The commander of the 68th Infantry Division, General Georg von Braun and many other senior German officers were killed under the ruins, and the work of the Kharkov transport hub was disorganized for a long time.

Starinov retired from active service in 1956, but continued lecturing at military and KGB academies and took part in writing the official history of the partisan war.

In December 1941, a special operational engineering group of the Southern Front was formed under the leadership of Colonel Ilya Starinov to set up mine-explosive barriers on the approaches to the city.

The mines were installed by former internationalist fighters of the Spanish Republican Army who arrived with Starinov, as well as Komsomol girls and teenagers of pre-conscription age.

[2][3] On 23 February 1942, during one of the "Ice campaigns", Colonel Starinov's sabotage group under the leadership of foreman Maxim Repin seized the captured "atomic notebook" of the officer they killed.

When I left Rostov, I showed the notebook to Rodion Malinovsky, who advised me to hand it over to the office of the Commissioner of the USSR State Defense Committee for Science, Professor Sergey Kaftanov.

I handed it over to the responsible employee, Doctor of Chemical Sciences Stepan Balezin, and he found in it that the notebook was not a fantasy at all, but real judgments about the possibility of using atomic energy in military operations… Then it was decided to develop such weapons by us...".

[2][3] The first official mention of the existence of the captured "atomic notebook" was announced only in 1985 in the memoirs of the former commissioner of the USSR State Defense Committee for Science, Professor Sergey Kaftanov, published in the media.

[4] Sergey Vasilyevich wrote that it was this "atomic notebook", along with the warning of physicist George Flerov, that prompted him and academician Abram Ioffe to contact the State Defense Committee with a letter about the urgent need to create a scientific center on nuclear weapons problems in the USSR.

Due to this, by the time Soviet intelligence received the drawings of the "Fat Man" bomb dropped on Nagasaki, the USSR had already created its own nuclear industry.