Not arguing with memory
Our everyday life is amazing because it sometimes gives us moments of communication with amazing people and their extraordinary fate. One of them was for all of us a veteran of the 70th Army, Colonel Pyotr Dmitrievich Tanan, whom we managed to meet back in 1996.
Acquaintance with him determined the further direction of all our research and search work. The case of searching for those who bravely and courageously fought against the Nazis on the fronts of the Great Patriotic War, but due to various circumstances remained unknown, is not at all simple.
After all, our common memory with such difficulty collects the finest and most often broken threads from documents, letters, personal memories into a single ball. And alas, sometimes it's just not possible to bring everything together.
However, everything is different with Peter Tanan - he himself managed to remember so much and so capaciously what he could, and tell those who had the good fortune to be with him. I remember how Pyotr Dmitrievich shared with us the phone numbers of many veteran border guards of the 70th Army.
So, soon we managed to contact Colonel of the Border Troops Yuri Sergeevich Ulitin (Frontier Truth of Officer Ulitin).
He is from that "fatal" generation
By the beginning of the war, he was not even twenty - Peter Tanan was born on August 25, 1921 in Moscow, in the family of a railway worker. Like all his peers, he went to school, went in for sports with enthusiasm and pleased his parents with excellent grades in many subjects.
The trouble came unexpectedly - in 1937 his father was repressed, and his fate, unfortunately, remained unknown.
In November 1939, after graduating from Moscow secondary school No. 212 and two months of study at the Moscow Geological Prospecting Institute (MGRI named after G. K. Ordzhonikidze), in accordance with the Decree of the Council of People's Commissars on the conscription of university students for military service, Tanan was sent to serve in the border troops NKVD USSR.
Before the start of the Great Patriotic War, he defended the borders of the Fatherland in the 23rd Separate Naval Commandant's Office in the city of Sevastopol as an ordinary border guard signalman. He served at the Foros border outpost, where in 1991, on the instructions of the State Emergency Committee, Gorbachev was kept, went on patrol.
From the first days of the war
In the first days of the war and during the raid of the German aviation on the city, Peter Tanan participated in the rescue of ships, military and civilian property, as well as in the detention and neutralization of saboteurs, paratroopers and traitors to the Motherland. He also had to build defensive structures.
At the end of June 1941, he was sent to study at the Menzhinsky Moscow Border Military-Technical School (communications department). As the commander of the cadet squad, he, as part of the search groups, participated in the search for saboteurs operating in the Moscow region, and also defended Moscow in the Volokolamsk direction.
On October 27, 1941, the border school was evacuated to Novosibirsk. And already in April 1942, the first group of excellent students was released ahead of schedule. Petr Tanan and 23 other cadets of the wire communication department are awarded the rank of "lieutenant".
Not that side
Is it necessary to explain that in those days all the peers of the young officer were rushing to the front. But Peter Tanan will have to leave for Transbaikalia for further service. Here he was appointed commander of a communications platoon.
In November 1942, after repeated requests, Pyotr Dmitrievich was sent to the newly formed Separate Army of the NKVD troops. He is appointed platoon commander of the 153rd Separate Line Communications Battalion. For providing impeccable wired communications on the Kursk Bulge, the border guard officer was awarded the medal "For Military Merit".
During the war years, the lieutenant had many difficult trials, because the combat path of the communications battalion is the path tank compounds to which it was attached. But Peter Dmitrievich Tanan passed all these tests with honor, ending the war in German Rostock as a company commander after meeting with the allies on the banks of the Elbe.
Svetlana Viktorovna Zolotukhina, daughter of fellow soldier Pyotr Tanan, recalled - “When Pyotr Dmitrievich, under whose command dad served, came to visit us in Ponyri, he promised to look for surviving fellow soldiers. He wrote poems containing the following lines:
Under Ponyri, Fatezh and Olkhovatka
Overcame lead hail and wind,
Completed the task in mortal combat
Our battalion one hundred and fifty-third ... "
Orders and memory
The two Orders of the Red Star, the Order of the Patriotic War of the second degree, the Order of Alexander Nevsky and two medals "For Military Merit" received by Peter Tanan testify to the fact that he defended the Motherland excellently, courageously and bravely.
The war ended, and Pyotr Dmitrievich continued to serve in various positions. Yes, and the units were also different, but P. Tanan always served, as it should be - with honor. From December 1961 to August 1963 he worked in Cuba as a military civil defense adviser, bringing the notorious Cuban Missile Crisis to its worst.
In April 1969, he was appointed head of a department at the USSR Ministry of Foreign Affairs and worked until April 1987. During his work, he received 36 commendations, a Certificate of Honor from the Supreme Soviet of the RSFSR and the Order of the Badge of Honor.
He was always like that, a real colonel-border guard Pyotr Dmitrievich Tanan, with whom he once happened to meet like this unexpectedly. And you will never forget such a person. Never!