What is written on Pavlov's house. Pavlov's house, defense organization

Pavlov's House is one of the main attractions of modern Volgograd, a symbol of the perseverance, courage and heroism of the Soviet people shown during the days of the Battle of Stalingrad. This is a 4-story residential building located on Lenin Square (previously - January 9th Square), in which during the Great Patriotic War a group of Soviet soldiers held the defense under the leadership of Senior Sergeant Yakov Fedotovich Pavlov, who took command of the squad after the injury of Senior Lieutenant Ivan Filippovich Afanasyeva.

The history of Pavlov's House in Volgograd dates back to the 30s of the last century, when the House of the Regional Potrebsoyuz (at Penzenskaya Street, 61) was built in pre-war Stalingrad - one of the elite residential buildings, along with the House of NKVD Workers, the House of Signals, and the House of Railway Workers and other buildings for nomenklatura employees. Party workers and specialists from industrial enterprises settled here. Next to the House of the Regional Potrebsoyuz there was its “twin brother” - the Zabolotny House, named after the war after the platoon commander, Lieutenant N. E. Zabolotny, who defended the building. Between these residential buildings there was a railway line leading to the Gerhardt mill.

During the days of the Battle of Stalingrad, the 42nd Guards Rifle Regiment of Colonel I.P. Elin held the defense on the January 9 Square. The commander of the 3rd battalion, Captain A.E. Zhukov, was tasked with conducting an operation to seize two residential buildings. For this purpose, two groups were created under the command of Sergeant Pavlov and Lieutenant Zabolotny, who successfully completed the task assigned to them.

The house, captured by Lieutenant Zabolotny’s fighters, could not withstand the enemy’s onslaught - the advancing German invaders blew up the building along with the Soviet soldiers defending it. Sergeant Pavlov’s group managed to survive, they held out in the House of the Regional Consumer Union for three days, after which reinforcements under the command of Lieutenant Afanasyev arrived to their aid, delivering ammunition and weapons. The building became one of the most important strongholds in the defense system of the 42nd Guards Rifle Regiment and the entire 13th Guards Rifle Division.

According to the recollections of German military leaders, German assault groups managed to break through to the first floor of Pavlov's House several times, but could not capture the entire building. Soviet chronicles contain information that the Germans, who organized attacks several times a day, did not make a single attempt to break into the building - each onslaught was successfully repulsed by Soviet soldiers who fought to the death. All this time, while the House of the Regional Consumer Union held the defense (from September 23 to November 25, 1942), there were civilians in the basement of the building who were not evacuated from Stalingrad.

Both Sergeant Pavlov and Lieutenant Afanasyev were wounded, but survived. Of the 31 defenders who defended Pavlov’s House, only three soldiers died - mortar lieutenant A. N. Chernyshenko, privates I. Ya. Khait (Hait) and I. T. Svirin. At the beginning of this year, only one of the defenders of Pavlov’s House remained alive - PTR shooter Kamolzhon Torgunov, living in the village of Bordimkul (Uzbekistan, Namangan region, Turakurgan district). There is no exact information about German losses.

Pavlov's House is one of the first buildings restored in Stalingrad after the end of the Great Patriotic War. It was with the restoration of this building that the famous Cherkasov movement began in the Soviet Union, when volunteer teams, on the initiative of kindergarten worker M.A. Cherkasova, practically rebuilt objects destroyed during the Second World War. In 1943, 820 such brigades worked in the USSR, a year later there were already 1192, and by May 1945 - 1227.

The feat of the defenders of Pavlov’s House is immortalized on a memorial wall-monument, where the names of the heroes are listed and the inscription is engraved: “In this house, the feat of arms and labor merged together.”

Photos and videos of Pavlov's House are presented in our photo gallery:

Current address of Pavlov's House: Volgograd, Sovetskaya street, 39.

The legendary house of Sergeant Pavlov (House of Soldier's Glory) in the hero city of Volgograd, which in the Battle of Stalingrad became a real impregnable citadel for the Nazis thanks to the courage and fortitude of its defenders. A historical monument of national significance and an object of cultural heritage of Russia.

An ordinary four-story residential building in the center is associated with a heroic page in the history of the city - the legendary battle for Stalingrad, which became a turning point in the Great Patriotic War and the Second World War.

In pre-war peacetime in Stalingrad (present-day Volgograd) on January 9 Square (now Lenin Square) there were residential buildings for the so-called elite - railway workers, signalmen, and NKVD workers. Near the square, in a four-story house No. 61 with 4 entrances on Penzenskaya Street, lived specialists from the city’s tractor, metallurgical and machine-building plants, as well as employees of the city committee of the CPSU. This house and its twin - the house, which later received the name of Lieutenant N. Zabolotny who defended it, due to the fact that a railway line passed right by them to the Volga, were destined to play an important role during the Battle of Stalingrad.

The story of one feat

Fierce fighting in July-November 1942 took place not only in the suburbs of Stalingrad, but also in the city itself. For the possession of residential areas and factory areas, the Nazis threw more and more human reserves and armored vehicles into mortal combat.

At the beginning of September 1942, during the period of the heaviest street fighting, the area of ​​January 9 Square was defended by the 42nd Regiment as part of the 13th Guards Rifle Division of the 62nd Army, commanded by Colonel I.P. Elin. Fights took place for every piece of land, for every building, for every entrance, basement, apartment. The troops of Field Marshal Paulus, supported by fire from the air, paved their way to the Volga, sweeping away all obstacles along the way. The buildings in the square square were already destroyed, only two residential buildings and one survived. These buildings turned out to be strategically important objects not only for defense, but also for monitoring the surrounding territory - one kilometer in the western, and two kilometers in the northern and southern directions. By order of Colonel I.P. Elin, who correctly assessed the strategic importance of the buildings, the commander of the 3rd Infantry Battalion, Captain V.A. Zhukov, organized two mobile groups under the command of Sergeant Ya. Pavlov and Lieutenant N. Zabolotny to seize residential buildings. The first group - Sergeant Yakov Pavlov and three soldiers on September 22, 1942, managed to knock out the enemy and gain a foothold in one of the houses. A platoon under the command of Nikolai Zabolotny occupied the house opposite, and the regimental command post was located in the mill building. The guardsmen of N. Zabolotny's platoon courageously held the defense of the captured house, but soon the Nazis managed to blow up the building, under the rubble of which all its defenders, along with the commander, died.

And in the basement of the first house liberated from the Nazis, fighters from Sergeant Yakov Pavlov’s group found civilians - about thirty women, children and old people. These people were in the basement of the house with the soldiers until the liberation of the city, helping the soldiers in defending the house.

Having sent a report to the command post about the successful operation to capture the house and requesting reinforcements, over the next two days four brave soldiers fought off the fierce attacks of the Wehrmacht units rushing to the Volga. On the third day of defense, the defenders received reinforcements - a machine-gun platoon from the third machine-gun company under the command of Guard Lieutenant I.F. Afanasyev (seven people with a heavy machine gun), six armor-piercing men with three anti-tank rifles led by senior sergeant A.A. Sobgaida, three machine gunners and four mortar men with two 50 mm mortars under the command of Lieutenant A. N. Chernyshenko. The number of defenders of the house increased to 24 people of different nationalities, among whom, along with the Russians, Ukrainians, Armenians, Georgians, Tatars, Jews, Kazakhs, Uzbeks, and Tajiks held the defense. Sergeant Yakov Pavlov, wounded in the first days of defense, handed over command of the guard garrison to Lieutenant I. Afanasyev.

For a more effective defense, sappers mined all approaches to the building, along a dug trench from the Pavlov House, which appears under that name in operational reports and reports of the regiment headquarters, to the Gerhardt mill, signalmen extended radio communications, and the call sign of the heroic detachment of defenders of the house “Mayak” for as long as 58 days and nights (from September 23 to November 25, 1942) connected the defenders of the building with the headquarters of the 42nd Guards Rifle Regiment.

Shelling and attacks by Wehrmacht units on Pavlov's House were repeated every hour, regardless of the time of day, but this did not break the spirit of the soldiers. During each offensive, the Nazis littered the approaches to the house with the bodies of their soldiers, struck down by heavy mortar, machine gun and machine gun fire, which the defenders fired from the basement, windows and roof of the impregnable building. The ferocity with which the enemy troops tried to take possession of Pavlov's House was shattered by the courage and heroism of the soldiers who defended it. Therefore, on maps of Wehrmacht military operations, Pavlov's House was marked as a fortress. Surprisingly, during the entire defense of the strategically and tactically important section of the approach to the Volga, which became an ordinary residential building on Penzenskaya Street on the way of the Nazis, only three of its defenders died - Lieutenant A. N. Chernyshenko, Guard Sergeant I. Ya. Khait and Private I. T. Svirin. Their names, like the names of all the fighters of the House of Pavlov, are inscribed in the history of the heroic feat of the unconquered city on the Volga.

As a result of one of the shellings, a shell explosion destroyed one of the walls of the building, but even in this seemingly unpleasant fact, the fighters were able to find a positive side, joking that now the ventilation in the house had become much better. And in rare moments of silence, the guards wondered whether they would restore the building after the war, because no one doubted that the war would end in victory.

Restoration of Pavlov's House

Perhaps there is something mystical in the fact that the first building, the restoration of which was undertaken almost immediately after the liberation of Stalingrad, was the House of Sergeant Pavlov, also called the House of Soldiers' Glory. Thanks to the initiative of Stalingrad resident A.M. Cherkasova, who in June 1943 organized a brigade of female volunteers to clear the rubble, repair and restore city buildings, this movement, soon called Cherkasovsky, swept the entire country: in all cities liberated from the Nazis there were numerous volunteer brigades in In their free time from work, they restored destroyed buildings, put streets, squares and parks in order. And after the war, A. M. Cherkasova’s team continued to restore their hometown in their free time, devoting a total of more than 20 million hours to this noble cause.

After the war, the square near which Pavlov’s House was located was renamed Defense Square, new houses appeared on it, with which, according to the design of the architect I. E. Fialko, the heroic house was combined with a semicircular colonnade. And the end wall facing Defense Square (renamed Lenin Square in 1960) was decorated with a memorial by sculptors A.V. Golovanov and P.L. Malkov. Its opening took place in February 1965 and was timed to coincide with the 20th anniversary of the liberation of Volgograd from the fascist invaders.

The newly rebuilt Pavlov's House became a symbol not only of the heroic feat of its defenders, but also of the feat of ordinary people who, on their own, restored Stalingrad from the ruins. The memory of this was immortalized by the architect V. E. Maslyaev and the sculptor V. G. Fetisov, who created at the end of the building from the street. Soviet memorial wall-monument with the inscription: “In this house, military feat and labor feat merged together.” The grand opening of the memorial took place on the eve of the 40th anniversary of the Great Victory - May 4, 1985.

The relief memorial wall made of red brick depicts a collective image of a warrior-defender, one of the moments of the defense of the building and a tablet with text that immortalizes the names of courageous and fearless warriors who did the impossible - at the cost of incredible efforts, stopping enemy troops on the very outskirts of the Volga.

The text on the sign reads: “This house at the end of September 1942 was occupied by Sergeant Ya. F. Pavlov and his comrades A. P. Aleksandrov, V. S. Glushchenko, N. Ya. Chernogolov. During September-November 1942, the house heroically defended by the soldiers of the 3rd battalion of the 42nd Guards Rifle Regiment of the 13th Guards Order of Lenin Division: Aleksandrov A.P., Afanasyev I.F., Bondarenko M.S., Voronov I.V., Glushchenko V.S. , Gridin T. I., Dovzhenko P. I., Ivashchenko A. I., Kiselev V. M., Mosiashvili N. G., Murzaev T., Pavlov Ya. F., Ramazanov F. Z., Saraev V. K., Svirin I. T., Sobgaida A. A., Torgunov K., Turdyev M., Khait I. Ya., Chernogolov N. Ya., Chernyshenko A. N., Shapovalov A. E., Yakimenko G. AND."

The Battle of Stalingrad, which radically changed the course of the Great Patriotic War and marked the beginning of the collapse of the Third Reich, became the millstone of the giant mill for the selected forces of the Wehrmacht. The legendary garrison of Pavlov's House also made its contribution to the liberation of the city from enemy invaders, the memory of whose feat is forever inscribed in the Book of Memory of the Hero City of Volgograd.

The Myth of Sergeant Pavlov's House

The main myth of the famous House of Sergeant Pavlov in Stalingrad is the assertion that during the defensive period of fighting in the city it was defended by a detachment of Soviet soldiers under the command of Sergeant Yakov Fedotovich Pavlov.

Sergeant Pavlov's house is a four-story building of the regional consumer union in the center of Stalingrad on the January 9 Square (then address: Penzenskaya street, 61). It became a symbol of the perseverance and heroism of the Red Army soldiers during the Battle of Stalingrad. At the end of September 1942, a reconnaissance group of four soldiers led by Sergeant Yakov Pavlov from the 42nd Guards Rifle Regiment of the 13th Guards Division of General Alexander Ilyich Rodimtsev occupied this house. There were no Germans there at that moment, although Pavlov himself later claimed the opposite in his memoirs. Since Pavlov’s group was the first to enter this building, later on maps it began to be designated as “Pavlov’s house.” A day later, a machine-gun platoon of senior lieutenant Ivan Filippovich Afanasyev was deployed to reinforce the defenders of the house, who took command. The number of defenders of the house increased to 24. Since those killed and wounded during the siege were replaced by new Red Army soldiers, a total of 29 soldiers defended “Pavlov’s house”. Of these, three died during the defense - mortar lieutenant A. N. Chernyshenko, privates I. Ya. Khait and I. T. Svirin. In addition, there was always one nurse and two orderlies from local residents in the house. Afanasiev also mentions in his memoirs two “cowards who were planning to desert,” who were apparently shot. All the time, a young mother with her newborn daughter also remained in the house, taking refuge there from the bombing. The defenders of Pavlov’s House repelled German attacks and held the building, from which the approaches to the Volga were clearly visible. Pavlov recalled: “There wasn’t a day when the Nazis left our house alone. Our garrison, which did not allow them to take a step further, was worse than an eyesore for them. Day by day they intensified the shelling, apparently deciding to incinerate the house. Once the German artillery fired for a whole day without a break.” In front of the house there was a cemented gas storage facility, to which an underground passage was dug. Another convenient position was located behind the house, about thirty meters away, where there was a hatch for the water supply tunnel, into which an underground passage was also dug. When the shelling began, the fighters immediately went to shelter. This circumstance explains the relatively small losses suffered by the defenders of the house. The Germans preferred to shell “Pavlov’s house” rather than attack it, realizing that this building would be difficult to take by storm. On November 26, after the encirclement of the 6th German Army in Stalingrad, Pavlov was seriously wounded in the leg during an attack on a house occupied by the Germans, and he was evacuated to the hospital. Later he fought as a gunner and commander of a reconnaissance squad in artillery units. On June 17, 1945, he was awarded the title of Hero of the Soviet Union. And soon Sergeant Pavlov was awarded the rank of junior lieutenant, in which he retired to the reserve in 1946. After the war, Pavlov visited Stalingrad and signed the wall of the restored house. It also preserves an inscription made by one of the Red Army soldiers during the battles: “This house was defended by Guard Sergeant Yakov Fedotovich Pavlov.” The figure of Pavlov, canonized by Soviet propaganda during the war (an essay about “Pavlov’s house” appeared in Pravda at that time), overshadowed the figure of the one who really commanded the garrison of the legendary house - Lieutenant Afanasyev. Ivan Filippovich survived the war, but never received the title of Hero of the Soviet Union. In 1951, Pavlov published his memoirs “In Stalingrad,” where there is not a word about Afanasyev. Guard captain Afanasyev was seriously shell-shocked in the last days of the defense of “Pavlov’s house”, and after the war he became almost completely blind and in 1951 was forced to resign from the army. In 1970, he also released his memoirs, “House of Soldier's Glory.” In 1958, Afanasyev settled in Stalingrad, and in the early 1970s, thanks to a successful operation, his sight was restored. Afanasyev died in Stalingrad in 1975 at the age of 59 - wounds and concussions took their toll. Pavlov was elected three times as a deputy of the Supreme Soviet of the RSFSR from the Novgorod region, and graduated from the Higher Party School. In 1980 he was awarded the title of honorary citizen of Volgograd. Yakov Fedotovich Pavlov died in Novgorod on September 28, 1981, three weeks short of his 64th birthday. Old wounds also affected. Nowadays in Veliky Novgorod, in the boarding school named after Ya. F. Pavlov, there is a Pavlov Museum for orphans. The history of the “house of Pavlov” was reflected in Vasily Grossman’s novel “Life and Fate,” where Lieutenant Berezkin, whose prototype was Ivan Afanasyev, is shown as the head of the garrison. In 1965, a memorial wall was opened next to Pavlov’s house. The modern address of the famous house: st. Sovetskaya, 39. And two houses away from it, a memorial plaque was unveiled on the house in which Ivan Afanasyev lived and died. The fact that Sergeant Pavlov was chosen for the role of the hero, and not Lieutenant Afanasyev, was explained not only by the accidental circumstance that on the maps the famous house was designated as “Pavlov’s house” - after the name of the unit commander who was the first to enter it. An even more important role was played by the fact that propaganda needed a hero from among the soldiers who defended Stalingrad, so the candidacy of Sergeant Pavlov was preferable to that of Lieutenant Afanasyev.

In his memoirs, General Rodimtsev directly calls Lieutenant Afanasyev the former chief of the garrison of “Pavlov’s house,” who turned “thanks to his energy and courage, this house into an indestructible fortress,” and describes his difficult fate: “For twelve whole years there was darkness all around him. The head of the Department of Eye Diseases at the Volgograd Medical Institute, Professor Alexander Mikhailovich Vodovozov, became interested in the fate of the hero of Stalingrad and decided to perform eye surgery on him. The operation took place without anesthesia; the patient himself was an assistant to the professor.

Overcoming the pain, from which it seemed that his mind was about to fade, Afanasyev answered the professor’s questions during the operation, when syringe needles, the tip of a scalpel and other surgical instruments invaded the eyes.

Only a warrior seasoned in severe trials could endure this.

In the memory of Ivan Filippovich, Stalingrad remained a city of ruins. When the scientist restored his sight, Afanasyev saw another city, revived to life from the dust and ashes into which it had been turned by the Nazis...” Maybe it’s worth posthumously awarding Ivan Filippovich Afanasyev the title of Hero of Russia?