Undermining Khreshchatyk: how the Red Army arranged a "fiery meeting" for the Nazis in Kiev

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The fiery "meeting" that the German-fascist invaders received literally on the fifth day after they entered the capital of Soviet Ukraine - Kiev - remains the subject of the most heated debates and discussions to this day. Someone considers it a brilliant sabotage operation of the NKVD and the Red Army, someone stubbornly continues to repeat about "one of the barbaric crimes of the communist regime" ...

Until now, there is no complete clarity either with the performers of this action, or with an accurate assessment of its effectiveness. In recent years, with the coming to power in Ukraine of nationalist forces, any serious research on this topic has become completely impossible, because these events have received an absolutely unambiguous interpretation in the form of "atrocities of damned Muscovites." Nevertheless, we will still try to find answers to some questions regarding those events.



Can't be given to the enemy ...


As a matter of fact, the main accusation against the leadership of the Soviet special services and the army regarding those events is the reproach for "the use of scorched earth tactics on their own territory." Like, "nowhere in the world has this happened." In all the countries of "enlightened Europe" Hitler's warriors could be completely calm for their own security - no one in the occupied territories blew anything up, set fire to and generally preferred not to bully the occupiers, fearing that they would foil evil on the civilian population. Holy truth! Well, almost ... Yes, it is impossible to deny the completely obvious fact that Europe did not fight the Third Reich at all, but, showing miracles of reduced social responsibility, fell back in front of him and wagged her tail in greeting. Countries that surrendered in a matter of days, or even hours of "battles"! "Proud" France, for the capture of the capital of which the Wehrmacht did not pay with a single life, and what is there - not a single shot cartridge ...

Czechoslovakia, which generously replenished the arsenals of the Nazis with tanks, artillery, small arms and diligently supplied them with weapons and ammunition until the end of the war ... There are many examples, but I would just recommend finding some good collections of photographs about life in the European capitals "occupied" by Germany - Paris, for example. Fortunately, there are at least a dime a dozen of them on the Internet. A solid idyll and, as they say today, a complete consensus with tolerance. But how could someone there encroach upon the "Aryans"? What if they get angry ?! It is clear that against the background of such splendor, the position of the USSR leadership regarding the fact that the enemy invading our land should not get a trolley of coal or ore, not a spike of grain, not a single whole enterprise, that the invaders should burn the ground under their feet, look uniform brutality.

Already on July 3, 1941, speaking on the All-Union radio with a famous address to all citizens of the USSR, Stalin said that in the regions seized by the enemy, "all valuable property that cannot be taken out must be absolutely destroyed," and for the occupiers, intolerable conditions "," to pursue and destroy them at every step. " That is how everything was done - except for those cases when the offensive of the Nazis was so rapid that no one simply had time to organize either evacuation or destruction. Alas, the invaders used the colossal reserves of not only fuel and food, but also weapons, ammunition, which they had inherited in their favor. equipment RKKA. Such a practice was completely unacceptable - in fact, any resources in the hands of the occupiers ensured their further advance into the interior of the country. Today, the domestic liberal public in its blasphemy reaches the point that it tries to assert: "Most of the losses among the civilian population during the German occupation are associated with this order, and not with the atrocities of the Germans." According to some of them, "the" scorched earth "strategy pursued by the Stalinists during their retreat in 1941-1942 should be categorically assessed as genocide of their own people." What can you say ?! “They would have fought worse, they would have drank Bavarian ...” In my opinion, for such “revelations” it is high time to introduce full-fledged liability - yes, not fines, but criminal. And, by the way, the leaders, foaming at the mouth, trying to prove that the "civilized countries" fought exclusively in white gloves, adhering to the positions of "high humanism" and sacredly observing the value of each life of their citizens and allies, are lashing like gray geldings.

Let's take the same British as an example. The historical fact that Sir Winston Churchill was well aware of the impending bombing of Coventry, but he did not do anything to save the inhabitants of the city, so as not to "light up" the decrypted codes of the Nazi encryption machine Enigma "are now persistently trying to refute. But what, tell me, what about the testimony of the same Frederick Winterbotham, who was in charge of the entire system of secrecy and security of the Ultra project, who was engaged in "reading" Nazi encrypted messages? He absolutely unambiguously states: Churchill knew! But strategic interests outweighed thousands of civilian lives. This is a war ... And the very same British in the course of Operation Dynamo simply covered themselves with Belgian and French soldiers, organizing the evacuation of their own troops, about the beginning of which the "allies" were not even informed - so they would not get confused under their feet. When the French, who were brutalized by such a scum, tried to break into the ships sailing from Dunkirk, the British met them with bayonets! In the end, it was thanks to this betrayal of the British that 40 thousand French troops were captured by the Nazis. These are just a couple of examples - believe me, there are many more. However, we digress from the topic. Few people know, but the tactics of leaving the enemy "scorched earth" when retreating and as densely mining everything that is possible (especially buildings suitable for placing enemy personnel), the Red Army borrowed from another "civilized Europeans" - the Finns ... It was they who used it during the "Winter War" of 1940, and our military leaders, having appreciated it, took note of it and adopted it. Wasn't it necessary?

"Sleeping" mines


However, it would be fundamentally wrong to believe that the military and intelligence officers of the Soviet Union came to such a thing as mining of important objects and potential locations of the enemy's deployment (especially his command structures) with someone else's mind, not their own. Work on the creation of radio-controlled landmines, which can be activated on the territory occupied by the enemy from a considerable distance, began in our country back in the 20s with the blessing of not even Stalin, but Lenin. They were carried out by employees of the Special Technical Bureau for Special-Purpose Military Inventions, led by two remarkable scientists - Vladimir Bekauri and Vladimir Mitkevich. It is because of this that the first "line" of such ammunition was called "BEMI". And by the mid-30s, tactical landmines (FTD) had already entered service with the Red Army, the most famous of which was the F-10. Known, of course, only in the narrowest circles, since both the development and use of such weapons were a matter of "special secrecy."

This device made it possible to create a "bookmark" containing from several tens to several hundred kilograms of TNT, capable of smashing almost any structure or structure to smithereens. It could be brought into action from a distance of up to half a thousand kilometers, or even more. The first "greetings" of this kind of Fritzes were received literally 22 days after the beginning of the Great Patriotic War - the invaders, conveniently settled in the town of Strugi Krasnye in the Pskov region, were blown up in the air as a result of an explosion of three mines, a quarter of a ton of TNT each. They tore them from a radio station, which was one and a half hundred kilometers away. Soon the same "surprise" awaited the German allies - the Finns, who entered Vyborg. An even more powerful blow was inflicted on them - 17 charges were blown up, having a capacity of one and a half kilograms to 4 and a half tons!

By the time the occupation of Kiev began, radio-controlled explosive devices were no longer a secret for the Germans. Moreover, according to available information, the Nazis managed to capture a group of Soviet sappers who were mining the city. In particular, Lieutenant Boris Levchenko, who commanded a special mining platoon and allegedly had a detailed plan for the location of the charges laid in Kiev. According to the German reports, the lieutenant was not a hero and quickly enough passed all the information available to him. Moreover, he volunteered to personally take part in demining, a large-scale operation on which was launched by the invaders on September 22. In many ways, it really turned out to be successful - they managed to defuse a number of F-10 landmines and remove several tons of explosives from the bookmarks. Nevertheless, its role was obviously played by the fact that not only servicemen of various subdivisions and structures of the Red Army were involved in the execution of the combat mission of preparing the invaders for a "warm welcome" - specialists from the Main Military Engineering Directorate, sappers of the 37th Army, a group, acting under the leadership of the head of the operational-engineering group of the South-Western Front Ilya Starinov, but also the employees of the NKVD. And Lavrenty Pavlovich's subordinates did not share their best practices and plans with the army team. There is every reason to believe that one of the main roles in the events of September 24 was played by the underground group of Ivan Kudri (“Maxima”), which was acting precisely along the lines of the NKVD. In any case, even if all the landmines planted in the center of the Ukrainian capital were remotely detonated, then there was someone who managed to spoil the water supply system and cut the fire hoses to shreds to prevent the Germans from coping with the raging flames.

According to eyewitnesses, the effect of the explosions, the first of which thundered at about 14 pm, blowing up the building located at the corner of Khreshchatyk and the Proriznaya house, where the Germans had located the headquarters of the 454th security division, was terrifying. Moreover, the devices laid in other buildings - the former Spartak hotel, in which the military commandant's office was located, and other places - began to work one after another. The flames in turn engulfed buildings, flaring like matches thanks to the wooden beams and the stocks of kerosene and coal stored in basements and kitchens. The fire very quickly engulfed almost the entire Khreshchatyk and began to spread to the adjacent streets. It was almost impossible to fight him. Fires and explosions continued, according to various sources, either until the 28th, or until September 29th, turning the center of Kiev into heaps of smoking ruins. By the way, undermining the German headquarters and other administrative bodies located on Khreshchatyk was not the first successful action of Soviet sappers in the city. Four days earlier, with the help of a radio-controlled device, they also managed to destroy the observation deck of the Kiev-Pechersk Lavra, on which at that moment there was practically all the personnel of the artillery department of the 28th corps of the Wehrmacht, headed by their commander Baron Hans-Heinrich von Seydlitz -und Golau. The Fuehrer, who was personally informed about his death, was very saddened. Under the ruins of Khreshchatyk, at least 300 invaders found their deaths, although the German command in their reports called smaller numbers, clearly underestimating the losses inevitable with such a large-scale sabotage. Civilians? Of course, there were victims and among them ... Someone died, someone was left homeless. Well - it was not just a war, but a confrontation in which it was decided - to be or not to be for all our people. Five days after the explosion, the Nazis launched an operation to exterminate Jews and other Soviet citizens at Babi Yar. At least 150 thousand people died there. Such was the scale ...

Undermining Khreshchatyk: how the Red Army arranged a "fiery meeting" for the Nazis in Kiev

For a long time, the true "authorship" of the explosions on Khreshchatyk was hidden in the most careful way. Soviet official historiography and propaganda, with their inherent blockhead obstinacy, continued to repeat for decades that the invaders had done it. This, in turn, led to the fact that subsequently our sappers began to ascribe the explosion of the Assumption Cathedral of the Kiev-Pechersk Lavra, which happened much later - on November 3, 1941 and, without a doubt, was just committed by the Nazis. The "logic" in this case was simple - "since the Bolsheviks rushed to Khreshchatyk and did not confess, then the Cathedral of the Dormition is also their handiwork!" No matter how much the present nationally concerned Kiev "historians" would like this, the facts in this case are against them. The explosion of the cathedral was captured on film by the Nazis in the most thorough and detailed way - this is impossible with a sudden sabotage. Long before November 3, they also evicted all the inhabitants of the Upper Lavra and the surrounding houses, and from the church, which was preparing for destruction, the invaders took out everything that seemed valuable to them. In addition, subsequently, the intentions to destroy not even one cathedral, but the entire Lavra, which the Reichskommissar of occupied Ukraine Erich Koch had, was announced by none other than the Minister of Armaments of the Third Reich, Albert Speer. I do not see any reason not to believe him in this matter. Well, and finally, the last - the rechargeable battery, which ensured the detonation of the F-10 land mine in activation mode, could function for no more than 40 days. If we consider that our troops left Kiev on September 19 (and the underground workers could not have penetrated the territory of the Lavra if they wanted to), it does not work out purely technically. All the explosions carried out in the city with the help of radio-controlled mines occurred much earlier.


Modern Ukrainian propaganda, of course, is trying to present the events of September 24 as one of the proofs of "the eternal striving of the Moscow invaders to destroy the hated Kiev." Nonsense, of course - in the same 1941, exactly the same work on laying explosives was carried out by the forces of the NKVD and in Moscow itself. If the Nazis had burst into it, they would have expected the same meeting there as in Kiev. Another question is that the occupier did not set foot on the streets of Belokamennaya. And after the war Khreshchatyk was rebuilt more beautifully than before - in the magnificent style of the "Stalinist Empire". It was the captured Germans who were noted with might and main during its restoration. The architectural appearance of both the center and the entire Ukrainian capital was irreparably degraded already in the years of "nezalezhnost". However, this is a completely different topic.
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  1. +3
    26 September 2020 21: 14
    Modern Ukrainian propaganda

    But our propaganda is not very different from the Ukrainian one. What films do the military make? You can't grow patriots on such films! What patriotism can the Unified State Exam and the modern school in general give? Lessons in labor and military training are almost never held. They play on the phone during these lessons. A good lesson in patriotism now would be to return Stalingrad to its name. But.....
    The history of our country is full of the exploits of our peoples. Books, films, write and shoot. Excellent article in a school textbook!
  2. -3
    26 September 2020 22: 29
    The Germans argued that more Soviet citizens died during these events. I am somehow not unambiguous about such events. On the one hand, the ground should burn under the feet of the occupiers, and from this point of view, the Soviet command did the right thing. On the other hand, it was initially clear that there would be numerous casualties among Soviet citizens, and the main task of the Soviet command was to protect these citizens, and from this point of view, the Soviet command did the wrong thing. Or the order of November 17, 1941 No. 428 on the burning of settlements in the rear of the enemy. On the one hand, the goal is to complicate the position of the German troops, on the other hand, Soviet citizens lived in these settlements, and this order not only deprived them of their property, but in many cases also the life itself, since it was ordered to destroy settlements with the help of aviation and artillery.
    War is evil and it is a terrible choice that the commanders and leaders of the country have been faced with.