Panfilov's Twenty-Eight Guardsmen

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Not to be confused with the Panfilovtsy in general.

The Panfilov Division's Twenty-Eight Guardsmen (Template:Lang-ru), commonly referred to simply as Panfilov's Men (Template:Lang-ru, Panfilovtsy), were a group of soldiers from the Red Army's 316th Rifle Division who took part in the defense of Moscow during World War II. According to official Soviet history, they were all killed in action on 16 November 1941, after destroying 18 German tanks and stopping the enemy attack. These casualties do not find confirmation from German or Soviet operational documents, and the Germans fulfilled their day objectives well before the end of the day. The Twenty-Eight were collectively endowed with the title Hero of the Soviet Union. An investigation by Soviet authorities in 1948, since declassified, revealed that the description of the events was not accurate. Not all the twenty eight were killed — six of the soldiers were still alive. One of them was arrested in 1947 on charges of high treason and confessed to having “voluntarily” surrendered to German troops and later joined a German police force. The findings were kept secret, and the Twenty-Eight Guardsmen were considered national heroes.

Fighting

Background

On 30 September 1941, the Wehrmacht commenced its offensive on Moscow. By mid-November, German units were only 100 kilometers away from the USSR's capital.

The Red Army's 316th Rifle Division – a formation that consisted mostly of recruits from the Kazakh and Kirghiz Soviet Republics, commanded by General Ivan Panfilov, was a part of Konstantin Rokossovsky's 16th Army (Western Front). The division had the heavy fighting on October 1941 westward of Volokolamsk, restraining the German offensive to Moscow. The division suffered heavy casualties, but showed high morale and good fighting qualities. General Zhukov, the commander of the Western front, recommended the division to the Guard's title and Order of the Red Banner for the battles of 20—27 October. At the end of October the 316th division was forced to leave Volokolamsk and took up positions eastward of the town.

Battle of Dubosekovo

On the morning of 16 November, the positions of the Division's 1075th Regiment near the small Dubosekovo railroad station were attacked by German forces from the 2nd Panzer Division. Germans formed three combat groups (Kampfgruppes) in typical Panzerwaffe manner. Using the frozen earth, two of them performed a maneuver and attacked the weak positions on the left flank of the regiment. At the 10 am (Moscow time) they already seized villages Petelino and Nelidovo and so bypassed Dubosekovo station. No mentions found in operational documents about heavy tank losses or an extremely stubborn resistance at this area. In the ensuing battle, the Kampfgrupps advanced further to the north, 1075 Regiment was overwhelmed and forced to retreat from its positions. In a later testimony, the 1075th's commander, Colonel Ilya Kaprov, told that his unit was engaged by German tanks, and that the 4th Company of his 2nd Battalion, commanded by Captain Pavel Gundilovich, suffered over a hundred casualties in the fight against them, and yet managed to destroy some (tanks). Dubosekovo was occupied by the Germans until 20 December.

Gloryfication

Krasnaya Zvezda articles

On 24 November 1941, Vasily Koroteev – a front reporter of the Red Army's newspaper, Krasnaya Zvezda – traveled to the 16th Army headquarters to interview Rokossovsky. While in the command post, he met Commissar Sergei Egorov, the chief political officer of the 8th Guards Panfilov Division - the new name of the 316th Division, which was granted to honor the memory of its commanding general, who was killed in action on 18 November. Egorov told the reporter of a group of soldiers who, when faced by 54 German tanks, fought to the last and shot two from among their own who wished to surrender. The commissar added that he was not present at the event, and heard of it from another political officer. He recommended that Koroteev would write about it in the newspaper.

Upon returning to Moscow, Koroteev spoke with the editor of Krasnaya Zvezda, David Ortenberg, and when asked how many soldiers took part in the clash, he arbitrarily replied that there were thirty in whole, and two traitors who wanted to surrender – thus reaching the number twenty-eight. Ortenberg decided that two would-be deserters were too many, and told him to reduce their number to one. On 27 November, an article by Koroteev, entitled Guardsmen of Panfilov in the Battle for Moscow, was published in Krasnaya Zvezda. The report discussed the Panfilov Division's contribution to the fighting, and mentioned that "A group of soldiers from the 5th company ... was attacked by a column of 54 enemy tanks, yet they did not flinch..." and adding that a Commissar named Diev led the soldiers until they have all been killed. Koroteev wrote that the enemy sustained eight hundred casualties and lost 18 tanks. On the following day, Krasnaya Zvezda ran an editorial by journalist Aleksander Krivitsky, under the title The Will of the 28 Fallen Heroes, dedicated solely to the incident in Dubosekovo which presented the same description of the events. Krivitsky added some historical reminiscences and slogan «The Guard dies but does not surrender!» as a motivation for the soldiers. He didn't know, that the division got the Guards’ title only the next day after the described fighting.

The Krivitsky mission

The first article got a positive response from Soviet leaders, including Stalin himself, but there was a need for names of fallen heroes. So, Krivitsky visited 8th Guard Division and tried to find witnesses of the fighting. He found, that nobody knows "commissar Diev", and colonel Kaprov told him that he never heard of the action of the "28 Guards". On 22 January 1942, Krivitsky published another article in Krasnaya Zvezda, where he change "5th company" to "4th" and made commissar Vasily Klochkov the main hero. Krivitsky also stated, that "Diev" was nickname of Klochkov, but nicknames never used in reports in Red Army. The last Klochkov's words in article were: "Russia is a vast land, yet there is nowhere to retreat – Moscow is behind us!". According to the article, the Guardsmen destroyed the 18 tanks using their few anti-tank guns and Molotov cocktails. The article claimed that the last survivor from the group, soldier Ivan Natarov, described their exploits shortly before dying of his wounds in a field hospital. The names of the dead were listed in addition. This is not known reliably, either these names were told to Krivitsky by the commander of 4th company Gundilovich as he remembered them, or were taken from some lists of killed and missed in action around the date of 16 November.

The story of the Twenty-Eight gained wide publicity. In March 1942, Nikolai Tikhonov wrote a poem entitled A Verse to the Twenty Eight Guardsmen. Other authors followed suit, and several literary works dealing with the battle at Dubosekovo were released. Consequently, the Guardsmen became celebrated heroes throughout the Soviet Union.

"Panfilov's Twenty-Eight Gaurdsmen" in Soviet time

Kuzhebergenov's arrest

On May 1942, the NKVD arrested a soldier of the Western Front, Danil Kuzhebergenov, for allegedly 'giving himself up to the enemy' by trying to surrender. When he was interrogated, the suspect claimed that he was the same Danil Kuzhebergenov that was listed as one of the Twenty-Eight Guardsmen. The NKVD discovered that he indeed served in the 4th Company of the 1075th Regiment's 2nd Battalion. Kuzhebergenov claimed that during 16 November he was knocked unconscious by an explosion and picked up by a German burial detail who presumed he was dead. He later managed to escape and joined General Dovator's Cavalry Division. The man was later recognized by other participants as one of the soldiers in Dubosekovo.

The NKVD forced Kuzhebergenov to sign a confession in which he professed to having been an impersonator who was never present at the area of the battle and based his claims on material gleaned from the newspapers. Commissar Muhamedyarov wrote a letter in which he claimed to have erroneously ascribed Danil Kuzhebergenov as one of the Guardsmen instead of another soldier, Askar Kuzhebergenov, who was henceforth listed among the Twenty-Eight in official publications. According to the division's records, a soldier by that name joined it during January 1942 and was killed shortly after. Danil Kuzhebergenov was imprisoned on charges of impersonation and cowardice, and later sent to a penal battalion. His criminal record as a 'traitor to the Motherland' was never expunged.

On 21 July 1942, the Guardsmen were all posthumously awarded the title Hero of the Soviet Union.

Afanasyev Report

In November 1947, the Kharkov Military Prosecutor's Office arrested Ivan Dobrobabin, a resident of the Kyrgyz town Kant, for being a suspected collaborator with the enemy. Dobrobabin told the investigators that he was one of the Panfilov Guardsmen. His claim was verified; he indeed was the same Ivan Dobrobabin who was listed as one of the dead in Dubosekovo. Dobrobabin claimed that during the clash on 16 November, he was captured by the Germans but managed to escape. He then decided to return to his native town of Perekop, in Ukraine, that was under German occupation. There, Dobrobabin joined the local Hilfspolizei and was made its chief. He was accused of participating in anti-partisan activity and of assisting the deportation of forced laborers to Germany. In 1944, when the German defeat was imminent, he fled his village and re-enlisted into the Red Army. Dobrobabin was convicted and sent to fifteen years in prison.

The Dobrobabin affair led to an official investigation of the Panfilov's Guardsmen story. A military judge, Lieutenant-General Nikolai Afanasyev, supervised the process. When he interviewed Kaprov, the Colonel told him that although heavy fighting took place in Dubosekovo, the Guardsmen did not perform the deeds attributed to them by the press. When questioned, Krivitsky admitted that he made up most of the details which were published in his articles, including Klochkov's famous last words and the dying Natarov's tale – documents from the 1075th Regiment's staff later revealed that Ivan Natarov was killed two days before the battle. Ortenberg and Koroteev told the judge that their main motive was to boost the morale of the Soviet troops, and therefore they published Egorov's story.

In addition to Kuzhubergenov – who the investigation confirmed to have a been one of the Twenty-Eight – and Dobrobabin, four other surviving Guardsmen were located by the commission: Grigory Shemiakin and Illarion Vasilyev were injured severely on the 16 November incident and evacuated to hospitals; Dmitry Timofeev and Ivan Shadrin were taken prisoner but eventually repatriated to the Soviet Union. In his report, submitted to the Procurator General of the Soviet Union on 10 May 1948 and passed on to Joseph Stalin and Andrei Zhdanov, Afanasyev concluded that the Panfilov Guardsmen's last stand "did not occur. It was a pure fantasy."

Post-war era

In spite of the Afanasyev report, the wartime version of the events was upheld. The 1965 official history of World War II claimed that the Twenty-Eight Panfilov Guardsmen knocked out 18 tanks and killed 70 enemy soldiers. Memorials to the fallen heroes were built throughout the Soviet Union, including five 12-meter tall statues near the site of the battle and the Twenty-Eight Guardsmen Park in Alma Ata. The municipal anthem of Moscow makes a reference to the city's "twenty-eight brave sons".

In 1966 the popular soviet literary magazine Novyi mir published an article "Legendy i fakty" by V. Kardin. There were some serious questions to Krivitsky and to a canonized version of "28 heroes". Kadrin named several surviving fighters and asked why there are no further studies. Such thoughts were slapped down personally by Leonid Brezhnev, the head of state: "Some of our authors even say that … there were no 28 Panfilov men, … that this fact was perhaps invented, that Klochkov did not exist, and neither did his appeal ‘There is nowhere to retreat — we have our backs to Moscow!’ These are slanders against … the heroic history of our party and Soviet people."

During the Perestroika, the still-living Ivan Dobrobabin petitioned the Military Prosecutor General for rehabilitation, claiming that he never hurt anyone during his service in the Hilfspolizei. Dobrobabin's plea attracted media attention to the case, which resulted in the eventual declassification of the Afanasyev report.

Contemporary Russia

In June 2015, Russian State Archive director Sergei Mironenko, citing historical documents, publicly stated that the story was in fact a myth. He earned a sharp rebuke from Culture Minister Vladimir Medinsky. Shortly afterwards, the Archive posted online the results of the 1948 investigation by Soviet military prosecutors, which concluded that journalists from the military newspaper Krasnaya Zvezda had concocted the story's details. The head of the Archive Mironenko was subsequently removed from his post.

Russia's culture minister Vladimir Medinsky stated that "It is my deep conviction that even if this story was invented from the start to the finish , it is a sacred legend which it’s simply impossible to besmirch. And people who try to do that are total scumbags."

The Twenty-Eight Guardsmen

Killed in action

Nikolai Ananiev (b. 19 November 1912)
Nikolai Belashev (b. 1911)
Grigory Bezrodnikh (b. 1909)
Yakov Bondarenko (b. 1905)
Piotr Dutov (b. 6 August 1916)
Piotr Emtsov (b. 14 May 1909)
Nursutbai Esebulatov (b. 1913)
Dmitri Kalenik (b. 1910)
Vasily "Diev" Klochkov (b. 8 March 1911)
Grigory Konkin (b. 1911)
Alikbai Kosaev (b. 11 May 1905)
Abram Kriuchkov (b. 1910)
Nikolai Maximov (b. 5 July 1911)
Nikita Mitchenko (b. 3 April 1910)
Gavril Mitin (b. 1908)
Ivan Moskalenko (b. 1912)
Ivan Natarov (b. 1910)
Grigory Petrenko (b. 22 November 1909)
Musabek Sengirbayev (b. 10 March 1917)
Ivan Sheptekov (b. 1910)
Duishenkul Shopokov (b. 19 May 1915)
Nikolai Trofimov (b. 9 May 1915)

Survived

Dimitry Timofeev (5 February 1907 – 6 June 1950)
Ilarion Vasilyev (5 November 1910 – 6 October 1969)
Grigory Shemiakin (25 December 1906 – 25 October 1973)
Danil Kuzhubergenov (1917 – 1976)
Ivan Shadrin (17 June 1913 – 21 October 1985)
Ivan Dobrobabin (21 June 1913 – 19 December 1996)

Popular culture

28 panfilovtsev is a movie about Panfilov's 28 men, produced by Libyan Palette Studios together with Gaijin Entertainment. The movie, released on 24 November 2016) is funded by crowdfunding.

References

^ Statiev, Alexander (2012). "La Garde meurt mais ne se rend pas!": Once Again on the 28 Panfilov Heroes". Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History. 13 (4): 769–798. doi:10.1353/kri.2012.0045.
"Russian Archives Cast Doubt on Legends of Soviet War Heroes". Retrieved 4 December 2016.
Balmforth, Tom (12 July 2015). "Soviet WWII Legend Of Panfilov Guardsmen Debunked As 'Fiction'". RadioFreeEurope/RadioLiberty. Retrieved 18 July 2015.
^ Sonne, Paul (10 August 2015). "Old Doubts About a Cherished Soviet War Legend Resurface, Unleashing Firestorm". WSJ. Retrieved 15 November 2015.
Sokolov, Boris (2015). Marshal K.K. Rokossovsky: The Red Army's Gentleman Commander. Helion. p. 496. ISBN 1912174502.
Village Dubosekovo is located 12 km to the south-west-west. 316th division had the heavy fighting in this area in October, before the loss of Volokolamsk
"An article by Yuri Prokhorov on hronograf.ru". Archived from the original on 29 September 2007. Retrieved 4 December 2016. {{cite web}}: Unknown parameter |deadurl= ignored (|url-status= suggested) (help)
An article by Sergei Koval on Izvestia.
In fact, there was another reporter with Koroteev in the 16th Army headquarter, it was Chernyshev from Komsomolskaya Pravda. His article with very similar details was published on 26 November, one day before Koroteev's one (with subscribe "Western front, 25 November). There also were mentioned political instructor Diev, 54 enemy tanks and so on. However, this article attracted little attention
"Эхо Москвы :: Цена Победы Панфиловцы: Андрей Мартынов". Эхо Москвы. Retrieved 8 December 2014.
"Tolts". Retrieved 8 December 2014.
". 28". Retrieved 8 December 2014.
"1997 N6". Retrieved 8 December 2014.
^ Jörg Echternkamp, Stefan Martens. Experience and Memory: The Second World War in Europe. Berghahn Books (2010). ISBN 978-1-84545-763-1. pp. 99–101.
Yuri Zhuk, The Battle of Moscow: Facts and Myths. p. 2.
"ПОДВИГ И ПОДЛОГ". Retrieved 4 December 2016.
"ПАНФИЛОВЦЫ - это... Что такое ПАНФИЛОВЦЫ?". Retrieved 4 December 2016.
Chris Bellamy, Absolute War, pp. 307–8. ISBN 978-0-330-51004-2.
"86 ". Retrieved 8 December 2014.
"2000 N6". Retrieved 8 December 2014.
Lieutenant-General Nikolai Afanasyev. Report on the Panfilov Guardsmen. 10 May 1948.
^ "Справка-доклад главного военного прокурора Н. Афанасьева "О 28 панфиловцах"". Государственный архив Российской Федерации.
A history of the Great Patriotic War of the Soviet Union 1941-1945 in six volumes. Moscow: Voenizdat, 1960-1965
An article by Boris Nevzorov.
Bone, Harry (2016-10-11). "Putin backs WW2 myth in new Russian film". BBC News. Retrieved 2017-05-21.
^ Walker, Shaun (2016-11-23). "Russian war film set to open amid controversy over accuracy of events". The Guardian. ISSN 0261-3077. Retrieved 2017-05-21.
The full list of the Guardsmen in Klochkov's entry on the Heroes of the USSR site. The biographers have set the dates of death as 16.11.41 when no other data was available.
""Panfilov's 28 men" official site".

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