Rank: Red Army Soldier Branch of service: Army Corps of Engineers He was called up to the Red Army by the Rubezhansky District Military Commissariat of the Voroshilovgrad (Lugansk) Region of the Ukrainian SSR in February 1943, at the age of 17, together with fellow villagers-classmates. In the same month, he took the first battle at the Tomashevsky Bridge over the Seversky Donets River between the cities of Rubezhnoye and Lisichansk. A group of teenagers, who did not even have time to take the oath, and the commandant's platoon of the city of Rubezhnoye, armed with rifles and one Degtyarev machine gun, managed to defend the bridge and prevent the enemy retreating from Stalingrad from entering the city. They held out until the arrival of the main forces of the Red Army. Then there was training in installation of pontoon bridges in the area of starits of the Oskol River near the city of Kupyansk, Kharkov Region. In the first multi-day battle as a pontoon man in the summer of 1943, he was severely concussed, but refused to go to the hospital and remained in the ranks, so as not to lose his unit and not to part with his classmates. With them, he crossed many water barriers of Eastern Europe: the Seversky Donets, the Dnieper, and the Danube Rivers. He finished the war in Prague. By the victorious May of 1945, a third of his class remained alive. After the Great Patriotic War, he continued to serve in the Soviet Army in Romania until 1949. During his service, he became a driver. After return to his native village, he passed the exams for the 10th grade as an external student and entered the Voroshilovgrad Pedagogical Institute, which he graduated with a "Red" diploma. For several years he worked as a teacher of physics and mathematics in the village of Melovatka in the Svatovsky District of Voroshilovgrad Region, then at the evening school in Severodonetsk, taught higher mathematics to students of the evening branch of the Kharkov Polytechnic Institute in Severodonetsk. Then he was invited to work in Severodonetsk Experimental Design Bureau of Automation, where, in addition to automating the production processes of the chemical industry, he was engaged in development of space programs. During this period, he received a second higher education as a computer engineer. He retired at the age of 65. In 1951, while studying at the Pedagogical Institute, he married a student of the same University. He lived a long and happy life with her, more than 50 years. He had children - a son born in 1952 and a daughter born in 1963.