Skopin Is Where General Guderian’s Army Was Stopped

When the Great Patriotic War began, my father was drafted into the Red Army, but was discharged due to a congenital heart defect and had to return to his civic journalistic duties in Moscow.

In July 1941, he took my elder brother Valery to Skopin where our grandmother Lidya lived in the midst of the Ryazan province where my ancestors used to reside ever since Ivan the Terrible ruled over Russia.

On November 18th, General Guderian’s tank army broke through Red Army’s defenses and rushed towards Moscow. Enemy troops captured 7 out of 11 railways leading to the Soviet capital.

One of the remaining 4 led from Moscow to the southern parts of the USSR and had exceptional importance. Skopin was on its way and now it was about to fall into enemy’s hands. To rescue Valery, my father went to Skopin in a truck.

He arrived into that city late at night. There were no Red Army troops there, but Skopin party and Komsomol officials, as well as local state security officers were forming a fighter battalion plus a partisan detachment. N. Starostin, their commander, with a machine gun on his chest, and a revolver at his side, advised my father to leave Skopin immediately:
– The Germans are only 20 kilometers away and will be here any time now.

Fortunately, my father and my brother managed to escape Nazi invaders a few hours before they occupied Skopin on November 25th. Thus, Skopin became the eastern most settlement in the USSR captured by the Wehrmacht that year.

In Skopin outskirts German soldiers intercepted half a dozen 16-year old boys:
– Who are you?
– We’re going to attend tractor driver courses.
– Tractor drivers? Future tank drivers?

And the Germans shot the youngsters.

When they entered Skopin and found out that civilians were fighting them, the Nazis shot 28 local residents, hanged a repairman, raped several women, burned down 23 houses, completely destroyed the mechanical and alcohol factories, plus the power station, and ruined 27 collective farms.

24 hours later, however, the invaders had to retreat as they could not resist an attack from the 84th Separate Naval Rifle brigade, formed by volunteer sailors of the Pacific Fleet and the Amur Flotilla and brought by Red Army commanders from the Far East. Evgeny Dronov, who served in that brigade as a cabin boy, later recalled:

“This is how the selection of volunteers was carried out. The sailors were lined up with full gear on alert, and the brigade’s commander and commissar addressed them: ‘Who is ready to defend Moscow, the capital of our Motherland, at the cost of their lives, step forward!’ The entire formation did just that.”

The Marines drove Nazi invaders out of Skopin on November 26th . After signal flares were fired, the men took off their hats, replacing them with sailor caps, and unbuttoned their greatcoats, making their “sea souls” – the slang name for the striped navy undershirt – visible.

It caused panic for Nazis who used to call Soviet marines “black death” and “striped devils”. With the words of their battle song — “Get up, comrades, everyone to your places!” — the sailors rushed into a bayonet attack.

Some 500 meters away from the outskirts of Skopin, a barrage of machine gun and mortar fire fell on the sailors. Nevertheless, they continued their onslaught. Many fell, never to rise again.

The fire grew stronger. “I will remember it for the rest of my life”, Dronov recalled. “Sailors in black clothes, framed in red blood, on the white snow”…

For most of the Marines, the battle for Skopin became their baptism of fire. And they endured it with great honor, forcing Guderian’s troops, who had marched victoriously across all of Europe with no defeat or retreat anywhere, to flee in panic from an ancient Russian city 1,000 years old.