Ilya Rodionov Grigorievich_x000D_ _x000D_ Branch of service: army, air force (except marine aviation), the coast guard, the troops of the NKVD border troops. Division: 93rd guards rifle Kharkiv twice red banner order of Suvorov and Kutuzov division. My grandfather was considered missing, and he was a private soldier! Since I was a child, I knew that my grandfather (my mother's father) was missing at the front. That's what they said at the time. And then somehow everyone fell silent and tried not to answer my questions anymore, saying that you will grow up, you will understand. But in the early 1970s, we learned about a letter from the pioneers to my grandmother, which reported the discovery of a medallion of private Radionov Ilya Grigoryevich. Members of the search party in the forests of the Kursk region found this and other medallions of Soviet soldiers. There was a note inside my grandfather's locket that they used to find my grandmother. But she had long since left the village where she and five young children accompanied their father and husband to the war - the Great Patriotic war. This letter has not been preserved, but we all know that the remains of the red army soldiers were reburied from the forest in a mass grave at the Sazhnoye station in the Kursk region. My grandmother, Elena Radionova, really wanted to visit the places of death and burial of her husband. Each of us tried to comfort her somehow and do something nice. I did the same. In the family photo album, we had a photo of my grandfather, which captured him in a room against a decorative panel with a resort landscape. He was photographed during treatment somewhere in the South of the country. I took this photo from the album to the photo Studio, after asking my mother for money to restore the photo. The small photo was enlarged to a portrait. I gave these portraits to my grandmother and her children: my mother, uncle Volodya, aunt Tosa, aunt Shura, and aunt Raya. So, thanks to search engines, many years later we learned that Ilya Grigoryevich died in battle during the most tragic period of the military operation that went down in history under the name"battle of Kursk". The battle lasted from July 5 to August 23, 1943, and private Radionov went missing on July 14. It was during these days that the German-fascist troops of the army groups "Center" and "South" (field marshals G. Kluge and E. Manstein) launched a major offensive on the "Kursk bulge" trying to regain the strategic initiative lost in the battle of Stalingrad. And many soldiers of the opposing sides were left lying on the battlefields. The Soviet troops of the Central and Voronezh fronts under the leadership of army generals K. K. Rokossovsky and N. F. Vatutin repelled this massive onslaught, and then together with the troops of other fronts launched a counteroffensive and provided a turning point in the war. The bloodiest war continued. And my grandmother, not waiting for her husband, moved with the children closer to their relatives. And all the difficult war and post-war years, only thanks to their work and state care, they managed to raise all the children. In the late 1980-ies, when it was not grandma, one of her grandchildren asked the Central archive of the USSR Ministry of defense and received a certificate, as follows: "the Arrows 278 guards rifle regiment, guards division 93, private Rodionov Ilya Grigoryevich, born 1906, native KAZ. SSR, Tumen, called up by the Khobdinsky RVC, died on July 14, 1943, buried at Sazhnoye station, Kursk region." As the years passed, I wanted to tell the growing children more about their great-grandfather. But it turned out that I knew very little about him, and there was no one to ask. So, I started collecting and recording information about him. And last summer, together with his 17-year-old younger son, he went to Kazakhstan in search of the village from which he left for the front. When we got to the district center, I learned that now Khobdinskiy area called Kobdinsky. We decided to start the search with an obelisk, which should be in the Park in the center of the village. After walking around the village, we found a park, but it was in disrepair with traces of dismantling of some structures. We were advised to go to the new park where at the foot of the epic monument there are seven stone slabs, each of which is carved with the name of a hero who lived in different periods of the history of the peoples living on this land. We didn't find any information about Ilya Grigoryevich there, so we applied to the district akimat (district administration) where the head of the culture Department took patronage over us. And we used it to meet with old residents of the village, who remembered the Rodionov family and advised us to go to the former district center, and also to the small village of Karaganda. Then we were invited to the district military enlistment office, where we were shown the records in the registration logs in the office of the military enlistment office. The first pages of the magazine were badly damaged, but we were holding a magazine with the inscription on the cover - "Alphabet book". In it we found an entry under number 48 about the mobilization of private Rodionov I. G. on October 17, 1942. In the book of the dead and missing, we were shown an entry made on December 25, 1943. This record showed that the family was registered and handed an official letter notifying them of the missing person. Then we were given a Soviet UAZ for a trip to the former district center, where there is an obelisk with the names of dead soldiers carved on it near the village club. There, among dozens of names, we saw the name of my grandfather. So, it turns out that the grandmother could not visit the place where her husband is buried, but she came to this obelisk. She was looking at this "No one is forgotten and nothing is forgotten" sign. When she was here, she visited him. That's right they say: "It's not the fallen who need it — it's the living who need it." Then we went to the village of Karaganda. We were driving off-road and within an hour and a half we saw a village of mud buildings lined up on a single street. We were taken to one of the houses where an old woman lives, who as a child often visited the Rodionovs' house. Her stories about the simple village life of that time made everyone listen. As I returned home, I was mesmerized by the sense of belonging to the great trials that befell our relatives during the war years, and I thought about the kindness and care shown to us by the locals. Apparently so did my son, who broke the silence with the question: "do they know you here?". It was hard for him to believe in the unselfish participation of those who saw us for the first time and helped us find the small homeland of our ancestors. So, after a little research, we learned a lot about our relatives and the people around them in those "forties-fateful" years and living now. And we also learned that in several important documents, the name Radionov was written with the letter "o". But the search for new information should be continued, because judging by the dates of birth of children, Ilya Grigoryevich was wounded and was treated before the beginning of the great Patriotic war. It is known that he was called up for service in peacetime, and then participated in battles and was wounded. After treatment, he went home. Then another daughter was born. And then, as we now know, in October 1942, he was mobilized for war. S. Nikolaev, Orsk, July 2010