"Her right hand was twisted and twisted behind her back, her stomach was open, her dress was torn" ...
At the end of 1942, a nineteen-year-old partisan Katya Miroshnikova was strangled by German soldiers in the deep Don Yar. Katya did not want to go to her last third intelligence - she had a premonition that she would not return - she wrote a farewell letter asking her to open it after her death. This envelope combat comrades opened in a week. Verkhnedonskoy district of the Rostov region German units occupied the beginning of July 1942. Endless columns were moving towards Stalingrad: on Hitler's orders, the city should have taken 25 July.
The armored units passed through the Don farms quickly - after them the rear units responsible for food supplies and uniforms settled here. The 8 soldiers of the Italian army were mainly engaged in this business, they were notable for their good-natured attitude and were not as aggressive as the Germans, who despised their allies - often the locals saw how the fascists mocked the macarons. Infantry units of the Italian division "Torino" also occupied the defense in small areas of the front.
The new law and order was followed by the order service (Ordnungsdienst), where elders and policemen were recruited from local residents who knew the former party and Komsomol activists well. Betrayal - at every turn. It was especially hard morally. "You will have nothing, your vegetables, bread are beyond the Volga, go and get from your husbands, as they protect the Soviet power, and not our real, which is now, our real power," said one of the policemen ( newest documentation stories Rostov region, case number 1, inventory 106-107).
The Soviet units at that time rolled over the Don River and supported the defense there. Among them was the guerrilla unit "Donskoy partisan" organized by the district party committee under the command of N.A. Merkulov, which was practically assembled from civilians. One of the squad’s combat missions is to deliver operational information for the 152 Infantry Division (part of the Stalingrad Front) about the number and redeployment of enemy troops, its firing points, the headquarters, commandant’s offices, and ammunition depots. Local activists, who also distributed the Co-information Bureau reports to the population, became the main sources of information - these leaflets gave people hope.
Katya Miroshnikova from the village of Migulinskaya also left with the partisans for the Don.
She was a responsible person. In the family, she was the first child and, growing up, helped mother Ustinya Ilyinichna to bring up seven brothers and sisters - her father worked as an accountant and all the time was engaged in his labor affairs. The family first lived in the farm Dubrovsky, and then moved to the village of Migulinskaya.
Before the war, Katya graduated from the Veshensk Pedagogical School, managed to work as a pioneer leader, and then left the school and became one of the Komsomol leaders in the local district Komsomol committee: she knew almost all the Komsomol members of the district because she was involved in accounting and controlling payment of membership dues by Komsomol members, reports from the secretaries of the Komsomol organizations. Before the Germans arrived, Katya managed to collect the entire card file and forward it to the Don.
“I, the red partisan, give the partisan oath to the Motherland, my comrades, that I will be bold, resolute and merciless to the enemies. I swear that I will never surrender my squad, my commander and my comrades. I will always keep the guerrilla secret if it will cost my life. I will be faithful to my Homeland, the party, the people to the end. If I break the sacred oath, let the harsh partisan punishment befall me, ”Katya said these words of an oath in her special department when she joined the detachment and put and his signature at the end.
After this oath she was sent on reconnaissance.
On the instructions of the partisan detachment command, she swam in a fragile shuttle to obtain information about the location of the enemy firing points, which occupied the dominant heights on the opposite bank and methodically fired at the Soviet units.
The first time everything went well. She went to the village of Migulinskaya to her friend, with whom they studied together before the war at the Veshensky Pedagogical School. A friend told Kate about the German firing points - after some time, these points were destroyed with precise artillery fire.
In the intervals between exits for a combat mission, Katya came to her mother in her own farm Dubrovsky, who was on the left bank of the Don and was not occupied by the Germans. She asked her mother for old things - blouses or skirts to dress them in intelligence. Scout men had a much harder time - many of Kati’s comrades died because they immediately paid attention to men and it was harder for them to invent a legend: usually men from a partisan detachment crossed the front line for three to six people and hiding along enemy ravines. Katya's intelligence method was somewhat different: she went on reconnaissance alone, without much hiding, wandered along the Don roads - it was easier for her to get lost in a crowd of women deprived of war.
The second time, when Katya went into reconnaissance she was wounded not far from the Don River: she was walking along the path to cross the river, as suddenly as she was met by two German soldiers, one of whom demanded to show her documents - Katya seemed to have got into a blouse for documents, and she drew her pistol and fired at one and then at another German. The Germans, startled, raised shooting - a machine-gun bullet touched his hand. But Katya was able to swim across the Don and come to her squad. The injury was minor - a bullet scratched the surface of the skin. Valuable information obtained by Katya about the exact location of the German fiery points were transferred to headquarters.
But there was another unpleasant news for the commander - Katya told him that one of the prisoners of war suspected that she was a partisan.
Despite this, the command again decided to send her in reconnaissance - Katya knew the terrain very well: winding Don gullies and abandoned fields. But this time she needed to get to the village of Migulinskaya - but this task was very dangerous because they could recognize her at any moment.
Before leaving for her third intelligence, Katya wrote a farewell letter and deposited it with her friend Lyubov Timoshenko. The letter was opened a few days later - Katya did not come to an agreed place near a large stone, where the guerrilla guard usually waited for her to transfer to her shore.
"My dear ones, how I want to live! How I would like to meet the dawn again over my native Don, to drop my lips to the dewy grass ... Do it for me. When I am led to execution, I will not regret that I did not have time ... ", - wrote Katya.
She did not have time to see how the 19 of November 1942 in the Stalingrad area began the offensive of the Soviet troops, which ended with the unification of the two fronts and the environment of the Paulus group. So began the famous Stalingrad offensive, which turned avalanche of liberation into Don farms. A month later, on December 18 on 1942, the Verkhnedonsk district was liberated by units of the Soviet army.
Employees of the NKVD of the USSR, executing the order number 001683 from 12 December 1941, “On the operational and security services of the areas liberated from enemy troops”, in one of the surveys learned from a local resident about the last path of Katya Miroshnikova. “She was being led down the street of the village bloodied, in a torn dress. She, poor thing, was barely walking. And not only the Germans, but also one of our police officers, Fyodor Derevyankin, escorted her.”
It was hard to believe what the investigators heard: Fyodor Derevyankin worked before the war as director of the Migulinsky high school and was distinguished by his patriotic views. Then they found one of the policemen, who said that it was Derevyankin, who saw his former pupil Katya Miroshnikova on the village street, shouted: "Grab her. She is a partisan."
And Katya ran. The Germans did not shoot - they decided to take her alive. She ran through the streets and realized that she would no longer find salvation. She was overtaken behind the stanitsa, near the river Peskovatka, which flowed into the Don - it was in this place that Katya swam across the river. Knocked down.
The preliminary interrogation took place in the village of Migulinskaya, but after learning of the capture of an important partisan, the German commandant ordered that Katya be brought to the farm immediately, Konovalovsky, where the district military commander's office was located. Her villagers saw the villagers. Eight days Katya was tortured - she turned gray. At dawn 30 September she was led up the hill. She did not live two and a half months before her birthday - 14 December 1942, she would have turned 20 years. But on this day, snow and wind covered up an unknown grave. Only in May, 1943, after a long search, was it possible to find her body.
As stated in the memorandum (RGASPI, F-1, 53 Inventory, 239 Case): “Katya was lying in the field, three steps from the road, in weeds, lightly sprinkled with earth. She had a bag on her head. Her right hand was turned out and pinched behind his back, his stomach is open, the dress is torn off. "
Policeman Derevyankin did not escape retribution - he was arrested and shot.
In 1965, by decree of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet of the USSR, Ekaterina Aleksandrovna Miroshnikova was posthumously awarded the Order of the Patriotic War of the Second Degree No. XXUMX.
In the Don steppe, on the spot where Katy died, there is a lone monument with a red star - sometimes people come here to pay tribute to the memory, but most of the time the monument stands alone.
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