Detailed Krasnodon village satellite map. Village during the revolution

This term has other meanings, see Krasnodon (meanings).

Krasnodon, an urban-type settlement in the Voroshilovgrad region of the Ukrainian SSR, 14 km from the city of Krasnodon. Located in Donbass, 3 km from the railway. Semeykino station (on the Rodakovo - Likhaya line). Coal mining. Auto parts plant (spare parts for cars and... ...

Sirotino (village, Lugansk region) Urban settlement Sirotino Sirotine Country UkraineUkraine ... Wikipedia

Urban settlement Sirotino, Ukrainian. Sirotine Country UkraineUkraine ... Wikipedia

This term has other meanings, see Novodarevka. Urban settlement Novodaryevka, Ukrainian. Novodar Yivka Country ... Wikipedia

Krasnodon: Krasnodon is a city in the Lugansk region of Ukraine. Krasnodon is a village in the Lugansk region of Ukraine, 14 kilometers from the city of Krasnodon. Krasnodon railway station in the city of Sukhodolsk, Lugansk region of Ukraine on the line... ... Wikipedia

This term has other meanings, see Krasnodon (meanings). City of Krasnodon, Ukrainian. Krasnodon Flag Coat of Arms ... Wikipedia

- (until 1938 the village of Sorokino), a city in Ukraine, near the Krasnodon railway station. 54.8 thousand inhabitants (1991). Coal mining. Stroydetal plant, etc. During the Great Patriotic War, an underground Komsomol group operated in Krasnodon... ... encyclopedic Dictionary

I Krasnodon (until 1938 the village of Sorokino) is a city in the Voroshilovgrad region of the Ukrainian SSR (Donbass), on the left bank of the river. Bolshaya Kamenka (right tributary of the Seversky Donets river), 7 km from the railway. Krasnodon station (on the Likhaya Rodakovo line). 70.4 thousand inhabitants... Great Soviet Encyclopedia

In the Lugansk People's Republic, outside its capital, I visited two cities - the one shown and the border city of Krasnodon, a large mining city (73 thousand inhabitants), through which we returned to Russia. It went down in history as the city of the Young Guard, but according to Ukrainian laws it has now been renamed Sorokino, which the LPR, of course, does not recognize.

From Lugansk to Krasnodon - 30-40 kilometers through the shown Khryaschevatoye, where the driver specially slowed down the crowded minibus to let me jump out and photograph a tank-monument with the inscription “For our and your future!”, left where it was hit after the battles for encirclement of Lugansk in August 2014. Krasnodon and its surroundings are a separate small agglomeration, which also includes Molodogvardeysk and Sukhodolsk, several urban settlements (including another Krasnodon, also renamed Tyoploye according to Ukrainian laws) and, with very short breaks, two more cities in Russia. As is usually the case in such places, the city begins gradually, and it seems that the Yunost plant is located at the entrance there, with a correspondingly decorated stop:

The main street of Krasnodon stretches across the entire city and changes its names several times: 60th Anniversary of October, Pervokonnaya (!), Kotov, Artyom, Chkalov, Red Partisans, perhaps recalling the fact that when these names were given out, these were all different villages. We got off at the end of Pervokonnaya, built up with low-rise buildings so typical for any working-class region:

Behind a huge wasteland, on the edge of a slope, there is an almost constructivist bus station... in fact, it is, of course, no older than the 1960s, but for the generally extremely dull bus station genre it is quite good. We immediately found out the schedule for Izvarino there, and came to the conclusion that it was not worth focusing on it.

This is already Kotova Street. In Krasnodon, the painful spirit of war is not felt at all - a sunny, crowded, noisy city, where, perhaps, many people moved from the front-line areas - after the summer of 2014, when the Ukrainian army came close here, occupying Izvarino, and suffered its first serious defeat there, Krasnodon remained such a “deep rear”. Even the military is almost invisible here.

Trolleybuses also go back and forth along the street - the Krasnodonskaya system was launched in 1987 with a line to neighboring Molodogvardeysk. Pay attention to the design of the car - it has been running like this for 6 years, of which only 2 years under the LPR.

A block from the bus station, to the left, past the rather ugly stele “Your Orders, Krasnodon”, the boulevard of Komsomolskaya Street leads to the main Krasnodon Young Guard Square. Regarding this shot, we came here from the right; on the other side of the square, Krasnodonugol and the city administration stand side by side.

The reverse side is more interesting - in the middle is a monument to the Young Guard (more on it later), on the right is school No. 1 (1928-29), where 28 of the Young Guards studied, including their leader Ivan Turkenich and the most famous participant, the main Komsomol member Oleg Koshevoy. Well, on the left is the Museum of the Young Guard (1966-70), where we immediately headed:

The museum was supposed to be closed on the occasion of Monday, but employees and even the director were inside, and as has happened more than once in the Donbass, we were incredibly welcome here, and having copied our passport and accreditation details, they gave us a guide, a map of the city with marked attractions (part which I actually missed during preparation), and finally they gave me tea and cookies and called a taxi.

In the wardrobe where we left our backpacks. a rare chest was discovered:

The museum consists of two square buildings with corners to each other, and in the one through which we entered there are offices of employees, one of the best assembly halls in the city and small exhibitions, as in the photo before last. The actual exhibition in the second building is generally small, but it is extremely impressive - one of the many “temples of communism”, which in fact were many Soviet museums or memorials. In the huge two-tiered hall there is a luxurious mosaic, opposite on the loggia there are busts of the most important Young Guards, and on this very loggia and in the passage behind the mosaic is the main part of the exhibition - without division into halls, but as if a continuous history.

The beginning of which is a kind of prologue, the story not of the Young Guard, but of its place of action. If Lugansk itself belonged to the Yekaterinoslav province, then there was already a pure Region of the Don Army, and do those who decided to rename Krasnodon Sorokino understand that a farm with that name was founded here at the end of the 17th century by sworn enemies - the Don Cossacks? And here and there in the surrounding area there are still Cossack smoking houses:

Coal had been mined here artisanally since the end of the 19th century, but only in 1909 did geological exploration begin, after which the Moscow-Kazan Railway bought the right to develop the newly discovered deposits in order to extract coal for its locomotives. In 1910, the Ekaterinodon mine was founded (from its location on the border of the Ekaterinoslav province with the region of the Don Army)... but it was not the city of Krasnodon that grew out of it, but the same urban-type settlement of Krasnodon next door - I still haven’t figured out where such confusion came from. There is also the Krasnodon station, launched in 1915 - but it is located in Sukhodolsk, and until 1961 it was called Verkhne-Duvannaya. The Sorokinsky mine was founded in 1913, and almost immediately the local mines were included in the “Whitepers” program - due to the First World War, to which most young men went, there was no one to work in the mines, and the tsarist government turned its gaze to Asian guest workers - Chinese and Persians, who made up a significant part of the local population in the 1920-30s - so, among those who helped the Young Guard during the war, the Chinese Maria Suyunpo was noted, and people with Persian appearance, according to our guide, remained in Krasnodon to this day. The Chinese, which is typical, all of them signed up for the Bolsheviks and in battles with the whites they were distinguished by their unsurpassed tenacity and cunning.
The city of Krasnodon was founded in 1938. On the stand are the simple equipment of the then miner, the house of a representative of the Moscow-Kazan road in Yekaterinodon and a typical working village, with light hand The Chinese here were called “Shanghaiks”:

As for the Young Guard, it was really young - all its members were born in the 1920s, and most at the beginning of the war were high school students or had just graduated from school. The German occupation here was relatively short-lived - the Nazis occupied Krasnodon only in July 1942. But by that time, the Soviet people had managed to relax a little, after the battle of Moscow they believed in a quick victory - the evacuees returned to Krasnodon, the mines started working, the underground that was being prepared was declassified... and then - the lightning strike of the Wehrmacht towards Stalingrad. The Germans, battered by past battles, came here embittered, and their occupation began with the fact that they drove several dozen disloyal citizens into a city park and buried them alive there. I don’t know if this is true, a rumor or just a legend, but if it’s true, it explains a lot: it seems to me that one of the main reasons for the mutual misunderstanding of peoples is the different reactions to the manifestation of force and cruelty. The Germans then and the Anglo-Saxons now are convinced that “Russians understand only force,” while history shows that when confronted with someone else’s force, more often than not, Russian people do not bow down, but, on the contrary, become wild. In general, the act of intimidation and further threats resulted in the emergence of underground cells throughout the area.

There was also an “adult” underground in Krasnodon, but it was very quickly defeated. But the organizations created by youth turned out to be much more viable, and quite quickly merged into the “Young Guard”, with which the surviving “adult” cell of Philip Lyutikov and Nikolai Barakov collaborated. Komsomol organizer Oleg Koshevoy remained the most famous of the Young Guard members, but the leader of the organization was the much more experienced Ivan Turkenich, a Red Army soldier who was unable to escape from encirclement. They understood the balance of forces and the fact that they would not be able to somehow influence the course of the war; an armed uprising was being prepared - but only on the eve of the approach of the Red Army. Basically, the “Young Guards” posted propaganda leaflets, once hung red flags on the tallest buildings in the city, and their biggest act was setting fire to the Black Exchange - that’s what they called local residents the labor exchange, which was actually responsible for recruiting “ostarbeiters,” and with this arson the guys saved many fellow countrymen from being deported to work in Germany. Another time, Young Guard member Yuri Vitsenovsky got a job as a mechanic to restore a mine, where he unobtrusively engaged in sabotage, eventually slightly filing the veins of the rope, which caused the mine cage to fly into a 250-meter shaft on the day of launch, completely destroying the equipment there. They also committed other acts of sabotage, but it never came to the point of open struggle, such as killing officers or blowing up police stations and commandant’s offices, although it was in the plans.

But it all ended in the winter of 1943 - on January 1, things from a robbed truck with gifts for German soldiers surfaced at the bazaar, the Nazis quickly established through whose hands they ended up there, and on the same day the first Young Guard members were detained. Then the arrests came one after another, and finally the traitor Gennady Pocheptsov was found in the Young Guard itself, who betrayed everyone he knew. The arrested Young Guards, after weeks in German dungeons, were mutilated and killed, and their bodies were thrown into a mine - in three stages on January 15-16 and 31, 1943. Ivan Turkenich and several other people managed to escape, some (including Koshevoy) were caught in Rovenki and shot there on February 9, and on February 14 the Red Army entered Krasnodon. Turkenich, who returned to its ranks, died in Poland a year later.

Then Fadeev came and wrote his famous novel, for the first edition of which, without the role of the party, but with randomly fleeing Red Army soldiers, he almost fell out of favor with Stalin, but the second edition, which satisfied the Leader, was studied long and tediously by Soviet children at school. A youth underground arose during the war in other cities, for example Kaluga, where the guys simply followed the movements of the Germans and reported this to the army, so I would even say that the image of the “Young Guard”, which became one of the pillars of the Soviet epic, can be considered collective.

Krasndon, like pre-revolutionary Sevastopol or Soviet Stalingrad, has turned into a memorial city, where most of the sights are associated with young heroes. A woman tour guide took us not only around the museum itself, but also around the city center, and the tone of her story became less and less official with every minute - cultural workers in the LDPR simply really appreciate such attention, because wars begin and end, and the culture that they cherish it, remains for centuries.

On the square between the museum and the school is the monument “Oath” (1951-54) - joining the organization really began with an oath, the text of which is given in the museum: I, (name), joining the ranks of the members of the “Young Guard”, in the face of my friends in arms, in the face of my native long-suffering land, in the face of all the people, solemnly swear: to unquestioningly carry out any tasks of the organization; to keep everything related to my work in the Young Guard in the deepest secrecy. I swear to take merciless revenge for the burned, devastated cities and villages, for the blood of our people, for the martyrdom of the heroic miners. And if this revenge requires my life, I will give it without a moment’s hesitation. If I break this sacred oath under torture or because of cowardice, then may my name and my family be cursed forever, and may I myself be punished by the harsh hand of my comrades. Blood for blood, death for death! By the way, her own mother tried to kill the traitor Pocheptsov during his arrest.

Behind the museum, near the unfinished church, is the grave of the Young Guards themselves, where they were buried on March 1, 1943:

"Grieving Mother" (1965) over the grave is notable for the fact that with reverse side monument, copies of prison inscriptions that the Nazis did not notice in the dark cell:

The church is being built on the site of the never founded Palace of Pioneers. The center of Krasnodon is mostly multi-story, but somewhere there are also one-story houses, perhaps remembering that time:

Behind the square is a park:

In the depths of the park is the very grave of the residents of Krasnodon, whom the Germans buried alive. I don’t know exactly when the monument was built on it, but it may well be that in the first years of the liberation of the city.

After all the fakes of the current information war It’s hard for me to believe that burial alive actually happened; other options keep coming to mind - for example, execution on the edge of a trench, into which some fell alive, as at Babi Yar. On the other hand, from our warm, cozy modernity it is impossible to imagine with what ferocity they fought then. After all, during the entire current war, fewer people died than during one day Great Patriotic War.

Parallel streets Sadovaya and Pionerskaya leave from the square, and in general form the Krasnodon center. Between them - private sector, and outside on both sides of the high-rise building is not at all of a “district center” scale - the city of the Young Guard was clearly held in high esteem by the Soviet authorities:

Oleg Koshevoy lived in a house on Sadovaya... in general, his house seems to be in every city in Ukraine, since he and one of his parents changed his place of residence several times, and a month later I was to see another such house in Priluki .

The Young Guard Museum, opened in 1944, was originally located here, and apparently this panel dates back to the same time:

The streets, crossing the Alley of the Young Guard (with their busts), turning into the Alley of Afghans, lead to another symmetrical square with perhaps the most monumental cultural center named after the Young Guard in the entire Donbass, apparently built as a gift to the city.

The sculptures are especially good:

We walked back along Pionerskaya Street without any special sights. At the end of the 1980s, Krasnodon began to be completely reconstructed, they managed to build a number of high-rise buildings and launch a trolleybus... but then there was no time for that, so there is a lot of non-construction in the center.

Closer to the square with the museum is a monument to the dead miners. At that time, the memory of the disaster at the Severnaya mine in Vorkuta was still fresh, especially since we had just returned from there from our last trip, and the museum worker remembered that among those who died at that mine there were Lugansk residents.

Having returned to the museum, having sat there for a while, drank some tea, discussed current affairs (in Krasnodon the prevailing approach is “We would rather have peace somehow, but we don’t want to go back to Ukraine after what it did to us”), at the called We took museum taxis to other Krasnodon points that were in one way or another connected with the Young Guard. We didn’t see school No. 22 in “small” Krasnodon (below), school No. 6 in Pervomaika (above) and others in the surrounding villages, especially since the most famous Young Guards still graduated from the school next to the museum:

On Chkalov Street, leading to the road to Russia - the Gorky Palace of Culture, in which the Young Guards gathered under the guise of a theater group:

On the opposite side of the center is the luxurious constructivist hospital No. 2 (infectious diseases), where the fascist commandant’s office sat - a copy of its white gates can be seen in the museum:

The waste heap and miners' houses, view from the hospital yard:

And the main monument in this system is “The Unconquered” (1981) at the Fifth Mine, where in January 1943 the mutilated and often still alive Young Guards were dumped

The website dedicated to the Young Guard provides the usual protocol of the form in which the bodies were removed - it’s really hard to read, I couldn’t stand more than a few points. They were obviously tortured not to trial, but to death. The bottom of the pit represents this memorial of 4 steles:

Moreover, it was not the Germans who detained, interrogated and mutilated the children, but the very Russians and Ukrainians, and now also on behalf of the oppressed Don Cossacks - the policemen at the Deutschkommandant's Office, most of them the same Krasnodon residents as their victims. This is how the city was structured during the occupation: several dozen traitors loyal to the Germans who “have a gun,” hundreds of their active opponents who don’t have a gun, and thousands of those who should not be condemned for simply waiting for all this horror to happen. will end.

View of the city from the low and Martian red waste heap of the Fifth Mine, left as part of the memorial:

To the right is the waste heap from frame No. 28, behind it you can see the same hospital, and in the distance the high-rise buildings of local “neighbourhoods”, as in Lugansk - named ones, on the far right, for example, the Barakova quarter. Below you can see a stone on the site of the mine bathhouse, where the last interrogation of the Young Guard took place.

A mysterious structure on the other side of the beam is possibly a memorial to the liberation of the city, founded in the late 1980s and never completed. By the way, my partner’s grandfather died near Krasnodon in 1943. But as we were told at the museum, he was most likely buried in a mass grave in one of the surrounding villages - there were no battles directly in the city.

And the sky above Krasnodon is already steppe free, like somewhere above Kazakhstan. There are further steppes and mines, a nest of smugglers in a village with perhaps the most wonderful of the strange Donbass toponyms called Ural-Caucasus, the border of that country, which some people look at from here with hatred, some with hope.

IN Lately The Young Guard also had many alternative interpretations. Some say that they were simply abstract anti-fascists and patriots of their region, to whom Fadeev attributed the Komsomol spirit under pressure from Stalin. Others even write down the entire underground on the territory of the Ukrainian SSR as Banderaites, and in general they say the main stronghold of Ukraine in those days was the Donbass, where the Soviets later brought “millions of criminals from the Urals.” I think the day is not far off when some gray-haired professor in a jacket over an embroidered shirt from the history department of the evacuated part of Lugansk or Donetsk universities will make a sensational discovery on TV that it was the Reds who killed the Young Guards, and blamed everything on the Germans - if the responsibility lies with the Reds They have since shifted it for Babi Yar, they are now shifting it for the Volyn massacre... So the question arises: why do the inhabitants of these huts love Ukraine, especially in its post-Maidan form? Ukrainian ideologists have erased the name of their city, which went down in history, from the map, declare their history criminal and dark and their work unnecessary, try to appropriate their heroes, and present the worst of the region’s inhabitants with his face - in a word, they try to prevent them from thinking in their own way and simply be yourself.

Moreover (unlike the Baltic states), without giving them in return a more satisfying and quiet life than on the other side of the Russian border:

We drive along Krasnodonsky streets getting closer to the exit to Izvarino:

Here and there you can see windmills waving their blades near the city:

Hidden away in the latter alley, Semashko Lane, is the Cossack Kuren, a museum created by the Don Cossacks back in 2001, which, however, no one has ever seen open:

To the north of the road, on the same side of the city facing Russia, there is a vast cemetery, and the mysterious Krasnodon Wall hangs over it:

Krasnodon residents have known about it for a long time, but scientists or pseudo-scientists who first learned about it in the mid-2000s are still arguing about what it is, or rather, whether it was created by nature or by man, and if by nature, then how, and if by man, then how? then when and why.

Moreover, it has been established that this is only a small fragment of a complex of such “walls” stretching for many kilometers, and journalists, of course, have already managed to come up with loud slogans like “Second Chinese Wall". In the most moderate interpretations, this is not a fortress, but a dam built about 3000 years ago. In general, I don’t presume to judge what it is - but it is certainly very picturesque:

And in general, I am glad that the last object of the LDNR we examined was not the trace of the current war, not the monuments of past wars or industrializations, but an unshakable ancient wall, of which all this history is a moment.

Stops on the way to Russia are symbolically painted under the flag of Novorossiya, which was officially canceled back in May last year. Here we caught a car and went to Izvarino along the “White Convoys” road:

I believe that the main reasons for the Donbass uprising, that is, for the discontent of the people, which other forces directed in a direction beneficial to themselves, in 2014 there were two - on the one hand, a rebellion against those who did not give the local people anything and ruined the work of generations their ancestors, took upon himself the right to try to remake them. On the other hand, this was an uprising not even against Ukraine, but against all the injustice that has developed in the ruins of the USSR over the past quarter century. And again, I see two reasons why this happened here - in Ukraine in general and in the Donbass in particular, these contradictions themselves, their entire bouquet from purely economic to purely ideological, were the most acute. Of course, this was not inevitable - many countries have serious internal contradictions, even very stable ones like Britain, Belgium, Spain or Canada, but up to a certain point there always remains the principle “don’t make trouble while it’s quiet,” “it works, it doesn’t.” climb” and simply “no matter what happens,” and in the winter-spring of 2014 exactly such a moment came in Ukraine, which became the second prerequisite. I think that if the standard of living in Britain was like in Ukraine, then after Brexit the Scots and Irish would probably take up arms against London. But against the same post-Soviet injustice - the sweet, affectionate West offered the Ukrainians an idea of ​​​​how to break out of this darkness, Russia has still not offered anything, and all these field commanders, or rather those of them who were not money-grubbers, but militant romantics, They tried their best to propose this idea themselves, but of course they failed. Novorossiya is not so much a state on the lands conquered by Catherine II from the steppe, but rather an idea of ​​renewal of the Russian world, and I think the ghost of Novorossiya will walk here for many more years, like the ghost of communism in the former Europe.

We passed Izvarino with an impressive station and a considerable number of old houses - most of all it reminded me of the village through which we entered the Donbass. There was a long queue at the border checkpoint, even pedestrians stood in the scorching sun for a good hour and a half, passing in batches of 20 people 2-3 times an hour, and for cars the queue even stretched for the whole day.

But the Russian side of the border took me a good two hours, where I was taken into his office with a portrait of Dzerzhinsky on the wall and an iron door by a young security officer with an unforgettable face. “You understand why you are here - information in our time is such a weapon that can be used to destroy states,” he told me, but in general the interrogation was casual and even boring, only in Moscow people were worried that I had not sent SMS for so long, that crossed the border. Abroad - the same Donbass, the same waste heaps:

And even your own Donetsk(48 thousand inhabitants), and the original one - if the city of Stalino became Donetsk in 1961, then the miners' Gundorovka - in 1955, and at its core was the village of Gundorovskaya, known since 1681, in whose district the Sorokino farm was included. But like the “real” Donetsk, little Donetsk-RF (as it is usually indicated in timetables) suffered from the war - on July 13, 2014, without taking into account the border, a stray land mine flew here and exploded in the courtyard of a private house, killing one and maiming two more people - but I couldn’t find the name of the murdered man anywhere, so isn’t this a fake? In Donetsk, I limited myself to transferring from a minibus from the border to a minibus in Kamensk-Shakhtinsky, and griphon .

Russia after the LDPR leaves mixed feelings - good roads, well-groomed fields, and an airfield with private planes flashed by. On the other hand, already in the queue the peace-loving people managed to get attached to me “to talk.” but disgustingly inattentive goons, and 9/10 of the conversations in the surrounding space were about how bad life is - everything is becoming more expensive, power is being stolen, rivers are becoming shallow, fish are leaving. It’s a paradox: Donetsk residents live many times poorer, but not once in two weeks on the other side of the border did I encounter any complaints about poverty - because they lived through such things, after which it’s a sin to complain about poverty, and besides, they lived through it together. I still have the feeling that in Dobass people - not initially, but after what they experienced - somehow became more honest not even with each other, but with themselves, there was something left there that I miss in Russia, where there is too much became sleepy, narrow-minded philistines. It’s strange - people often have such emotions upon returning from Europe, but I do upon returning from a war zone. But this was only a short-lived phantom - after a few days I realized that I hardly wanted to return to Donbass.

We passed Kamensk-Shakhtinsky(90 thousand inhabitants), where there have been no mines for a long time - a large, well-groomed, lively city with entire streets of county houses and an impressive Stalin. The Kamenskaya station station, which went down in history with a terrible crash on August 7, 1987, when an out-of-control freight train with a stone rammed a passenger train standing on the tracks - it was not possible to give the radiogram to follow without stopping because of equipment failure, and at the station, when they immediately touched it, they said in person to the driver, one of the unsuspecting conductors pulled the stop valve... A few seconds later, a blow to the tail crushed two cars and killed 114 people.

Entrance to the LDNR stations is free, but here it is only through one door on the side of the platform. Here they checked my documents for the last time - angry that there were no tickets for the evening and simply exhausted by the anxious trip, I raised my voice at my partner because of some nonsense, and a couple of minutes later (she walked away at that moment) a policeman came up to me , flipped through his passport and, in a rather vile tone, began to argue that raising his voice in the waiting room could be classified as hooliganism, but in the end he fell behind.

And we got out onto the Don highway and, crossing the Seversky Donets bridge, left by bus for 1000 rubles per nose. Sitting next to us was an extremely sociable gopnik from Shakhty, in front of us was a man who had bought himself two chairs and reclined the backs on both. which left me with a narrow gap; The feature film “Unaccountable” about Berezovsky and Co. was shown on TV, but we reached Moscow by morning. I didn’t yet know how strongly the images of Donbass would remain in my mind and how long I would tense inside at the sight of a man in camouflage.
But there, in the Donbass, which survived the war, there is some kind of not political, not ideological, but simply human TRUTH. Mezhygorye. Nearest surroundings.
. Two old centers.
. Two new centers.
Krasnodon.
Epilogue. Letters and comments.