Balkan countries

We will start the narrative with the countries of the Balkan Peninsula, where the main form of struggle against the invaders was armed struggle, due to both the terrain and the mentality of the locals.

Greece

Historical review

On April 6, 1941, the German invasion began, with Italian and Bulgarian troops joining it. By early June, the country had been conquered and divided into three occupation zones. The Italians controlled the largest part of the territory^[1]. — check Document 1.

A guerrilla war against the occupiers began here in the summer. Units, created by various political parties, participated in it (parties’ abbreviated names are ELAS, EDES, EKKA).

The guerrillas had been successful since the summer of 1942, when they managed to liberate part of the mountainous regions and form local government administrations here. At the end of summer 1943, when Italy surrendered to the Allies and began withdrawing military forces, the area of the liberated territories increased abruptly.

By the summer of 1944, the total number of guerrillas had reached 150,000 people, and the leading role was played by ELAS, created by the Greek communists. But at that time, contradictions arose between the British, who provided assistance to the guerrillas (with weapons, ammunition, and equipment) and the Greek Communist Party. The issue was should Greece again be a monarchy? The conflict culminated in the capture of Athens by ELAS and armed clashes with British forces trying to displace ELAS units from the city in December 1944. The death toll on both sides reached 15,000 people. Only the personal intervention of Winston Churchill was able to resolve this conflict.

Soviet prisoners of war and “ostarbeiters” who escaped from the camps to the guerrillas turned out to be mostly in ELAS units. Almost all of them were taken by British officers from Greece to the USSR (via Turkey and Iran), in order not to worsen relations between the USSR and Great Britain.

Kaluga citizens as the participants of the Resistance Movement in Greece

We present to you the materials about Grigory Ivanovich Sedov (award list) and Andrey Vasilyevich Senin. — check Documents 2-8.

It is curious how fate brought together two natives of the village of Gorodishche (Meshchovsky district), who were of the same age (both were born in 1914). — They served in the Red Army before the war, worked on the same collective farm, were recruited in July 1941, served in different units, were surrounded, but managed to escape and return to their native village in the fall of 1941. In early 1942, they were recruited back into the Red Army, and again they were surrounded and captured. Together they went through war prison camps and ended up in a labour camp in Greece. Only here their paths diverge: having escaped at different times, they ended up in different ELAS units. And they met after the war in their native village.

For their military exploits, both were awarded medals “For the Victory over Germany” only in 1965.

Here is a fragment of Senin's memoirs about escaping from a labour camp:

“[We] worked on the repair of the railway. On August 6, 1943, we were at work. It started raining heavily. It was impossible to work; the guards hid. Grigory Pshenichnikov and I decided to arrange an escape. We walked unnoticed around the corner of the building and headed from the station towards the city. We met two women in medical gowns, probably nurses. They gave us a watermelon. We kept going. We met a Greek. He took us to the barn, brought a knife to cut a watermelon, and then he started running around, looking for someone. We were on our guard.

The Greek brought a hairdresser who spoke Russian well. It was the first time in a long time that we heard Russian: “Hello, guys!”. The old man and the hairdresser turned out to be the couriers of the guerrilla detachment. They offered us to eat. — I lost my appetite from joy. — We were offered to spend the night. We started telling them that we had been seen entering the house, and we might be traced. We found guides.

In the evening, an 18-year-old Greek boy came. He was the secretary of an underground Komsomol cell. He greeted us in his language and patted us on the shoulders, as if to say: you're good, you're fit to become guerrillas.

We agreed on how we’d leave the city. — The hairdresser is in front, Grigory and I are behind at a distance of 20 steps. We went outside the city, came to a dilapidated shed. We waited 20 minutes. Two people came and brought us clothes. After changing the clothes, we went with them to the mountains; the hairdresser returned to the city. Three hours later we came to the hut. One Greek left; the other stayed with us. We spent the night.

The next morning, the Greek left, and the old man came, bringing us bread, grapes, and cheese. We had breakfast. Two more Greeks came. [We] gave the old man our outerwear, and we went in our clothes, which we had been wearing at the camp. In the evening, [we] came to a hut, which was behind a large village. The Greeks set off for the village. Another Greek came and took us to the village. He brought us into the house, and they fed us. We were taken to a poor Greek for the night.

At midnight, the owner woke us up and took us to the mountains. We walked until 3 p.m. We came to the village of Kroras and met the commander Gavriates. We said hello. The commander smiled, pleased. The old man returned home. Gavriates and I went to the village of Mazarenka. The whole detachment was there. We met four Russians in the detachment. We were delighted. We also met Kryuchkov, who escaped from our camp a little before us.”

Yugoslavia

Historical review

The territory of Yugoslavia was occupied in the first half of April 1941 by German, Italian and Hungarian forces. The occupation zones mostly coincided with the borders of the country's regions. Serbia became a pro-Germany puppet government, headed by M. Nedić (Nedich), Slovenia was occupied by the Italians, and formally independent Croatia was subordinated to them. — check Document 9.

The occupation provoked ethnic and interfaith conflicts that lessened in the 1920s — 1930s: for example, Christian Serbs were excluded from Muslim Croatia (according to modern estimates, up to 400,000 people). And the first guerrilla units were created by the Serbs to fight against the Croats.

In fact, on the territory of Yugoslavia, the struggle against the occupiers and the collaborationist detachments immediately took on an armed character. Ethnically homogeneous guerrilla units operated in the regions, and, created by the Communists, the NLAY (National Liberation Army of Yugoslavia) operated throughout the country. — check Document 10.

The enemies of the guerrillas were not only the occupation administration and military units, but also detachments subordinate to the collaborationist governments: the Serbian State Guard (which some Chetniks joined) and the Serbian Volunteer Corps in Serbia, the Ustaše (Ustasha) detachments in Croatia, and the Volunteer Anticommunist Guard in Slovenia.

From the beginning of the occupation up to the middle of 1944, two movements certainly prevailed among the guerrillas (both originated in Serbia): the NLAY under the leadership of Josip Broz Tito and the Ravna Gora Chetniks under the command of Dragoljub Mihailović (Mihailovich) (the latter were originally formed from former soldiers of the Yugoslav army and were in contact with Peter II, the king in exile). The Serbs dominated the NLAY until the beginning of 1945, and only Serbs served in the Chetniks. In the autumn of 1941, both groups were driven by the invaders out of Serbia to the territory of Bosnia, where they remained until the summer of 1944. At the same time, they were in conflict with each other, as they saw the political future of Yugoslavia differently. Additionally, if the NLAY was an irreconcilable enemy of the occupiers, then Mihailović avoided clashes with the Germans, saving his strength to struggle for power in the country at the end of the war. In other words, there was no unified national anti-fascist force in Serbia. The same thing was in other regions of Yugoslavia: the local guerrillas did not form an alliance with the Communists.

The confrontation between various forces in Yugoslavia escalated in September 1943, when the struggle for the previously occupied territories began after the surrender of Italy. NLAY detachments, Mihailović's Chetniks, Croatian Ustaše and German units participated in it, with the Ustaše and Germans acting as allies. However, the Chetniks and NLAY did not manage to escape from Bosnia to Serbia, and in the early summer of 1944 they were rather worn out as a result of the punitive expedition of German occupiers.

At the same time, D. Mihailović entered into negotiations for cooperation with the head of the Serbian government, M. Nedić. Some Chetniks perceived this as a betrayal, and separated, starting to act independently. Units, loyal to Mihailović, now fought more actively against the Communists, but were defeated by the NLAY. As a result, the position of King Peter II changed: due to the betrayal of D. Mihailović, the successes of the NLAY and the approach of units of the advancing Red Army, the king and Great Britain declared their support for J. Tito. In the spring of 1944, the USSR began helping the NLAY: a Soviet military mission was sent, loans were provided, and arms supplies began.

But everything was not simple: a civil war broke out on the territory of Serbia, in which three sides participated: supporters of the occupation regime, the Serbs, who looked up to Great Britain and the United States, and those who supported J. Tito and NLAY.

Kaluga citizens as the participants of the Resistance Movement in Yugoslavia

Mostly, Soviet citizens who escaped from captivity ended up in the NLAY detachments. The camps where they were held happened to be located in the area of operation of the Communist detachments, i.e. on the territory of Serbia.

Two of the five Kaluga citizens, whose biographies are presented, are former prisoners of war (V. Savkin and V. Moroshkin), and three were abducted to work from the occupied territories.

All of them bravely fought alongside the Yugoslav patriots. There are some documents about them.

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Vladimir Alekseevich Ladygin, as part of the 23rd NLAY Strike Brigade, participated in an attack on a German airfield near the city of Niš (Nish). — check Documents 11-13.

And here is a fragment of his memories of how he was abducted by the invaders and worked in labour camps:

«I met September of the dreadful year of 1941 as a 9th grade student in the village of Milyatino, Smolensk region. We spent the whole September gathering the harvest on collective farms, and after studying for 3 days in October, we couldn't go to school on the fourth [day] due to brisk fighting, and the next day we saw the fascists. Even now, it is terrifying to remember those days when hordes of invaders with great insolence, plundering everything around, moved in an endless stream towards the capital of our Homeland…

[At the beginning of 1943] the front line remained near Zaitseva Gora, while [the village of] Milyatino was still temporarily occupied by the Germans. But all violence comes to an end. In March 1943, the Germans abducted all the youth [to the west].

For several months we were forced to work in various jobs, mainly repairing bombed roads, and then we [were] taken to Poland. Somewhere, I guess, not far from Warsaw, to a place called Zilenka. But even there, the Soviet army was at the back of the pack, and we were sent to Yugoslavia, to the town of Niš, and forced to work loading coal onto locomotives at the Tsrveni Krest (Red Cross) station.

The Germans' guard was not as it was to be, the elderly men, [called up for] total mobilization, often looked up at the sky in a fear to see planes. Nevertheless, it was possible to escape to the guerrillas only from work during the air raid, when the so-called warriors were the first to flee to the bomb shelter…»

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            Vasily Yakovlevich Savkin served as a scout. — Let us have a look at excerpts of his memories about the beginning of the war and about his actions in the NLAY brigade. — check Documents 14-16.

            Pyotr Ivanovich Shkadov, despite the fact that he did not serve military service in the Red Army, was an excellent machine gunner. Here's what he recalls about one of the battles in 1944:

«We spent a lot of fighting attacking German columns moving from Greece towards Belgrade (they said that to the “Russian” front). The Germans know no peace, either on the march or at a stop for the night (and at night the Germans were afraid to move around Serbia at all). Everywhere they were ambushed by guerrilla bullets, grenades, and mines.

One day, our troop was assigned the task: together with a group of Yugoslav sappers, we were to mine and blow up a section of the Niš—Belgrade road, along which there was heavy movement of Germans during the day (of course, from south to north, from the landed Allies closer to the Russians). All night [we] marched along the mountain trails. The site [for mining] was excellent: the road was pressed against sheer cliffs on one side, a river flowed on the other side, and then there were sheer cliffs again. The main forces of the troop were located nearby, resting. I (one of the commanders), along with a small detachment of guerrillas, took up a convenient position on the hill, ready at any moment to defend the bombers working on the road below.

In this unforeseen^[2] battle, I had to hold up a column of krauts with a machine gun, [in order to] give the sappers a chance to take cover and handle the German column roughly, and burn 12 enemy vehicles. In this battle, it was only my cap which was pierced by a fragment of an explosive bullet, without affecting the inner side [of it]. We retreated into the mountains, due to the approach of tanks and the Chetniks (Dražins) encircling us. But this fulminant battle cost the Germans dearly: they were forced to dump 12 destroyed vehicles into the river, in order to resume traffic for half a day, and they took at least 200 corpses of the dead with them. The next day, in the same place, the road was undermined so much that it was impossible for cars to move along it until the arrival of the Red Army.»

And here is P. I. Shkadov’s photo and his description. — check Documents 17-18.

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            Alexander Yakovlevich Bulkin and Vyacheslav Ivanovich Moroshkin and their comrades blew up railway bridges. Here's what Bulkin A. recalled:

«We had to fight the first battle with the Germans early in the morning, I don't quite remember the date or month. I remember we stood on the defensive at the top of the mountain. They walked with their sleeves rolled up. We fought off the first attack. After a while, the Germans resumed their attack again and began to press our left flank. And then the leader of the detachment led us into a counterattack. About 70 people were killed on the battlefield: the Germans were not captured at that time. The others retreated.

We were assigned the task to blow up a railway bridge. I was a part of the covering group. When we approached the railway bridge, the guards discovered us [and] started machine-gun fire in our direction. Then the head of the group decided to kill the guards and blow up the bridge. He chose 3 people among the Yugoslavs and told them to blow up the earth fortification. When we lay down behind the mound [of the railway] and started rifle and machine-gun fire on the wood earth fire point, a group sent by the commander, consisting of 3 people, secretly crawled up to the earth fortification and launched grenades. 12 Germans were killed, and the bridge was blown up. Our losses were 5 people and 12 [wounded].»

And Moroshkin V. recalls the combat operations:

«Our unit derailed trains that were carrying food, ammunition, weapons, and uniforms to the Germans. One day, 17,000 Germans marched to the French front for reinforcement^[3]. The entire detachment received an order to ambush and lead the Germans to the place where the main forces of the brigade were. There was a Montenegrin [guerrilla] detachment next to us. Our unit set up an ambush in pine forest. The Germans were moving down the mountain. As they approached, we opened rifle and machine-gun fire on them. The Germans began to surround [us], and we began to retreat, drawing [the enemy's] forces behind us. And when the Germans caught up with the main forces, they opened fire on them with heavy weapons^[4]. A lot of Germans died. It took two days to remove the bodies after the battle.»

The heroes were awarded late, twenty years after the war. — check Documents 19-23.

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After the expulsion of the occupiers from the territory of Yugoslavia, four of the Kaluga citizens, were recruited into the Red Army and ended the war in other countries. Meanwhile, V. Moroshkin remained in Yugoslavia until the summer of 1945, participating in the cleansing operations in the liberated areas against collaborationists.

Some of them received military awards at the end of the war, others were awarded military and commemorative medals within the period of 1965-1971, but Savkin V. was unlucky: documents about his participation in the guerrilla detachment were lost, and he was never awarded.