Panfilov's Twenty-Eight Guardsmen

[6] On the morning of 16 November, the 1075th Regiment's positions near the small Dubosekovo railroad station (crossing loop, literally raz'yezd)[7] were attacked by units of the 2nd Panzer Division.

Egorov told the reporter of a group of soldiers who, when faced by 54 German tanks, fought to the last and shot two from among their own who wished to surrender.

The report discussed the Panfilov Division's contribution to the fighting and mentioned that "A group of soldiers from the 5th company ... was attacked by a column of 54 enemy tanks, but they did not flinch", adding that a Commissar named Diev led the soldiers until all had been killed, but managed to keep the position in the face of the tank attack.

[10] On the following day, Krasnaya Zvezda ran an editorial on the front page by journalist Aleksander Krivitsky under the title "The Will of the 28 Fallen Heroes", dedicated solely to the heroic fight of Diev's group, which presented the same description of the events.

He arbitrarily replied that the company was incomplete and likely there were thirty men at all, including two traitors who wanted to surrender – thus reaching the number twenty-eight.

[11][1] The first article got a positive response from Soviet leaders, including Stalin himself, but there was a need to identify the names of the fallen heroes.

In spite of this, on 22 January 1942 Krivitsky published another article in Krasnaya Zvezda, in which he changed "5th company" to "4th" and made commissar Vasily Klochkov the main hero.

In fact, Dobrobabin commanded only one squad of the rifle platoon and there was a man with higher rank, staff sergeant Gavriil Mitin, among the "28 Guardsmen".

Now Soviet historians were forced to look for traces of the feat there, while documents drew the opposite picture – the rapid advance of the Germans.

[1] According to the article, the Guardsmen killed 70 enemy "submachine gunners" and destroyed 18 tanks using their anti-tank rifles, grenades and Molotov cocktails.

The article claimed that the last survivor from the group, soldier Ivan Natarov, described their exploits shortly before dying of his wounds in a field hospital.

Kuzhebergenov claimed that during 16 November he was knocked unconscious by an explosion and picked up by a German burial detail who presumed he was dead.

[17] The NKVD forced Kuzhebergenov to sign a confession in which he professed to having been an impersonator who was never present at the area of the battle and based his claims on material gleaned from the newspapers.

[19] In November 1947, the Kharkov Military Prosecutor's Office arrested Ivan Dobrobabin, a resident of the Kyrgyz town Kant, on suspicion of collaboration with the enemy.

When he interviewed Kaprov, the Colonel told him that although heavy fighting took place in Dubosekovo, the Guardsmen did not perform the deeds attributed to them by the press.

Ortenberg and Koroteev told the judge that their main motive was to boost the morale of the Soviet troops and therefore they published Egorov's story.

[16][22] In addition to Kuzhubergenov, who the investigation confirmed to have been one of the Twenty-Eight, and Dobrobabin, four other surviving Guardsmen were located by the commission: Grigory Shemiakin and Illarion Vasilyev were injured severely on the 16 November incident and evacuated to hospitals; Dmitry Timofeev and Ivan Shadrin were taken prisoner but eventually repatriated to the Soviet Union.

In his report, submitted to the Procurator General of the Soviet Union on 10 May 1948 and passed on to Joseph Stalin and Andrei Zhdanov, Afanasyev concluded that the Panfilov Guardsmen's last stand "did not occur.

Memorials to the fallen heroes were built throughout the Soviet Union, including five 12-meter tall statues near the site of the battle and the Twenty-Eight Guardsmen Park in Alma Ata (Almaty).

[26][full citation needed] In 1966, the popular Soviet literary magazine Novyi mir published an article entitled "Легенды и факты" ("Legends and facts") by V. Kardin [ru].

Such thoughts were slapped down personally by Leonid Brezhnev, Soviet Union's Head of State: "Some of our authors even say that ... there were no 28 Panfilov men, ... that this fact was perhaps invented, that Klochkov did not exist, and neither did his appeal 'There is nowhere to retreat – we have our backs to Moscow!'

"[1] During the Perestroika period, the still-living Ivan Dobrobabin petitioned the Military Prosecutor General for rehabilitation, claiming that he never hurt anyone during his service in the Hilfspolizei.

[31] Medinsky stated that "It is my deep conviction that even if this story was invented from the start to the finish ..., it is a sacred legend which it's simply impossible to besmirch.