Description of the attraction
The monument to 23 soldiers-guards was erected in 1989. The monument is presented in the form of a group of soldiers confronting the enemy, and a stele with the names of the dead, from the top of which bronze cranes fly into the sky. The author of the monument is the sculptor A. I. Penkov.
The monument was erected in honor of the immortal feat of 23 guardsmen of the 158th regiment of the 51st guards rifle division. A small group of fighters, led by Guard Lieutenant A. M. Grigoriev, at the cost of their own lives, kept the only bridge not blown up in the city of Polotsk. The Germans tried fourteen times to dislodge the soldiers from the position they held. The heroes were destroyed only by a flurry of flamethrower strike.
For a long time it was believed that all 23 soldiers died in the battle for the bridge over the river, however, one of them was lucky - he was seriously injured, but he was picked up and rescued by orderlies. It was Sergeant Major Mikhail Kozhevnikov. He was burned by a jet of a flamethrower, but immediately covered with earth, which flew into the air after being hit by an enemy projectile next to the foreman. Sergeant Sergeant Alferov, risking his own life, dug the wounded man out of the ground - he was still alive. The wounded hero was able to be transported to the medical battalion, and then to the hospital in the rear. Mikhail Kozhevnikov, after his second birth in a terrible meat grinder in Polotsk, found his place in the peaceful post-war reconstruction of the destroyed country. He worked in construction, in the Stavropol Territory as a driver, at a factory.
This monument is worth seeing if you are going to Polotsk. Not only to pay tribute to the memory of those who paid with their lives for the freedom of the whole country, but also to admire the amazingly energetic and dynamic, piercingly sad composition.
