PARTISAN MIKHAIL TROITSKY

The Nazi aggressor was fought on both the frontlines and deep in the enemy’s rear. Mikhail Troitsky fought with a guerrilla unit on the enemy-occupied territory. He was born in Ukraine, which was then part of the Soviet Union. 
     
“We were seven in the family – four brothers and three sisters,” Mikhail Troitsky recalls. “In the 1930s my father was a tunneling team leader and built Moscow’s first underground line. In 1938 my elder brother Yegor joined his team. But in 1939 Yegor was called up to the Red Army, and he left right from Moscow. My father had to return to the village a year later to work to support our big family. And right before the war another brother was called up and soon found himself on the frontlines. By that time I had grown up too – I turned 16 in 1940.” 

After completing with honors his seven years at school Mikhail Troitsky went on to study bookkeeping not far from the Ukrainian capital, Kiev. He was diligent in his studies, looking forward to the day when he would be able to work to help his family. But the plans were disrupted by a severe illness fraught with the loss of eyesight. A surgery was needed urgently, and the operation went off successfully. But the war broke out, and he had to forget about bookkeeping. 

On June 22nd 1941 Nazi Germany attacked the Soviet Union. In the summer and autumn of 1941 Nazi troops occupied a considerable part of the European Soviet territory, where they imposed an inhuman occupation regime. 

In October 1941, a month after Mikhail’s return from hospital, the Nazis came to his native village of Baranovka. Fairly soon the villagers got a very good idea of what the “German order” was all about. 

The tragedy struck on December 19th 1941, the day after a clash with guerrillas, in which a group of Nazis and policemen was killed. The Nazis put the blame on the villagers, who were patriotically minded and showed no intention to collaborate with the occupying troops. A punitive squad arrived at Baranovka.                                                         

“The Nazis drove all villagers into a large barn, which housed a fire brigade before the war, and began to call people out one after another by pointing at them with their fingers: “You go out, you….” All in all, 19 people were called out and among them - a young girl, my relative. All were marched to the clearing between the two houses and all were shot dead. When we came out of the barn, I saw everybody around me running and crying. We had heard the shots but never thought that the worst would happen. The demonstrative execution of our fellow villagers made it imperative for us, young men and women, to join the guerrillas as early as possible,” Mikhail Troitsky said. 

At the end of December 1941 Mikhail Troitsky and his friends join a guerrilla unit based several kilometers from Baranovka. 

“I was fairly short and very young – in November 1941 I turned 17 only,” Mikhail Troitsky says. “The rest of the fellows were a bit older. I was banned from military operations at first. So I had to clean weapons and prepare meals. I was disappointed, of course… Fighters who had been with the guerrilla unit long enough tried to console me. Just wait a bit, they would say, and take the oath first…”

The oath-taking was a solemn occasion, with each newcomer facing the ranks of his comrades: “For burned cities and villages, for the deaths of our women and children, for torture, violence and the gruesome acts of barbarism against my people I swear to take vengeance and fight the enemy without mercy to the last breath!”

Mikhail Troitsky took the oath on February 17th 1942. And on the following day he got his first assignment, which could have been his last. After several hours of keeping watch in freezing temperatures Mikhail got his feet frost-bitten so badly that they thought he would have to have them amputated, but he recovered and was back in the ranks fast enough to become a full-fledged member of the guerrilla unit. 

The chance to test himself in battle presented itself fairly soon too, and Mikhail Troitsky opened his battle account by killing his first Nazi soldier. He felt no fear because he knew he stood on his native soil and ought to defend it against the enemy. Every defender, including the guerrillas, who fought in the enemy’s rear and grew in number practically daily, was convinced that he was fighting for the right cause. 

“In 1942 guerrilla movements were mushrooming on a mass scale,” Mikhail Troitsky recalls. “Weapons were in short supply, so the newcomers ran into sort of restrictions – they had to come with their own weapons. That’s why many locals signed up with the Nazi police and, having obtained a weapon, presented themselves to a guerrilla unit two or three days later.” 

The guerrilla unit also got reinforcements from among soldiers and officers of the Red Army who escaped Nazi camps or broke free from a siege. One of those was border guard Mikhail Naumov, an officer, who later took the command of a guerilla formation. “Like a giant magnet, the guerrillas attracted everyone who was burning to fight the invaders,” Mikhail Naumov wrote in his memoirs. “People reached us by god-forsaken forest paths, one by one and in groups… We took in groups of military, escaped camp prisoners, locals listed as “unreliable”, and young people who were suffocating from the pernicious atmosphere of “the new order”. 

The guerrilla unit lived by strict rules and tough army discipline. It had a medical section to treat the wounded. The medicines were captured from the enemy at first, just as the weapons – whatever they needed they had to fight for.                           

“Danger! Partisans!” Posters of this kind in German and Russian were placed in areas where guerrillas were operating. The guerrilla movement posed a real threat to the Nazis. In spite of Hitler’s order to wipe out the partisan movement on the occupied territories, the guerrillas continued to attack police garrisons on a more than regular basis and prevented the forced removal of Russian people to Germany.  More frequently than not they held whole areas under control. 

All this forced the Nazi command to assign considerable manpower and materiel to fight the partisans. For punitive raids the Nazis called in special task forces, units from the fronts, tanks, artillery and even aviation.  

“In March 1942 the Nazis drew a substantial force to the area we were based in,” Mikhail Troitsky recalls. “Of course, they outnumbered us in tanks, artillery and mortars, and we came under such an avalanche of fire that all our attempts to hold out failed and we had to retreat to the north, to the Bryansk woods.”  
 
A month later the guerrilla unit came back and continued to fight deep in the enemy’s rear. But soon the Nazis made another attempt to destroy the resistance unit launching a massive air and ground attack against them. 

“Fierce fighting continued for three days. We were bombed from the air, from mortars, from artillery pieces and from tanks. It was as if the whole hell had come down on us. And again, we were by far outnumbered, so the only solution was to retreat back into the woods. All hardware at our disposal had to be dumped into the marshes or buried underground. With us we carried submachine-guns only – in the event we faced a breakthrough,” Mikhail Troitsky says. 

To survive as a unit the partisans had to retreat in the same Bryansk direction. The Bryansk woods stood as an unassailable fortress for the enemy and provided a reliable shelter for the partisans. Several large guerrilla units were based there and all maintained radio communication with Moscow. The specially equipped airstrips regularly received transport planes, which delivered weapons, food and medicines and took the wounded. 

The commander of one of the units, Hero of the Soviet Union Mikhail Naumov wrote in his memoirs: “For nearly two years the enemy had no idea as to what was going on in the dense forests of Bryansk. The Nazis were helpless against the rebellious forested areas and could do nothing to disrupt the daily work of partisan headquarters and airfields.” 

This time the partisan unit had to stay in the Bryansk woods for a whole six months, during which Mikhail Troitsky grew into a skillful fighter, rising up from a gunner to a reconnaissance officer. 

Once the reconnaissance group he was with resolved to thwart a Nazi plan to make a public show of an execution of civilians in one of the Ukrainian villages. Mikhail Troitsky recalls: “We had to come from the rear so that the punitive squad would be unable to retreat. It was wintertime, and the snow made it difficult for us to move fast, and we arrived late. When we engaged into battle, the barn with children, teachers and the local doctor in it was already on fire. The barbarians had burnt people alive. What was left to us was to destroy them. By the evening the battle was over, the punitive squad was done with. But we were late all the same. Had it not been for the snowdrifts, we would have prevented the deaths of innocent people…”

The bitter feeling that episode left remained in the heart of the former partisan for life. But war is war – it is inevitably associated with blood, death and suffering. …    

In February 1943 members of the partisan unit merged into a larger one under the command of Mikhail Naumov, who faced a no-easy task – to go through the enemy’s rear across the entire territory of Ukraine. The newly formed unit consisted of experienced battle-hardened partisans, and 19-year-old Mikhail Troitsky was among them.  Well armed and very fast moving, the unit advanced forward without encountering any serious resistance. In the course of the raid the partisans destroyed enemy garrisons and laid ambushes on the roads. The unit’s fighters were dressed in Soviet Army uniforms and carried Soviet-made submachine-guns and handguns. So the people on occupied territories welcomed them as Red Army fighters who had come to liberate them. 
     
A major operation on the partisans’ agenda was the liberation of Soviet prisoners of war, who worked in granite quarries. There were more than two thousand prisoners in the Nazi camp. A group of 25 reconnaissance fighters were assigned to the operation. 

As they approached the camp, they looked into their binoculars. No movement, the passages were all quiet. They started to move forward. 

“We were some one hundred meters from the building the prisoners were kept in, when the first submachine and machine gun volleys hurtled overhead,” Mikhail Troitsky recalls. “We moved faster and came out on the central street, which led right to the school building. Bullets hailed from all directions, and one of us was killed. We entered into battle and soon we lost another four. We were twenty. Our commander was killed too and some of us were wounded.” 

Mikhail Troitsky was wounded in the battle too. “The bullet went though my right shoulder and lung,” he says. “I felt blood running over my spine, and my vision was blurred. I collapsed to the ground and, just before I passed out, I heard the Nazi shouting. The enemy was pushing on us. Only a half of our group’s fighters were still alive. I was doing my best to grab the handgun, because I knew I was not going to surrender alive. Suddenly everything became very still and then just as suddenly the guns of a gun company that had come to our rescue burst out into life. We liberated the camp eventually, but it cost us severe losses. I felt somebody lean over me and say “Alive?” That was my friend, Sergei. I then lost consciousness and came round only two days later…” 

Even though the wound was serious enough with substantial damage to the lungs and the right shoulder blade split, Mikhail Troitsky and his comrades had to travel all the way back across the whole of Ukraine to their base.  But they did it, and Troitsky was on the first plane to Moscow to receive a treatment.  

At the age of 19 Mikhail Troitsky was decorated with the Medal “For Combat Services” and the Order of the Red Star.     
        
He never made it back to his unit. After a special training Mikhail Troitsky found himself in the enemy’s rear again a year later, but now he was within a subversive group operating on the territories of Poland, and then Slovakia. By that time the Soviet territory had been liberated from the Nazi invaders, and the war had retreated beyond our country’s borders, to Western Europe.

“In June 1944 we flew from the Ukrainian capital Kiev to Poland, where we landed in the enemy’s rear,” Mikhail Troitsky recalls. “Three days later we started out along Poland’s southern border, mining railroads as we went. We marched several hundred kilometers across Poland, and two months later our subversive group crossed the Polish-Slovak border.” 

He stayed in Nazi-occupied Slovakia for nearly a year. In the Slovak anti-Nazi uprising from August to November 1944 the subversive group Mikhail was a member of fought shoulder to shoulder with the insurgents. When the far outnumbering Nazi force quelled the rebellion, the group had to retreat into the mountains and go on fighting with a partisan unit. Mikhail Troitsky was appointed commissar of the unit, which consisted of both Slovak and Soviet partisans. The guerrilla war was on until the joining of forces with the advancing Red Army troops in the early 1945. 

After joining forces with the 4th Ukrainian front the group was disbanded. Right before the end of the war – in April 1945 – Mikhail Troitsky returned to Kiev and then moved to Moscow. 

Ahead of him was peaceful life, studies at the Moscow Energy Institute and subsequent work at one of research institutes in Moscow, where he worked his way from a laboratory assistant to engineer. 

For participation in the resistance movement in the years of the Second World War Mikhail Troitsky was awarded 29 orders and medals, including the Order of the Red Banner, the Medal “Partisan of the Great Patriotic War” First Class, the Polish Order “Partisan Cross” and the Czechoslovak “Partisan Star”. 

When asked why in the remote 1941 he, a 17-year-old youth, chose to join a guerrilla unit, Mikhail Troitsky says that it was his duty to his Motherland, that it couldn’t have been otherwise. And he has fulfilled this duty…