AF Burtsev’s contribution to the Great Victory received medals and orders of the Red Banner and the Patriotic War. Photo: Photo from family archives
Andrey Fyodorovich Burtsev was born in 1917 in the Altai Territory, where he graduated from six classes of a local school. But it turns out that the main events of his life took place far from his native country, in Belarus. Here, during the Great Patriotic War, he bravely fought for the common homeland, and here he found personal happiness.
… At the beginning of the war, Andrei Burtsev already had experience as a soldier. He was drafted into the Red Army in 1939, he even managed to fight Finland for ten days. Then in 1940 he took part in the campaign of Soviet troops in the Baltic countries, was in the 5th separate sapper battalion in Daugavpils. And shortly before the war, in March 1941, part of it was transferred to the Grodno region of Belarus for the construction of defensive structures. At that time, Andrei Burtsev was already a senior sergeant. They built pillboxes on the border with Nazi-captured Poland. This is where the war came.
