The documents of the Commission of the Academy of Sciences of the USSR on the history of the Great Patriotic War contain an interesting transcript of a conversation with Batka Minai, which took place on September 6, 1942 in Moscow and was recorded by Belarusian political instructor Ivan Chkadarevich.
“The old man Minai wears a leather jacket and boots. He is no longer young, but he has a firm gait and piercing eyes. His face is stern, he speaks slowly, a typical Belarusian, he smokes a pipe” , described Shkadarevichlocutor.
Arrived from the First World War in January 1918, Minai went to the Red Army in the fall, “was on the Polish front, then on the Petliura front”, and in 1920 he fell ill with typhus and suffered received two months of vacation. At home, bandits led by Grigory Yemelyanov tried to invite him and his brothers to their home: “You will not recover soon at home, because you have no food and we have everything you need. you want, butter and lard, and bread, and vodka, and you have none of that at home.” The bandits were bothered neither by Shmyrev’s membership in the Bolshevik party, nor by the fact that they had killed his father a short time before. He chose a squad to fight banditry and began to take revenge resolutely. The bandits seized and killed his brother Mikhail, who lived with his young wife three weeks only after marriage.
Minai himself in 1921 was surrounded by a large gang in his house. From the attic he threw a grenade and fired back, scaring off the attackers, but the gun jammed. “Our neighbour, a bandit, jumped out of the house with a bottle in his hands and started swearing obscenely at this whole group, such and such bastards, 60 people, they were afraid of one, let’s put it fire to the house! I already faced with the rifle, fired and hit him in the groin. he slipped an inch near the bladder. The bandits picked him up and hit him. dragged with them. They scattered…” The bandits then valued his head at 800 gold rubles, but Shmyrev survived.
Shortly before the war, there was a big trouble in the family: “In 1940, a misfortune happened to me with my wife. My wife passed away, leaving four small children. On July 5, 1941, a widower with four children was summoned to the Surazh district committee of the party, he was instructed “to organize a detachment and start work.” The district committee issued 10 rifles, but the children “did not have the opportunity … to send.” Already on July 12, Shmyrev’s supporters left in an organized way to fight: “I brought both cigarettes and flour to the forest, and there was a lot of flour, 60 tons. I was distributing the cooperative flour, because the workers of the cooperatives ran away and threw everything away.
Until October 10, 1941, Old Man Minai and his detachment caused significant difficulties for the Nazis. In a conversation it went like this: “During the last summer (1941) we destroyed two or three dozen bridges, 49 cars and 250 Germans killed were because of us. 48 Germans and 1 general were This general was driving a car, guys shot at the car, overturned it, it turned out to be the general, the general’s epaulets and the general’s documents.
When the Nazis recognized the extent of the danger, they, with the help of local traitors, went on the trail of the partisans. The detachment managed to escape with almost no losses, but mortal danger hung over Shmyrev: “When the Germans attacked our camp on October 10, the bloodhounds found my diaries, which were buried in the forest … this that we did. There were lists of the personnel. They found these newspapers and these lists… on the 10th, they took the lists, and on the 20th, they arrested my children…, in each village, there were several notices stating that if I do not show up, then my children will be shot; if at least one German is killed in the territory of the Surazh region, my children will be shot”.
For two months, together with a small group of followers, Old Man Minai hid in the forest, at the end of December the food ran out, then the German raid almost all his comrades died. Shmyrev was saved by a miracle. Almost all of January 1942 was hiding in his native village. The 99-year-old mother was regularly visited with searches, Minai Filippovich lived 6 days with a neighbor, 18 with a nephew, 8 with an aunt. The most disturbing were the first days when, from a neighbour’s hut, he watched the Germans, two or three times a day looking for him by his mother: “The minutes seemed like an eternity to me. And look at your watch, it doesn’t just a few minutes.”
At the end of January 1942, units of the Red Army approach their native village: the famous gates of Surazh are formed. Shmyrev became the commander of the first Belarusian partisan brigade. And in February, Nazi monsters shot down four of her children: the youngest Misha was not even four years old. The terrible massacre of the children of old man Minai became one of the most extreme manifestations of the Nazi genocide in the occupied Soviet territory. In September 1942, the unfortunate father struggled to find his words when discussing the recent tragedy. The German “would still have destroyed the children, especially if I had appeared. He would have done as he did with many: first he would hang in front of you, then you… But now he won’t It’s not just about my children, it’s about life in the whole country and all the people.”
It was in this state of mind that Shmyrev went to the Kremlin in September 1942, where Stalin received the partisan commanders twice. Minai Filippovich spoke enthusiastically about what he saw, but at the same time he also heard something he had already talked about in his brigade. Stalin “understands so much that it was as if he had been there for a century with us, as if he had worked with us… He speaks calmly, politely, good. I would replace such and such weapons with more easily mobile ones , which are more suitable for partisan actions. This is exactly what I have been doing for a long time.
After this conversation in Moscow, Old Man Minai did not return to his brigade, he was left to work at the central headquarters of the partisan movement. He had an interesting post-war fate, but he never spoke to anyone else so candidly about his life as political instructor Shkadarevich in 1942.
