Nikita Karatsupa was born on April 25, 1910 in the village of Alekseevka of the Tauride province (now the territory of the Zaporizhzhya region of Ukraine) into a simple peasant family. Shortly after the birth of Nikita, his father died, and his mother moved to Kazakhstan with her two sons and daughter. But when Nikita was only six years old, she was gone. The boy was left an orphan.

From farm laborers to border guards

“The childhood of the future hero was not easy. In order to have at least a piece of bread, he went to farm - graze cattle. Already at this age, the guy showed a love for animals and the ability to find a common language with them. He himself perfectly trained the dog, making it an assistant in protecting the flocks of sheep from wolves, ”said Alexander Mikhailov, specialist historian of the Victory Museum, told RT.

After the Civil War, Karatsupa moved to Siberia, got a job on the collective farm. Once in the village in which he lived, a border guard who served in Karelia came to visit. From him, the future Hero of the Soviet Union learned about border protection and official dog breeding. When in 1932 Nikita Karatsupu was called up to the military registration and enlistment office, he himself asked to serve in the border guard. At first they didn’t want to send him to the border guards because of their low growth, but the young man joked that it would be more difficult for violators to notice him, and he got the desired direction.

Karatsup began his service in the Far East, which in those years was one of the most troubled sections of the Soviet border. Only in 1930-1931 there were detained about 15 thousand violators. The guy who didn’t spoil his life liked the service. In his autobiographical works, he later writes that the comrades became brothers for him, and the head of the outpost - "like his own father."

After serving at the border for several months, Nikita Karatsupa was sent to study at the Far Eastern District School of the junior command staff of official dog breeding. Due to the fact that Karatsupa started classes later than his classmates, he did not have a service dog. But he himself began to raise a thoroughbred puppy found under the bridge.

Having learned about the cadet’s amateur activities, the school head was angry at first, but then he allowed Karatsupa to continue classes and even put the puppy on official contentment. He was given the nickname Hindu. Later, when the USSR became close to India, for reasons of political correctness, the name of the dog was replaced with the neutral “Ingus” in all the biographies of the hero.

According to Alexander Mikhailov, Karatsup showed impressive ability to recognize traces.

“He began to develop his own system both in training service dogs, and in working with traces of violators. At first he did this at school, and then - in practice. He learned to recognize a lot of smells and accurately determine who crossed the border with cargo or light, and also showed excellent results in long-distance running and in hand-to-hand fighting, ”the expert emphasized.

An example to follow

According to the calculations of Karatsupa himself, already in the three years of service on the Far Eastern border, he spent more than 5 thousand hours in outfits and went about 16 thousand kilometers pursuing the enemy. During this time, he detained 131 offenders and seized a significant amount of smuggled goods, opium and alcohol.

“Karatsupa’s observation turned him into a thunderstorm of border violators,” Mikhailov said.

Once the border guard drew attention to several people who awkwardly fished in the zone of responsibility of the outpost. When Karatsupa spoke to them, the men tried to impersonate the residents of a nearby village. But the border guard knew all its inhabitants by sight, so strangers were detained. During the search in the backpacks of the "fishermen" was discovered a load of explosives.

Sometimes, in order to detain the violators, before reinforcements arrived from the outpost of Karatsup, giving commands, imitated the presence in the forest of a whole detachment of border guards, although apart from the Hindu, there was often no one near him.

Karatsupa became a celebrity at the border, but the materials of the special correspondent of Komsomolskaya Pravda Yevgeny Ryabchikov brought him all-Union fame. The journalist arrived in the Far East to describe the service of Soviet border guards. The command issued a rifle to the special corps and allowed to personally accompany in the outfits the tracker Karatsupu, who was awarded the Order of the Red Star. At first, the border guard reacted coolly to the command undertaking, but then he became a mentor for the journalist, “sensibly and simply,” explaining what he considered necessary and useful.

The Komsomolskaya Pravda special correspondent, in particular, was present at the detention by border guards of violators who tried to confuse the pursuers by attaching horseshoes to their shoes.

“I saw how Nikita Karatsupa walked for tens of kilometers, shot at a gallop, silently kept a secret. And everything that he did, he did in silence, calmly, confidently, and so simply and modestly, as if there was neither risk nor mortal danger, ”Ryabchikov wrote in his essay.

  • Nikita Karatsupa
  • © Museum of the Border Administration of the FSB of Russia in the Primorsky Territory

According to him, Karatsup performed all his exploits, having at his disposal only a horse, a dog, a Mauser and a rifle.

“Neither helicopters, nor all-terrain vehicles, nor extensively branched communications, nor radio equipment, nor night vision devices, nor locators — there was nothing from the complex of the latest technical equipment attached to the border guards,” the journalist emphasized in the post-war period, talking about the skill of Karatsupa.

Articles in Komsomolskaya Pravda made the border guard a celebrity. “In Karatsupu” children began to play in the courtyards of houses throughout the Soviet Union; it served as an example for young Red Army soldiers.

“The stories about the exploits of the legendary Nikita Karatsupa with his Ingus, who detained about 400 border violators, also reached us. Could this have passed by the young guy’s consciousness and feelings? ”, Colonel Oleg Ivanovsky, a military counterintelligence officer and lead designer of the first Vostok spacecraft, who came to serve in the border troops in 1940, shared his memories in the book“ Notes by a Smersha Officer ”.

Karatsupa himself has always sought to improve his professional skills. In 1937, he attended training courses for senior officers at the Central School for Service Dog Breeding of the NKVD Border and Internal Guards. And in September of the same year he continued to serve in the command posts of the Grodekov border detachment.

During one of the operations on the border, Nikita Karatsupa lost his friend Hindu in battle. Subsequently, he had four more shepherd dogs bearing the same name, and all of them died in battles with violators.

The legend of the border troops

In 1944, Nikita Karatsup was transferred to the service in the Belarusian Border District and took a direct part in the fight against Nazi spies and Hitler collaborators.

“There is no detailed information about this period of Karatsupa’s service in the published sources. It is possible that the data on the operations in which he took part will still be declassified in the future, ”said Alexander Mikhailov.

Since 1952, Karatsupa served in the headquarters of the Transcaucasian Border District, and since 1957 - in the Main Directorate of the Border Troops of the KGB of the USSR. In the same year, he was sent on a special trip to Vietnam, where he helped debug the work of the country's border service.

  • Hero of the Soviet Union Nikita Karatsup
  • RIA News
  • © Peter Bernstein

In 1961, Colonel Nikita Karatsupa left the reserve. According to official figures, during his service, he personally detained 338 violators of the USSR state border, and also eliminated 129 spies and saboteurs.

Colonel Karatsup was awarded the Order of Lenin, two Orders of the Red Banner, the Order of the Red Star and medals, and in 1965 he was awarded the title Hero of the Soviet Union.

After entering the reserve, he worked at the Pulsar Research Institute and at the Central Museum of the Border Troops, conducted active public and literary activities, wrote books about his service at the border.

Nikita Karatsup died on November 18, 1994. In memory of him, streets were named and monuments were installed in various cities of the former Soviet Union. Border outposts in Russia, India and Vietnam bear his name.

“Unfortunately, after the death of the Hero of the Soviet Union Karatsupa, his figure became the object of meanness on the part of historical falsifiers. On the Internet these days, the widespread lie that the famous border guard allegedly detained only Soviet citizens fleeing abroad. This, of course, has nothing to do with reality. Karatsupa was wounded and caught well-trained saboteurs. But there is nothing sacred for counterfeiters. They are trying to turn our story inside out, ”said a full member of the Academy of Military Sciences, reserve colonel Andrei Koshkin in an interview with RT.

  • Monument to Nikita Karatsupe
  • © Wikimedia Commons

According to the expert, he himself in childhood was read by the life story of Nikita Karatsupa, and this greatly influenced his intention to connect fate with the defense of the homeland.

“The life of Karatsupa inspired many young people to serve in the border troops; he himself trained thousands of border guards and dog handlers. His experience in the field of official dog breeding at the border is still used. He is a true legend of the border troops, ”summed up Alexander Mikhailov.