In honor of an Ingush soldier

Pavel Tsoroyev, Nazran. Exclusively to VK

67 years ago the Great Patriotic War ended. Ahead of Victory Day, people in the North Caucasus remember those who didn’t come back from the battlefields. Thousands of Ingushetians died for their motherland. The veteran Khamzat Malsagov told VK about one of them: “My uncle, Hasan Malsagov, who was the twin brother of my father, died on March 1st 1943, in the village of Merchanskoe in the Crimean region of Krasnodar Territory. He was buried there in a mass grave. My uncle was born on March 4th 1916 in the village of Yandyrka in the Saunzhen region. When he died, there were a few days left before his 27th birthday.”

Hasan Malsagov was called to the army during the Finnish war in 1939. That’s how his military career started. Then the Great Patriotic War broke out. Malsagov didn’t send many letters to relatives, and we know scarce facts about his life. According to Khamzat Malsagov: “In January 1943 my father, Hussein Maksagov, who was a locomotive engine driver, returned from a tour of duty and heard his twin brother's voice in the office. Hasan was standing on the doorstep. They embraced. Uncle’s convoy had made a stop on the way to Krasnodar Territory, and he had come to see his brother. It was their last meeting.”

It was in autumn 1944, when our 242nd Taman mountain division fought in Czechoslovakia. Sniper Vasily Kislyakov was sent to hospital with a bullet wound to the chest. When it became known that they wanted to evacuate him to the home front, he begged the doctors to make him stay in the hospital: “I will be fine soon and come back to my division. I have to settle accounts with Hitlerites for the death of my friend Hasan. I promised at his grave to kill at least 50 fascists, but I have fulfilled only a half of it. Please, don’t send me to the home front.”

The friendship between Kislyakov and Malsagov began in Krymsk. In early 1943 our division prepared for a breakthrough near Balaklava. About one thousand people from Yakutia came for personnel replacement. They were included into the attack teams. Yakut Vasily Kislyakov and Ingush Hasan Malsagov found themselves in one team of the 890th regiment. They soon became friends. Together they spied and countered Hitlerites’ attacks at Bezymyannaya, to the west of Balaklava. There Soviet soldiers destroyed a fascist squadron. The regiment provided fighting reconnaissance, trying to reach a fortified point. After the end of the battle, neither Kislyakov nor Malsagov were found among the dead or the living. The night passed, but no news came from them. Only in the evening did Kislyakov bring his heavily-injured friend to the regiment. Malsagov died few hours later.