"Were ready to die for our country": how the Minsk underground fighters fought the Nazis

After the attack of fascist Germany on the Soviet Union, the events in Belarus developed rapidly - on the seventh day after the start of the war the German troops entered Minsk. But by that time, the communist underground had already formed in the Belarusian capital, headed by the former secretary of the Zaslavsky District Party Committee, Ivan Kovalev.

“The process of creating an underground in the occupied territories was not spontaneous. Great efforts were made by the NKVD and the GRU to create groups. But without the mass support of the people, the professionals recruited by the head of foreign intelligence Sudoplatov among former champion boxers could not do anything. Ordinary civilians and, first of all, members of the party and the Komsomol went to the underground, ”said historian and writer Alexander Kolpakidi in an interview with RT.

• Ivan Kovalev
• © SI “National Press Center of the Republic of Belarus”

In July, the creation of the first groups began in Minsk to distribute leaflets, collect weapons and rescue prisoners of war. However, in October, one of the underground organizations was crushed. The Nazis were hanged by twelve of its members, and the Nazis managed to recruit one of the underground fighters, the former cryptographer, quartermaster 2 of the rank of Boris Rudzyanko.

Despite the first failure, the underground movement was expanding. New party and Komsomol organizations were created. There were sabotage in enterprises and institutions. Female underground workers, under the guise of relatives, bought Soviet prisoners of war from concentration camps from the Nazis and collaborators. Soldiers made new documents and sent them to the forest, to the partisans.

In November 1941, an underground town party committee was formed in Minsk, which began preparations for a mass escape of prisoners of war and a city-wide uprising. The traitor Rudzianko was also admitted to the activities of the unfolding underground structure, and then nobody knew about his contacts with the Nazis.

In the spring of 1942, a significant part of the underground groups was crushed, and the uprising was broken - Rudzianko handed over to the Nazis all the information about the plans and participants of the resistance. The documents of the underground workers got to the Nazis, more than a thousand of Minsk residents were shot. However, the Nazis did not succeed in destroying the city committee of resistance — in the summer of 1942, the underground workers rescued and transported more than 4 thousand people to partisan detachments. But in September, Rudzianko again came out on their trail. Using the status of the commander of the Red Army, he made new acquaintances among the anti-fascists and said that he could get weapons for the underground workers — his Gestapo curators took care of this. The proposal was accepted, Rudzianko received contacts, and as a result, at the end of September the underground city committee was crushed. Thousands of underground workers died, and Ivan Kovalev was sent to the “Little Trostyanets” death camp, where they were burned alive in 1943. The underground movement in Minsk was divided for a while.

But that was not enough for the Nazis. After killing Ivan Kovalev, they spread a rumor that he allegedly works for them and even wrote articles on behalf of an underground worker in propaganda newspapers. The name of the leader of the underground was cleared only as a result of a thorough investigation conducted after the war. At the same time, the justice caught up with the real traitor - Boris Rudzianko. In 1951, he was convicted by a military tribunal for treason and sentenced to death.

Heroes are not born

Nikolai Kedyshko was born on August 3, 1923 in Minsk. He was the firstborn in a large family. Four more children were born after him. When Kolya was only ten, his father was gone. Having remained the eldest man in the family, he tried to help his mother in everything. After completing seven classes, Kohl entered the Minsk school of factory training № 24, from which he graduated in 1940, having mastered the profession of painter-plasterer.

According to the memoirs of relatives, during his studies Nikolay said to his mother: “You, mother, work, and I will work.” And after graduating from the factory school at the age of 16, he got a job as a painter.

After the occupation of Belarus, Komsomol member Nikolai Kedyshko immediately created his own underground youth organization. After the defeat of the underground city party committee in the fall of 1942, she was left without communication. In February 1943, Nikolai sent his sister Nadezhda out of town in search of partisans. Partizan girl found, and those, in turn, brought her to the underground city committee of the Komsomol, located near Minsk. Soon Nikolai himself met the members of the city committee.

• Family Kedyshko. From left to right: Luba - died in the Auschwitz death camp; Nikolay - Hero of the Soviet Union, died November 7, 1943 in Minsk; Vera Pavlovna (mother); daughter Nadia and son Boris.
• © Belarusian State Museum of the Great Patriotic War

The young man was officially recognized as the leader of the Komsomol underground organization. Kedyshko played the guitar well and named his band “Andryusha” after his favorite song. From it also took the words for passwords and reviews. The organization soon became the most powerful among the Komsomol underground organizations. Nikolai Kedyshko was accepted as a member of the Komsomol city committee and helped create a whole series of new underground groups that had begun an active struggle against the occupiers.

The city committee sent to Minsk underground literature, Sovinformburo reports, explosives. In turn, the city Komsomol members handed over to the partisans the collected intelligence, medicines and weapons that they were able to obtain from the fascists.

Nikolai Kedyshko created a network of ten safe houses. His organization "Andryusha" carried out over 40 large-scale sabotage, destroyed more than fifty military personnel of the enemy, rescued from the Nazis and sent dozens of Soviet citizens to partisan detachments. Young underground workers destroyed several Hitler vehicles with explosions, set fire to a train carrying aviation fuel, and stole a large number of weapons.

In August 1943, the Nazis broke into the house to Kedyshko. The search did not give the Nazis anything, but they decided to take Nicholas and question him at the commandant's office. Kedyshko pretended to agree and asked only to let him get dressed. The fascists allowed him to enter the house for clothes, but Nikolay did not wait for his arrest and jumped out the window from the opposite side of the hut. For six days he was hiding in the pipe of the bakery “Automatic”, on which he officially worked.

At this time, the youngest of the sisters Nicholas was sent to a shelter, and the rest of the family was taken to the security service, trying to dislodge information from them about the whereabouts of the Komsomol member. But relatives kept silence. As a result, the grandfather and grandmother of the underground fighter died in the death camp Trostenets, sister Lyuba died of the disease in Auschwitz. Brother Boris fled the camp and participated in the resistance movement in Europe, and my mother was released from Auschwitz and returned home only after the war.

After a search in the house of Nikolai, it became clear that the Hitlerite special services had succeeded in attacking the trail of "Andryusha". Kedyshko was asked to go into the woods, but the underground worker decided to first hold in Minsk events dedicated to the anniversary of the October Revolution. The Nazis, meanwhile, were able to calculate one of his safe houses. Hitler's counterintelligence captured her and arrested part of the organization’s headquarters. Not knowing what had happened, Nikolai Kedyshko himself went to the apartment. When the head of the organization realized that the turnout was failed, he opened fire on the Nazis with a pistol, killed two of them and tried to escape. But when Nikolai was already in the courtyard, he was shot in the legs from a machine gun. Not wanting to be in captivity, being a carrier of classified information, Kedyshko, who was only 20 years old, committed suicide.

After the war, a monument was erected in memory of the fearless leader of the Andryush organization in Minsk and one of the streets of the Belarusian capital was named in his honor, the Minsk State Vocational and Applied Arts College also bears the name of Nikolai Kedyshko. In 1965, the young underground worker was posthumously awarded the title Hero of the Soviet Union.

Belarusian underground

Belarus is considered one of the most affected by the Nazi aggression of states. During the war years, approximately every fourth resident of the republic died - more than 2 million people. The Nazis destroyed 209 of the 270 cities of the BSSR, destroyed 5454 villages, conducted about 140 punitive operations against partisans and civilians. On the territory of the republic there were 260 concentration camps, death camps and other places of massacres. Only in the death camp "Trostyanets", one of the largest in Europe, according to various estimates, from 200 to 500 thousand people were killed. In the Red Coast concentration camp, the Nazis collected children in order to pump blood from them, which was then used for transfusion by Wehrmacht and SS soldiers.

However, the Belarusian people did not accept the Nazi slavery. About 1.3 million immigrants from the BSSR fought in the ranks of the Red Army, over 400 thousand local residents joined the ranks of the underground partisan movement. In Belarus, one of the largest diversions during the war years was carried out - an undermining of four echelons with tanks and ammunition at the station in Osipovichi. Polotsk-Lepel battle is considered one of the largest partisan battles. On the territory of the BSSR, one of the most senior officers of the Hitlerite civil administration, Gauleiter Wilhelm Cuba, was destroyed.

“In Belarus, one of the strongest underground partisan movements in the world was created,” military historian Yury Knutov said in an interview with RT.

According to Belarusian scientists, the Minsk anti-fascist underground was the largest urban underground in Europe.

“We need to understand that the Nazi special services in the occupied territories of the Soviet Union carried out tremendous work. It was a total war, which threw huge forces. This concerned intelligence, counterintelligence, punitive operations, propaganda. The notorious abverkomandoby - this is only the tip of the iceberg, were involved a lot of structures and organizations. This happened because nowhere in Europe did the Nazis encounter such resistance. And therefore it was important for them to crush the ideological foundations on which it rested, ”explained Alexander Kolpakidi.

According to the historian, wherever the Nazis came to the territory of the USSR, they everywhere faced with underground fighters and partisans, most of whom "were in principle prepared for death for their country."

“There was no such powerful and widespread resistance anywhere in the world. The widely publicized European resistance intensified and gained momentum only after the Allies landed in Normandy. In addition, quite a few people from the USSR fought in its ranks, in particular, prisoners of war who had escaped from the camps, ”Kolpakidi said.

According to Yuri Knutov, still little is known about the activities of the Soviet underground in the occupied territories of the Soviet Union. “The secrecy stamp has not yet been lifted from many cases,” the historian emphasized.

• Underground anti-fascist printing house in Minsk.
• © vsr.mil.by

Alexander Kolpakidi, however, believes that it is not only the vultures. “The history of the underground was complex and confusing. Many organizations died because of betrayal. It was succeeded to understand right after war only with a small part of similar episodes. Therefore, we will never know much about the activities of the underground workers, their victories and tragedies, ”he said.

Nevertheless, according to the historian, what we know is enough to objectively evaluate the contribution of the underground workers to the defeat of Nazi Germany. “The contribution of the fighters of the Soviet underground, including the Belarusian, Minsk, to the victory over Nazism is enormous,” concluded Alexander Kolpakidi.