three packs of bandages, a mirror, a plastic comb with the inscription “Leningrad. 1938" Next to the bag were smaller bones - women. When I took out the skull, there was a feeling that it had grown through the roots of a tree, but what kind of roots could there be at such a depth? It was the girl's hair, the braid.
There were German positions 400 meters from this place, and the girl pulled out the wounded, but died with him. She accepted a heroic death. I found her death locket, but the insert was not filled. In Moscow, during the examination, this was confirmed - not a line, not a word. So we will never know her name. Her remains, like those of the unknown soldier, were buried in Verigino.

UNDERSTOOD THAT I SHOULD

GRANDSON FOR GRANDFATHER NOT IN ANSWER?

- A very complicated story happened to a German banker named Kurt. He contacted me himself, invited me to his Moscow office. He said that his grandfather fought on the Eastern Front, died after the war in 1969. Offered money for our monument. It was difficult to make such a decision, but I had to refuse. I thought some of my comrades would not understand such a thing as this, "the enemy pays us." But it was hard for me to refuse, because I saw that he was acting from the bottom of his heart, says Konstantinov. - I want to invite Kurt to the construction site now, so that he would help with everyone there.
In general, war is a common tragedy. A man whose mother worked as a postman during the war told me that when our troops liberated these places and moved on, the corpses of both German and our soldiers floated along the local river, but no one cared about them. The corpses lay along the railroad. The authorities mobilized the population to clean them up, because the railway was functioning, and the smell of decomposition interrupted the overall joyful picture. The elderly, women and children were forced to go out and collect the remains with pitchforks and rakes.

In August last year, I managed to meet with one of those who buried these remains. He himself walks badly, but his son showed us a field 800 meters from the railway, where his father, at the age of twelve, buried dead soldiers. We spent five hours searching, eventually dug a small hole, found fragments of the skeleton, but could not determine the boundaries of the mass grave. According to the old man himself, more than 500 people are buried there. They had no weapons, the Germans took them. Soldiers were buried in the remains of clothing. From this I concluded that there might be some documents in the pit. We didn’t dig then, there were only three of us, but in the summer I’ll try to gather a larger group to expand the search area. According to the documents of that period, it seems that the battle took place there.

THIS IS NECESSARY ALIVE

- The memory of the war, of the Victory is gradually weakening. Today, young people do not know the history of the war, the names of those people who won. I recently asked a sixteen-year-old boy which of the generals of the Great Patriotic War he knows. To which he received a short answer, which reflects the degree of knowledge, the depth of training, the breadth of outlook: "Zhukov and Stalin."
Boys and girls born in the early 90s, who are now about twenty, are incomparably behind my generation in terms of education, intelligence, breadth of outlook, intuition. At some point, I was afraid to think about who would replace me, - Alexander reflects - My father went to the front in 1943. Once I was a boy, I played it with medals, and I had no understanding of what war is. I saw that every year on May 9, my father and other veterans commemorated their front-line friends and cried. They told me that war is hunger, grief, poverty. But I, as a child, could not understand all this. However, I had to take a sip of military hardship when I myself became a soldier. Then I remembered my father's words.
Of course, it is necessary to remember the war. With all the well-being that is present in life today. The state said: our goal is to perpetuate the memory of the dead. This is a good undertaking, a strong ideological message. If this is still backed up by concrete deeds, then everything will be in order. After all, all the work will be carried out by the hands of the young, active generation. This is how we keep the memory.

The fee for this publication will be transferred to the fund for the construction of a memorial to a nurse from Zubtsov. Web wallet Yandex-money to assist in this good cause: 410011854073367 .

In April of this year, the head of the Forensic Expert Center (ECC) of the Ministry of Internal Affairs for the Republic of Kazakhstan, Sergey Solodyankin, again went to the vicinity of the Novgorod region - to the annual Memory Watch. I went not on duty - at the call of my heart, as he has been traveling every year for many years in a row. Search engines raise the remains of soldiers who died in this terrible place to the surface, return their names, and bury them.

This work has been carried out since 1946, but it will still be enough for many, many years: in the Myasny Bor area, according to official data, more than 150 thousand soldiers of the Second Shock Army died in the winter of 1941, in the spring and summer of 1942 alone. Although there is reason to believe that in fact there were many more dead ...

Meat Bor. death valley

Myasnoy Bor is a strange name, creepy. At first, they say, this village was called Meat Boy, because there was a slaughterhouse here. Then the name changed a little, becoming literally prophetic: the surroundings of this place were littered with the bodies of the fallen in the Great Patriotic War for many kilometers.

Until now, you can sometimes hear: Lieutenant General Andrei Vlasov surrendered the army, all of it went into the service of the Germans, betraying the Motherland. In general, this is a myth. Especially and there was no one to betray the Motherland in the Second Shock - almost all of its fighters perished in the vicinity of Myasny Bor, in the so-called Death Valley. Well, those who were taken prisoner ended up with the Germans not at all of their own free will.

... At the end of 1941, during an 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 that had formed, they advanced towards the strategically important settlement - Lyuban.

In the area of ​​Myasny Bor, a corridor 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 the soldiers of the Second Shock and the locals 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 reach the Soviet troops.

This is where hell started.

What happened in the "Volkhov cauldron" was captured in the photographs by the German war correspondent Georg Gundlach. These photos can be found on the Internet. On one of them, German soldiers are next to a signpost in the area of ​​Myasny Bor. It has an inscription in German. Literally, "hell begins here". The Germans were photographed on the eve of hell, and he himself, all nine of his circles, were where the Second shock fought desperately.

The survivors of this terrible meat grinder shared their memories with the author of the book “Valley of Death. The feat and tragedy of the 2nd shock army "by Boris Gavrilov:

“Extreme natural conditions were supplemented by the constant artillery and aviation impact of the enemy. The Germans bombed around the clock. 2nd shock again began to starve. Salvation was that there were many horses of the Gusev corps, killed in the winter. The soldiers called this food "goose". A former soldier of the 92nd division, M.D. Panasyuk, recalled: “Horse skins were a blessing, we fried them on a fire and ate them like cookies, but it was unprofitable, they began to cook jellied meat. From this slurry, many began to swell and die of starvation.

Former commissar of the artillery battery from the 327th division, P.V. They, as a rule, left their villages and settled in groups in drier places, and in some places even in swamps. An unsightly picture was created: the children ask us for bread, but we don’t have it and there’s nothing at all to treat them with.”

Former nurse of the 59th brigade E.L. Balakina (Nazarova): “The hunger was unbearable, they ate all the horses and sour grass. No bread, no crackers. Sometimes U-2s broke through, dropped crackers in paper bags and mail, as well as leaflets that gave us hope for salvation.

Former senior lieutenant P.P. Dmitriev from the 894th artillery regiment of the division: “Hunger constantly tormented me. From May 30 to June 22, I, as a commander, received an official ration - 5 grams of pea concentrate and 13 grams of crackers ... The Red Army soldiers were supposed to have even less ... To the credit of the division officers, they gave all the products they received to a common cauldron and, along with the soldiers, endured the pangs of hunger ".

Writer V.D. Pekelis, a participant in the breakthrough: “The losses in those battles were huge ...

There is no place to bury the dead - all around is deeply frozen ground, trees, waist-deep snow. All clearings, clearings, plots were littered with corpses, they walked along them, sat on them, lay down. When it was required to mark a path in the forest or passages in the snow, instead of milestones, the bodies of the dead were stuck ... "

At the Memory Watch.

Sergei Solodyankin heard a terrible story about the events in Myasnoy Bor in 1989, when he first came to the Novgorod region for the All-Union Memory Watch. Got there by accident. A friend, the coach of the Youth Sports School from Vizinga Alexander Morozov, gathered a detachment, invited him with him. 26-year-old Sergei, then the second secretary of the district committee of the Komsomol of the Priluzsky district, went.

Of course, he had no experience of searching for the remains. More experienced comrades helped - in the Novgorod region, a search movement was already developed at that time. Volunteer Nikolai Orlov became its founding father, who began search work back in 1946, organized several search teams in the region, and achieved the involvement of the military in the search. He continued his work until his death in 1980.

As Sergei Solodyankin says, both then and now the search engine has three main “weapons”: a probe, a metal detector and a shovel. The search technique was learned on the spot - it turned out to be easy.

At that time, “special signs” also remained on the ground: if a rusted barrel of a rifle or a helmet is visible from the ground, it means that somewhere nearby it is necessary to look for the dead. In the vicinity of Myasny Bor, there were still rusted skeletons of cars, and indeed there were a lot of all kinds of "iron".

S. Solodyankin for the rest of his life remembered the name of the first fighter, whom he "raised" from the ground - Ovechkin. Then he was lucky: he had a soldier's medallion with him, and there all the data - last name, first name, patronymic, rank.

The search engine from Komi encountered the remains of the soldiers for the first time, but did not experience either disgust or fear - only sadness: there was a man, a boy at all, still to live and live, but here, in the swamp, he disappeared without a trace. And only then did the newcomer to the search business understand what it meant to bring back the memory of the missing person. It’s like fulfilling your duty to him: not just an obscure “unit” of the Red Army rotted in a swamp, but a Man with his own destiny, aspirations and hopes, with his life taken away so early, cruelly and senselessly.

Sergey Solodyankin began to go to the Memory Watch every spring. In 1991, he entered the police service, and the very next year he took three difficult teenagers to the Novgorod region. The boys skipped classes at school, swore obscenities, smoked on trifles, windows at school could be broken. The boys did not shy away from work, but they were somehow indifferent to everything - some bones, some pieces of iron ... The turning point came at the end of the shift, when the search engines, who had come to Myasnaya Bor from all over the country (two thousand, there were), lined up at the mass grave, where the remains of the soldiers were buried. The mother of one of the children who died in 42 was also there. She spoke, remembered her son, shed a tear, began to thank the search engines. And suddenly, she knelt in front of them. And all two thousand people in a single impulse fell to their knees in front of her.

- I look at the boys, - says Sergey Solodyankin, - and their tears are rolling. Since then, the boys have been replaced - not a single drive to the police. They grew up to be worthy people.

Pulls, and that's it!

And then those same “dashing 90s” began, and Sergey Solodyankin’s Memory Watch was interrupted - somehow it didn’t work out to go. But at the beginning of the new century, search engines from the Syktyvkar detachment "Link of Times" turned to him, already heading the ECC of the Ministry of Internal Affairs for the Republic of Kazakhstan. They found a soldier's medallion at the battlefields and asked to read the data. It is clear that over the years since the war, not only the paper has decayed - the inscriptions on the iron medallions have been erased. But experts have both methods and special preparations that help restore these inscriptions.

The expert helped the search engines, at the same time he remembered his Memory Watches. And next spring he went with the detachment to Staraya Russa, Novgorod region - at his own expense, of course. I took a special vacation for this. But the main place of his Memory Watch is still Myasnoy Bor. Now he goes there every year, but he cannot explain why: he pulls, and that's it!

In the new century, the picture in the Valley of Death has changed dramatically. There was almost no “iron” left - in the post-perestroika hard times, people smashed everything to scrap metal collection points. Black diggers at the battlefields also worked: they raked everything clean. Only the bones were left, they do not need them - they do not bring profit.

On the one hand, it became more difficult to work, because the more time passes, the better nature hides the traces of battles - the places where soldiers died are overgrown with grass, trees, burials sink deeper into the swamp. On the other hand, it has become easier: now Sergey Solodyankin has the experience of a forensic expert. By the nature of his service, he was used to small details, “evidence”, to notice. Somewhere the earth sank, somewhere a barely noticeable mound, and there the tree was somehow strangely curved ...

Living past.

Sergey Solodyankin can talk about the dead soldiers of the Second Shock for hours. He remembers everyone by name, who he raised from the earth, knows who died how. Once we stumbled upon a clearing and found the remains of a Red Army soldier on it. They dug nearby - another one. Then another and another... 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 shovel. And it is clear that they went on the attack. All one after another was mowed down by a German machine gunner.

Even the soldiers of the German army remember that in the Valley of Death the most terrible - worse than winter frosts and air bombings - were precisely these insane Russian attacks. Exhausted, starving soldiers, almost empty-handed, went on the attack on machine guns and tanks, ready to kill and die ...

Another time, the search engines dug up a dugout, and in it were the remains of twenty people. It can be seen that the shell hit the dugout, and everyone was immediately covered. The remains were literally collected by the bone. Somehow they raised the bones, it is clear that part of the human chest. But in the same pile, there were other bones - although not human, but very familiar. I didn’t even remember right away - chicken! The identity of the deceased person was established, and the military specialty - a cook ... Where did he get this bird from in that terrible hunger? What was going to cook from it? What did you think about at the last moment of your life? Maybe, falling to the floor, he covered his greatest value with his chest - a skinny chicken, which was supposed to be a dinner for twenty people ...

And in the spring of 2011, the remains of a woman were raised from the ground, they found out: a nurse Tamara Bystrova. They found her niece, and she hardly even heard about the missing aunt. But the news of the deceased relative prompted her to study the history of the family, and she learned everything about Tamara. It turned out that she met her soul mate in the war.

She is a nurse, he is a military doctor. They served together and fell in love with each other. They were waiting for the Victory in order to get married and have children. In the Valley of Death, they also ended up together, together they dreamed of escaping from the encirclement.

The remains of Tamara's beloved were raised back in 1991 - they found him at approximately the same place as the remains of the nurse. It looks like they died together. Only then it was "overlooked". But twenty years later, the lovers reunited again - in the same mass grave.

How did these two die? Now one can only guess about it. But in the book of Boris Gavrilov there is a very similar episode:
"... commander of the 2nd battalion
Lieutenant Pred of the 1265th regiment of the 382nd rifle division left the encirclement together with the military assistant girl Spirina on the night of June 25th. From the explosion of a mine, she lost her leg, his arm and leg were torn off. The young man and the girl simultaneously took out a revolver and a pistol. Two more shots were added to the roar of the battle.

The land of Myasnoy Bor keeps many such terrible stories.

The remains of the fighters - both identified and unnamed - are buried in mass graves. If relatives can be found, they are invited to the funeral. Is it just that all this is necessary for people who sometimes have never even seen their missing relative? Sergey Solodyankin admits: a few years ago it seemed that it was not necessary. But in recent years, something has changed - not only the older generation, but also young people come to the funeral. Although, of course, there are more elderly people, and they experience their loss more acutely.

I remember one case: they found the remains of a fighter, established his identity, it turned out that he was a Ukrainian. A nephew was found in Donetsk - he himself is already about seventy years old. But he came to his uncle's funeral, called relatives from all over the former Soviet Union - some from Ukraine, some from Russia, some from Moldova. At their native grave, they mourned together the tragedy of that war - Patriotic for all of them.

Mysticism and more...

They say that Myasnoy Bor has become a zone of chrono-mirages. Like, the concentration of human suffering in this place was so dense that it changed the very structure of space and time. So one hears in the Novgorod forests either German wartime music, or the roar of tanks, or the screams of attackers and the groans of dying people. Villagers say that the ghosts of dead soldiers knock on their houses, asking for food. In the swamps at night they notice translucent figures that float inaudibly over the bog.

Also, the birds don't sing here. Yes, and they are not in the Valley of Death, as if they are specially flying around a dead place.

Sergey Solodyankin is skeptical about mystical stories. I haven't seen a single ghost in all my years. But the search engine admits: there is something strange in these places.

Once we stumbled upon a clearing where our hospital was during the war. Having captured the clearing, the Germans finished off the wounded soldiers and threw the corpses into the funnel. In the same funnel, a pillow happened to be, apparently, one of the wounded was thrown along with the bed. When the search engines unearthed the funnel, they could not believe their eyes. The bodies of the soldiers decayed, but from the pillow, when she was lifted, blood flowed. As if not seventy years had 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 fighters put instead of insoles. Naturally decayed, wet - to be honest, it's just pieces of dirt. But Sergei Solodyankin put them in a bag, decided to investigate in Syktyvkar, in case he could find out something. In boots, the officer could hide the documents so as not to lose them.

I forgot about the package at home, 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 wastebasket and went about his business. And after a while I heard a whisper: I am here, I am here...» The sound was coming… from the wastebasket.

When the shock passed, the search engine took out a cardboard box from the urn, reviewed it, again found nothing, and again threw it into the basket. He left the office for a few minutes to distract himself - maybe he was imagining it from fatigue. He just returned and sat down, and from the basket he was already more insistent: “ I'm here, look!»

S. Solodyankin admits: he is not a superstitious person, but at that time - his hair stood on end. He dismantled the cardboard in layers, almost laying it out “by molecules”. And I found the miraculously preserved pieces of the receipt. And from them came the name - Aristarkh Kuziminsky. So one more victim returned from oblivion - an officer of the Second Shock.

"News" from the dead.

And other dead soldiers find even stranger ways to “give news of themselves” to their relatives. Sergey Solodyankin is friends with Alexander Orlov, the son of the same Nikolai Orlov, who began the search work in Myasny Bor. Somehow they got into a conversation, and Alexander complained: they say, so many documents have been collected, but no one sees them. As they lay in the ground, so now they lie in the archive. We thought about it and decided to publish a series of books. Alexander undertook to prepare the text, Sergey was responsible for photographs and copies of documents.

The books were published at their own expense. The series was called simply - "Documents of War", a total of five books were released. The circulation, of course, was small, but one copy of each was sent to Myasnoy Bor - to the hall of military glory. Well, one day sightseers from Moscow arrived there. They go and look at exhibits. One elderly visitor took a book published in Komi, leafed through it, cried out and fainted. When the ambulance medics brought her to her senses, the excursionist grabbed the book again: here, she says, the father’s signature is on the document.

She said that her father went missing in 1942. Mother all her life tried to find out at least something about his fate, then her daughter looked for data. And suddenly I saw my father's autograph. It was made in 1942, maybe just before his death.

Of course, they gave the book to the daughter of a fighter. Upon learning of this story, Sergei Solodyankin sent her the original document with his father's signature. So the soldier of the Second shock I was able to say goodbye to my family.

... The great Russian commander Alexander Suvorov once said: “ The war is not over until the last soldier is buried.". Today Sergey Solodyankin and his search engine friends are back in the Valley of Death. And maybe, through their efforts, the day when the last unknown soldier of the Great Patriotic War will return his name and find his last refuge has become even a little closer.

Hello Kamrad!
This article is about choosing a good place for further good search with a lot of finds!
I wrote it based on personal experience.
So, let's begin!
If you think about it, there are a lot of places to search. Wherever you go, there are forests, fields, ponds, lakes all around, which are somehow connected with the places of hostilities - the war has left its traces almost everywhere.
How many years have already passed, how many diggers and search engines have passed through such places, how much swag has been dug up. But there is no need to be sad, if everything is collected on top, then at a depth of one and a half to three meters, the swag is waiting for its owners.
On the battlefields, we can see the wonders of field fortification in the form of trenches, cells, dugouts, pillboxes, dugouts, caponiers, etc. Each of these objects can give us wonderful finds.

But not all such places need to be carefully searched. The territory that is literally lined with craters from mines and shells requires complete processing. The more of them, the more likely it is that the cop will end up perfectly. After all, during artillery shelling, bombing, soldiers often lost personal belongings, uniforms in the confusion. In such a situation, the fighters either did not look for them or simply did not notice the loss.

Most often at the sites of the excavation, trenches and dugouts are found, usually by eye you can determine whose they are. The German army used zigzag trenches, while the Soviet army dug more straight lines, without unnecessary twists. By depth, you can determine the period of hostilities. If this is the winter season, then the depth of the trenches will be small, which gives a good advantage when pitting. All others are within 1.5 meters deep. In the trenches, one should ring the parapet, there are bullets, cartridges, shells, thorns, grenades, fragments. It is worth checking the walls, there will be mostly bullets, if you are lucky, you can find a niche with cartridges or grenades. Be sure to explore the back and front of the trenches, as the soldiers could advance and retreat, along the way losing things or throwing away all sorts of uniforms. The trench itself can be shoveled, but only in those places where there is a huge amount of shells or cartridges.

The dugouts look like a square or a rectangle, depending on their purpose. The square ones were used by officers and soldiers, the rectangular ones went under artillery or equipment, only this is no longer going like a dugout, but like Caponiers. But even rectangular ones could be residential, so be careful! The depth can be different, but at least two or three meters. First of all, it is better to dig at the entrance and where the bunks were located. You need to dig to the floor. The floor of the dugout is lined with boards or simply heavily trampled down, it is difficult to miss it. In the case when the floor is earthen, small objects can be trampled into it, if the floor is covered with boards, then it is worth looking for small things under them. Usually, there is a dump near each German dugout, nowadays it looks like a small hole or depression not far from the dugout. These are garbage dumps - a digger's favorite place) There you can find a lot of interesting things.

When digging trenches, the earth was poured in a shaft from the side facing the enemy, this embankment is called the parapet of the trench.

Also, do not forget about the funnels, which must be punched with a probe. Sometimes, there are the bones of soldiers.
Thank you all for your attention, good swag and good places.
Author: Alexander Shinkarenko Vkontakte group.