In Stalingrad (now Volgograd) on Lenin Square there is a 4-storey residential building. Once it was destroyed almost to the ground, with the exception of a fragment of the wall, as a result of dense German shelling. However, before this happened, the house for 58 days was an impregnable fortress for German soldiers. The heroic defense of the Soviet soldiers made the village home legendary. Today it is known as Pavlov's House.
The original four-story house was built in the mid-1930s by architect Sergei Voloshinov. Before the war, highly qualified specialists from industrial enterprises and party functionaries lived in it. Other prestigious houses were located next to the building, for example, the House of Railway Workers, the House of Signalers, the House of NKVD Workers. By the way, the architect of the house, Sergei Voloshin, will die under a German air raid along with his wife on September 27, 1942.
The future Pavlov's House will be one of the few buildings on modern Lenin Square that will survive as a result of German bombing. And it is here that the Red Army defenders organize the defense under the leadership of Sergeant Yakov Fedotovich Pavlov, who will take command of the unit after the wounding of Senior Lieutenant Ivan Filippovich Afanasiev. The house will be defended by Pavlov's reconnaissance group, the mortar squad, the machine gun crew of Sergeant Voronin and the squad of armor-piercers with anti-tank rifles.
Soviet soldiers turned the houses into a real fortress. A firing position was organized on each floor. A system of trenches and tunnels was created around the house. From Pavlov's House, trenches led to other buildings around, or, in any case, to what was left of them at that time. One of the trenches led to a sewer that connected to a water tunnel. Red Army soldiers hid there during German bombing and mortar attacks. At such moments, only observers remained in the house itself or near it. The favorite "joke" of the Red Army was the launch of their own flares captured from the Germans. The defenders of the house let them in when they saw the launch of a German rocket. This was done to mislead the approaching German aircraft.
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The approaches to the house were carefully mined. Almost the entire space around the house was blocked by firing points, in particular, machine-gun emplacements. There were also two snipers in the house. One, Garya Badmaevich, was constantly in the house. The second sniper Anatoly Chekhov periodically came to help with fire, moving along the route from firing points. There were days when snipers alone destroyed up to 20 enemy soldiers with fire.
A well-organized defense by Yakov Fedotovich became the key to success. There is even an opinion that as many Wehrmacht soldiers died around Pavlov's House as Germany lost during the capture of France. At different times, from 24 to 31 surnames were attributed to the defenders of the house. Among the names not included in the venerable official list, in addition to the sniper Chekhov, is also the medical instructor Maria Stepanovna Ulyanova. Like Anatoly Ivanovich, she only occasionally visited the house in order to help the wounded. There is reason to believe that some names were not included for propaganda reasons. In some memoirs, the name Tsugba appears in the lists of defenders. In the future, the same surname pops up in the lists of the ROA. True, it is difficult to say whether these two events are connected or whether we are talking about namesakes.
If you want to know even more interesting things, then you should read about what it is "Lyra": what was the strength of the Soviet nuclear submarine project 705.
Source: https://novate.ru/blogs/240222/62248/