This Soviet saboteur was driving fear into the Nazis

2024 Author: Seth Attwood | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-16 15:55

In the matter of blowing up enemy buildings and derailing trains, Ilya Starinov had no equal in the Red Army. Adolf Hitler personally announced a bounty for his head.

"The great demolition man", "the grandfather of the Soviet special forces", "the god of sabotage", "the genius of the mine war" - this was the name of the colonel of the engineering troops Ilya Grigorievich Starinov. During the entire period of World War II, under his leadership, 256 bridges were blown up and 12 thousand enemy echelons were derailed.

Starinov both himself participated in operations and was engaged in the preparation and training of sabotage and partisan detachments. In addition, he personally developed a number of mine-explosive obstacles and sabotage equipment, launched into mass production.

Spain

Ilya Grigorievich's talent as a saboteur was fully manifested during the Civil War in Spain, where he was sent under the pseudonym "Rodolfo" as part of the Group of Soviet Specialists in 1936.

Ilya Grigorievich Starinov.

Starinov was a masterly approach to business. Once the explosives were hidden in a captured field kitchen, left on the bridge and detonated when a column of enemy troops passed through it. Another time she was put in a box, which was dragged by an ownerless mule, and which, overjoyed by the unexpected find, the Franco soldiers took to the location of their unit in the fortified monastery of Virgen de la Cabeza. After the explosion, detachments of the Republican army, hiding in ambush, went to storm.

In order to disable an important tunnel on the Peñarroya-Cordoba section, the mine was disguised as a car tire and placed between the rails. A passing train with ammunition for Franco's troops caught and dragged the tire into a tunnel, where an explosion was soon heard. The fire and detonation of ammunition lasted for several days.

Starinov's loudest success in Spain cost him a lot of nerves. The fact is that while mining the railway tracks near Cordoba, his group was sure that passenger trains did not run here. When leaving, they noticed to their great surprise that just such a train was approaching the mine, which was no longer possible to stop.

“That night was difficult for me. I did not expect anything good from the future. I knew that excuses would not help … Danger hung over our whole business, which had been established with such difficulty,”Ilya Grigorievich wrote in“Notes of a saboteur”. However, the tragedy turned into a triumph. In the morning it turned out that it was not the passenger train that had been derailed, but the headquarters train of the Italian aviation division.

People's Commissar of Defense of the USSR Kliment Voroshilov shakes hands with Captain Ilya Starinov, 1937

Upon his return to his homeland, Starinov almost fell under the rink of the repressions that broke out then. He knew many of the commanders accused of treason and executed, and the arrested Jan Berzin was his immediate leader in Spain. The People's Commissar of Defense Marshal Kliment Voroshilov saved the saboteur from the tribunal.

Hitler's personal enemy

When, soon after the invasion of the German army into the USSR, it became clear that the Soviet doctrine "to beat the enemy on its territory and with little blood" did not work, there was an urgent need to create an extensive partisan network and organize sabotage activities behind enemy lines. Starinov's skills were fully useful here.

German troops in Kharkov, November 11, 1941.

In October 1941, there were fierce battles for Kharkov, a large industrial center of Soviet Ukraine. The operational-engineering group of Ilya Grigorievich was instructed to mine the city in case it was occupied by the Wehrmacht. As a result, 30,000 anti-tank and anti-personnel mines were planted here, about 2,000 delayed-action mines and over 5,000 decoy mines - dummies, which the enemy would nevertheless spend time and resources on demining.

In addition, Starinov prepared a special trap for the Germans. In a luxurious house in the center of Kharkov, where, as the saboteur assumed, the enemy's command would stop, a radiomine (350-kilogram charge of tol) was laid, carefully hidden in the floor of the boiler room. In order not to arouse suspicion, here in the pile of coal was hidden a "float" mine, not intended for detonation.

painted by Klimbim

When German sappers discovered and defused the distracting Soviet mine, Lieutenant General Georg von Braun and the headquarters of the 68th Infantry Division were located in the house. On November 14, at 5 am, a real mine was activated by a radio signal at a distance of 300 km from Kharkov. A powerful explosion led to the death of both Brown and the entire command of the division.

Hitler was furious at what had happened. After the military intelligence of the Third Reich found out the identity of the organizer of the sabotage, a reward of 200 thousand Reichsmarks was assigned to Starinov's head.

Israel Ozersky / Sputnik

The Germans never managed to catch the impudent saboteur. Until the end of the war, Ilya Grigorievich was involved in organizing partisan warfare behind enemy lines, supervised interaction between Soviet troops and the National Liberation Army of Yugoslavia, and also supervised the clearance of roads in Hungary and Germany.

Spetsnaz grandfather

In the post-war period, Ilya Starinov focused on teaching at the educational institutions of the KGB. He trained more than a dozen highly professional special forces officers who affectionately called him "grandfather."

Starinov was awarded dozens of medals and orders, but never received the country's main award. Three times in the Soviet Union and twice in Russia they wanted to nominate him for the title of Hero, but each time the award was canceled. The reason was the quarrelsome and straightforward character of the saboteur, his habit of expressing the truth to his superiors in person.

Although he never managed to become a general, Ilya Grigorievich took it lightly.

“It is better to be a living colonel than a dead marshal,” said Starinov, who lived to be a hundred years old.