Matrosov, Alexandr Matvejevič

Matrosov, Aleksandr Matveyevich
Александр Матвеевич Матросов
Rjadovoj Alexandr M. Matrosov

(1924 - 1943)


Hero of the Soviet Union

Born in 1924 in the small village of Kunakbayevo in Bashkortostan as Shakiryan. His father, Yusun Muhamedjanov, lost a leg in the Civil War and made a living as a beggar. His mother died when he was seven years old. His father remarried and then wandered from village to village with his family. When his second wife left him and he married a third time, the boy ran away from home. He ended up in an orphanage in Melekessu (Dimitrovgrad) in the Simbir region, where he became Sasha Matrosov. Later, in documents, he gave Dniepropetrovsk, a city he had never seen, as his birthplace. On February 7, 1937, he was sent to the Ivanovo orphanage and at the age of fifteen he started working as a laborer at the Kuybyshevskaya wagon factory. Shortly afterwards he escaped and returned to his native village. After his capture, he was taken to Saratov and there, on October 8, 1940, he was sentenced to two years of forced labor for illegally leaving his workplace and vagrancy. He served his sentence in a labor camp in Ufa and after serving it volunteered for the Red Army.

In September 1942 he became a student at the military infantry school in Orenburg, which he did not complete and in November was assigned to the 91st Infantry School. On 27 February 1943, near the village of Chernushki in the Pskov region, he performed his famous feat when he covered an enemy machine gun with his own body. There are different versions of how the event happened. According to one of them, Private Matrosov was shot with his rifle when he was about to throw a grenade into the "nest" at the moment when the German machine gunner ran out of ammunition, as the machine gun burst would have had to throw the hero's body back several meters. However, his example encouraged the whole unit to attack and led to the breaking of the enemy defences. The command demanded such examples of heroism, and Matrosov became literally overnight a legend, the very prototype of the Soviet "new man". On 8 September 1943, he was awarded the title Hero of the Soviet Union in memoriam.

For propaganda purposes, the hero's biography had to be modified. According to the official version, both his parents died when he was young and the boy became an inmate of an orphanage, where he set an example for other children in sports and artistic activities. At the age of 16 he joined Komsomol and became an assistant tutor. He longed to become a sailor and sail by boat to Moscow so that he could tell Comrade Stalin about his beautiful childhood. He therefore stole Admiral Obolensky's uniform from the naval museum and for this he was briefly expelled from the Komsomol and sent to an educational institution. This story was told to children in schools for decades after the war, and his name was carried by schools, streets, ships, kolkhozes and sovkhozes all over the USSR. A monumental statue of him stands in Bashkortostan's capital, Ufa, and an "eternal" fire burns beside it.

ru.wikipedia.org

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o Alexandru Matrosovovi a jeho činu byl loni v ruské televizi uveden dokumetární film
"Александр Матросов. Правда о подвиге"
podrobnější informace zde:
www.stepashka.com
URL : https://www.valka.cz/Matrosov-Alexandr-Matvejevic-t33485#221426 Version : 0
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