Rank: Captain. Service branch: Army, Air Force (with the exception of Naval Aviation), Coast Guard, troops of the NKWD border troops. Ivan Danilovich Kudrya -secret service officer who led a sabotage group working in Kiev during the World War II. Kudrya was born in 1912 into a farming family living in Salkovo, today's village of Protsev, Kiev region, Boryspil district. He had to grow up without a father, so Ivan worked a lot as a farmhand from childhood on. After finishing 7 grades of school, he started to work as a locksmith in MTS. Then, after training in teacher courses, he ran a primary school in the village of Chaplinka, Dnipropetrovsk region. In the autumn of 1934 Ivan Danilovich was called up to join the Red Army in the NKVD Border Guard. Kudrja served in the border units on the western borders, and even then he showed himself to be a brave and courageous man. He was recommended by the command to study at the NKVD school, whereupon he was sent to serve in the foreign intelligence service. After completing his studies in 1938, Kudrya began working on the committees of the GB, and in 1939 he was accepted into the ranks of the CPSU (b). In March 1941 Ivan Kudryu was sent to work in Kiev, where he encountered the war. Our troops were in retreat, and in order to fight the German invaders in the Ukrainian capital, a reconnaissance and sabotage group was organized from the ranks of local residents, and Ivan Kudryu was assigned to lead it. Since September, the Maxim group, under whose name Kudrya worked with the underground, began carrying out acts of sabotage. As a result of the operations, the Nazis suffered considerable damage to manpower and equipment. Underground workers blew up a cinema with the fascists there and the office of the military commander. Sabotage operations were regularly carried out on the railway, in factories and at Darnitsa station. The group gained new people for their work, collected valuable information, which was transferred to the front after communication with the mainland was restored. Kudrya carefully maintained secrecy, but the Gestapo still introduced an agent to his group, and in July 1942 Maxim was arrested along with some of his associates (Zhenya Bremer, a German citizen, Okipna Raisa, an opera actress). The group continued to operate, and for a long time nobody knew anything about the fate of the arrested. After a thorough search, which took many years, it turned out that they were tortured for about three months during daily interrogations, but they did not succeed in breaking the will of the underground. Ivan Kudrya died in silence, without giving a single name, without telling a single episode of the activities of his group. The Soviet intelligence officer Ivan Danilovich Kudrya received the Order of Lenin for outstanding service, courage and bravery in 1965 and was posthumously awarded the title of Hero of Soviet Union by decree of the Presidium of Supreme Soviet of USSR on May 8, 1965.