Pilot Suprun twice a hero of the Soviet Union. Heavenly hero

Born on August 2, 1907 in the village of Rechki, now the Belopolsky district of the Sumy region, in a peasant family. Graduated from junior high school. Since 1929 in the ranks of the Red Army. In 1930 he graduated from the school of junior aviation specialists, in 1931 - from the military aviation school of pilots. Since 1931, a test pilot. Deputy of the Supreme Soviet of the USSR of the 1st convocation. In 1939-1940 he participated in battles with the Japanese invaders in China, commanded a group of fighters. Personally and in a group with his comrades, he shot down several enemy planes. On May 20, 1940, Major S. P. Suprun was awarded the title of Hero of the Soviet Union for heroism and courage shown in battles. From June 1941 he fought on the fronts of the Great Patriotic War. The commander of the 401st Special Purpose Fighter Aviation Regiment (23rd Mixed Aviation Division, Western Front) Lieutenant Colonel S.P. Suprun personally shot down 2 enemy aircraft. 4 July 1941 died in an air battle with 6 enemy fighters. 22 July 1941 posthumously awarded the second Gold Star medal. Decorated with the Orders: Lenin (twice); he was buried in Moscow at the Novodevichy cemetery. A bronze bust was installed in Sumy. Streets in Moscow, Borisov, Sumy and the village of Ruchki, school number 9 and a boarding school in the city of Sumy are named after the Hero. Installed: a stele in the village of Rechki, a bas-relief in the city of Belopole, a memorial plaque on the building of the Sumy Machine-Building NPO.

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Stepan Suprun is a man of truly extraordinary destiny. He was born on August 2, 1907 in the village of Rechki, now the Belopolsky district of the Sumy region, in a peasant family, becoming the second son of a young Ukrainian couple Pavel Mikhailovich and Praskovya Osipovna. It so happened that by the will of fate, Stepan lived a third of his life far from his homeland - in Canada.

From an early age, his father worked for local landowners and German colonists. There were many like him in those years in Ukraine. Some, due to backbreaking work, went overseas in search of a better life. In 1910, Stepan's father, leaving his native place, went in search of happiness across the ocean - to distant Winnipeg. After 3 years, when Stepan was barely 6 years old, she came to Canada with children, and there were three of them, and her mother.

It turned out to be difficult living in a foreign land - without knowledge of the English language it was difficult. They were interrupted by temporary earnings. But the years passed, the children matured. From 1915 to 1924, Stepan attended schools in Howardville and Winnipeg. In 1917, his father joined the Communist Party of Canada and helped found its Russian branch in Winnipeg. In 1922, on the advice of his father, Stepan, along with his brothers Grigory and Fyodor, joined the League of Young Communists.

In 1924, the Suprun family returned to the USSR. For some time the Supruns lived in Altai, then in Alma - Ata and Pishpek, and in the fall of 1925 they moved to Ukraine, in Belopol'e. There Stepan got a job as an apprentice in a handicraft carriage workshop. Soon, his father was elected secretary of the Sumy Regional Executive Committee. Stepan moved to Sumy and began working as a carpenter in the comborbez (committee to combat unemployment). In 1928 he got a job at the Sumy Machine-Building Plant. In the summer he worked as a pioneer leader. One day he almost drowned in a river while saving two children.

Many young men in those years dreamed of aviation, of exploits. Stepan was no exception. When it came time to be drafted into the Red Army, he asked to join the aviation. In 1930 he graduated from the school of junior aviation specialists in Smolensk, in 1931 - from the military pilot school. Already there, his outstanding flying abilities were manifested. This is evidenced by the review of instructor Kushakov, who wrote in the characteristic:

"Cadet S. P. Suprun has all the data to be not only an excellent fighter pilot, but also a thoughtful researcher, an experimenter in flight."

Pilot Stepan Suprun

The mentor was not wrong. This is exactly what Stepan Pavlovich Suprun later became.

After flying school, he served in combat units in Bobruisk and Bryansk. Was the flight commander of the 7th separate fighter aviation squadron named after V.I. F.E.Dzerzhinsky.

Once, during aerial shooting lessons, a towing aircraft, having made an unsuccessful turn, swept over the wing with the target's tow cable. The pilot tried to throw the loop off the wing, but nothing came of it. The target pulled the wing to the side, turning the plane over. Somehow keeping in the air, he began to quickly lose altitude. The pilot was about to jump out with a parachute. Seeing this, Suprun flew up to the towing vehicle and, with a wave of his hand, ordered the pilot to level the plane in any way. Swiftly turning around, he caught up with him, cautiously approached the wing and chopped off the cable with a screw, preventing an inevitable catastrophe.

In July 1933, he was transferred to the Air Force Research Institute for flight test work. He took part in tests of the "Vakhmistrov's bookcase" and various airplanes for an "inverted" spin. Desperate courage, a great desire to master a new specialty and hard work helped him to join the ranks of the best aviators of that time. In one of the characteristics of the command of the Air Force Research Institute on S.P. Suprun it is written:

“Disciplined on the ground and in the air ... In flight work, he is enduring and tireless. Flies on all types of fighters. He is fluent in the elements of air combat of high-speed aircraft. Ideologically stable. It has no accidents or breakdowns due to its own fault. He works with great interest to improve his knowledge, masters new techniques and is irreplaceable in this respect. "

In May 1935, as part of the five aerobatic team, he took part in an air parade over Red Square, where he flew on an I-16 type 5 aircraft painted blue.

For successful testing of new technology and its mastery, he was awarded a gold personal watch of the People's Commissar of Defense of the USSR (1935), the Order of Lenin and a passenger car of the M-1 brand (1936).

In 1935, Suprun was vacationing at an Air Force sanatorium on the Black Sea. There he accidentally met a young man. The next day, having gone out on a boat to the sea together, they talked for a long time.

Suprun listened attentively to the young man, who frankly admitted that he, the aircraft technician, was denied a transfer to the flight crew. “Cheer up,” said Suprun. “Believe me, I didn’t manage to climb into the sky right away. I had to endure a lot. But he got up! I believe - you will rise too! The main thing is not to lose your dream. "

Later, the interlocutor Suprun graduated from the pilot school. During the Great Patriotic War, he shot down 59 fascist aircraft personally and 6 in a group. About 15 more downed aircraft, for various reasons, were not officially credited to him. Alexander Ivanovich Pokryshkin became three times Hero of the Soviet Union and Air Marshal.

In December 1937, Stepan Pavlovich Suprun was elected a Deputy of the Supreme Soviet of the USSR from the Sevastopol district.

Astoundingly quickly, Suprun made a steep rise to skill and fame, becoming one of the best pilots in the country, a member of the government.

However, at first he had to go through a very unpleasant period of his life. It happened while serving in the Bobruisk brigade. Then one of the autumn days, technician Strizhev, who was sitting in Suprun's plane and checking the operation of the engine, unexpectedly taxied from the parking lot to the start and went to take off with a climb to the west. The alarm was sounded at the airfield, and the plane was raised in the air. But it was too late, it was already impossible to catch up with the fugitive.

Strizhev crossed the state border and landed in Poland, near the city of Lida. Some time later, the Poles returned the plane, but refused to return the equipment. Soon, the Bobruisk air brigade announced an order from the People's Commissar of Defense to bring the squadron commander, squadron engineer and squadron engineer to trial, whose subordinate technician turned out to be a traitor to the Motherland. They also betrayed ... Stepan Suprun, whose plane was used for the escape. All four, sentenced to different terms, were imprisoned in the Bobruisk prison ...

Soon, Suprun was released from prison, but this episode nevertheless played a negative role in his future career - he became the only one among the pilots of the Heroes of the Soviet Union who was not awarded a single early assignment of military ranks.

... In 1936, the Spanish Civil War began. Suprun was one of the first to come to Voroshilov with a report: "Please send me as a volunteer!" But the report turned into a rather peculiar order: Spain and not quite Spain ... A city in the Soviet south, a rocky field of an airfield with rare islands of dry grass, guys with bronze bodies topless, a temperamental tongue twister, in which no - no, and they utter a word vaguely reminiscent of English : "Comrade" ... "Gloria!"

These were young Spaniards who were thrown by the Pyrenean tornado into the Soviet south. The People's Commissar's resolution to the report of Suprun fulfilled the pilot's wish, but only partially. Here in Kirovograd, Stepan did not spare himself or his students, giving them all the knowledge and skills accumulated over the years of flight work. One of his best students was Jose Maria Bravo. And yet, Suprun soon had to fight ...

December 15, 1938 during the tests of the new I-180 fighter. Suprun wrote a letter to Voroshilov:

“By the 18th congress of our party, the second copy of the I-180 aircraft is released, on which the best pilot of our Motherland, Valery Chkalov, died, the first copy of this aircraft was to be tested: Chkalov - factory and I - state.

Now people are afraid to entrust me to carry out tests and be the first to fly this plane just because I am a deputy of the Supreme Soviet of the USSR.

Comrade People's Commissar! Now it has become extremely difficult for me to work - all the bosses are for insurance purposes ... in every possible way they are trying to push me aside, so long as I do not fly. All this is fundamentally wrong and extremely insulting to me. You personally know how I fly on a high-speed plane - for 10 years of flying work, I have not had a single accident, have not crashed a single plane ... I have dozens of facts that I could cite to prove to you how they do not trust me. I will not divert your attention to a number of minor facts, I will indicate only the most basic ones: for a number of years I have been asking you to send me on a business trip to China or Spain to gain combat experience. All my efforts remain unsuccessful.

On my personal advice, 5 lightweight (red) I-16 aircraft were built, on which in 1937, the top five of us showed group aerobatics on August 18, Aviation Day. Now all these planes have been taken away from us, even the plane on which I flew the top five, supporting my piloting technique, air combat and aerial shooting, were taken by people who had gained combat experience. Soon it will be half a year since I did not conduct any test, during this time I flew no more than 5 hours on a high-speed fighter, and there is no plane on which I could train.

Together with test pilot Stefanovsky, we personally wrote a report to you so that you could help us get permission from our government to set a world record - a flight around the world without landing. The Air Force Military Council approved our proposal, but, in my opinion, this has not been reported to you personally, since we have not received an answer from you.

I ask you to give an order to give me the test of the I-180 aircraft and make the first flight on it. I am sure that you will not refuse my request. Test pilot of the Air Force Research Institute Major SP Suprun. "

The I-180 fighter had high speed, powerful armament, the necessary range and altitude. A big war was approaching and the country needed high-class aircraft. Suprun got his way. Flight on the I-180 was cleared.

Experienced fighter I-180 (2nd version), which was tested by S.P. Suprun. Checking the I-180, the pilot performed thousands of aerobatic figures on it. Even before completing the test programs, in a conversation with the Air Force command, Suprun praised the new Polikarpov fighter. After that, an order was made for 100 cars at once! However, Suprun continued to fly the plane into the sky, looking for the reason that killed Chkalov. And I did not find it. The chassis broke. The plane skapoted at high speed. When Suprun was removed from the rubble, he was unconscious. When the pilot came to his senses, he was taken to the Botkin hospital. But this time fate was favorable to him.

The brigade commander Suzi was instructed to complete the I-180 tests. During the spin tests, the plane lost control. Susi managed to jump out, but the parachute did not open. After this, the tests were nevertheless stopped and the production of the aircraft was curtailed (only about 10 pre-production machines were built).

When Suprun was discharged from the hospital, he was summoned to the Kremlin and offered to volunteer to go to China, which had been fighting the Japanese invaders for several years.

In June 1939, 50 Soviet volunteer pilots brought their planes to the temporary capital of China - Chongqing. Suprun's group consisted of two divisions. The I-15 squadron under the command of Konstantin Kokkinaki was intended to combat bombers. Squadron I-16 - to fight fighters.

Under the leadership of Suprun, the young, not yet fired pilots fought their first battle brilliantly. The observation posts made it known that Japanese bombers were heading for Chongqing. First, 3 flights of I-15 Kokkinaki took off. In a couple of minutes, Suprun's group is on. The Fifteenths immediately rushed to the top nine of the bombers. The Sixteenths left with a climb, into the sun. They were supposed to pin down the Japanese fighters covering the bombers. One of the top nine bombers, stitched by a fiery track, began to smoke and abruptly went downhill. The structure of the Japanese, however, was not disturbed. At these minutes, having dispersed the fighters, Suprun's group struck the enemy from above. In a matter of seconds, 2 more bombers were shot down. One I-15 was hit by rifle fire, but the battle had already been won.

A group of fighters, commanded by Major S.P. Suprun, quickly put things in order in the sky over the city. Losing their planes with every raid, the Japanese began flying mainly at night from July. Suprun began to raise his squadrons in the dark, destroying enemy bombers, and then landing the cars with the bat-and-mouse lanterns and the headlights of the aircraft stationed at the airfield. At his request, large-caliber machine guns were installed on several I-16s, which significantly increased the power of fire. By the end of July, he personally shot down 2 enemy aircraft and several more in the group.

The Suprun Air Force (up to 50 fighters) soon became one of the main "containment forces" of the Japanese. In December 1939, the group was transferred to the south, where the fighting in Yunnan province became more and more fierce. There, the pilots covered airfields and communications from enemy raids. In January 1940, Suprun, who, according to various sources, won from 6 to 8 victories, was recalled to Moscow. By that time, the pilots of his group had shot down 34 enemy aircraft in air battles, and destroyed more than 20 more aircraft and 2 large fuel and ammunition depots on the ground. Their losses amounted to 5 aircraft.

Stepan Suprun was popular not only among Soviet pilots, but also among many pilots around the world. After the signing of a non-aggression pact between the USSR and Germany on August 23, 1939, a trade agreement was concluded, according to which the Soviet Union pledged to supply Germany with certain types of raw materials and bread in exchange for German equipment and machinery, including aviation technology. To implement this agreement, a trade delegation left for Germany in March 1940, which included Stepan Suprun.

The famous pilot of the First World War Ernst Udet introduced the Soviet delegation to the products of German firms, thanks to whom almost all the achievements of German modern aviation technology were shown to our delegation.

At the airfield in Rostock, the commission presented a new Heinkel He-100 fighter. Suprun, having examined this plane, asked for permission to fly. Representatives of the Heinkel company tried to dissuade the pilot, but after making sure that Suprun was well versed in the matter, they were allowed to fly. With his amazing flight, he conquered everyone present at that moment at the airport. In his memoirs, Ernst Heinkel recalls this episode with great fondness:

“It was a tall, handsome man. Before his first flight in the He-100, the fastest aircraft he ever flew, he had a 10-minute consultation with one of my best test pilots. Then he lifted the car into the air and began to throw it across the sky, performing such figures that my pilots were almost numb with surprise. "

Experienced German fighter Heinkel Not-100. S.P.Suprun flew this one.

When Suprun landed, technicians, mechanics, engineers picked up the pilot and carried him to the airfield casino. German pilots admitted that on this flight they first saw such high flight and technical capabilities of their aircraft.

During the stay of our delegation in Germany, a new British Spitfire fighter, captured somewhere, was transferred to one of the German airfields. Suprun received permission to fly on it. Penetrated by several bullets, the battered Spitfire behaved obediently in the sky. Stepan Pavlovich shared his thoughts on this plane at the institute. Reporting on flights on the "" and "Heinkel-100", Suprun added a description of the "Spitfire": "The plane is very easy to take off and land due to its low speed. Easy to perform aerobatics, has good durability. The fuel supply is low. The propeller is not automated, there is no heavy machine gun or cannon. Not very cleanly made, insufficient horizontal speed. "

On May 20, 1940, Stepan Suprun was awarded the title of Hero of the Soviet Union. He was awarded the Gold Star medal # 461.

Upon his return from Germany, he worked hard to test new fighters and LaGG-3s. So, on June 15 - 27, 1940, together with Stefanovsky, he conducted the state. As a lead test pilot, he became convinced that the fighter was unstable in flight and that landing on it was dangerous. In May 1941, he began testing. After completing the flight cycle, he was very pleased with this machine.

During this period, Stepan Suprun was twice recommended for the post of commander of an aviation division, as well as assistant commander of a fighter brigade or assistant chief of the Air Force Research Institute for the flight part. He promised to think about these proposals, but the war broke all plans for the future ...

The beginning of the Great Patriotic War caught Suprun while on vacation in Sochi. Already at dawn on the 23rd he was in Moscow. On the way home, he had the idea of ​​creating combat regiments from test pilots. Having obtained Stalin's permission, he urgently set about forming them. The latest aircraft were requested from the factories: MiG-3, LaGG-3, Il-2,.

On June 27, 1941, it was decided to form 6 special-purpose regiments (2 fighter air regiments on the MiG-3, 2 bomber air regiments on the Pe-2, an attack air regiment on the Il-2, a long-range bomber air regiment on the TB-7) and a separate reconnaissance squadron.

It was difficult to meet the 3 days given for the formation. The shelves were about half full. Leaving his deputy on the farm, Lieutenant Colonel S.P.Suprun with an incomplete regiment urgently flew to the front.

Arriving at the Zubovo forest airfield in the Bobruisk region, the regiment, as they say on the move, joined in combat work. Immediately after landing at the front airfield, they were discovered. Wasting no time, Suprun lifted his MiG-3 into the air. The German, noticing the Soviet fighter, began to climb away, creating ideal conditions for the attack for Suprun - the MiG-3 was created precisely as a high-altitude fighter. Therefore, Spepan Pavlovich easily caught up with the Junkers and shot him in several bursts. After landing, Suprun ordered to load the machine guns and refuel his plane as soon as possible.

The Germans will not wait for the first scout, - Suprun vigilantly looked at the sky, smiled. Then he said sternly: - We need to intercept the second one. Will be sent by all means ...

Soon a second Junkers appeared. In front of his subordinates, almost over the airfield, he shot down the second plane.

The next day, an order was received to destroy the enemy crossings across the Berezina River. Suprun proposed to carry out an attack with fighters. A sudden raid by two squadrons caused panic among the German troops. In a matter of minutes, the crossing was broken, but during an attack by anti-aircraft artillery, the plane of Senior Lieutenant Kruglikov was shot down and exploded in the air. This was the first loss of the regiment.

In just the first 4 days of fighting, the pilots destroyed 12 enemy aircraft in air battles (of which 4 were the commander personally), a lot of manpower and equipment. Almost all combat missions of the regiment were carried out under the direct leadership of Suprun. All this time he constantly flew on the MiG-3 fighter with the tail number "13".

Commanding the 401st Fighter Aviation Regiment, he taught his subordinates the skill of fighting, encouraging them to use the high-speed capabilities of the MiGs, luring the enemy up. He was the first to use fighters for attacking crossings, oriented the regiment to combat single low-flying aircraft, introduced strict order and discipline - the pilots of the duty units were ready to take off on alert at every moment.

According to the recollections of the commander of the 1st squadron of the regiment V.I. Khomyakov, during these 4 days there were two cases when Stepan Pavlovich fought alone with 6 and 4 German fighters. In both cases, Suprun was confident in himself and his war machine. This confidence then seemed excessive to some. But the regiment commander was faithful to his principles to the end. He personally flew for reconnaissance, each time he climbed into the sky with his pilots, leading them to escort bombers or fight enemy fighters.

Here is a brief chronicle of the regiment's actions over the past few days:

July 30 - on the very first day of arrival at the front, Suprun personally shot down 2 enemy reconnaissance aircraft.

July 1 - the delivery of assault strikes at the crossings across the Berezina. In air battles, 4 enemy aircraft were shot down, 1 of which (Me-110) was personally by Suprun. Their losses - 1 plane, the pilot of which was killed.

He spoke about his victory over the Me-110 multipurpose aircraft as follows:

“The Germans did not come up with anything new either in tactics or in aviation technology ... As for my meeting with the Me-110, I must admit, it was not an easy battle. All over I felt that I was dealing with an experienced pilot. I attacked him from behind. However, in the first attack he missed and slipped past. He chased me with cannon fire. I had to go up. I knew that the Me-110 would not keep up with the MiG in the climb. But the enemy, in all likelihood, did not know this and climbed headlong upward. Without dropping, I turned slightly to the right. Carried away by the attack, he also began to roll the car in the same direction in the set. And then, losing speed, fell onto the wing, which is what I needed. In a coup, I went to him from below and dealt a fatal blow. "

July 3 - the destruction of 2 crossings across the Berezina, a railway bridge and a lot of enemy equipment and manpower. When attacking an enemy airfield, 17 aircraft, warehouses with fuels and lubricants and ammunition were burned on the ground. 4 aircraft were shot down in air battles.

July 4 - in the morning, together with Lieutenant Ostapov, Suprun flew for reconnaissance, then 2 times for escorting bombers. In the afternoon - the 4th flight to the Borisov area, again for escort. Before this flight, he went up to the engineers of the squadrons N. S. Pavlov and A. A. Manucharov, shrugged his shoulders and said contritely:

Guys, I don’t recognize myself today. I am already flying for the 4th time, and so far I have not shot down a single enemy aircraft.

The fourth sortie was the last for Suprun. Returning to the airfield, in tandem with Ostapov, he made reconnaissance of the combat situation. Ostapov noticed an enemy four-engine long-range bomber FW-200 in the sky and attacked it, but was shot down by enemy fire (returned to the regiment on foot after 2 days).

Suprun, left alone, decided to continue the flight. Soon he found the second "Condor" in the clouds (as our pilots called it). Not seeing the fighters accompanying the bomber, Suprun rushed to the attack. During the exit from it, a bullet from a German shooter hit him in the chest.

At this time, six "Messers" fell out of the clouds. Already wounded, Suprun did not withdraw from the battle. The MiG's turn flashed through the fascist plane, and it caught fire and sharply went to the ground. Already losing consciousness from blood loss, Suprun missed the attack of another Me-109. His fire was accurate. The fighter caught fire. Straining his last strength, trying to save himself and the car, Suprun managed to land the plane in a clearing at the edge of the forest ...

On July 4, 1941, in the afternoon, many residents of nearby villages - Monasteries, Pankovichi, Surnovka, as well as soldiers who were in the Drutsk castle witnessed an air battle between a lone Soviet fighter and six German planes. The women grazing the cows saw: 3 Messers, surrounding the burning MiG, followed it as if on a parade. Our plane landed at the edge of the forest. It seemed that the Soviet pilot would jump out of the cockpit of the burning car, but the plane suddenly burst into flames, something exploded in it. One of the Messers descended and once again fired at the burning MiG. The armored back, found at the Suprun landing site, is now kept in the museum of the city of Sumy. The traces of bullet dents indicate that the German failed to flash through Stepan Pavlovich's body with this burst.

Local residents tried to help the pilot, but the merciless flame did not release him from his captivity. In a blue smoking tunic, he sat motionless in the open cockpit, the fingers of his left hand gripped the control lever. Near the charred, sintered wound on the chest, the Hero's "Gold Star" flickered ...

On July 5, he was buried by local residents near the village of Monastyri. Having dug a shallow hole, covering it with aircraft sheathing sheets, they carefully laid the pilot's body on the bottom, covered it with tin, and threw earth and turf on it. And the very next day the Germans entered the village ...

The personal example of the regiment commander always helped the pilots to successfully smash the enemy. His death echoed with pain in the hearts of all his fellow soldiers, and soon the inscriptions appeared on individual planes: "For Suprun!" Already without him, they continued to successfully solve all the combat missions of the command.

After the death of Suprun, the regiment was led by Konstantin Kokkinaki.

By the end of the month, the regiment had 54 downed aircraft on its combat account. Models of courage and courage were shown by Konstantin Kokkinaki, Valentin Khomyakov, Leonid Kuvshinov, Vladimir Golofastov and many other air fighters.

German propaganda announced that Suprun had surrendered. In this regard, Stalin personally ordered to clarify the cause and place of death. It became known that on July 9, 1941, a peasant came to the headquarters of the division, who brought the badge of a deputy of the Supreme Soviet of the USSR, the Gold Star medal No. 461, charred documents and a TT pistol.

A note from the commander of the 23rd Air Division, which included the 401st IAP ON, Lieutenant Colonel V. Ye. Nestertsev, on the presentation of Suprun for a government award, reads: “At the head of a group of high-speed fighters MiG-3 smashed the fascist monsters and showed himself to be a fearless commander; Leading the group, Suprun immediately repulsed the hunt for vultures to walk at a low altitude, which certainly deserves the title of twice Hero of the Soviet Union. "

On July 22, 1941, Lieutenant Colonel Suprun Stepan Pavlovich was awarded the title of twice Hero of the Soviet Union posthumously.

19 years have passed since the death of Suprun, but the place and details of the drama played out remained unknown. Local residents who participated in the burial of the famous Soviet pilot died during the occupation. Official documents about his death, prepared by the commander of the 23rd SMAD, Colonel Nestertsov, to the chief of staff of the Western Front, were lost ...

In the summer of 1960, the hero's brother, Colonel Fyodor Suprun, resumed the search for the place of death of Stepan Pavlovich. The archives contained a report from the commander of the 23rd Aviation Division, which included the 401st IAP ON: “S. P. Suprun died near the town of Tolochin, Vitebsk region. "

With the help of the staff of the Tolochin military registration and enlistment office and local residents, the search area was determined. And soon, under the wreckage of the MiG, in the grave, the remains of the famous pilot were found. Based on the search results, an act was drawn up, which is now kept in the Central Museum of the USSR Armed Forces.

In July 1960, the remains of S.P. Suprun were brought to Moscow and buried at the Novodevichy cemetery. The red granite block was delivered from the quarries of the Zhytomyr region with the assistance of three times Hero of the Soviet Union A.I. Pokryshkin.

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In conclusion, I would like to say a few words about other aviators bearing the glorious surname Suprun - the brothers of Stepan Pavlovich.

In one of the interviews, Stepan Suprun said: "Father raised us children as communists, and I, brothers, as pilots." And that was true. Brothers Fedor and Alexander, following Stepan's example, became military pilots. Fyodor Pavlovich, having graduated from the A.F. Myasnikov Kachin Military Aviation School, flew 23 types of aircraft.

The beginning of the Great Patriotic War found Fyodor Suprun as a student of the engineering faculty of the Zhukovsky Air Force Academy. Upon learning that his brother Stepan had died in battle, Fyodor Pavlovich immediately wrote a report in which he asked permission to go to the front. But the command of the academy did not grant his request.

After graduating from the academy in 1942, Fyodor Pavlovich was appointed to the post of leading engineer - test pilot at the Air Force Research Institute, that is, where Stepan served before the war. There he was mainly engaged in testing the combat aircraft of our allies, supplied to the USSR under Lend - Lease.

In December 1943, the Bell company announced the creation, taking into account all the remarks of the Air Force Research Institute on, its new combat vehicle.

At the same time, the Americans asked to send a pilot and an engineer to conduct control tests. This work was entrusted to lead test pilot Andrei Grigorievich Kochetkov and lead engineer Fyodor Pavlovich Suprun.

On February 17, 1944, the Li-2 aircraft took off from the Frunze Central Aerodrome and went to the United States. There, in Buffalo, on the banks of Niagara, Kochetkov, as a pilot, and Suprun, as an engineer, began testing a new machine. Once something happened that often happened in battles on the Soviet - German front - the plane did not come out of a tailspin, Kochetkov was forced to leave it with a parachute.

Fighters R-63A "Kingcobra" from the Soviet Air Force, 1945.

The task of testing the new machine was carried out brilliantly and in the same 1944 new fighters R-63 "Kingcobra" began to enter service with the Soviet Air Force. Despite all the modifications, these machines retained many of the shortcomings of their predecessor, the R-39 Airacobra fighter, so these machines almost did not take part in hostilities. They were supplied only to the rear air defense regiments.

After serving at the Air Force Research Institute, Fyodor Pavlovich served as head of the faculty at the Kiev Higher Engineering Aviation School.

The younger brother, Alexander also became a fighter pilot. After graduating from a military aviation school just before the war, he soon showed himself to be an excellent air fighter. Defending the skies of Moscow, he shot down 6 enemy aircraft (3 personally and 3 in a group), was wounded.

In the well-known book "Air Defense Forces of the Country in the Great Patriotic War of 1941-1945", on pages 151 and 163 there is a mention of him:

“On September 26, 1942, the pilots of the 16th IAP (6th IAK of the Air Defense), Senior Lieutenant A.P. Suprun and Petty Officer Kravchenko, flew to intercept the enemy Ju-88 aircraft near the Vereya station, and entered into battle with him. Kravchenko's plane was hit and he had to use a parachute. Left alone, A.P. Suprun nevertheless destroyed the Junkers ...

On November 7, 1942, a large group of soldiers of the Moscow air defense system was awarded government awards. Guard Junior Lieutenant V. M. Pomogalov was awarded the Order of Lenin, Captain G. S. Bogomolov, .. Senior Lieutenant A. P. Suprun ... - the Order of the Red Banner.

After the war, Alexander Pavlovich continued the work of his brother Stepan, working as a test pilot in the same Air Force Research Institute.

But in the Suprunov family, not only men tied their lives with heaven, but also women. Anna Pavlovna, the younger sister of Stepan Suprun, became a famous parachutist.

In 1930-1940 she worked as an instructor in one of the flying clubs. She trained dozens of parachutists. Then she became a candidate of chemical sciences and took up science.

Such glorious aviation traditions were in this large and friendly family ...

(2. 8. 1907 - 4. 7. 1941)

WITH uprun Stepan Pavlovich fighter pilot. Born on August 2, 1907 in the village of Rechki, now the Belopolsky district of the Sumy region (Ukraine), into a peasant family. Ukrainian. Member of the CPSU (b) since 1930. In 1913 he emigrated to Canada with his family. Graduated from junior high school in Winnipeg. In 1922, together with his brother Fyodor, he joined the League of Young Communists. In 1924, the family Supruna returned to the USSR. He lived in Altai, then in Alma-Ata. In the fall of 1925, the family returned to Ukraine in Belopole. Stepan went to the apprentices to the handicraftsman-coach. Then he worked as a carpenter in Sumy. In 1928 he got a job at the Sumy Machine-Building Plant. As a pioneer leader, he nearly drowned in a river while rescuing two pioneers.

V Red Army in 1929. In 1930 he graduated from the school of junior aviation specialists in Smolensk, in 1931 - from the military aviation school of pilots. He served in Bobruisk and Bryansk, was a flight commander. From 1933 he worked at the Air Force Research Institute. In November 1937 he was elected a deputy of the Supreme Soviet of the USSR of the 1st convocation from the Sevastopol district.

WITH May 1939 fought in China. He commanded a group of fighters that covered important targets from Japanese air raids. In air battles, he shot down 6 enemy aircraft.

May 20, 1940 years for the courage and heroism shown in battles to the major Suprunu S.P. awarded the title of Hero of the Soviet Union.

After returning from China in January 1940, he again worked at the Air Force Research Institute. He tested new fighters I-21, I-26 (Yak-1), MiG-1, LaGG-1. He mastered 140 types of aircraft in total. In March 1940, he was a member of the Soviet commission chaired by I.F. Tevosyan, who visited aircraft building firms in Germany. Met with E. Heinkel and W. Messerschmitt.

WITH the beginning of World War II, lieutenant colonel Suprun formed the 401st Special Purpose Fighter Aviation Regiment from test pilots. On the evening of June 30, the regiment flew to the front and became part of the 23rd mixed aviation division (Western Front).

In the first battle on July 1 near the village of Zubovo Suprun shot down an enemy reconnaissance aircraft. In the evening, flew a second time and shot down another scout. On July 2 and 3, the regiment's pilots under his command shot down 8 enemy aircraft, launched an assault strike at the crossing of the Berezina and at the enemy airfield, where they burned 17 aircraft, fuel and ammunition depots.

Have throm July 4, 1941 Suprun flew for reconnaissance. Then he twice accompanied the bombers at the head of the group. At 13.00 he flew to the MiG-3 (side No. 13) together with Lieutenant Ostapov for reconnaissance (this was the fourth combat mission of the day). Ostapov noticed an enemy bomber and chased after him, but he himself was shot down. Left alone Suprun in the area of ​​the city of Tolochin, Vitebsk region, he entered into battle with 6 enemy fighters. In this battle, he shot down a Me-109, but he himself was shot down. I planted the burning plane in a clearing at the edge of the forest near the village of Krupki, but did not manage to get out of the cockpit. There was an explosion and Suprun died.

July 22, 1941 he was posthumously awarded the second Gold Star medal. He was awarded 2 Orders of Lenin, a Chinese order.

On July 5, he was buried by local residents near the village of Monastyri. And the very next laziness, the Germans entered the village. After death Supruna The regiment was headed by Konstantin Konstantinovich Kokkinaki (later Hero of the Soviet Union). By the end of the month, the regiment had already numbered 54 shot down German aircraft on its combat account. German propaganda announced Supruna surrendered. In this regard, V. I. Stalin personally ordered to clarify the cause and place of death. It became known that on July 9, 1941, a peasant came to the headquarters of the division, who brought the badge of a deputy of the Supreme Soviet of the USSR, Gold Star No. 461, charred documents and a TT pistol. In 1960, Colonel F.P. Suprun resumed the search for the place of death of his brother. With the help of the staff of the Tolochan military registration and enlistment office and local residents, the remains of the pilot and parts of his plane were found. Based on the search results, an act was drawn up, which is now kept in the Central Museum of the Armed Forces.

V July 1960 the remains of S.P. Supruna were taken to Moscow and buried at the Novodevichy cemetery. A bronze bust was installed in Sumy. Streets in Moscow, Borisov, Sumy, and the village of Rechki are named after the Hero. A stele was installed in the village of Rechki, and a bas-relief in the town of Belopole. A memorial plaque was installed on the building of the Sumy Machine-Building Research and Production Association. The museum of the city of Sumy keeps an armored back from the MiG-3 Supruna found at the landing site.

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Sources:
1) Aviation: An Encyclopedia. - M .: Great Russian Encyclopedia, 1994.
2) The Great Patriotic War 1941-1945: Events. People. Documents.-Politizd. 1990
3) Vishenkov S.A. Twice Hero of the Soviet Union S.P. Suprun.- M.: Voyen, 1956.
4) Military encyclopedic dictionary. - M .: Military Publishing, 1983.
5) Heroes of the Soviet Union: A Brief Biographical Dictionary. T.2. M.: Voeniz. 1988.
6) Twice Heroes of the Soviet Union. - Moscow: Military Publishing, 1973.
7) People of immortal feat. Moscow "PL" v.2 1975
8) Pokryshkin A.I. Readiness for a feat. -? Red Star? - 1975. - October 16.
9) Stepan Suprun... / Pilots. - Ed. 2nd. - M .:? Young Guard ?, 1981.
10) Stefanovsky P.M. Three hundred unknowns. - Ed. 2nd - Moscow: Military Publishing, 1973.

Born into a peasant family. Ukrainian. In 1913 he emigrated to Canada with his family. Lived in Winnipeg. Graduated from junior high school. In 1917, his father joined the Communist Party of Canada and helped found its Russian branch in Winnipeg. In 1922, on the advice of his father, Stepan, along with his brothers Grigory and Fyodor, joined the League of Young Communists.

In 1924 he returned to the USSR with his family. For some time the Supruns lived in Altai, then in Alma-Ata and Pishpek, and in the fall of 1925 they moved to the Ukraine, in Belopole. There Stepan got a job as an apprentice in a handicraft carriage workshop. Soon, his father was elected secretary of the Sumy Regional Executive Committee. Stepan moved to Sumy and began working as a carpenter in the comborbez (committee to combat unemployment). In 1928 he got a job at the Sumy Machine-Building Plant. In the summer he worked as a pioneer leader. One day he almost drowned in a river while saving two children.

In the Red Army since 1929. Member of the All-Union Communist Party of Bolsheviks since 1930. In 1930 he graduated from the school of junior aviation specialists in Smolensk, in 1931 - from the military school of pilots.

His characterization stated: "He has all the data to be not only an excellent fighter pilot, but also a thoughtful researcher, an experimenter in flight."

After graduating from the aviation school, he served in Bobruisk. Was the flight commander of the 7th separate fighter aviation squadron named after V.I. F.E. Dzerzhinsky.

Once, during aerial shooting lessons, a towing plane made an unsuccessful turn and swept over its wing with a target's tow cable. The pilot tried to throw the loop off the wing, but nothing came of it. The target pulled the wing to the side, turning the plane over. Somehow keeping in the air, he began to quickly lose altitude. The pilot was about to jump out with a parachute. Seeing this, Suprun flew up to the towing vehicle and, with a wave of his hand, ordered the pilot to level the plane in any way. Swiftly turning around, he caught up with him, cautiously approached the wing and chopped off the cable with a screw, preventing an inevitable catastrophe.

But there were also more difficult trials in his life. One autumn day, technician Strizhev, who was sitting in Suprun's plane and checking the engine's operation, unexpectedly taxied from the parking lot to the start and went to take off with a climb to the west. The alarm was sounded at the airfield, and the plane was raised in the air. But it was too late.

Strizhev crossed the state border and landed in Poland, near the city of Lida. Some time later, the Poles returned the plane, but refused to return the equipment. Soon, the Bobruisk air brigade announced an order from the People's Commissar of Defense to bring the squadron commander, squadron engineer and squadron engineer to trial, whose subordinate technician turned out to be a traitor to the Motherland. Suprun, whose plane was used for the escape, was also betrayed to the court. All four, sentenced to different terms, were imprisoned in the Bobruisk prison ...

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From July 1933 he served as a test pilot at the Research Institute of the Red Army Air Force. Participated in tests of the "Vakhmistrov's stack", tests of aircraft for an "inverted" spin. Desperate courage, a great desire to master a new specialty and hard work helped him to join the ranks of the best aviators of that time.

In May 1935, as a member of the aerobatic five, he took part in an air parade over Red Square. For masterly possession of the plane, by order of the People's Commissar of Defense, he was awarded a gold personal watch.

In the summer of the same year, Suprun was vacationing at an Air Force sanatorium on the Black Sea. There he accidentally met a young man. The next day, having gone out on a boat to the sea together, they talked for a long time. Suprun listened attentively to the young man, who frankly admitted that he, the aircraft technician, was denied a transfer to the flight crew. “Cheer up,” said Suprun. “Believe me, I didn’t manage to climb into the sky right away. I had to endure a lot. But he got up! I believe - you will rise too! The main thing is not to lose your dream. "

Later, Suprun's interlocutor graduated from the pilot school. During the Great Patriotic War, he shot down 59 fascist aircraft personally and 6 in a group. About 15 more downed aircraft were not officially credited to him for various reasons. Alexander Pokryshkin became three times Hero of the Soviet Union and Air Marshal.

05/01/36, during the air parade, Suprun led the aerobatic five.

05/26/36 he was awarded the Order of Lenin.

On 18.08.36 he was awarded for excellent aerobatics with a Moskvich passenger car.

His certification stated: “Disciplined on the ground and in the air ... In flight work, he is enduring and tireless. Flies on all types of fighters. He is fluent in the elements of air combat of high-speed aircraft. Ideologically stable. It has no accidents or breakdowns. He works with great interest to improve his knowledge, masters new techniques and is irreplaceable in this respect. "

In 1937 he was elected a deputy of the USSR Supreme Council of the 1st convocation from the Sevastopol district.

However, the wave of repressions that swept the country during these years almost covered Stepan Suprun.

Test pilot 1st class I.I. Shelest says: “Lipkin is chairing. Colonel Romanov is sitting next to him. Leaning with both hands on the table for greater stability, Lipkin announced in a crackling voice:

So ... There was a proposal to expel Suprun from the party for his connection with the enemy of the people Gamarnik. Who is for this proposal, please raise your hands!

Petrov felt a nauseating lump under his throat. He squinted to the right, to the left ... someone ... began to raise his hand, and then, little by little, others reached up. The terrible silence was distorted only by the faintly audible creak of the chairs.

So ... - said the chairman.

Petrov looked around and saw a forest of hands. It looked like they were voting unanimously.

Please omit! Lipkin suggested.

“What is this being done ?! - Petrov was horrified. - ... But what is happening to us ?! "

Who is against? ..

Abruptly leaning back in his chair and looking at Lipkin, Petrov threw up his hand ...

Are you ... comrade ... pro-t-tiv? .. - Lipkin breathed out somehow, as if a board was breaking under him.

Yes, I am against the expulsion of Stepan Suprun from the party, - said Petrov in a very high voice, not recognizing himself ... Petrov saw Colonel Romanov sitting next to Lipkin turn pale before our eyes. He began to rise somnambulously.

Explain your position, - he spoke in an icy voice, ignoring the chairman, - why do you vote alone, contrary to the opinion of the entire team?

Brigade Commander Petrov held the post of chief of the aircraft department at the institute, it was impossible not to reckon with him. Petrov got up ...

I believe in Stepan Pavlovich Suprun, I believe in his honesty as a person and a communist. He did so much for our Air Fleet, showing courage and heroism many times as a test pilot and defender of the Motherland, proving his selfless devotion to the party, that I cannot help but believe him. Therefore, I vote against his exclusion from the party. As for his “connection with the enemy of the people,” I’ll say this: we are all military people here, and if we are sent somewhere and with someone in the same carriage, like Supruna, we will go without admitting the thought that such the high boss, with whom we go on a business trip, may turn out to be an "enemy of the people." This is my position and it is unshakable.

For a few moments the hall was chained by an oppressive silence. All around Petrov were now sitting downcast - everyone, hey, had a disgusting heart. And only Petrov and Romanov stared intently into each other's eyes. And then in the first row by the aisle a reclined seat crashed, and Suprun, a tall, strong athlete, stood up, and when he turned and walked towards the exit, Petrov saw tears rolling down his cheeks. In the hidden hall, his steps were well heard ... Then everyone began to rise, not looking at each other.

Two days later, the commission of the Central Committee of the CPSU (b) canceled the decision of the meeting and reinstated Stepan Suprun in the party. "

12/15/38, during the tests of the new fighter, Valery Chkalov crashed.

Suprun wrote a letter to Voroshilov: “By the 18th congress of our party, the second copy of the I-180 aircraft is released, on which the best pilot of our country Valery Chkalov died, the first copy of this aircraft was to be tested: Chkalov - factory and I - state. Now people are afraid to entrust me to carry out tests and be the first to fly this plane just because I am a deputy of the Supreme Soviet of the USSR.

Comrade People's Commissar! Now it has become extremely difficult for me to work - all the bosses are for insurance purposes ... in every possible way they are trying to push me aside, so long as I do not fly. All this is fundamentally wrong and I am extremely offended ... You personally know how I fly on a high-speed plane - for ten years of flying work I have not had a single accident, have not crashed a single plane ... I have dozens of facts that I could would lead to prove to you how they do not trust me. I will not divert your attention to a number of minor facts, I will indicate only the most basic ones: for a number of years I have been asking you to send me on a business trip to China or Spain to gain combat experience. All my efforts remain unsuccessful.

On my personal advice, 5 lightweight (red) I-16 aircraft were built, on which, in 1937, the five of us showed top group aerobatics on August 18, Aviation Day. Now all these planes have been taken away from us, even the plane on which I flew the five, supporting my piloting technique, air combat and aerial shooting, were taken by people who gained combat experience. Soon it will be six months since I did not conduct any test, during this time I flew no more than 5 hours on a high-speed fighter, and there is no plane on which I could train.

Together with test pilot Stefanovsky, we personally wrote a report to you so that you could help us get permission from our government to set a world record - a flight around the world without landing. The Air Force Military Council approved our proposal, but, in my opinion, this has not been reported to you personally, since we have not received an answer from you ...

I ask you to give an order for me to be allowed to test the I-180 aircraft and make the first flight on it. I am sure that you will not refuse my request. Major Suprun, test pilot of the Air Force Research Institute.

The I-180 fighter had high speed, powerful armament, the necessary range and altitude. A big war was approaching and the country needed high-class aircraft. Suprun got his way. The I-180 was allowed to fly.

While checking the I-180, the pilot performed thousands of aerobatic figures on it. Before completing the test program, in a conversation with the Air Force command, Suprun praised the Polikarpov fighter. After that, an order was made for one hundred cars at once! However, Suprun continued to fly the plane into the sky, looking for the cause that killed Chkalov. And I did not find it. The chassis broke. The plane skipped at high speed. When Suprun was removed from the rubble, he was unconscious. When the pilot came to his senses, he was taken to the Botkin hospital. But this time fate was favorable to him.

The brigade commander Suzi was instructed to complete the I-180 tests. During spin tests, the plane lost control. Susi managed to jump out, but the parachute did not open. After this, the tests were still stopped.

The journalist Brontman recalls: “I had Senya Suprun ... The last time I saw him was the day after Chkalov's death ... Then he tested a second copy of the same car.

What happened to her?

Yes, you probably heard that I kissed on it, overturned. I was in the Botkin hospital. Well, what about the car - they handed it over to the archive. Look: Valka was killed on it, Susi was killed, I crashed, another pilot jumped out with a parachute. There is nowhere to go further, and even if it were suitable, it should not be allowed into the unit anyway. Imagine, this car comes to the unit, the pilot, who graduated from school a year ago, gets on it, and they tell him: Chkalov was killed on it, Suzi was killed, Suprun was fighting. Yes, he will be taken to the hospital before he gives gas. No, a car with such a biography cannot be started up. "

When Suprun was discharged from the hospital, he was summoned to the Kremlin and offered to volunteer to go to China, which had been fighting the Japanese invaders for several years.

Participated in the national liberation war in China in June 1939 - January 1940. In total, during the fighting in China, he personally shot down 6 enemy aircraft.

Suprun's group was entrusted with protecting the skies over the city of Chongqing. It consisted of two divisions. The I-15 squadron under the command of Konstantin Kokkinaki was intended to combat bombers. Squadron I-16 - to fight fighters.

Under the leadership of Suprun, the young, not yet fired pilots fought their first battle brilliantly. The observation posts made it known that Japanese bombers were heading for Chongqing. First, three flights of I-15 Kokkinaki took off. In a couple of minutes, Suprun's group is on the I-16. The Fifteenths immediately rushed to the top nine of the bombers. The Sixteenths left with a climb, into the sun. They were supposed to pin down the Japanese fighters covering the bombers. One of the top nine bombers, stitched by a fiery track, began to smoke and abruptly went down. The structure of the Japanese, however, was not disturbed. At these minutes, having dispersed the fighters, Suprun's group struck the enemy from above. In a matter of seconds, two more bombers were shot down. One I-15 was hit by rifle fire, but the battle had already been won.

At the initiative of Suprun, large-caliber machine guns began to be installed on the fighters. The firepower of our aircraft has grown exponentially. Very soon the Japanese pilots felt it.

In January 1940, Suprun was recalled from China and flew to Moscow. During the fighting, the pilots of his group shot down 34 enemy aircraft, destroyed more than 20 aircraft and two large fuel and ammunition depots on the ground. Their losses amounted to 5 aircraft.

At this time, the Air Force Research Institute was in full swing testing new fighters - MiG-1, Yak-1, LaGG-1.

In the winter of 1940, Suprun got acquainted with the Yak-1 fighter.

In the early spring of 1940, Major Suprun went to Germany as a member of the commission for the purchase of aircraft. The delegation also included representatives of the Red Army Air Force, who were instructed to get acquainted with the modern weapons of the Luftwaffe and select aircraft for purchase. Suprun had previously flown the Messerschmitt Bf.109 and could, if necessary, sit in the cockpit of other German aircraft.

The famous pilot of the First World War Ernst Udet introduced the Soviet delegation to the products of German firms, thanks to whom almost all the achievements of German modern aviation technology were shown to our delegation.

At the airfield in Rostock, the commissions presented a new fighter Heinkel He.100 Suprun, having examined this aircraft, asked for permission to fly. Representatives of the Heinkel company tried to dissuade the pilot, but after making sure that Suprun was well versed in the matter, they were allowed to fly.

Aircraft designer Heinkel recalls: “It was a tall, handsome man. Before flying for the first time in the Xe-100, the fastest aircraft he has ever flown, he had a ten-minute consultation with one of my best test pilots. Then he lifted the car into the air and began to throw it across the sky, performing such figures that my pilots were almost numb with surprise. "

When Suprun landed, technicians, mechanics, engineers picked up the pilot and carried him to the airfield casino. The German pilots admitted that this was the first time they saw such high performance capabilities of their aircraft.

During the stay of our delegation in Germany, a captured English Spitfire fighter was transferred to one of the German airfields. Suprun received permission to fly on it. Penetrated by several bullets, the battered Spitfire behaved obediently in the sky. Stepan Pavlovich shared his thoughts on this plane at the institute. Reporting on flights on the Messerschmitt and Heinkel, Suprun added a description of the Spitfire: “The plane is very easy to take off and land due to its low speed. Easy to perform aerobatics, has good durability. The fuel supply is low. The propeller is not automated, there is no heavy machine gun or cannon. Not very cleanly made, insufficient horizontal speed. "

05/20/40 Major Stepan Pavlovich Suprun was awarded the title of Hero of the Soviet Union. He was awarded the Gold Star medal No. 461.

15-27.06.40 Suprun together with Stefanovsky conducted state tests of the LaGG-3 aircraft. As a leading test pilot, he became convinced that the fighter was unstable in flight and that landing on it was dangerous.

After landing the plane, he went up to the lead engineer and said: "Landing on this thing is like kissing a cobra: it is dangerous and no pleasure." Suprun was witty, precise in expressing thoughts. And he didn't really like writing paper reports.

In May 1941, Suprun began testing the upgraded Yak-1M fighter. After completing the cycle of flights, he was short: “Great fighter! In war we will shoot down Messerschmitts in yaks.

The beginning of the Great Patriotic War caught Suprun while on vacation in Sochi. Already at dawn on the 23rd he was in Moscow. On the way home, he had the idea of ​​creating combat regiments from test pilots. Having obtained Stalin's permission, he urgently set about forming them. The latest aircraft were requested from the factories: Mig-3, LaGG-3, Il-2, TB-7.

In the process of creating the regiments, Suprun did not forget about the fate of the Yak-1M, continuing its tests. The front needs "Yak"! " - such is his opinion about this fighter. By this time, Suprun flew about 140 aircraft. But he failed to fight on the Yak.

On 27.06.41, a decision was made to form six special-purpose regiments.

It was difficult to keep within the three days allowed for the formation. The shelves were about half full. Leaving his deputy on the farm, Lieutenant Colonel Suprun with an incomplete regiment urgently flew to the front.

Participated in the Great Patriotic War in July 1941.

On 07/01/1941, thirty fighters of the 401st Special Purpose Regiment appeared on the Western Front under the command of the Hero of the Soviet Union, Lieutenant Colonel Suprun. Immediately after landing at the front airfield, they were discovered by the fascist Junkers Ju.88 reconnaissance aircraft. Wasting no time, Suprun lifted his MiG-3 into the air. The German, noticing the Soviet fighter, began to climb away, creating ideal conditions for the attack for Suprun - the MiG-3 was created precisely as a high-altitude fighter. Therefore, Spepan Pavlovich easily caught up with the Junkers and shot him in several bursts. After landing, Suprun ordered to load the machine guns and refuel his plane as soon as possible.

The Germans will not wait for the first scout, - Suprun looked sharply at the sky, - we need to intercept the second. Will be sent by all means.

In front of his subordinates, almost over the airfield, he shot down the second plane.

On the same day, an order was received to destroy the enemy crossings across the river. Berezina. Suprun suggested that the attack be carried out by fighters. A sudden raid by two squadrons caused panic among the German troops. In a matter of minutes, the crossing was broken, but during an attack by anti-aircraft artillery, the plane of Senior Lieutenant Kruglikov was shot down and exploded in the air. On the same day, Alexei Kubyshkin did not return from a reconnaissance flight.

Suprun raised his squadrons several times on July 1st. On this day, they managed to shoot down 4 enemy Messerschmitts. One of them was the personal victory of the regiment commander.

According to the memoirs of the commander of the 1st squadron V.I. Khomyakov, in four days of fighting there were two cases when Suprun alone fought six and four German fighters. For the first time, 15 "MIGs" were accompanied by three nines of SB bombers. Suprun went forward and was surrounded by 6 Bf. 109. The second time, also covering the bombers, he was among the four "Messers". In both cases, Suprun was confident in himself.

They will shoot down, comrade lieutenant colonel! - Khomyakov told him at the airfield.

No, I won't be knocked down! You see, the second time I am fighting with a numerically superior enemy, and both times the Germans could not do anything with me, - answered Suprun.

Suprun personally led his pilots into battle, flew for reconnaissance, covered the bombers.

07/03/41, the 401st regiment bombed two crossings, blew up a railway bridge. On the same day, a raid was made on a large German airfield, where Suprun's pilots burned 17 aircraft, depots with fuel and ammunition.

On the morning of 4.07.41, Suprun flew to reconnaissance, then twice led his regiment to escort the bombers. Before the fourth flight, he approached the engineers of the squadrons of N.S. Pavlov and A.A. Manucharov, shrugged his shoulders and said contritely:

Guys, I don’t recognize myself today. I am already taking off for the fourth time, and so far I have not shot down a single enemy aircraft.

The sixth flight on 4.07.41 was the last for Suprun. Together with senior lieutenant Ostapov, he went on reconnaissance. Ostapov noticed an enemy four-engine long-range bomber Focke Wulf Fw.200 in the sky, attacked it, but was shot down by enemy fire. He returned to the regiment on foot two days later.

Lieutenant Colonel Suprun, left alone, decided to continue the flight. He soon found the second Condor in the clouds. Not seeing the fighters accompanying the bomber, Suprun rushed to the attack. During the exit from it, a bullet from a German shooter hit Suprun in the chest.

At this time, six "Messers" fell out of the clouds. Already wounded, Suprun did not leave the battle and spun such a merry-go-round with the Germans in the sky that they understood what kind of Soviet ace they were dealing with. From the very first attack, the turn of the "flash" pierced the fascist plane, and that, having caught fire, sharply went to the ground. Already losing consciousness from blood loss, Suprun missed the attack of the German fighter. His fire was accurate. Suprun's fighter caught fire. Straining his last strength, trying to save himself and the car, Suprun managed to land the plane in a clearing near the forest ...

4.07.41, in the afternoon, many residents of nearby villages - Monasteries, Pankovichi, Surnovka, as well as soldiers who were in the Drutsk castle witnessed an air battle between a lone Soviet fighter and six German planes. The women grazing the cows saw: three Messerschmitts, surrounding the burning "moment", followed him as if in a parade. Our plane landed at the edge of the forest. It seemed that the Soviet pilot would jump out of the cockpit of the burning car, but the plane suddenly burst into flames, something exploded in it. One of the "Messers", having descended, once again fired at the burning "moment". Local residents tried to help the pilot, but the merciless flame did not release him from his captivity. In a blue, smoking tunic, he sat motionless in the open cockpit, the fingers of his left hand gripped the control lever. The hero's star flickered near the charred, sintered wound on his chest ...

On July 5, 1941, he was buried by local residents near the village of Monastyri. Having dug a shallow hole, covering it with sheets of aircraft skin, they carefully laid the pilot's body on the bottom, covered it with tin, and threw earth and sod on it. And the very next laziness, the Germans entered the village.

After the death of Suprun, the regiment was led by Konstantin Kokkinaki. By the end of the month, the regiment had 54 downed aircraft on its combat account. German propaganda announced that Suprun had surrendered. In this regard, Stalin personally ordered to clarify the cause and place of death. It became known that on July 9, 1941, a peasant came to the division headquarters, who brought the badge of a deputy of the Supreme Soviet of the USSR, the Gold Star medal No. 461, burnt documents and a TT pistol ...

Note from the commander of the 23rd Air Division, which included the 401st Iapon, Lieutenant Colonel V.E. Nestertseva on the presentation of Suprun for a government award says: “At the head of a group of high-speed fighters MiG-3 smashed the fascist monsters and showed himself to be a fearless commander; Leading the group, Suprun immediately repulsed the hunt for vultures to walk at a low altitude, which certainly deserves the title of twice Hero of the Soviet Union. "

On July 22, 1941, Lieutenant Colonel Suprun Stepan Pavlovich was awarded the title of twice Hero of the Soviet Union posthumously.

Nineteen years had passed since the death of Suprun, but the place and details of the ensuing drama remained unknown. Local residents who participated in the burial of the famous Soviet pilot died during the occupation.

In 1960, Colonel F.P. Suprun resumed his search for the site of his brother's death. A report from the commander of the 23rd Aviation Division, which included the 401st Special Purpose Fighter Aviation Regiment, was found in the archives: “S.P. Suprun died near the town of Tolochin, Vitebsk region. "

With the help of the staff of the Tolochin military registration and enlistment office and local residents, the search area was determined. And soon the remains of the famous pilot were found in the grave under the wreckage of the "moment". Based on the search results, an act was drawn up, which is now kept in the Central Museum of the USSR Armed Forces.

In July 1960, the remains of S.P. Supruna were taken to Moscow and buried at the Novodevichy cemetery. The red granite block was brought from the quarries of the Zhytomyr region with the assistance of three times Hero of the Soviet Union Pokryshkin.

A bronze bust of the Hero was installed in Sumy. Streets in Moscow, Borisov, Sumy, and the village of Rechki are named after him. A stele was installed in the village of Rechki, and a bas-relief in the town of Belopole. A memorial plaque was installed on the building of the Sumy Machine-Building Research and Production Association. In the museum of the city of Sumy, there is an armored back plate from the MiG-3 Suprun, found at the site of the forced landing.

interested in relatives
Maria Chabanyuk 04.03.2008 03:10:14

I was also Suprun (on my father's side) lived in the city of Dneprodzerzhinsk, Dnepropetrovsk region. Born in 1973. I would like to know all my dear people.

On that afternoon, many residents of nearby villages - Monasteries, Pankovichi, Surnovka, as well as soldiers who were in the Drutsk castle, witnessed the air battle.

In a break in the clouds, a strained humming bomb carrier with crosses sailed and disappeared behind the forest. Six more emerged with swastikas on their tails. The military observer from the Drutsk castle noted - "Focke-Wulf", two twin-engine "Junkers" and four "Messerschmitt" fighters. And suddenly, out of nowhere, coming from somewhere, a "hawk" with red stars on its wings darted to intercept them. Machine guns crackled in the sky; The MiG-3 and Messerschmitts whirled in a vertical ellipse-carousel. The Soviet "hawk" rushed at one of its pursuers and set it on fire. But the tail of the MiG also began to smoke. Tracking the sky with a streak of smoke, our plane began to descend, cutting off the tops of the trees. Women collective farmers, grazing cows in the trees, saw: three "Messerschmitts", surrounding the MiG on the left, behind and on the right, followed it, as in a parade, and soared upward over the very wall of the forest. The MiG landed at the edge of the forest. For a moment, the women were waiting for the Soviet pilot to jump out of the cockpit of the burning plane, but the plane suddenly burst into flames: something exploded in it ... From the street of the Monastyri village it was also clear that the pilot had landed a burning plane one and a half kilometers away - in the tract Raspberries. Several men and children rushed there. They ran through the wheat, driven by the desire to help the pilot. But the merciless flame did not release the pilot from his captivity. In a blue, smoking tunic, burned from above, he sat motionless in the open cockpit, the fingers of his left hand still gripping the lever. On the wrist was a black circle of a watch. The cone of a golden star shimmered against the charred, sintered wound on his chest. One of those who ran up saw a plate of a badge on the smoldering clothes, wiped it off with his sleeve, and the letters lit up: "Deputy of the Supreme Soviet of the USSR." A few minutes later, a car with an officer and a soldier arrived at the edge of the forest from Drutsy Castle. They removed the Hero's Star, a holster with a pistol from the pilot and, having asked the peasants to bury the pilot, left.

Who is this pilot? Why did one rush into a fight with six fascist planes? No one in the Drutsk castle or in the district town of Tolochin asked such questions anymore. It was not up to that. Tank columns of the Germans approached Tolochin, the roar of cannon fire reached the fields and forests, among which the villages were hidden. The Germans occupied Minsk, bombed Borisov.

In the morning of another day, the collective farm beekeeper Denis Petrovich Vasilevsky and the storekeeper Andrei Efimovich Akulovich, people who are already elderly, went with shovels to the tract to bury the pilot. From hour to hour, fascist tanks and motorcycles could drive into the village of Monasteries. Having dug a shallow hole, covered it with sheets of aircraft skin, the collective farmers carefully laid the pilot's body on the bottom, covered it with tin, and threw earth and sod on it.

ON THE FRONT!

He was a military test pilot. He served in the Scientific Testing Institute of the Air Force of the Red Army.

In June, Stepan had a rest in a sanatorium in the city of Sochi. Sunday morning June 22 was no different from the others - sunny and idle. At twelve o'clock in the afternoon, all the chambers and corridors of the sanatorium became alert. Molotov's voice sounded in the loudspeaker. Fascist Germany treacherously attacked our country, German aviation is bombing Kiev, Riga, Sevastopol, Brest, Bobruisk ...

A few minutes later Stepan, suitcase in hand, was already hurrying along the road to the airfield. There were no planes to Moscow. Neither phone calls nor a certificate of a deputy of the Supreme Soviet of the USSR helped to escape from Sochi before evening. Suprun arrived in Moscow only at dawn on June 23rd.

Anxiety for the fate of aviation, for the army, when he listened to the morning report from the theater of operations, increased. Arriving home, he began to call the Kremlin to make an appointment with Stalin.

Then he called somewhere else, having achieved nothing, ran into the yard to his "emka", rushed off to the airfield.

At the airfield near the hangar, he collided with Pyotr Stefanovsky.

- Have you heard? The Germans have bombed our airfields! - said Stefanovsky. - Hundreds of planes did not have time to take off ...

“I’ll go to see Stalin,” Suprun suddenly announced. - Come with me to the Kremlin?

And Stepan outlined his idea of ​​creating regiments of test pilots.

- Drive, perhaps, alone, you are a deputy, it will be easier for you to get through ...

Before going to the Kremlin, it is necessary to urgently complete the work that was not completed before the vacation. In the hangar there is a copy of the latest Yak-1M fighter. Excellent stuff! Stepan tested her. Take off once or twice, make sure that the car will not hurt.

The yak was taken to the runway. Stepan sits in the cockpit. Three propeller blades come to life, merge into a translucent disc. A few more minutes - and the wheels, taking off from their place, are rapidly running into the air. The wings climb up to the cloud, drill it, then the plane dives - and a grove swoops in on the pilot, houses, gardens, vegetable gardens grow in size, telephone poles rush towards ...

“The yak is better than the Messer,” Stepan admires, driving the car to the runway.

In the office, with a firm hand, he writes out a report on the test of the fighter: "The front needs a yak!"

Returning home from the airfield, Stepan sat down on the sofa to the phone. He was waiting for a call from the Kremlin. Painful minutes. Periodically turning on the radio, I would catch news from the front. The phone rang, Stepan grabbed the receiver, but there was a brittle bassline of a sailor from Sevastopol, who, finding himself in Moscow, remembered the deputy and said hello from the Black Sea.

- Stepan Pavlovich, come urgently ...

Pulling back the flaps of his tunic, Stepan entered the waiting room. He was ushered into an office where Voroshilov, Molotov, Kalinin were at the table ... Walking on the carpet, Stalin smoked his pipe. His keen gaze did not escape the pilot's southern tan.

- Have a rest, comrade Suprun?

- That's right, Comrade Stalin, just right ...

- What is your offer?

Frustrated with excitement, Stepan summarized: it is possible to urgently form four or six regiments of military test pilots.

“Few,” said Stalin. - We need twenty or thirty regiments ...

Suprun explained that there is no such number of pilots at the institute; those who can fly to the front are brave and experienced people, they will immediately respond with a blow to the blow of the Germans, check the machines in battle, give comments on improving the design of new aircraft, study their tactics and combat qualities. This will boost the morale of our pilots!

- Testers are needed in the rear! - noticed one of those present.

“The best test of a military aircraft is in combat,” Suprun objected.

Voroshilov nodded approvingly. Stalin agreed: in this situation, the deputy's proposal to urgently create new regiments of the best pilots is timely.

“Try to organize more volunteers,” he said to Suprun. - The term for creating the parts is three days.

On the first day on the ground and in the air, Soviet aviation lost 1,200 aircraft. The huge gap had to be closed with something. Stalin's order gave Suprun extraordinary powers. Stepan Suprun is obliged to report on the readiness of new units directly to the Kremlin.

Closing the door behind him, Stepan realized what three days awaited him ahead.

June 24... On this day, he was the first to appear in the office of the chief of the Air Force Research Institute; the heads of the institute and the People's Commissariat of the aviation industry gathered here. The news that the enrollment of volunteers for the front was beginning quickly spread throughout all departments and offices; the pilots in the corridors gathered in groups and exchanged views. When Stepan went out into the foyer, then they showed him the lists of volunteers. Each squadron and flight was joined at will. The backbone of the regiments was the pilots who beat Japanese samurai in the skies of China, Mongolia and the Nazis in Spain. Aircraft of the latest brands MiG-3, LaGG-3, Il-2, TB-7 were requested from the factories ...

And Suprun was also worried about the fate of the Yak-1M fighter. Stepan Pavlovich had a special relationship with this car. As Stefanovsky later recalled, once Suprun, in an interview with the designer Yakovlev, said:

- Why don't you try to create a light maneuverable vehicle for fighter aircraft?

Yakovlev smiled and said nothing. And after a while, an elegant single I-26 "hawk" appeared at the airfield. Powerful water-cooled M-105 motor: two machine guns firing through the propeller; in the collapse of the cylinders - a 20 mm cannon. The new vehicle was named Yak-1.

The yak was circled in the sky by the famous test pilot Yulian Ivanovich Piontkovsky. From the first flights, the quiet, calm Julian appreciated the excellent aircraft and tested the car with the stubbornness of a rider. On April 27, 1940, he was spinning a "barrel" under the clouds, which did not work out in any way. The plane soared upward, descending, lay on its back. And suddenly he tumbled down ...

S.P.Suprun and P.F.Fedrovi immediately undertook to save the reputation of Yak, who killed the pilot. It was important to break the arguments that the Yak is an unreliable machine: it does not come out of a spin, it is difficult to perform aerobatics on it.

“When evaluating these aircraft, his opinion was often decisive,” aircraft designer Yakovlev noted about Suprun many years later, and described the last meeting with him this way:

“We went with him to the assembly shop, where there was a second copy of this aircraft, ready for dispatch, intended for a serial plant as a sample.

Suprun got into the cockpit, fastened the seat belts. Looked around.

Praised the designers for so quickly implementing the previously recommended improvements to this aircraft to facilitate the difficult work of a fighter pilot in flight.

Stepan Pavlovich was a frequent visitor to our design bureau. We loved him very much. He attracted with his cheerfulness and friendliness. A tall, slender brown-haired man with a charming appearance, always neat and dapper, in his blue flight uniform, he was handsome in the full sense of the word.

This time Suprun was especially lively and kept talking about his desire to go to the front as soon as possible in order to personally measure his strength with the German aces.

Saying goodbye, we shook hands tightly, and he took my word that the first modified serial Yaks would get into his future fighter regiment. I sincerely wished this remarkable man success in his deadly work. He went straight from the factory to the General Staff to work on organizing his regiment. "

Suprun's Report on the flyby of the Yak-1 (modified) aircraft with the M-105 engine says:

“On takeoff, the behavior of the aircraft is the same as that of the Yak-1 aircraft, only the takeoff run has slightly increased. In terms of piloting technique, the Yak-1M plane is even simpler than the Yak-1 plane ...

The aircraft is of great value for its simplicity in piloting technique.

It is urgent to put the plane into production. "

Suprun flew about 140 aircraft by that time. He failed to fight on the Yak. But the fate of the aircraft turned out to be brilliant. In terms of its qualities, it was superior to the German fighter. The Yaks who had been in combat, patched up, repaired in the field, noticeably reduced their speed. Then the surface of the Jacob began to be varnished, the weight of the aircraft was lightened by removing some of the equipment. Increased power, added speed and maneuverability. The "godfather" Stepan Pavlovich Suprun would not be ashamed of the work he had done together with the aircraft designer on the manufacture of the famous aircraft. “It is urgent to put the plane into production” - this sentence of the conclusion, written by Suprun on the third day of the war, was more than ever useful.

In 1941, 1,354 aircraft were produced.

27th of June... S.P.Suprun, A.I.Kabanov, P.M.Stefanovsky were invited to the Kremlin. How worried people should have been, knowing that the assignment of the secretary of the Central Committee of the All-Union Communist Party of Bolsheviks had not been completed - the regiments were not yet ready to be sent to the front?

The three days that were allotted for the formation of the air regiments were not enough. The uniforms of the flight and ground personnel were going on, planes and ammunition were received from the factories; weapons were zeroed in, maps were studied ... At the same time, six regiments were created: two fighter regiments on the MiG-3 under the command of S.P. Suprun and P.M.Stefanovsky, one assault on the Il-2 under the command of N.I. Malyshev, two bomber on diving Pe-2 under the command of A.I. Kabanov and V.I. Zhdanov, one long-range bomber on TB-7 (Pe-8) under the command of N.I. Lebedev.

The situation at the fronts was becoming more complicated. In terms of armament, the Western Front was inferior to the Hitlerite grouping of armies "Center": in tanks - 7 times, in artillery - 2.4 times, in aircraft - 4 times. On the offensive, the Germans occupied Daugavpils on June 26, the battles were fought near Slutsk, the encirclement threatened to close east of Minsk. Six regiments, which were created at the suggestion of S.P. Suprun, the Headquarters of the Supreme Command assigned the name "special purpose" and intended to use it in a special way ...

Stalin's face was tired.

- Is the formation finished? He asked calmly.

“Half of the regiment is ready to fly to the front,” Suprun reported and explained that the rest of the squadrons were still being completed.

“Okay,” Stalin turned his gaze to the other commanders.

Their regiments were also half formed.

“All right,” said JV Stalin thoughtfully. - Where to fly and at what time, get the order today. Leave your deputies to complete the formation. With ready crews yourself, upon receiving an order, take off to your destinations. Do you have any questions?

- Yes, - said Stepan Pavlovich. - Can't we get a Li-2 plane for the transfer of technical personnel and ammunition? Fighter regiments also need leaders. After all, we fighters rarely fly the route.

- Good, - was the answer of J. V. Stalin. - Li-2 will be assigned to each of the regiments at your complete disposal. Comrade Kabanov will appoint the leaders for the fighters. I wish you success.

The regiments of Stepan Suprun and Pyotr Stefanovsky were ordered to fly to the front on June 30 at 17 o'clock, Nikolai Malyshev's regiment on July 5, Alexander Kabanov's regiment on July 3, and others a little later.

30 June... In the morning Stepan Pavlovich was at the airport. Together with his deputy, Konstantin Kokkinaki, he checked the readiness of the two squadrons for departure. I studied the area of ​​participation of the regiment in battles on the map - Vitebsk region.

Before leaving Moscow, Stepan really wanted to see his younger brother Alexander, who had just graduated from the military flight school, but the meeting did not work out. I called my sister from the airfield to wait for him.

When he entered the room, Anya met him confused and frightened. She didn’t quite understand the extent of her brother’s work.

- I'm flying to the front. - Stepan sat down on the sofa and asked for tea.

- Today, in two hours.

Anna brought tea, pushed the sugar bowl over. She was worried about her brother's alienation. He was sitting next to him, and his thoughts were very far away. What is he thinking about now?

He probably thought that even brilliant test pilots did not have enough aircraft and weapons. In battles, Soviet pilots will need double and triple skill. Many feelings were mixed in his alarm: both the fact that the plan to hit the Germans with a powerful air fist had not yet succeeded, and the fact that some of the command considered this idea insane, a waste of the country's best military flight personnel, for many test pilots They are capable, they say, to command regiments, train cadets, test new types of aircraft. Stepan himself has already been twice recommended for the position of division commander, as well as assistant commander of a fighter brigade or assistant head of the Scientific Testing Institute for flight operations ... So what?

Calmly serve in the rear, while the factories bake many planes and you are entrusted to command a division at the front? Yes, he, Stepan Suprun, is ambitious. But his heightened ambition is devoid of self-interest and careerism. Suddenly he turned to his sister:

- Tell me, friend, who would I be if the family stayed in Canada?

- A gangster ?!

“You're wrong, oh, you're wrong,” he shook his head. - You were a baby in Canada, you don't remember a thing.

- I remember everything! The sister objected, not without stubbornness. - You studied poorly. In Winnipeg I was six and you were sixteen. I remember how a banner was raised over the roof of the school on a winter morning, and I woke you up, brothers, shouting: "Get up, get up, the flag is raised!" And we, having breakfast, ran down the snow-covered street to the school. And the doors are locked. The first-graders toddlers beat out a shot with their teeth. Chilly. And you, tall, fast, darted into the courtyard, made your way into the boiler room and from there entered the corridor, unlocked the doors for us. The kids climbed up to you in a crowd, scattered around the classes, and the watchman caught you and led you to the guardian. Is not it?

- So, so, - Stepan threw up his hands. - Do you remember that yourself?

- By herself, by herself!

- They punished me unfairly ...

- Well, don't tell me! Sometimes it was right - my sister did not give up. - Forgot how he hid the pistol? You stole it from the real bandits. The car was parked in the bushes near the circus, and you and your friend Levka made your way into the cockpit and grabbed the pistol.

- This is Levka grabbed!

- Brother Fedya told me that you took the pistol from Levka, fled to the prairie and hid it there. Then after school he shot at targets, at birds.

- Eh, Anyuta, Anyuta, how gullible you are, - Stepan smiled, stirring tea with a spoon, as if he had the whole day ahead. - You don't know a lot. Fedya and I then, in 1922, already joined the cell of the League of Young Communists. Many times I had to listen to professional revolutionaries, and I prepared myself to be revolutionaries. And the shooting ... It was very useful to me. I shoot great.

He wanted to say hello to his mother and brothers. He took a sheet of paper from the shelf and, having quickly written something, handed it to Anya.

Dear family!

Today I am flying to the front to defend my Motherland, my people. I picked up some wonderful eagle pilots. I will make every effort to prove to the fascist bastards what a Soviet pilot is capable of.

I ask you not to worry. Kisses to all.

Anya helped to put things in the suitcase, still not believing that now he would leave. And my brother was calm, as if he was leaving on another long business trip. He shaved, refreshed himself with cologne, combed a wave of hair. Neat, in a cap, with a suitcase in hand, stood at the door.

- Take care! She whispered.

“Everything will be fine,” he shook his head, as if freeing himself from all non-military concerns. - I won’t be wasted ... I have a request for you. He looked closely at his sister. - Evgenia did not have time to return to her homeland. I ask you, when she arrives in Moscow, will call you, help her.

He talked about the bride ... Last March, when he traveled to Germany as a member of the commission for the purchase of German planes, he met in Berlin the translator Yevgenia, who worked at the Soviet embassy. Stepan did not hide from anyone that she was his bride. And now Eugene is in the den of the Nazis, and Stepan is in no way able to alleviate her fate.

“Don't worry, I'll do everything,” said the sister.

In Anna Pavlovna's memory, he remained tall, with a leather jacket thrown over his shoulder, confident and a little coldish. Then, together with Stefanovsky's wife at the airport, she waved to the departing planes. About three months later, Evgenia, who had reached Moscow, phoned Suprun's apartment. Anna Pavlovna told her that Stepan had died.

The ninth day of the war was ending. Everyone who saw Stepan Suprun at the airfield remembered him as strong-willed and focused. He led thirty test pilots to the front on MiG-3 aircraft.

In order to master a new combat vehicle, a pilot requires a long training. Before the start of the war, less than a thousand MiGs were produced. Suprun had a friendship with aircraft designer Artem Ivanovich Mikoyan back in 1937. Then three students-graduates of the Air Force Engineering Academy named after N. Ye. Zhukovsky designed and built a miniature sports aircraft "Oktyabrenok". The weight of the airplane is a little more than a motorcycle, and the speed is up to 130 kilometers per hour. Suprun, already a renowned pilot, took this aircraft into the sky and praised it. This inspired the designers Mikoyan, Samarin and Pavlov. In December 1939, Artem Ivanovich Mikoyan became the general designer, together with MI Gurevich he participated in the competition for the creation of a single-seat fighter. In January 1940, Stepan Suprun returned from China, where he took part in hostilities on an I-16 aircraft, and Artem Ivanovich invited the pilot to his place for a conversation, questioned for a long time about the behavior of the fighter in battle ... On April 5, 1940, test pilot Arkady Nikiforovich Yekatov began factory testing of the MiG. Suprun all the time followed the preparation of this machine for the series, he was the leading test pilot of the MiG. After flying around the plane, Kubyshkin, Filin, Kabanov, Stefanovsky, Kochetkov made many comments to the aircraft designers. The plane was reaching out, finishing up.

“The MiG-3 is also expensive because it was tested by such wonderful pilots as A. N. Ekatov, S. P. Suprun, and others,” A. Mikoyan said much later, in 1965, to the magazine's correspondent Aviation and Astronautics.

At 17.00 Suprun's plane took off into the sky. Thirty MiGs started behind him. On the fuselage of the MiG Stepan Pavlovich number 13. The lieutenant colonel demonstrated his contempt for superstition. Two squadrons followed Suprun's plane in order of battle. At 5.05 pm Pyotr Stefanovsky's hawks started, they laid down on a course towards Kalinin.

Fields of fields, patches in vegetable gardens, beavers of gardens and dense, impenetrable forests, lined with lines of clearings, in places cut by mirrored glasses of meandering rivers and streams; and along the banks - matchboxes of houses; large and small villages, towns and cities.

Calmly went to the landing. A well-equipped airfield lost in the woods. Behind the fields is the village of Zubovo. The wheels touched the anthracite strip. Stepan, coming out of the cockpit, ordered that the planes be dispersed among the parking lots and camouflaged. He ordered to set up tents for the personnel in the forest, to dig a trench near each. He scanned the sky and noticed a point approaching. Is it a fascist? A German scout was approaching the airfield. Suprun rushed to his plane. Another minute - and the wheels spun, raising dust over the strip. The fighter emerged from the forest, not allowing the German to recover, who had already noticed the danger and was trying to escape, quickly caught up with him and attacked. The pilots who had seen air battles in the skies of Spain could not help but admire the work of the regiment commander: the fascist car immediately started to smoke and, tumbling indiscriminately, fell into the forest.

Demonstration fight, as in training.

After landing, Suprun ordered technicians to inspect the plane and refuel. He was sure that the Germans were waiting for their plane, if he did not return, they would send a second one.

- That's what, friends, - Stepan approached the group of pilots who were waiting for him. “This is a reconnaissance plane. We do not have such. We'll have to conduct a thorough reconnaissance. Fascists fly with impunity at low altitudes, terrorizing troops and civilians. We will organize a hunt for them. We need an alternate airfield, otherwise they will cover us at night.

Soon the phone rang - from the place of aerial observation it was reported that a second reconnaissance plane had appeared in the sky. Stepan took off into the air. He climbed into the clouds, "hid there", waiting for the enemy. And as soon as the air pirate approached, he attacked ...

So on the first day of his arrival at the front, Stepan Suprun personally destroyed two fascist aircraft.

Four days of fighting

To understand the battles fought by the 401st Special Forces Regiment from July 1 to 4 on the Western Front, it is necessary to imagine the combat situation. Here, in the western direction, he dealt the main blow to the Soviet troops. On June 28, Minsk fell, 11 of our divisions, hitting the encirclement, fought behind enemy lines. The General Staff did not find out about this immediately. Using their advantages, the German fascist troops marched forward - to Moscow. Marshals B. M. Shaposhnikov and G. I. Kulik were sent to assist the command of the Western Front. On June 27, KE Voroshilov went there. On the night of July 1, 1941, Voroshilov reported to Stalin via HF that the situation was deteriorating, the Germans forced the Berezina in several places, created a threat to Mogilev and Rogachev. On the afternoon of July 1, a meeting was held in the forest near Mogilev, in which K.E. Voroshilov, V.M.Shaposhnikov, front commander A.I. Eremenko, chief of staff of the front G.K. P.K.Ponomarenko.

The newly appointed front commander, A. I. Eremenko, issued a directive to the troops of the Western Front, according to which aviation was charged with the responsibility: "Near repeated sorties, destroy the enemy at the Bobruisk airfield and enemy tank columns east and west of Bobruisk near Smolevichi and Borisov."

German aviation dominated the air and bombed the rear.

“The situation was not easy,” A. I. Eremenko later recalled. - The front had very little aviation (there were only 120 serviceable vehicles). On July 1, another 30 were planted on us. Of the 150 serviceable aircraft, 52 were fighters. It was decided with the available aviation to strike at two groups of Guderian's tank forces.

On July 1, on my order, our aviation was raided. Until noon, the planes were used in Bobruisk, in the afternoon - in Borisov directions. On the crossings across the Berezina, guided by Guderian's troops, we sent 15 attack aircraft under the cover of a link of fighters. Knowing that the enemy would immediately raise its fighter aircraft into the air, in 7-8 minutes we sent 24 fighters into the battle area. Our tactical technique was fully justified. As soon as our attack aircraft began to bomb the ferries and airfields in Bobruisk, the Nazis immediately sent fighters. An air battle ensued. How much joy was there for the troops and the population when five German planes were shot down over Mogilev in front of everyone in a few minutes, and the sixth caught fire and also began to descend. In the Bobruisk region, we destroyed 30 aircraft. And in two days of air battles, the enemy lost at least 60 aircraft. When I reported this to Moscow, the Chief of the General Staff even asked me over the phone if I was mistaken.

We ourselves lost only 18 cars. "

The thirty fighters that appeared on the Western Front on July 1 were aircraft from the 401st regiment of S.P. Suprun. The combat situation for the regiment commander and his staff was completely unclear. Having received the order to strike at the river crossings, Stepan Pavlovich took off early in the morning for reconnaissance.

The fog in the forest had not yet cleared, and the pilot had to fly the plane low in order to make out the roads and cars on them. Seeing the accumulation of dots on the road, he did not immediately guess that these were women with children, they carried the children in their arms or led them, and carts loaded with belongings dragged along. Not recognizing their fighter, people rushed into the bushes. Fascist pilots, shooting refugees from low-level flights, taught people to hide from aircraft. Flying over the tops of a dense pine forest, Suprun discovered a road leading to the ferry, along which tanks with white crosses, trucks covered with tarpaulins, tractors with cannons, and armored cars were walking. The technique moved without any camouflage to the river bank.

It was then that a daring thought flashed across Stepan Pavlovich's mind: to bomb the crossing from fighters!

At the forest airfield, they were already waiting for him, nervous, since the flight time had expired, the plane should run out of gasoline.

- Prepare your planes to bomb the crossing! Suprun ordered sternly. - Before the war, fighters were tested for attack. It worked well. Now we are going to hit the crossing.

He instructed the pilots how to hang bombs under fighters, how to enter a crossing, how to storm.

- After the bomb strikes, we will beat the Germans three times with machine-gun bursts! - instructed Suprun.

A sudden raid by two squadrons caused panic among the German troops at the crossing. The bombs did their job, turning cars into wreckage, detonating ammunition, setting fire to tanks; panic scattered the horses, scattered the soldiers. The German anti-aircraft gunners soon caught themselves, their shots crackled. Having entered the dive, the plane of Senior Lieutenant Yuri Kruglikov exploded from a direct hit from a shell.

At the airfield, Suprun was reported that Alexei Kubyshkin's plane had not returned from reconnaissance. The link of Ivan Dubon, having gone to study the roads, was squeezed from all sides by the Messerschmitts, nine fighters each attacked it twice. The link escaped from these fights, leaving Kubyshkin somewhere. Later it turned out that the water system of his plane was damaged by a shot, and Alexey, diving, found a forest clearing, buried his nose in it, broke his wing on a birch trunk.

Suprun raised his squadrons several times on July 1. They managed to shoot down four enemy Messerschmitts. One of them became the personal prey of the regiment commander.

In the evening, Suprun ordered the regiment's aircraft to be relocated to other parking areas. They left only one damaged MiG, and with it three people for repair and protection - a mechanic, a technician and a minder. In the morning, the technician and minder found Suprun, reported that they had been bombed by Junkers all night. Someone fired rockets from the forest, directing the Nazi planes to the airfield. The mechanic, with a grenade in his hand, rushed into the bushes for a spy, but was mowed down by a burst of machine-gun fire.

According to the recollections of the commander of the first squadron V.I. Khomyakov, in four days of fighting there were two cases when Stepan Pavlovich Suprun alone fought six or four German fighters. For the first time, 15 MiGs went to escort three nines of SB twin-engine bombers, Stepan Pavlovich, having gone ahead, was surrounded by six Me-109s. The second time, also flying to escort bombers, Suprun was among the four Messerschmitts. In both cases, Suprun was confident in himself.

- They will shoot down, Comrade Lieutenant Colonel! - Valentin Ivanovich Khomyakov told him at the airfield.

- No, I won't be knocked down! You see, the second time I am fighting with a numerically superior enemy, and both times the Germans could not do anything with me, - answered Suprun.

Suprun's confidence in his skills and the new Soviet MiG-3 aircraft seemed excessive to some.

He personally flew for reconnaissance, each time he climbed into the sky with his pilots, leading them to escort bombers or into a battle with fascist fighters.

On July 3, Suprun's regiment bombed two crossings on the Berezina, blew up a railway bridge, destroyed a lot of enemy equipment, on the same day the squadrons made another raid on a large German airfield, where they burned 17 aircraft, fuel and ammunition depots.

On the morning of July 4, 1941, Suprun, together with Lieutenant Ostapov, flew to reconnaissance, then flew twice to escort the bombers. Before the fourth flight, Lieutenant Colonel Suprun approached the engineers of the squadron Nikolai Stepanovich Pavlov and Andrey Arsentievich Manucharov, shrugged his shoulders and said sadly:

- Guys, I don’t recognize myself today. I have already taken off for the fourth time, and so far I have not shot down a single enemy aircraft.

In the afternoon, he again flew to escort the bombers. Then, together with Lieutenant Ostapov, he flew to reconnaissance of the combat situation. Ostapov noticed a German Condor plane in the sky, chased after it and was himself shot down. He returned to the regiment a day later. And Suprun, in a break in the clouds, met the German Focke-Wulf-200 bomber. Not seeing the escorting fighters from behind the flying wisps of clouds, Suprun rushed to the attack, made a turn to the left, opened his chest and was wounded by an arrow's bullet. He could not have received such a wound from a fighter! The Messerschmitts immediately arrived. The Nazis immediately felt that they were dealing with a Soviet ace. The MiG attacked and set fire to one German plane. But then the MiG caught fire from an enemy shell. Straining his strength and will, Suprun led his plane to a clearing near the forest and managed to land it, but at the last moment tanks with the remnants of fuel and ammunition exploded. The three Messers accompanying the burning plane, making sure that it was engulfed in flames, soared up. But the fascist who was walking behind the MiG gave another round to the back of Suprun's head.

The armored back, found at the Suprun landing site, is kept in the museum of the city of Sumy. The traces of bullet dents indicate that the German failed to flash Stepan's body with this burst.

On July 3, he, along with all the personnel of the two squadrons, listened to the radio in the forest near the airfield - the Chairman of the State Defense Committee spoke, and the speech contained the following words: looking at the faces. "

There were cases of cowardice and confusion in the first days of the war. Other commanders were waiting for instructions from above, orders, they were afraid of the risk. Stepan Suprun knew better than the other pilots of his regiment about the situation at the front, from the first moment he learned about the beginning of the war, he was initiative and decisive. He taught pilots skill, dedication. After fighting with the Messerschmitts, shooting down the fascist, in the evening he explained to the pilots that the Germans had appreciated the shortcomings of the Soviet MiGs. Our planes are not maneuverable at low altitudes, but they have advantages over the fascist ones at high altitudes, and have a higher speed. Therefore, Stepan Pavlovich urged to use the speed of MiGs, to lure the fascists up in order to deftly maneuver, attack and destroy the enemy. Suprun used these fighters to storm the crossings, he directed the regiment to fight for single low-flying German vultures, introduced strict order to the regiment - the pilots were ready to take off on alert every minute.

The impression made by the Soviet aviation on the German troops can be judged by the confession of the commander of the German Panzer Group, Guderian; in his report of July 4, 1941, he reported: "The regiment of the division, which was on the defensive north of Borisov, suffered heavy losses from enemy aircraft."

A. I. Eremenko in his book "At the beginning of the war" recalls these days: "Until that time, enemy aircraft, almost not meeting our aircraft in the air, operated on a wide front in small groups. We used our small aviation massively and therefore were successful. These two-day battles were of no small importance for the solution of further tasks. The first serious air strike was dealt to the enemy in this sector of the front. Our pilots perked up: they realized that the enemy must be defeated with skill and high organization. The infantry was also inspired, as the news of inflicting losses on the Germans in the air was passed from mouth to mouth. "

A note from the commander of the 23rd Aviation Division, which included the 401st Special Purpose Regiment, Lieutenant Colonel V. Ye. Nestertsev, on the presentation of Suprun for a government award, reads: “At the head of a group of high-speed MiG-3 fighters, he smashed the fascist monsters and showed himself to be a fearless commander; Leading the group, Suprun immediately repulsed the hunting of vultures to walk at a low altitude, which certainly deserves the title of twice Hero of the Soviet Union "...

* * *

Each of the six volunteer regiments created at the Air Force Research Institute at the suggestion of Suprun had its own combat biography. In four days of fighting, the Suprun regiment shot down 12 fascist aircraft, and in three months of the war - already under the command of Konstantin Konstantinovich Kokkinaki, now Hero of the Soviet Union, winner of the Lenin Prize, - 54 German aircraft.

During the war years, the 402nd regiment destroyed hundreds of fascist vultures, thousands of soldiers, officers, horses, barges, boats and wagons ...

The Ilov (NI Malysheva) assault aviation regiment set fire to and scattered columns of cars and tanks at the crossings, crippled German airfields and aircraft with bombs and rockets; a separate squadron, created in the regiment by August 6, photographed the groupings of German troops, airfields, revealing the secrets of the Hitlerite command in the Smolensk region before throwing themselves on Moscow.

The 332nd Bomber Aviation Regiment (V.I. Lebedev), having received TB-7 aircrafts, equipped them with diesel engines by July 29. On the night of August 11, ten heavily loaded vehicles (the eleventh fell near the airfield: two engines failed at once) went into darkness, flew over the entire territory occupied by Nazi troops, and bombed the capital of the Third Reich - Berlin. This bomb strike went down in the history of the Patriotic War, and the return of the ships back was full of tragedy and adventure ...

A special regiment of dive bombers (A.I. Kabanov) took part in hostilities on the Western Front on 3 July at the approaches of German troops to Moscow.

Many associates of Stepan Suprun glorified themselves in battles, the names of his friends went down in the history of the Great Patriotic War: Dmitry Kalarash, Grigory Kravchenko, Alexander Pokryshkin, Konstantin Kokkinaki ... battle, the use of the latest aircraft. All this was foreseen by Stepan Suprun.

On July 22, 1941, the regiment commander S.P. Suprun was awarded the title of twice Hero of the Soviet Union.

Children of the rebel

Stepan was born on August 2, 1907 in the village of Rechki, which is near the city of Belopol'ya, in the Ukraine, in the house of Mikhail Savelyevich's grandfather. The young couple Suprunov - Pavel Mikhailovich and Praskovya Osipovna - Stepan was the second son.

Grandfather was not very happy with his granddaughter, especially since in the August days he was terribly angry with his son Pavel. Pavel grew up rebellious, cocky, and when he got married, he completely stopped obeying Mikhail Savelyevich. Their relationship became more complicated fourteen years ago, when the priest kicked Pashka out of school after the second grade as punishment for Mikhail Savelyevich, who released his wife Arina for Easter with an all-night vigil at some party. This punishment not only left Paul illiterate, but laid a stain on the entire family of Suprun-grandfather, made him God-fearing. And in the fall, when Stepka was born to Pavel Mikhailovich, several fires happened in the meadows outside the village - stacks of local rich people were burning. Suspecting his son of rebellious actions, Mikhail Savelyevich first drove him out to work with a sugar refinery, on the so-called pans' savings, and soon, with two babies in his arms, kicked Praskovya Osipovna out of the house.

It was not without effort that Pavel managed to rent a room in the barrack for the family; he, working from dawn to dusk, soon advanced to the mechanic of steam plows. His family increased by one more male voice - a boy was born, who was named Fyodor, and it seemed that the young Supruns settled forever on the landlord's economies. However, in 1910 there was a strike at the sugar refinery, in which Pavel Mikhailovich took part. The police, looking for the ringleaders and investigating the arson of the haystacks, arrested two young peasants and took an intense interest in Pavel Suprun. He was threatened with prison. In the spring, a steam plow mechanic joined a group that was leaving Ukraine in search of happiness across the ocean - to Canada.

For two years Pavel Mikhailovich was adapting to Canadian life, every now and then changing his job: he was a lumberjack, a laborer on a farm, a carpenter for a contractor, a photographer's assistant. Living in different parts of the province of Manitoba, most of all in the town of Winnipeg, he tried to save money to move his family here from the village of Rechki. At first, his rebellious disposition hindered him greatly. Once the owner of the farm where Suprun worked, threw the laborers into the field and drove home. Pavel Mikhailovich jumped into the cart, threw off the farmer and took the farm laborers away. But, of course, he himself preferred not to meet with the farmer. Its other owner did not give Pavel Mikhailovich a salary. No matter how many times the carpenter came to the house, the contractor's wife said: "There is no husband." Guessing about the deception, Pavel Mikhailovich burst into the bedroom, beat the contractor and, leaving the house, went to look for a new job.

By 1913, they managed to save up money for a shift card, and Suprun's village friend from Rechka brought Praskovya Osipovna with three children from Ukraine to Winnipeg. It was he, Trofim Stepanovich Voloshin, who helped the large Suprun family many times.

The plight of the family in Canada early awakened in Stepka thoughts of injustice, sharpened his consciousness. Gifted by nature, Styopa, like his father, grew up a strong, tall boy, dominated among his peers and soon disturbed his father with various tricks. Disliking the teacher, Styopa fired a paper bullet from a slingshot at the hour of prayer. The angry teacher took the mischievous person into the classroom and, as was customary then, began to punish - hitting the palms with a ruler.

“Thank you,” the student repeated.

This infuriated the teacher, and she complained about him to the guardian; he, in turn, found it necessary to call his father. Pavel Mikhailovich did not have to punish his son, because Wall's palms were so streaked with a ruler that they were swollen and did not heal for a long time.

In 1915, a crisis began in Canada. Foreign worker Pavel Suprun was expelled from the factory and forced to leave the city of Winnipeg - he settled in a deep forest near Lake Winnipeg, near Riverton station. Here in Howardville, he built a hut, cut down a patch of forest, got chickens, sowed wheat. Soon the skillful hands of Suprun put up a solid wooden house. Having dug a well and built a barn, in accordance with the then Canadian law, he became the owner of the house, buildings and a plot of land. However, the wind of change, which in 1917 blew from across the ocean, from Russia, did not leave Pavel Mikhailovich alone. Leaving his house in the woods, he again moved to the city of Winnipeg, where he soon took part in a general strike. Father Suprun's friendship with the professional revolutionary Boris Pavlovich Devyatkin led him to become a communist and participated in the founding of the Russian branch of the Canadian Communist Party in the city of Winnipeg. On the advice of their father, the eldest sons Grigory, Stepan and Fedor joined the League of Young Communists.

Since 1917, Pavel Mikhailovich was haunted by the thought of returning to Soviet Russia. In 1920, when the family broke away from the forest farm, this goal seemed very close. However, the illness of Praskovya Osipovna's wife, who underwent kidney surgery, confused all plans. The family was again without money ...

Having come running from school, Styopa found grieving men in his apartment. He knew them by sight - they were Boris Pavlovich Devyatkin, Trofim Stepanovich Voloshin, Viktor Ivanovich Fridman ... They sat at the table and cried.

- What's happened? - Styopa asked quietly.

“Lenin is dead,” tears glistened on my father’s cheeks.

The shock that Stepan experienced in those minutes turned his soul upside down. Adults, fathers of families, who knew the severity of labor and saw more than one death, grieved over the man who died overseas, in Moscow. Stepan understood the fanaticism of his father, who, returning late from work, went to bed right away, but after two hours he woke up, sat down at the table and took notes of V. I. Lenin's books.

- Let's go, son, to Russia, - the father smoothed his mustache. - The Comintern will help us ...

Travelers

While Pavel Suprun's family was in Canada, Mikhail Savelyevich with his wife and sisters moved from Ukraine to Altai - to the village of Vostrovo, Volchikhinsky district. The Ukrainian land surveyor, completely ruined in the village of Rechki, built a house on Siberian soil, got into the middle peasants and became sad about his son, a “foreigner”. There was a horse and a cow on the farm, the front corner in the upper room was lined with icons, and there was grain in the bottom of the house. Mikhail Savelyevich wrote letters to Canada that he was old, that he was going blind and that he needed the help of his son.

Having received permission through the Third Comintern to leave Canada, as well as a document signed by the leaders of the Canadian Communist Party, stating that the Suprun family would receive assistance on their way home, Pavel Mikhailovich took his wife and six children on a ship to the coast of Europe. After moving from Riga to Moscow, we stopped at the Balchug Hotel. The golden hands of Suprun Sr. immediately found a job, the family was offered an apartment. However, he remembered his father's call, and in the summer he had already moved into Mikhail Savelyevich's hut. The village of Vostrovo gladly accepted the "foreign specialist", he quickly set up the mill, which used to grind flour intermittently. Soon, in the hut-reading room, Pavel Mikhailovich gave a lecture on an anti-religious topic, which aroused the terrible anger of his father. On the same evening, the family of "damned foreigners-atheists" was deprived of supper, grandfather locked the pantry, cellar and barn.

The ten-month feud of a communist son with a believing father ended with the fact that Pavel and his wife and children had to harness horses to two carts, put two wooden chests with locksmith tools in one of them, and put their sons and daughter in one of them, covered with a canopy, so that together with other displaced persons to leave the village.

The wheels of the carts creaked. The horses plodded along the bumpy road; now the sun burned, now it rained. Praskovya Osipovna rode in a wagon with her eldest son Grisha. Styopka was with his father. Pavel Mikhailovich instructed him to guard the chests with tools more than an eye. At any plant, it is enough to show such wealth, and Pavel Mikhailovich will be called to the shop. Still in the cart, under the hay, two double-barreled guns were hidden.

Stepan remembered two events from this trip thousands of kilometers through Rubtsovsk, Semipalatinsk, steppe and semi-desert to Alma-Ata. At the lake, peasants-settlers unharnessed their horses, one boy, carried away by playing with a foal, received a blow on the forehead with a hoof, and the skin slipped over his eye with a rag. There was no doctor or medicine man. It was then that the father, getting off the wagon, took out a shiny needle from the chest, boiled it in a metal jar, and then, rolling up his sleeves, washing his hands, sewed the skin on the boy's head with a harsh thread. Stepan helped the "surgeon". The operation ended well, the wound dried up after a few days.

On one of the dark nights, a group of mounted Basmachi flew into the sleeping camp. And again Pavel Mikhailovich was not at a loss, he woke Styopka, gave him a double-barreled gun, knowing that he owned a weapon, and a friendly salvo was enough to drive off the robbers.

Since that night, Stepan idolized his father.

Alma-Ata greeted the Altai wretches with red-hot stone pavements, stuffiness, buildings collapsed from an earthquake. The men from the carts, not finding work, left the city for the villages. But Father Suprun, having two chests of tools, neglected the rural smithies. He drove the horses across the pass to the city of Pishpek, now Frunze. But there was no luck there either. They sold horses, carts, guns, and with the remaining belongings, the Suprun family set off by train to Ukraine.

Since the fall of 1925, the large Suprun family lived first in the house of relatives in Belopolye, then rented two rooms in a building on the Stetskovsky Way in Sumy, where all the children had to sleep side by side on the floor. In 1927, Pavel Mikhailovich Suprun at the machine-building plant, as an excellent specialist and a communist public figure, was allocated a two-room apartment on Sudzhinskaya Street, and then in Pisarevsky Lane.

Pavel Mikhailovich was elected secretary of the Sumy Regional Executive Committee.

Styopa was at first a student of the handicraftsman-coachman Golomudka in Belopole. For the very first disobedience, the Nepman beat the boy. After holding out in the artisan's workshop for eleven months, he moved to Sumy. During that period, the devastation caused by the civil war and foreign intervention was still affecting; there were not enough jobs in the city. The nineteen-year-old Komsomol member was hired as a joiner in a combo-bez - that was the name of the committee for combating unemployment. At the same time Stepan began to study, read a lot; in Canada, he managed to finish seven classes. And only in July 1928 Pavel Mikhailovich pulled Stepan, and then Grigory, to his plant.

During these years, a friendly family experienced grief. In 1926, while swimming in the river, Stepa's twelve-year-old brother Andryushka drowned. This was a terrible shock for the mother and the whole family. And in 1928, being a pioneer leader, saving two schoolchildren, Styopa almost drowned. It was a hot summer. Two detachments went out of the city to the beat of drums. One of them was led by Stepan Suprun. He spent the night with his pioneers in the forest, and when in the morning the detachment went to the river bank, the schoolchildren of the second detachment approached it from the other side. Rivalry with each other, the two boys on the other side swam too far and began to drown. Stepan, without hesitation, rushed to save them, he managed to catch both boys by the hair, but he did not have enough strength to drag the floundering guys to the shore, and he, desperately working only with his feet, did not let the boys go to the bottom. Having lost control of themselves, the drowning guys escaped from Stepan's hands, grabbed him by the neck. The struggle ended with the fact that Stepan, together with the guys, was finally rescued by other guys who finally sailed on a raft and logs. The courage of the pioneer leader Suprun, who fought for the lives of the two boys, was rewarded with parental praise when the fathers and mothers of the victims visited the Suprun family. Praskovya Osipovna and Pavel Mikhailovich, after this conversation with their parents about their son, fell ill: they were very worried that their Styopa could drown, like Andryusha ...

Plane over father's hut

After graduating from the school of junior aviation specialists in Smolensk in 1931, Stepan entered the school of military pilots. And already in 1932 they started talking about him as a talented, very resourceful pilot. Serving in Bobruisk and Bryansk, he received certifications as an excellent pilot, good at flying in the clouds and at high altitudes. He is assigned to train young pilots.

Flying over the airfield, the commander of the Even Stepan Suprun signaled with his hand that the towing plane would raise the target into the sky. The target is a cone attached to a towing aircraft by a long rope; it creates a picture of a maneuvering enemy vehicle, and pilots rush to attack it on their "hawks". However, what is it? The towing aircraft, having made an unsuccessful turn, swept over its own wing with a rope ... The pilot is trying to maneuver, throw off the loop from the wing, but it didn't work, the unfortunate target pulls the wing to the side, flips the plane, and he, somehow air, quickly losing altitude. A few more minutes and disaster is inevitable. The pilot in confusion shifts the flashlight over his head, preparing to leave the cockpit with a parachute.

Seeing this, Stepan Suprun throws his plane towards the tumbling tug, with a wave of his hand orders the pilot to level the plane with all his might, and he himself, swiftly turning his car, enters the tied tug from the tail; first, he chases after him, then, repeating the "somersaults" of the emergency aircraft, carefully brings his fighter closer to the wing of the towing vehicle and cuts off the rope with a screw. The freed comrade smoothly lifts the plane up and confidently leads it towards the landing.

Stepan's enthusiastic letters to his father and brothers, excited stories about his service when he visited his relatives in Sumy, dizzy Fedya, Sasha and his sister Anechka. Fortified, in a blue flight uniform, slender and handsome, Stepan delighted everyone with his appearance. Both father, mother, and brothers went to him in Bryansk, where Stepan took them to the airfield, showed them his plane. There was one more reason for these trips: it was hungry in Sumy.

Stepan maintained a touching relationship with his family. He sent them money, arranged for his mother to go to Moscow for an operation to the best doctor, and helped the brothers Fyodor and Alexander enter military flight schools.

None of his relatives remember the case when he saw Stepan sad, absent-minded, bored. He always appeared smart, cheerful and generous. In 1933 he was recommended to the Scientific Testing Institute of the Air Force of the Red Army. And in the summer of 1934, Anya came to visit him, having finished the ninth grade. Her brother introduced her to all the pilots of his flight, to such future celebrities as Vladimir Kokkinaki, Viktor Evseev ... She participated in sports competitions, where she won first place among the wives and relatives of the pilots and received a ticket to the Alushta sanatorium.

Imagine the girl's surprise when, in the sanatorium, she found out that her brother was in the hospital ... It turns out that on those happy days when Anya was staying with him, Stepan was busy during the day in difficult group flights - he was lifting one of the five flight planes into the air , connected by silk ribbons, made aerobatics. One of the landings was unsuccessful.

In the summer of 1936, while on a business trip in Kharkov, Stepan took part in flights and, unable to visit his parents, where his mother and father were already living, he made two circles over the house, shook his wings and flew away.

“Oh, the storm is thundering,” said the frightened Praskovya Osipovna.

“That’s not a thunderstorm, but Styopa is visiting us,” Pavel Mikhailovich guessed, looking out the window.

In the evening they brought a telegram: “I visited you, flew over the house. Kiss. Stepan ".

He never forgot about his family, neither during the hot battles in China, nor during the days of rest on the Black Sea coast. Here is one of the letters sent from China to my father:

“I ask you, dad, to write to me how mom feels after the resort. If the doctors said that she needed to go to another resort for treatment, then let Anya take the money from my savings book and buy a ticket through our medical unit. And you also need to undergo medical treatment.

Now about the health of brother Grisha. I am a little worried that he is going to perform an operation in Sumy. If he can postpone it until my arrival, then he will come to me and perform the operation there. And if this is so urgent, then let Anya send him a thousand rubles out of my money. Let him go to Kharkov for an operation. "

From China, he asks if his sister flies in the flying club, gives advice to the brothers.

“My father raised us children as communists, and my brothers as pilots,” Stepan said.

It was true. Brothers Fyodor and Alexander, following Stepan's example, became military pilots; Fedor Pavlovich, having graduated from the engineering faculty of the Air Force Engineering Academy, flew twenty-three types of aircraft, was the head of the faculty at the Kiev Higher Military Aviation Engineering School. During the war years, he was sent together with test pilot Andrei Kochetkov to the United States. American aircrafts "Ercobra" arrived in our country. Their first series were unsuccessful, the "Ercobras" did not come out of the tailspin, their tail "curled". Several disasters were reported to the American firm, but improvements were made in a hurry. It was then in Buffalo, on the shores of Niagara, that Kochetkov and Fyodor Suprun, an engineer, began test flights. Once something happened that happened in the battles on the Soviet-German front - the plane did not come out of a tailspin, Kochetkov was forced to leave the "Ercobra" with a parachute. The aircraft, modified after that, became a formidable weapon against the Nazis.

Stepan's younger brother, Alexander Pavlovich, became famous in battles, shooting down six Nazi planes; after the war, he was a test pilot of the same Air Force FDI, where his brother Stepan served. And my sister Anna Pavlovna broke up with the flying club: she graduated from the institute, defended her thesis of candidate of chemical sciences.

In the fall of 1935, while resting on the Black Sea coast in Khost, while walking, Suprun noticed a pariah who was pulling out a boat. He immediately undertook to help him, and he recognized Suprun: how! famous test pilot! Stepan liked the guy who alone went out to sea on the oars. This was enough for him to gain confidence in the young man and make friends with him. The next day they went out on a boat to the sea together and talked there for a long time. Suprun listened to the young man, who frankly admitted that he, the aircraft technician, was denied a transfer to the flight crew.

“Cheer up,” said Suprun. “Believe me, I didn’t manage to climb into the sky right away. I had to endure a lot. But he got up! I believe - you will rise too. The main thing is not to lose the dream. And you know what? Save your technical knowledge. This is very important for a real pilot: both for normal work in the sky, and, if necessary, for a feat ... You see, Sasha, you need to be fully prepared ...

In the family archive of Suprun's relatives, faded photographs are still kept, in one of which young people are sitting on a boulder, and in the other Suprun is standing next to Sasha under a palm tree. In 1939, Suprun's new friend, Alexander Pokryshkin, graduated from the Kachin Aviation Pilot School, during the Great Patriotic War he shot down 59 fascist aircraft, became three times Hero of the Soviet Union, and an air marshal.

“I often remember this meeting. It would be more accurate to say that I always remember her. After all, with her, in fact, my flying life began, "admitted Alexander Ivanovich Pokryshkin many years later, talking about the 1935 sailing on a boat with Suprun at sea.

A terrible misfortune for Stepan was the death of Viktor Yevseyev, one of the members of the Red Five. He died during training. In the mournful hour, when the funeral procession was slowly moving along the road, the red plane in the sky performed dizzying aerobatics. So Stepan Suprun spent his best friend on his last journey.

Leap for glory

Stepan Suprun was three years younger than Valery Chkalov, but eight years later he entered the flight school. In November 1937, at the same time as Chkalov, he was nominated as a candidate for deputy of the Supreme Soviet of the USSR from the Sevastopol district.

In the town of pilots, surrounded by a dense pine forest, Stepan arrived in July 1933. There was an airfield, where the latest aircraft made in one copy were tested. And who tested - the gods of aviation! The best pilots of the country! Suprun was recommended here as an experimental pilot from the Belarusian Military District. He has not yet accomplished anything outstanding. At first, it was easy for a visitor to earn money. Alexander Anisimov, Vasily Stepanchenok worked in the town ...

Since 1931, the so-called airplane with "chicks" has been tested here. A heavy TB-1 bomber with fighter planes fixed on its planes rose into the sky. Their engines were powered by fuel from the bomber's tanks. At the right moment, the "chicks" uncoupled from the wings of the aircraft and flew forward. This allowed a heavy bomber to go deep behind enemy lines, and, moreover, be guarded by fighters.

The aircraft was piloted by Adam Zalevsky and Ivan Kozlov, and the fighter planes of Alexander Anisimov and Valery Chkalov were fixed on its wings.

Stepan Suprun appeared at the Air Force Research Institute when aircraft designer-engineer Vladimir Sergeevich Vakhmistrov, who invented the aircraft, planted two fighter "chicks" on it, and offered to drag a third onto the fuselage. For some reason, the designer was hampered by the wings and tail of the upper plane, then a fighter was dragged onto the bomber from above without them. Here the experienced test pilots protested.

- What role will I play in this unguided torpedo? - one of them was indignant.

No one wanted to climb into the cockpit of the third plane, since he considered his position in it completely unreliable and meaningless. The tests were postponed.

The commander of the TB-3 bomber aircraft at that time was Pyotr Stefanovsky, soon the closest friend of Stepan Suprun. Once, right on the airfield, a novice pilot approached Peter. He said that his leader Vasily Stepanchenok had sent him, that he, Stepan Suprun, really wanted to participate in the tests of an aviation link with a torpedo plane on top of a bomber.

- On the wingless? - Pyotr Stefanovsky was surprised.

- On it, - Stepan nodded.

Flights in the cockpit of a torpedo plane, devoid of tail and wings, planted on the bomber's hump, brought Stepan Suprun fame among pilots, technicians and all aviation specialists of the Air Force Research Institute. Stepan joined the circle of experienced flight masters - Stepanchenko, Anisimov, Nyukhtikov ... Soon the ugly wingless plane was taken to the hangar, the very idea of ​​using it for flights was rejected. But engineer Vakhmistrov proposed a new design: four fighter planes were hooked up to the heavy bomber from below and from above the wings, in one of them was Stepan Suprun.

However, Stepan watched his leader, Vasily Andreevich Stepanchenko, with excitement and envy. When a bomber plane soared into the sky from the airfield, carrying fighter planes on its wings and under its wings, Stepanchenok followed suit to the clouds on a hawk. Its purpose was to train in the precise approach of its aircraft to the aircraft landing gear, where there was a special landing site for the fifth "chick" - a fighter.

These tests were carried out by aircraft designer-engineer Vladimir Vakhmistrov, test pilots Vasily Stepanchenok, Pyotr Stefanovsky, Stepan Suprun, Konstantin Budakov, pilot-engineers Trofim Altynov, Alexei Nikashin.

Spectators from the side of the airfield watched as the bomber lifts up four "chicks" -fighters, as the fifth hovers in the air, then he joins the airplane, and the bomber is circling over the airfield. Another moment - and a heavy, strong bird, as it were, throws off its "chicks" - they hover over it, scatter to the sides, and when it touches the wheels of the airfield, one by one they sit down behind it.

It took time to appreciate these daring experiments. At the beginning of World War II, aircraft carriers were used to transport fighter-bombers for massive attacks on bridges.

Already in the 1920s, Valery Chkalov flew upside down on an FD-7 plane. This was considered hooliganism. Later Chkalov began deliberately testing the aircraft upside down. I went to check the flight personnel of combat units. Chkalov learned that sometimes pilots die in training battles at the moment of a spin in the aircraft's upside-down position. It was Chkalov, complicating his experiments, flying upside down, looking for ways out of an inverted spin.

In 1935, Stefanovsky unexpectedly encountered an inverted corkscrew. Two weeks later, Vasily Stepanchenok, Stepan Suprun and other test pilots began to study the unusual phenomenon.

Gradually complicating the figures, making one turn at a time, Stepanchenok and Suprun learned to enter and exit an inverted spin. They tried various options.

The corkscrew was a formidable phenomenon, he twisted the plane in a whirlwind, carrying it towards the ground. The vertical fall of the plane while rotating it around its axis was a mystery to scientists, it claimed many lives of the pilots. Without understanding the reasons for the spin, as well as flutter - self-excited vibrations of an aircraft - progress in aircraft construction was impossible. Therefore, Stepan's participation in testing aircraft for a spin simultaneously with one of the greatest masters of Soviet aviation, Vasily Stepanchenko, was already a recognition of Suprun's talent.

A virtuoso of precise flight, Vasily Stepanchenok made things more complicated and complicated for himself, putting the plane into a spin and looking for options for getting out of it. Once, carried away by experiments, he suddenly felt that the rudders had ceased to obey him, the plane swirled and no force could stop the collision with the ground flying towards him. The strong-willed and daring master managed to jump out of the cockpit with a parachute, although during a spin, the pilot's body was severely overloaded.

The crashed plane reminded of what a tailspin leads to. But the pilots gathered around discussed the experimental material brought from the sky by Vasily Stepanchenko. Stepan Suprun took part in this conversation on an equal footing, because he personally tested the planes, and also checked them for all types of spin.

Becoming an equal among the most experienced test pilots, rising to the sky-high heights either to test the latest oxygen device, or for a prototype fighter aircraft, Stepan went through the school of dangerous surprises. He screwed the "hawk" into the blue of the sky, pierced a random cloud and suddenly, reaching the "ceiling", he lost consciousness ... Only powerful health awakened his body when he dived to the ground, and he, waking up, guessed that the oxygen device had failed. Another time his plane caught fire at the moment when he turned it from a position with wheels upside down into a normal state. Stubbornness won, "cutting off" the flames from the engine with air currents, Suprun successfully landed the car at the airfield, making an accurate conclusion: at the moment of the plane's overturn, somewhere fuel flows out, falls on the hot parts of the engine and flares up. The flaw is easily eliminated, and the plane is saved for a long life.

The most complex test experiments confirmed his skill in the documents of the leadership of the Air Force Scientific Testing Institute. “Disciplined on the ground and in the air ... In flight work, he is enduring and indefatigable. Flies on all types of fighters. He is fluent in the elements of air combat of high-speed aircraft. Ideologically stable. It has no accidents or breakdowns. " But glory found Stepan Suprun not on these flights.

Having been injured while landing in July 1934, Stepan did not leave flights in the five-link aircraft, which were tied together with silk ribbons. Five fiery red cars, as if fastened not with ribbons, but with metal rods, walked across the sky, gaining altitude, dissecting clouds, falling into a steep dive, switching to low-level flight, delighting the audience at the airfield. There has never been such a thing for the planes to go into a dive together, make several loops without losing formation, simultaneously perform figures and sit down on the field in unison. Taking off again, the monolithic link crumbled like fiery sparks, and the planes were screwed in an ascending corkscrew into the blue depth of the sky, arranged a carousel.

When it came to solo flights, Suprun showed the audience such skill that everyone's spirits died away: the most complex figures flashed before the eyes of observers a few meters from the ground. The pilot seemed to be playing with death.

Young pilots, experienced aces, and simply fans of air sports admired such flights. Celestial acrobatics became fashionable. New and new fives were born, demonstrating flying skills in many cities of the country. The "devils" of the first five who, having shown their art in the skies over the Tushino airfield, involved hundreds and thousands of other pilots in this business, were Stepanchenok, Suprun, V. Kokkinaki. Preman, Evseev. The flight over Red Square in May 1935 delighted thousands of Muscovites. Stepan was awarded by the People's Commissar of Defense KE Voroshilov a gold personal watch.

In 1936, Stepan himself led the five in the air parade. Virtuoso flights in front of thousands of spectators, which seemed to civilians as acrobatic numbers, were in fact, as it were, elements of air combat. Acrobatics above the ground is the practice of piloting techniques, the ability to maneuver in the vertical and horizontal planes. Soon, this acrobatics was required by Soviet pilots in battles with fascist pilots in the skies of Spain, in battles with the Japanese in the hot heights of Mongolia and China.

On May 25, 1936, Mikhail Ivanovich Kalinin presented the Order of Lenin to Stepan Pavlovich Suprun in the Kremlin. Stepan glowed with joy and was very embarrassed. In August 1936, People's Commissars K.E. Voroshilov and G.K. Ordzhonikidze presented S.P. Suprun with an M-1 passenger car.

Many young pilots will remember August 18, 1937 for the rest of their lives, when Stepan Suprun demonstrated the "instructor with a student" number at the Tushino airfield. At first he performed intricate aerobatics. Then he began to portray an inept student in the sky. His plane lost speed, moved uncertainly, got into the most difficult emergency situations, fell to the ground, his tail fell through ... When landing, the plane hit its wheels on the runway and immediately soared up, then hit again and jumped again. Only Suprun could have dared to do that!

Echoes of battles in Spain

In 1936, civil war broke out in Spain. Not having the strength to cope with the people, General Franco, who rebelled, asked for help from Hitler and Mussolini, and they sent him their troops. Volunteers from different countries volunteered to help the Republican troops in repelling the fascist aggression. Soviet volunteers, including pilots, appeared in the international anti-fascist brigades.

German and Italian aviation suffered major defeats from Soviet aircraft. However, soon the improved German fighters "Messerschmitts" appeared on the fronts, and our aircraft more and more often could not withstand them.

Information about this from Spain was brought by military pilots to the Air Force Scientific Testing Institute. The failures on the Spanish front worried the test pilots, and Stepan Suprun took them to heart. While testing the latest aircraft, he was able to notice the shortcomings that prevented the development of better military aircraft than abroad. Stepan often consulted about this with other test pilots, talked with aircraft designers and Air Force leaders. In mid-1937, Suprun sent a letter to Comrade Stalin about the prospects for creating new models of military aircraft. Unfortunately, it, presented in a too passionate form, did not receive approval. The aircraft designer A.S. Yakovlev writes about this in the book "The Purpose of Life".

“By the way, Suprun told me the following story. Impressed by the failures in Spain in the circles of our military pilots, especially in the Air Force Research and Testing Institute, critical sentiments and doubts arose about the correctness of the technical policy in the field of military aviation. The most prominent test pilots of the Air Force Research Institute S.P.Suprun and P.M.Stefanovsky wrote to the Central Committee of the Party with a letter about the need to have fighters with not only air-cooled engines, but also water-cooled engines in our air fleet, and they motivated this idea in detail.

After a while, Stalin summoned the pilots. He said that their proposal met with approval in principle. But when they met, Stefanovsky behaved very harshly, attacking the People's Commissariat of the aviation industry. According to Stefanovsky, everything was bad with us. Stalin did not like this. He got the impression that Stefanovsky was a vicious critic.

Having dismissed the pilots, Stalin immediately called Voroshilov, told about his impression of meeting them. Voroshilov suggested the head of the aircraft department of the Air Force Research Institute, General I.F.Petrov, to check Stefanovsky. As a sin, there was something wrong with the questionnaire.

Ivan Fedorovich Petrov reported everything that was known about Stefanovsky to Voroshilov and asked what to do with him. Voroshilov asked: "Do you yourself believe him?" And in response to Petrov's words: "Of course I do," he said: "Well, then act according to your conscience."

Everything worked out with Stefanovsky ...

Letter to K. E. Voroshilov

Soon after becoming the chosen one of the people, Stepan Pavlovich suddenly felt that he was being overly taken care of. This caused a storm of protest in him.

At first, Suprun expressed his feelings that he was being protected from difficult flights to his friends. Then he went to the heads of the Air Force Research Institute. Their explanations did not satisfy him. Then Stepan Pavlovich wrote a letter to the People's Commissar K. E. Voroshilov. But this was preceded by important events.

At the end of 1938 and at the beginning of 1939, there was already open talk among the pilots that the best fighter in the world, the I-16, was being defeated in the Spanish sky by the newest Messerschmitt model. Aircraft designer Nikolai Nikolaevich Polikarpov began to work hard on the new aircraft. The flight unit of the Air Force Research Institute was then based in Moscow, at the Central Aerodrome. In December 1938, a modified copy of the I-180 fighter appeared there. Surrounded by tall buildings on the Leningradskoye Highway, this airfield was no longer very suitable for overflights of aircraft. On December 15, Valery Pavlovich Chkalov came to test the newest prototype of a high-speed car. During the two to three weeks before that day, he had meetings and talks about the new fighter with Stepan Suprun, with Yulian Piontkovsky, Vladimir Kokkinaki and other test pilots. He believed in the I-180, as he believed in his beloved aircraft designer Polikarpov. Raising a red short-winged fighter into the frosty air, Chkalov made circles over the city. Then he steered the device to a descent, and suddenly the engine of the plane failed, the pilot realized that he could not jump over residential buildings, sharply turned the nose of the plane to the side; Chkalov tried to evade a collision with the barracks and crashed into a post.

The death of the famous test pilot was a grief for millions of Soviet people. The event was discussed in the government. It was decided to build), three more prototypes of the I-180 and fly around them. Whom to entrust the tests to?

It was then that Suprun sent a letter to K. Ye. Voroshilov.

“By the 18th congress of our party, the second copy of the I-180 aircraft is released, on which the best pilot of our Motherland, Valery Chkalov, died,” wrote Stepan Pavlovich to K. E. Voroshilov, “the first copy of this aircraft was to be tested: Chkalov - factory and I - state. Now people are afraid to entrust me to carry out tests and be the first to fly this plane just because I am a deputy of the Supreme Soviet of the USSR.

Comrade People's Commissar! Now it has become extremely difficult for me to work - all the bosses are for insurance purposes ... in every possible way they are trying to push me aside, so long as I do not fly. All this is fundamentally wrong and extremely insulting to me.

In my opinion, you personally know how I fly on a high-speed plane - for ten years of flying work, I have not had a single accident, have not crashed a single plane ...

I have dozens of facts that I could cite to prove to you how distrustful I am. I will not divert your attention to a number of minor facts, I will indicate only the most basic ones: for a number of years I have been asking you to send me on a business trip to China or Spain to gain combat experience. All my efforts remain unsuccessful.

On my personal advice, 5 lightweight (red) I-16 aircraft were built, on which, in 1937, the five of us showed top group aerobatics on August 18, Aviation Day.

Now all these planes have been taken away from us, even the plane on which I flew the five, supporting my piloting technique, air combat and aerial shooting, were taken by people who had gained combat experience.

Soon it will be six months since I did not conduct any test, during this time I flew no more than 5 hours on a high-speed fighter, and there is no plane on which I could train.

Together with test pilot Stefanovsky, we personally wrote a report to you so that you could help us get at our government has permission to set a world record - a flight around the world without landing. The Air Force Military Council approved our proposal, but, in my opinion, this has not been reported to you personally, since we haven’t received a response from you ”.

Stepan Pavlovich urged the People's Commissar to allow him to test the I-180 aircraft.

And with what inspiration, excitement he undertook to bypass the obstinate plane when he received permission to do so! The winged horse delighted him. He curled like a bird, obediently performed aerobatics. Before completing the test program, Stepan Pavlovich, in an interview with the Air Force command, praised the Polikarpov fighter. This immediately gave an order for a hundred cars! However, Suprun continued to fly the plane into the sky, looking for the cause that killed Chkalov. And I did not find it. Another departure. One more. And when it was already possible to believe in the perfection of the fighter, he touched the landing strip with his wheels and fell on his back ... Stepan, who, having lost consciousness, was hanging upside down, was pulled out of the cockpit. When the pilot came to his senses, he was taken to the Botkin hospital. On the same day, Suprun's ward was filled with flowers, girls and women crowded at the doors of the compartment where the test pilot lay. And he suffered not from bruises, but from the failure of the plane.

It turned out that the landing gear wheel turned during landing and became transverse to the axis, and this turned the plane over.

The mystery of the fighter could not leave test pilots indifferent to it. Tomas Pavlovich Susi took advantage of the right of the most experienced, believing in the value of the car.

Having thrown the plane into a spin from a great height, Thomas Susi deliberately tested his obedience and suddenly realized that he was but obeying him. The pilot managed to jump out of the cockpit, but his parachute did not open, and Susi died.

What is this - a fatal coincidence or an imperfection of the fighter? The I-180 aircraft was rejected. Stepan Pavlovich bitterly experienced the death of Chkalov and Thomas Susi. In the fall, having visited his parents in Sumy, he confessed to his mother:

- No, I will not marry, mother, I have no right ... Praskovya Osipovna, who raised four sons and a daughter, threw up her hands:

- Oh, too much ... Yes, the yaki are right ...

“Anyutka will give birth to her first child, and I’ll take him up,” Stepan joked seriously, softening his confession.

Acquainted with the Suprun's attestation sheet for 1938, we read:

“Has flown on 1.X.1938, 1282 hours 13 minutes. (3838 landings). Of these, 35 hours at night. 29 minutes Plaque for 1938 from 1.I to 1.X. - 149 hours 30 minutes...

He works with great interest to improve his knowledge, mastering new techniques in this part too irreplaceable .

Physically healthy and well developed.

The position of test pilot of fighter aircraft is quite consistent. According to his personal qualities and knowledge of the matter, he can command a fighter regiment and a brigade. "

In the description for 1939 it is noted: “ Participated in flying over almost all experimental aircraft and gave the designers a number of valuable comments, enjoys great authority in the design world, influences the improvement of aircraft design. "

"Indispensable" - with this assessment Suprun entered in 1939.

Hunting stories

In June 1939, fifty Soviet volunteer pilots brought their planes to the temporary capital of China, Chongqing. Their arrival was connected with the request of the Chinese government to protect the city from Japanese bombers.

Since May 4, Japanese aviation has been massively raiding densely populated areas of the city into ruins, killing women, children and the elderly.

A group of fighters, led by Major Suprun, quickly put things in order in the sky over the city. Losing bombers, the Japanese abandoned daytime raids in July. Guessing about possible night bombing, Stepan Suprun dispersed his planes in the bushes along the highway that led to the airfield. And he was right: in the first night raid, the Japanese dropped bombs on the highway. Someone gave them the secrets of the disguise of Soviet volunteers. And although not a single plane was damaged, Suprun took even stricter camouflage measures. His ingenuity led him to lift his squadrons into the air in the dark, destroy Japanese bombers, and then land planes under bat lanterns, under the headlights of aircraft stationed on the airfield. Following his example, fighter pilots began to fly out to meet the Japanese, armed with heavy machine guns, which were installed in aircraft.

Once outside the city, a navigator was caught from a downed Japanese bomber. During interrogation, he not only named the names of Suprun, Kokkinaki and other Soviet aces, but also the numbers of their aircraft, because the Japanese intelligence was well organized. Soviet volunteers continued to shoot down Japanese pilots over the entire Sichuan province.

Once, Japanese planes began bombing an airfield where Chinese pilots had just landed their cars. One Chinese fighter remained in the air. The starting floodlights are broken. The Chinese pilot was doomed in the dark over the airfield. He could not sit down and did not risk being thrown out with a parachute. And it’s not safe: around the mountain. At these minutes, the resourceful Suprun jumped into the car, drove out onto the airfield and illuminated the landing strip with headlights. The Chinese pilot managed to land safely, and when the second echelon of Japanese bombers began to iron the airfield, Suprun had already taken the vehicle off the field.

On November 15, 1939, the Japanese landed a large assault force in the Qinzhou region, seeking to occupy the Nanning road junction and cut off the Chinese connection with Indochina and Burma. Japanese aircraft bombed Chinese reserves; unable to organize a defense, surrendering Datan and retreating from the previously occupied lines, the Chinese command requested the help of Soviet fighters. At the request of General Bai Chung-si, who commanded the Southwest Direction, the General Headquarters and the chief military adviser in China transferred 30 aircraft of the Chongqing group led by Suprun to the Guilin and Liuzhou airfields. The help of Soviet volunteers helped stabilize the front. In December, Chinese troops launched an offensive.

In January, Stepan was recalled to Moscow, and Konstantin Kokkinaki was appointed commander of the group instead.

In March 1940, he went on a business trip to Germany with a commission headed by IF Tevosyan; the head of the group for the purchase of aircraft was the deputy people's commissar of the aviation industry for experimental aircraft construction and science, aircraft designer A.S. Yakovlev. Stepan brought many impressions from the trip: he met with German aircraft designers Heinkel and Messerschmitt, visited many factories, flew on German planes completely unfamiliar to him, delighting Heinkel, who soon sent him an album of photographs from Berlin, as well as German test pilots. journalists and the public.

In his memoirs after the war, Heinkel wrote about Suprun:

“It was a tall, handsome man. Before flying for the first time in the Xe-100, the fastest aircraft he has ever flown, he had a ten-minute consultation with one of my best test pilots. Then he lifted the car into the air and began to throw it across the sky, performing such figures that my pilots were almost numb with surprise. "

Stepan Pavlovich returned from Germany not only even more famous, but also brought himself work - he had to fly German planes at his airfield. We bought there Messerschmitt-109, Heinkel-100, and Junkers-88 ...

Before the Great Patriotic War, Stepan Pavlovich Suprun worked hard to test the latest models of fighter aircraft. From June 15 to June 27, 1940, Stepan Pavlovich, together with Stefanovsky, conducted state tests of the LaGG-3 aircraft. As the leading test pilot of the I-21 aircraft, Stepan Pavlovich became convinced that the fighter was unstable in flight, and landing on it was dangerous. After landing the plane, he approached the lead engineer-pilot of the test of this plane, said:

“Landing on this thing is like kissing a tigress: dangerous and no pleasure.

“This phrase contains the whole Suprun,” recalls Andrei Grigorievich Kochetkov, now an honored test pilot of the USSR, Hero of the Soviet Union. Stepan Suprun was witty, precise in expressing thoughts. And he didn't really like writing paper reports.

* * *

Anyone who has ever been on a duck hunt will understand Stepan's excitement, with which he went every time to the forest. In the autumn evening hour or early in the morning at dawn, he loved to sit holding his breath in a hiding place and, peeping out from behind the shriveled yellow tops of reeds, peer into the twilight sky, waiting for wild ducks. Even from China, he sent letters in which there was a dream of hunting. “You will write to me,” he addressed to his sister Anya in a letter dated October 1, 1939, “write how the hunt is going this autumn! Only I don't have to hunt. But here the hunting is more interesting. Hot days have come. "

And then in the days of October 1940 there was an opportunity to hunt. Brother Alexander, who was finishing a flight school, unexpectedly came to Moscow from Borisoglebsk, and Stepan left the city with him. In the forest, at the hunt, the hunters were met by an old huntsman. He had boats, he knew where ducks flew.

However, on the first evening the hunt did not work out. On the shore they started talking about this and that - about air battles in China, about Stepan's trips to France, the USA, and Germany. He was questioned by the pilots who had arrived with him.

- You, son, have become completely famous, - the huntsman intervened in the conversation, holding a triuch in his hands. - Previously, he came just as a pilot, then he showed up as a deputy, and now he is already a hero. Such a fate is written in your family.

- Who wrote down my fate for me? - Stepan was surprised, looking through the smoke of the fire at the old man.

“It's very simple,” the old man smacked his lips, shaking his head, for significance. - One baby has a hero's star, and another has a quiet life in the forest.

- Well, these are fairy tales! - Stepan protested. - If I could not fly, so I learned. In China, we shot down thirty-six Japanese vehicles, while we ourselves lost only five. What is the fate here?

- The Japanese are no worse warriors than us! - the huntsman shrugged his shoulders. - I fought with them in nine hundred and fifth, they took how many of our prisoners then! Their planes are worse than ours, or what?

- Light, maneuverable like birds, - Stepan praised the Japanese cars, - but our planes are faster than theirs and even stronger. Once my plane was riddled with forty bullets, but I nevertheless brought it and landed on the airfield. If a Japanese fighter jet had fallen under such a line, it would have left down and feathers.

- Conspirated! The old man said sternly. - And I've gone through three wars, but at least I got one scratch. I have a good hat. - And he shook his three-ear. - I even wore it in a duffel bag in summer. A little danger - I get it on my head. It is like armor. Not a single bullet bit me.

“Are the bullets bouncing off of her?” - the hunters laughed. - Let's check!

With great reluctance, the old man gave the three-handed to the pilots, who, not without interest, were examining the crumpled cap with worn cloth and greasy lining. On the huntsman's dark, weather-beaten and sun-baked face, the flames of a bonfire danced.

- Miss, Stepan Pavlovich! He warned Suprun angrily.

Stepan quickly uncovered his rifle, turned in the direction of the bushes, where the slope of the sky was still glowing: the silhouette of the cap would be clearly visible. It was a sin to miss.

- Fire! - the command was distributed.

The double-barreled gun was immediately discharged by both barrels. Everyone rushed to the hat hanging on the branch of the bush. By the fire, they carefully turned it over, looking for at least one hole.

- You have a magic hat, - Stepan looked at the old man with serious eyes. - Take my gun, you won.

The next day, returning to the city, Sasha asked his brother:

- How did it happen that you missed the huntsman's hat?

Stepan grinned:

- Would it be better if I riddled her? I would have robbed my grandfather of both his hat and faith. Besides, he wanted a gun.

The answer of the Malinniki tract

Stepan Suprun brought his regiment from Moscow to the Vitebsk region on the personal instructions of Stalin. In the first twelve days of the war, the successes of the Nazi armies were so great that the fascist command considered the war with our country almost over. The chief of the general staff of the German army, General Halder, reported to Hitler on July 3, 1941: "Therefore, it would not be an exaggeration if I say that the campaign against Russia was won within 14 days." And on these extraordinary days for the Soviet country, the news came to Moscow about the death of the legendary test pilot, whose military skill no one doubted. I didn't want to believe in Suprun's death. And since there was no exact information about the place of the hero's death, someone said that Stepan Pavlovich fell into the hands of the partisans. But the news of the rapid death of the famous pilot shocked some people so much that they spread a rumor about the destruction by the Germans in the first battles of the entire regiment commanded by Suprun. Rumors proved to be tenacious, took root in the books of memories. In the Vitebsk and Sumy regions, which were occupied by fascist troops, it was profitable for the Germans to shout on the radio that the Hero of the Soviet Union, Deputy of the Supreme Soviet of the USSR Suprun surrendered ...

Anna Pavlovna, Suprun's sister, who lived in Moscow, having received news of the misfortune with her brother, in early July visited Sergei Ignatievich Rudenko, now an air marshal; he told her that Joseph Vissarionovich ordered to clarify the cause and place of Suprun's death.

The archive contains several reports from the 23rd Air Division, which included the Suprun regiment, about the death of Stepan Pavlovich. First, the assistant chief of staff, Captain Andreev, reported that on July 4, 1941, Lieutenant Colonel Suprun at 13 o'clock took off at the head of ten MiG-3 aircraft with the task of escorting the SB for bombing in the Borisov area. Suprun walked in front. On the way back after reconnaissance, he was not in the ranks. Then the commander of the 23rd mixed air division, Colonel Nestertsev, wrote to the chief of staff of the Western Front:

“When a group of bombers returned, accompanied by nine MiG-3s, Lieutenant Colonel Suprun was tenth. Having separated from the group, wishing to carry out reconnaissance along the Borisov-Orsha road, he dropped to a low altitude and, apparently, was shot down by fire from the ground. In the area of ​​Tolochin, a burned-out plane and the corpse of a pilot were found. A Gold Star was found in the rubble. 07/09/1941 ".

Even later, Nestertsev reported: on July 9-10, a peasant brought Suprun's charred documents from the forest to the division headquarters that the same peasant had seen a charred plane near the village of Krupki. The number of the found Hero's Star was reported: 461.

Unfortunately, this testimony of Nestertsev remained unknown to anyone. Even K. E. Voroshilov did not know about him, who once in 1946 called Sumy and talked on the phone with Suprun's father.

In the summer of 1960, the hero's brother Colonel Fyodor Pavlovich Suprun resumed the search for the place of death of Stepan Pavlovich. A commission was created, which included employees of the Tolochinsky and Krupsky district military enlistment offices of the Vitebsk region, as well as the journalist I. Brainin.

In the village of Krupki, in the surrounding villages, hundreds of people were interviewed. Many talked about the places where Soviet aircraft crashed during the Great Patriotic War. But the search for the remains of the aircraft yielded nothing.

At the request of the military registration and enlistment office, the Tolochin regional newspaper "Leninesch" published a note about the search for Suprun's plane. The next day, a collective-farm blacksmith from the village of Surnovka, Mikhail Efimovich Pokatovich, came to the editorial office of the newspaper. In the letter, he recounted his memories as follows:

“Around the end of June or early July 1941, a fighter of the latest brand was shot down in an air battle. At that time, I served as an observer of the VNOS post, which was located in the Drutsk castle. After the plane crashed, I, together with the lieutenant (I don't remember his last name), drove to the crash site, the plane burned out when we arrived, the pilot, whose body was burnt, except for the lower part of the body, was still in the cockpit. ”

A search group of officers, headed by the district military commissar, Lieutenant Colonel N.I. The village, having learned about the search for the crash site, gathered many witnesses of different ages. They recalled that on July 5, 1941, fascist tanks and vehicles had already approached the village, and then, before the Germans entered the street, collective farmers Denis Vasilevsky and Andrei Akulovich buried the pilot. The sons of Vasilevsky, Vladimir and Yevgeny, approached the search group, who saw how their father buried the pilot, examined the burned plane.

At the request of the military registration and enlistment office, bushes were cut down in several places. The grave was not there. Then the sappers led by Major A.S. Gavryutin were called to the edge of the forest. Private Romanyuk quickly found the spot where the shovel blades were directed. Soon the shovels hit the metal cover. The remains of the buried pilot were under the skin of the plane. Near the grave, people found half of the plane's engine crankcase, a reducer, an air compression cylinder, and the pilot's armored back. In the fence of one collective farmer, an aircraft engine block with a number has been preserved.

Engineer Lieutenant Colonel P.S. Shcheglov invited from Minsk confirmed that the metal parts belonged to the MiG aircraft.

The conversation with many people ended with the drawing up of an act, which is now kept in the Museum of the Armed Forces of the USSR.

At the same time, in the summer of 1960, the remains of S.P. Suprun from the clearing outside the village of Monasteries were transported to Moscow and buried with great honors at the Novodevichy cemetery. Monuments to Suprun are installed in Sumy, in the village of Monastyri, streets in Moscow, Sevastopol, Sumy, in the village of Rechki are named after him, schools, pioneer squads and detachments are named after him.

From the book "Pilots"

Dates of the life and work of S.P. Suprun

1913 - Mother Praskovya Osipovna took the sons of Stepan, Grisha, Fedor to Canada, to their father, who left there in 1911.

1915-1924 - Stepan goes to schools in Howardville and Winnipeg.

1922 - Joins the League of Young Communists of Canada in Winnipeg.

1928 July - 1929 September- A milling machine operator at the Frunze machine-building plant in the city of Sumy, a pioneer leader.

1929 October - 1931 July- Cadet of the school of junior aviation specialists in Smolensk and the school of military pilots.

1935, May- Participation in the air parade over Red Square. Awarded with a personalized gold watch of the USSR People's Commissar of Defense.

1936, May- Participation in the air parade over Red Square. He was awarded the Order of Lenin for testing and mastering new military equipment.

1939, July - 1940, January- Participation in hostilities with Japanese militarists in China as the commander of a group of volunteer fighters.

1940, March- Member of the Commission for the purchase of aircraft in Germany. 1940, May 20- Awarded the title of Hero of the Soviet Union.

1940, summer - autumn- Conducted state tests of the new MiG-3 and LaGG-3 fighters, recommended them for serial production.

1941, June 23- Made a proposal to create six regiments of test pilots.

1941, June 24- I signed an opinion on the Yak-1M fighter plane, and recommended it for serial production. 30 June- led the 401st Special Purpose Fighter Regiment to the front; on the same day he personally shot down two enemy planes.

Brief bibliography

A. S. Yakovlev. The purpose of life. Ed. 4th, dollar M., Politizdat, 1974.

P. M. Stefanovsky. Three hundred unknowns. Ed. 2nd. M., Military Publishing, 1973.

A. Ya. Kalyagin. On unfamiliar roads. M., "Science", 1969.

S. I. Rudenko. Victory wings. M., Military Publishing, 1976.

A. I. Eremenko. At the beginning of the war. M., "Science", 1964.

Twice Heroes of the Soviet Union. M., Military Publishing, 1973.

S. Vishenkov. Twice Hero of the Soviet Union S.P.Suprun. M., Military Publishing, 1956.

1907-1941

Twice Hero of the Soviet Union (05/20/1940, 07/22/1941), test pilot, lieutenant colonel.
Born on August 2 (July 20 - old style), 1907 in the village of Rechki near the city of Belopillya in Ukraine. In 1910-13 he lived in the USA, from 1913 in Canada. In 1924 he graduated from the 8th grade of school in the city of Winnipeg.
In 1924 the family returned to the USSR. He lived in the village of Vostrovo (Altai Territory) and the city of Alma-Ata (Kazakhstan). In 1925 he worked as an apprentice in the carriage workshop in Belopole, in 1926-28 - as a carpenter in the committee for combating unemployment in Sumy, in 1928-29 - as a turner-milling machine operator at the Sumy machine-building plant.
In the army since October 1929. In March 1930 he graduated from the school of junior aviation specialists in the city of Smolensk, and in July 1931 - from the pilot school at the 83rd aviation detachment (in Smolensk). He served in the Air Force as a flight commander of the 7th separate fighter aviation squadron in Bobruisk.
From July 1933 on test work in the fighter squadron of the Research Institute of the Red Army Air Force. The immediate superior, V.A. Stepanchonok, introduced him to the commander of the TB-3 bomber P.M. Stefanovsky. After the export flight on a fighter, Stefanovsky accepted him into the group "Link-2A" of V.S. Vakhmistrov. Suprun participated in tests of the Zven variants until 1938.
In 1935-39 he took part in the May Day air parades over Red Square, demonstrated aerobatics at the Tushino airfield - both single and as part of the "red five".
In December 1937 he was elected a deputy of the Supreme Soviet of the USSR of the 1st convocation.
In 1937-38 he visited the United States as part of a delegation, and in 1939 - an exhibition in Paris.
He tested I-16 variants, aircraft Seversky 2PA-L (1938), Me-109 YuMO 210 (1938), etc.
Already in 1938, in his attestation it was written: "... He is working on improving his knowledge with great interest, he is mastering a new technique, and in this part it is irreplaceable."
In the description for 1939, it is noted: "He participated in flying around almost all experimental aircraft and gave designers a number of valuable comments, enjoys great authority in the design world, and influences the improvement of aircraft design."
After the flight to America, the correspondent of the Pravda newspaper asked how V.P. Chkalov felt in the role of the most fearless man in the world (after all, the North Pole submitted to him), he replied: “I am the most fearless? Then you don't know Suprun! " After Chkalov's death, Suprun obtained permission to test the I-180-2, and on May 1, 1939, he demonstrated the I-180 at an air parade over Moscow. Checking the I-180 "for survivability", the pilot played aerobatics on it. Flight - landing, flight - landing. And at the next landing, the chassis broke. The plane skipped at high speed. Suprun was removed from the wreckage of the fighter, he was unconscious.
Participant in hostilities in China: from July 3, 1939 to January 20, 1940 - the commander of a fighter group. His group, which defended the sky over the city of Chongqing, consisted of two divisions. One flew on the I-15 under the command of K.K. Kokkinaki and was intended to fight bombers, and the other on the I-16 to fight enemy fighters.
In January 1940, summoned by the institute, Suprun, the only one from the group, flew to Moscow to test new fighters. In March 1940, he was on a business trip to Germany as a member of the Soviet commission for the purchase of aircraft. Here he performed a number of flights on German aircraft completely unfamiliar to him, incl. He-100, delighting Heinkel. Then he flew over the already purchased aircraft. From May to October 1940 at the Air Force Research Institute Dolgov, Dudkin, Kabanov, Kovalchuk, Nikolaev, Suprun, Shaporov and others tested He 100, Bf 109, Bf 110, Do 215B, Ju88A-1, Bu 131D, Bu 133, FW 58B, FW 58C.
On May 20, 1940, Suprun was awarded the title of Hero of the Soviet Union.
In May 1940 (until June 1941) he took part in the tests of the IS-1 fighter by V.V. Shevchenko and V.V. Nikitin. On May 25, Suprun performed 2 flights on the I-200 # 01 (MiG-1) fighter. According to the results of state tests of the I-200 AM-35A aircraft, he noted that the I-200: “is the most advanced aircraft when it enters the state. tests that the prototype aircraft went well. " From June 15 to June 27, Stepan Pavlovich, together with Stefanovsky, conducted state tests of the I-301 (LaGG-1) at the Air Force Research Institute. In July, he conducted state tests of the I-153 with a pressurized cabin designed by engineer Shcherbakov.
During factory tests of the first instance of the I-21 fighters, Stefanovsky and Suprun noted that the fighter was not sufficiently stable in the air, and landing on it was dangerous. After landing the plane, Suprun approached the lead test engineer and said:
“Landing on this thing is like kissing a tigress: it’s dangerous and no pleasure.”
In January-February 1941 he took part in the overflight of the UTI-26 (Yak-7UTI), from April - I-30 (Yak-3-1). The report on the test of the Yak-1M with a proposal to launch the aircraft into production was signed by him on June 26, 1941. By this time, he had flown about 140 aircraft.
June 23, 1941, on behalf of the command of the Air Force Research Institute, makes a proposal to form regiments of test pilots based on the latest technology. JV Stalin gives 3 days for the formation of 6 regiments (including two fighter regiments on the MiG-3). On June 29, S.P.Suprun, P.M.Stefanovsky, A.I.Kabanov were summoned to the Kremlin, where they reported on the progress of the work. And already on the 30th, Suprun flew to the front as the commander of the 401 IAP for special purposes. On the very first day of his arrival, he personally destroyed 2 enemy aircraft. Suprun personally led his pilots into battle, flew for reconnaissance, covered the bombers.
On the morning of July 4, Stepan Pavlovich flew to reconnaissance, then twice led his regiment to escort bombers. Before the fourth flight, he approached the engineers of the squadrons N.S. Pavlov and A.A. Manucharov, shrugged his shoulders and said sadly:
- Guys, I don’t recognize myself today. I am already taking off for the fourth time, and so far I have not shot down a single enemy aircraft.
The sixth flight on July 4, 1941 was the last for Suprun. In a pair of Art. l-Tom Ostapov Stepan Pavlovich went on reconnaissance. Ostapov noticed an enemy Focke-Wulf-200 "Condor" in the sky, attacked it, but was shot down by enemy fire. He returned to the regiment two days later.
Left alone, Suprun entered into battle with 6 enemy fighters. In this battle, he shot down a Me-109, but he himself was shot down. I planted a burning plane in a clearing at the edge of the forest near the village of Krupki, but did not manage to get out of the cockpit. There was an explosion and Suprun died.
On July 22, 1941, he was posthumously awarded the second Gold Star medal, becoming the first twice Hero of the Soviet Union in the Great Patriotic War.
He was awarded 2 Orders of Lenin (05/26/1936, 05/20/1940), a Chinese order.
Only in July 1960, his remains were found near the village of Monastyri in the area of ​​the town of Tolochin, Vitebsk region. With great honors they were reburied in Moscow at the Novodevichy cemetery.
A street in the city of Sumy is named after him.

Sources of information:

• Book of Memory of GK NII VVS. 1945-1945 / M., 2015 /
• Pilots. Collection / Comp. V. Mitroshenkov, M. "Young Guard, 1978" /
• "The history of aircraft designs in the USSR (1938-1950)" / VB Shavrov, 1988 /
• Suprun Stepan Pavlovich / Heroes of the Country /