Alexander Matveyevich Matrosov (1924–1943) was a nineteen-year-old Red Army private who gave his life to silence a German machine gun that was stopping his battalion’s attack. On 27 February 1943, near the village of Chernushki in the Pskov region, he closed the embrasure of an enemy bunker with his own body so that his comrades could go forward. His name became a byword for self-sacrifice in battle.
A difficult childhood
Matrosov grew up without his parents, in children’s homes and then in a children’s labour colony in Ufa, where he finished school and worked as an assistant teacher. In 1942, at the age of eighteen, he was called up and sent to the Krasnokholmsk infantry school near Orenburg. In early 1943, with many other cadets, he was sent straight to the front as an ordinary soldier.
The battle for Chernushki
Matrosov served as a submachine gunner in the 2nd Separate Rifle Battalion of the 91st Separate Siberian Volunteer Rifle Brigade, which was fighting south of Velikiye Luki in the Kalinin region (today Pskov region). On 27 February 1943 the battalion was ordered to attack the German strongpoint at the village of Chernushki. The approach lay across open snow, and the attack was held up by fire from German bunkers at the edge of the village.
Two of the bunkers were destroyed by submachine gunners and anti-tank riflemen, but a machine gun in the third kept the whole stretch of ground in front of the village under fire. Several attempts to silence it failed. Matrosov crawled towards the bunker, threw grenades at it and fired his submachine gun at the embrasure. The machine gun went quiet, but as soon as the soldiers rose to attack it opened fire again. Matrosov then rushed forward and threw himself against the embrasure, covering it with his body. In those seconds his company was able to rise and reach the bunker, and the village was taken.
Hero of the Soviet Union
On 19 June 1943 Alexander Matrosov was posthumously made a Hero of the Soviet Union. By an order of the People’s Commissar of Defence of 8 September 1943 his name was given to the 254th Guards Rifle Regiment, the unit his brigade had become, and he was entered permanently on the roll of its 1st company. He was the first Soviet soldier to be enrolled in his unit for ever in this way. In 1944 a Soviet postage stamp was issued in his honour.
Matrosov was first buried near the place where he fell, and in 1948 he was reburied in Velikiye Luki, where a memorial stands over his grave. Many other soldiers across the Red Army performed the same deed during the war, and Matrosov’s name came to stand for all of them. Streets, schools and ships were named after him, and monuments stand in Velikiye Luki, Ufa and many other towns.
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