Rank: Corporal Branch of Service: Artillery Unit: 245 Volynska Ruzicka Red Banner Rifle Division Kuzma (according to award documents - Konstantin) was the head of the bakery shop in the village of Borovoe, Novousmansky District, Voronezh Region. He was a member of the CPSU(b). The beginning of the war found him in Voronezh, where he was with his wife visiting his brother Sergey, an employee of the aircraft Factory #18. On the same day, he and his brother volunteered for the front. Having passed training, Kuzma was assigned to the 245th Rifle Division on February 18, 1942. There, he immediately proved to be an intelligent Red Army soldier, for which he was enlisted as a scout-observer in the 770th Separate Artillery Reconnaissance Regiment. With an attempt to completely the blockade the German troops in the Demyansk pocket, his battle path began. Operating in the close rear of the enemy, the scouts-observers paved the way for the division forward. Swamps of the Baltic States, industrial areas of Silesia, wooded Sudetenland-Kuzma Grigoryevich's long road to victory. In the area of Staraya Russa in August 1943 he receives his first award-the medal "for military merit". Then, together with the division, it participated in the offensive on Riga in the summer and autumn of 1944 and the elimination of the Kurland group of German troops until January 1945. Heavy combat conditions of the scout observer: multi-day sorties to the rear of the enemy, waiting lying in the water and snow, could not have a positive effect on the health of Kuzma Grigoryevich. In one sortie, his intelligence unit was ambushed. The Germans kept prisoners in a damp cellar, from where corporal Berdnikov managed to escape and return to the location of the unit. Hiding the fact of captivity from his superiors, he kept his reputation, but earned tuberculosis of the lungs, an incurable disease at that time. Since the beginning of 1945 Kuzma Grigoryevich is being transferred to a Separate anti-aircraft machine gun company, where his glorious path to victory continues. During the Sandomierz-Silesian offensive, he participates in the famous special intelligence operation to prevent the explosion of a mined Cracow, for which he receives a certificate of honor. Later, in 1967, Julian Semyonov would write the novel Major Whirlwind about these events. In the lower Silesian offensive, corporal Berdnikov earned the medal of honor for Bravery and received a certificate of honor for the capture of Oppeln. Victory met in Czechoslovakia, accepting the surrender of the German army group "Center". Corporal Berdnikov arrived home only in 1946, where he received a group I disability due to tuberculosis and died 2 years later. He is survived by his wife and daughter, who was born in February 1942. The father was shot by the invaders in his own home in Voronezh, and the mother survived the shooting in the Sandy Log and survived her son.