Dyakov, Pyotr Egorovich

Pyotr Dyakov was born in the volost village of Ust-Lamenka into a peasant family. In 1926 he joined the Komsomol.

At the beginning of 1929 he learned to drive a tractor and became a tractor driver of the commune "New Way". July 2, 1929 was taken to hospital.

According to the version common in Soviet times, he was beaten at night with local fists, doused with kyrosin and set on fire, but survived. And according to another version that had spread in the nineties, Peter himself inadvertently doused himself with kyrosin, lit a match, caught fire, and his fists, who were next to him, brought him to the hospital.

According to the testimony of P. Dyakov himself, his communards took him to the hospital, he was treated for two years.

Later, since 1931 he was the builder of Magnitogorsk.

He passed the Great Patriotic War from beginning to end, having received two orders for participating in the battles, and worked as a machine operator.

On August 3, 1929, the essay “Fiery Tractor Driver” was published in the newspaper Komsomolskaya Pravda . ^{[2] [3] [4] [5] [6]}

“Hire us, Petrush, on a tractor” - Soviet Russian folk song . The words are taken from the poem “Diakov Peter” by Ivan Molchanov (1929), the music is attributed to Vladimir Zakharov or the head of the Ivanovo association “Agites” Ilya Gorin ^{[7] [2]} . In the melody of the song, as the Soviet composers of those times often did, a marching “lining” is added to the intonational fabric of the ditties of misery, in this case, however, hardly distinguishable ^[8] .

Based on the song, a self-titled picture was written in a genre close to naive painting , Anna Blizeeva - countrywoman Pyotr Dyakova ^[9] .

Leonid Brezhnev in his memoirs “ Sense of the Motherland ” (1981) writes about P. E. Dyakov ^[10] :

All this was not in the movies, not in books, but in his own life. Together with other Komsomol members, I came across fists in the fields, arguing with them at rural gatherings. We were threatened with stakes, pitchforks, vicious notes, stones thrown out the window. Once they read in the newspapers that in the neighboring Tyumen region, the kulaks committed a heinous crime - one of the first that thundered all over the country during the period of mass collectivization. At night, they guarded the tractor driver Pyotr Dyakov, who was sleeping in the cab, doused with kerosene and set it on fire. We were experiencing the terrible death of an unknown comrade and comrade who was immediately familiar to us. And even more decisively, bolderly led an attack on the hated fists.

And soon a song appeared about that tractor driver. We loved her and sang endlessly, moreover, often standing - in memory of the hero of collectivization.

On a rough track, whether on a path -

Anyway, you and I are on the way.

Hire us, Petrush, on a tractor,

Hire us to the outskirts!

In general, we were finishing a soft, lyrical, emotional song menacingly, turning her words to ourselves:

Snarling, fierce, barking,

They are not happy about our harvest ...

Kulach gets to you:

Komsomolets, dear, don’t be sick!

Only thirty years later, thirty years later, did I learn that Pyotr Dyakov miraculously survived, and even conquered the whole war. In a word, truly a man from a song

• Dyakov, Petr Egorovich - article from the Encyclopedia of Siberia
• Laura Colt . Hire us, Petrush, on a tractor (neopr.) . proza.ru (November 18, 2010). Date of treatment January 19, 2015.
  • poltora_bobra: In defense of the "fiery tractor driver"