Memory Watch 2017 ends in Bryansk Region
RELEASE
News from projects and regions
The remains of Soviet soldiers, partisans, underground fighters and civilians who lost their lives during the Great Patriotic War of 1941–1945 were finally laid to rest in the town of Navlya, Bryansk Region, on June 21, 2017, the eve of Remembrance and Mourning Day. They were recovered during the Memory Watch 2017 search campaign organized by Gazprom Transgaz Moscow and formally reinterred in the Komsomol Underground Fighters park in Navlya.
Attending the ceremony were Alexander Bogomaz, Governor of the Bryansk Region; Alexander Babakov, Director General of Gazprom Transgaz Moscow; Vladimir Popkov, Chairman of the Bryansk Region Duma; His Eminence Metropolitan Alexander of Bryansk and Sevsk; Alexander Zhigunov, Deputy Governor; Alexander Prudnik, Head of the Navlinsky District Administration; Alexander Sobolev, Council Chairman of the Otechestvo Civic Movement of Military & Patriotic and Search Associations of the Bryansk Region; veterans of the Great Patriotic War, local wars and armed conflicts; Young Patriots’ Movement detachments; and members of the Bryansk Region’s NGOs.
“Seventy-two years after the Great Victory, so many of our compatriots remain buried in anonymous graves,” Governor Alexander Bogomaz pointed out. “Search teams are now exploring all of the areas where the war took place, including the Bryansk Region. Today’s ceremony was made possible by the efforts of Gazprom Transgaz Moscow’s search enthusiasts and Otechestvo, our region’s search team association, working together as part of the nationwide Memory Watch campaign. Let me also express the warmest gratitude to the veterans who have joined us here today, all those who fought on the fronts of the Great Patriotic War, all those to whom we owe our peace and freedom.”
Alexander Babakov, Director General of Gazprom Transgaz Moscow, added: “Our search teams do their field work in every region within our area of responsibility, recovering bodies of unidentified soldiers, civilians, underground fighters and partisans, eventually to be laid to rest so that the young generation would always keep memory of those fallen in battle during the Great Patriotic War.”
Before the war, the park area, then known as Lesokhimovskaya Hill’s Ravine, was the site of mass executions. Partisans, underground fighters, and civilians were shot to death and buried in the ravine together with hanged victims brought from elsewhere in the Navlya town and district. Red Army POWs, members of the Navlya underground resistance movement, partisans and their families, Jewish families, and other civilians were executed on the site in large numbers in June and September 1942 and in May 1943.
As the excavations proceeded, the largest and most shocking discovery was made in the Khutor Kholmetsky village: a burial pit containing the remains of 63 people shot right there. Three of them were Red Army soldiers, and the rest were civilians – old people, children, and women.
According to an extract from the Ministry of Defense Centralized Archives dated September 7, 1943 (Fund 239, Series 2187, File 94), “… a number of air bomb craters were discovered in the Khutor Kholmetsky village, Bryansk Region, filled with the remains of civilians, including children, old people, and women, shot to death by Hitler’s troops. The investigation found that the Germans were moving civilians to their territory by force to turn them into slaves, but in a hasty retreat, when relocation of civilians became impossible, they forced them into the pits and shot them to death.”
The military & patriotic campaign organized jointly with the Otechestvo movement of the Bryansk Region and the KvadroGaz NGO took place in the Bryansk Region between June 13 and 22, 2017.
The campaign brought together over 40 young specialists from the company’s 14 operating regions, including two employees of NIIgazeconomika. Search activities were carried out in several Bryansk Region communities: Lipki, Borshchevo, Krasny Kolodets, and Khutor Kholmetsky.
Background
The purpose of the Memory Watch military & patriotic campaign organized by Gazprom Transgaz Moscow is to commemorate Great Patriotic War heroes and educate young specialists in the spirit of patriotism.
In 2015, the company’s young specialists searched a number of sites in the Tver Region for the remains of soldiers and officers killed in the war. One of its branch units, Kryukovkoye Gas Pipeline Operation Center, and the Poisk military & patriotic group joined efforts with the KvadroGaz athletic and patriotic club and the Seligerskiye Zori recreational compound based in the Tver Region to form a search team manned by the employees of the company’s 25 branch offices. The search was focused on the Ostashkovsky District in the Tver Region, an area of fierce fighting in 1942–1943. The remains of 63 soldiers were exhumed and recovered, and the volunteers worked to establish their identities. On June 24, 2015, the fallen soldiers found their final resting place in a communal grave in Svetlitsa, Tver Region, near the Nilo-Stolbenskaya Pustyn monastery.
In 2016, the international Memory Watch 2016 military & patriotic campaign dedicated to the 75th anniversary of the commencement of the Great Patriotic War took place in the Kaluga Region. A total of 80 young specialists from 20 Gazprom subsidiaries, some of them representing CIS countries (Armenia, Belarus, and Kyrgyzstan), and from 14 Gazprom Transgaz Moscow operating regions took part in the search activities and recovered the remains of 17 servicemen and three soldier name tags. On June 21, 2016, the remains of Soviet soldiers and officers were formally reinterred at the local war memorial site in Barsuki, a village in the Mosalsky District of the Kaluga Region.
Memory Watch 2017 took place in the Bryansk Region. The campaign’s find totaled 63 sets of human remains.