Katin, Nikolay Andreevich

Born in a family of Russian peasants in Tatarstan . Received secondary education. In 1941 he entered the Kazan Aviation Institute . In August 1943 he went to the front.

Fight at the village of Pobetin

The commander of the machine-gun company of the 68th Infantry Regiment ( 70th Infantry Division , 43rd Army , 3rd Belorussian Front ) Senior Lieutenant Nikolai Katin distinguished himself in the battle for the enemy stronghold at the village of Pobeten (now Romanovo village of the Kaliningrad region ).

The company of Nikolai Katin received the order to seize the height - the outcome of the offensive depended on this. The senior lieutenant advanced forward with a machine gun, wedged into the enemy’s defenses. The enemy began to counterattack. The first attack of the Nazis was drowned - the machine gun hit accurate, short bursts. The first counterattack was followed by several more. Katin’s calculation allowed the Germans to 70–80 meters and fired aimed. Precise machine gunner strikes forced the enemy forces to retreat, which eliminated a significant part of the group. In this battle, Nikolai Katin destroyed 30 Nazi soldiers and officers.

Königsberg Assault

On April 7, 1945, in a battle for the village of Friedrichsberg ( the Zelenoye village of the city ​​of Kaliningrad ), Katin seized the house with a group of fighters.

Bursting into a heavily fortified strong point, she cut the retreat of part of the garrison. But there were too few Soviet fighters on this site to develop success. By the middle of the day, the situation had changed. The Nazis surrounded several houses where our machine gunners settled. For three hours, the company restrained their onslaught. Only two soldiers survived near Katin. The senior lieutenant entrusted them with one of the machine guns, and he himself fired from the second. The Germans conducted continuous artillery shelling of the house.

After another rupture, the machine gun behind the commander was silent - his last calculation was lost. Kate was forced to fire two machine guns simultaneously, firing on both sides of the street. By the sixth attack of the enemy, machine-gun belts ran out.

The “Ferdinand” self-propelled gun , which fired point-blank at the house, came close to the house.

Using two grenades, Kate destroyed the self-propelled gun. As soon as the Nazis broke into the house, Katin threw a grenade under his feet.

By a decree of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet of the USSR of April 19, 1945, for the exemplary performance of command missions on the front of the struggle against Nazi invaders and the courage and heroism shown, Senior Lieutenant Nikolai Andreyevich Katin was posthumously awarded the title Hero of the Soviet Union . After the assault ended on April 9, 1945, Senior Lieutenant Katin was buried in a mass grave in the village of Pereslavskoye, Zelenogradsky District, Kaliningrad Region.

In 1985, in connection with the directive to enlarge all military graves in the Zelenograd region, the officer’s remains, among other soldiers, were recovered from the former cemetery of the military medical battalion in the village of Voloshino. However, as it turned out after 20 years, the reburial was carried out with gross violations. For a month and a half of work on the site, the trackers of the Conscience detachment discovered the remains of 128 Red Army men, including Nikolai Katin. They found his ashes on decayed epaulettes and the nature of the wounds. The remains of the soldiers, packed in plastic bags, were held by Ruslan Khimasov, the leader of the Conscience detachment, for more than two years, since local officials could not allocate funds for the reburial. The situation changed only after a journalistic investigation undertaken by the correspondent of the Izvestia newspaper in the Kaliningrad Region, Ilya Stulov.

On October 20, 2006 , in a festive atmosphere, the remains of 271 soldiers of the Great Patriotic War, including the Hero of the Soviet Union, Senior Lieutenant Nikolai Katin, were reburied at the Pereslavl military-historical memorial near Kaliningrad.

He was awarded the Order of Lenin , two orders of the Red Star .

An obelisk is installed in Kaliningrad, and a memorial plaque is installed on the house where the Hero died. Streets in Kaliningrad and Zelenodolsk are named after Nikolai Katin.

• Street Lieutenant Katina .

Katin, Nikolai Andreevich (Russian) . The site " Heroes of the country ."

• Katin Nikolai Andreevich - “Chkalovsky Bulletin” No. 7 for April 2006 (retrieved August 4, 2008).
• The hero of the Soviet Union, and after death, rescues his fighters - Izvestia on 07/11/06 (checked on August 4, 2008).