The Nazi invaders visited Kerch twice: in November 1941, but then they were thrown back quite quickly (at the end of December 1941) during the Kerch-Feodosia operation, and in May 1942, when they again captured the Kerch Peninsula , broke through to the strait and surrounded a number of Red Army units.
On May 16, 1942, one of the most famous and long-lasting “underground” wars in human history began. In Crimea, near Kerch, the Red Army soldiers went into the quarries and, contrary to all forecasts, created a truly combat-ready army there, underground.
Combined detachment of Colonel Yagunov P.M. found himself surrounded, and the unit did not receive an order to retreat. Then our warriors, not wanting to surrender to the enemy, retreated to the quarries near the village of Adzhimushkay and took up a perimeter defense there. In the fall of 1942, only a few rose to the surface, although on May 18 more than 10 thousand descended into the quarries. 
Two-pylon composition above the Adzhimushkay quarries defense museum
In the same quarries there were several thousand local residents, mostly women, old people and children, fleeing bombings and enemy shelling. In total, more than 20 thousand people gathered here.
Two separate underground garrisons arose in the quarries: in the Big ones - numbering approximately 10 thousand people, in the Small ones - up to 3 thousand. Of course, no one prepared the quarries for defense in advance; there were no special reserves of weapons, ammunition, food, or medicine. Therefore, we had to fight in very difficult conditions.
It was especially difficult for the soldiers in the Big or Central quarries, since it was here that more than 500 of our wounded soldiers and civilians were located. 
Adzhimushkay quarries on the map. Sights of Kerch (Crimea).
Two selected infantry regiments of the 46th division, tanks and mortars, the 88th engineer battalion and a special team of CC troops were thrown against the besieged. But at first, neither tanks nor machine gunners could even get close to the entrances to the quarries - everywhere they were met by fire from covering detachments. Only on May 16, 1942, the enemy managed to blockade the quarry area.
But even then, day and night, brave souls came to the surface and with sudden raids drove the Nazis away 3-4 kilometers. Several times they held the villages of Adzhimushkai, Kolonka and the Voikov plant for a long time, using this success to replenish water and food supplies.
The struggle of the surrounded Soviet soldiers was led by the defense headquarters, headed by Colonel P.M. Yagunov, Commissar I.P. Parakhin, Colonel F.A. Verushkin, Lieutenant Colonel G.M. Burmin. In Small Quarries, the underground garrison was headed by Senior Lieutenant M.G. Povazhny.
The Adzhimushkai defense regiment was formed with three battalions and special teams of reconnaissance officers, radio operators, tank destroyers, a quartermaster unit, a hospital, a water extraction group and a group of “listeners” who observed the explosive work on the surface. 
The entire life of the underground garrison was conducted strictly according to the regulations of the Red Army, and this significantly increased its defense capability. In the first fierce battles with the Germans, the commander of the 1st battalion, senior lieutenant N.N. Belov, captain V.M. Levitsky, lieutenant Novikov, junior lieutenant Pavel Saltykov and dozens of other heroes died the heroic death of the brave. Our command tried to help the besieged garrison; Soviet planes dropped ammunition and food into the catacomb area.
In 1942, our soldiers, having no flashlights, came up with the idea of cutting car tires into thin strips and setting them on fire. They burned, smoked the ceiling, clogged the lungs, mucous membranes of the nose, and bronchi with fumes, but provided at least some light. Russian bright minds also came up with the idea of making a hole in the casing of a large projectile into which they inserted a wick, and poured used engine oil into the cavity of the casing. It turned out something like a candle. This is how light was produced.
It is not for nothing that one of the wells, from which the fighters of the underground garrison tried to draw water for their needs, was called the Well of Life. The defenders of Adzhimushkai went upstairs to get a bucket of water, as if on a hunt, in groups. One group walked with empty buckets, the other group drew water from the well, and the first group immediately threw empty buckets to them. The third group covered the rear with fire, since the wells were well shot at by the Germans in the open and the casualties of our soldiers when drawing water were catastrophic.
A bucket of water was equated to a bucket of soldier's blood. 
Well of Life
When there were no available means to get the fire out, they came up with the idea of simply stringing a telephone wire between different parts of the quarries. Handing over it with their hands, Red Army soldiers and civilians moved from one room to another in pitch darkness. For example, from the “barracks” to the so-called “headquarters”. These names are arbitrary, because there were no rooms as such underground.
Shots, grenade and mine explosions thundered over the quarries day and night, then powerful explosions of aerial bombs began to sound, with which the Nazis wanted to open the central underground trenches. By May 20, 1942, planes arrived in Kerch from Berlin, delivering secret weapons to fight unruly Soviet soldiers. This weapon turned out to be a new gas invented by fascist scientists. The gas was contained in large cylinders and grenades of a special design. Having covered all the exits from the quarries with stones and earth from explosions, the Nazis brought pipes from compressed gas cylinders to the cracks. Grenades were thrown down through drilled holes. And those who tried to get up were shot down with machine guns and machine guns. 
The first gas attack was carried out on the night of May 25. It was followed by others - over several days at intervals of 3-5 hours. This tragedy was described in his diary by junior lieutenant Alexander Ivanovich Trofimenko, one of the heroes of Adzhimushkai. At least 10 thousand people died from gases and collapses. Some of the unconscious people fell into the hands of the Nazis.
But these barbaric attacks did not break the will of the surviving defenders of Adzhimushkai. The end of May and June they gave no rest to the punitive forces. However, their strength was fading every day. People died from hunger and thirst, from gas attacks, and died during forays from quarries.
At the beginning of July, Pavel Maksimovich Yagunov tragically died. Coming from a peasant family in the village of Chebarchino, Ostashevsky district, Mordovian Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic, he went through a difficult life. During the Civil War, Yagunov took part in battles with the White Cossacks near Aktobe. Then, in the ranks of the 5th Turkestan Rifle Regiment, he fought in the south with Denikin’s White Guards, with Basmachi gangs in Central Asia... Pavel Maksimovich became a career military man, before the war he served in the Baku Military Infantry School, then the front...
After Yagunov’s death, Grigory Mikhailovich Burmin, a career military man, tank driver, and participant in the battles at Khalkhin Gol, took command of the defense of the quarries. In Crimea, at the head of a tank regiment, he covered the rearguards of infantry units, defended the Voikov plant until the last hour, and after the blockade of Adzhimushkai he made his way into the quarries with a group of soldiers. After many days of stubborn fighting and heavy losses in the garrison, Parakhin, Verushkin and their comrades ended up in the Gestapo prison in Simferopol. They were tortured for a long time and, having achieved nothing, were shot.
The last scattered groups of exhausted defenders of Adzhimushkai left the quarries in November 1942, when the ground was covered with wet snow. Among the participants in the Adzhimushkay defense, Pirogov A.I., Sidorov P.E., Danchenko N.S., Filippov N.D., Levitsky V.M., Golyadkin A.G., Solovyov V.A., Goroshko N. stood out. P., Shukevich V.I., Skilevoy P.I., Barmet G.I., Trubilin G.F., Kostenko V.I., Derkach G.K., Kaznacheev F.F., Efremov N.A. , Povazhny M.G., Voronov A.M., Kazmirchuk A.P., Kolodin V.I., Ch. Zhunuskulov, A. Chukulyuk, Egorova Z.S., nurses Anya Churova and Lida Gordeeva, machine gunner Kovalev, Red Army soldier Khazarov G.Ya. and many other brave fighters.
In November 1943, units of the Separate Primorsky Army crossed the Kerch Strait and were one of the first to liberate the village of Adzhimushkay. What the soldiers saw in the quarries is difficult to describe. Several thousand people died at the entrances and vents, suffocating from gases. They were in positions that spoke of terrible torment. Over 3 thousand corpses were recovered from the catacombs. 
Later, the names of those who gassed our soldiers and civilians became known. A monstrous crime was committed by a group of Nazis with the shoulder straps of generals and officers. Among them: General Gaccius - commander of the 46th German Infantry Division; SS captain Paul Knipe; the commander of the special team, non-commissioned officer Bonfik, who arrived from Berlin to carry out gas attacks; commander of the 88th Engineer Battalion, Captain Hans Freulich; the commander of the 2nd company of the 88th engineer battalion, Fritz Lineberg, especially committed atrocities in the Adzhimushkai quarries area, and many others. 
The history of the 170-day defense of Adzhimushkai became known through the study of a variety of sources: wall inscriptions, Red Army books found in quarries, letters and memoirs of defense participants and eyewitnesses, materials from trials of war criminals, captured materials. A special place among them is occupied by diary entries. Of greatest interest is the diary that was kept in the central quarries, that is, where the main command of the garrison of Adzhimushkai defenders was located. On 59 notebook pages, in neat handwriting, it was told about the first days of defense until the beginning of July 1942, when the author died of hunger and exhaustion. Its author was junior lieutenant Alexander Ivanovich Trofimenko:
May 16. The Germans surrounded our catacombs on all sides. In the church there is a firing point, machine guns, machine guns. Most of the houses in Adzhimushkai were captured by the Germans, and machine gunners were stationed in almost every one. Movement in the yard becomes difficult. It's difficult to get water...
May 17. Everything was already prepared for the attack. I walk through for the last time, checking my eagles. Morale is good. I'm checking my ammunition. Everything is there. One hundred people were ordered by the command to lead the attack. One hundred eagles pay attention to who will lead them into battle for their homeland. I'm thinking through a plan for the last time. I divide it into groups of twenty people. I single out the older groups. The task is clear to everyone, we are waiting for the general signal...
Shots rang out. The sky was covered with smoke. Forward! The enemy wavered and began to retreat in disarray... the guys from the right flank had long since made their way forward, shouting “Hurray!” smash the enemy... 
May 20. As for water, things have gotten completely worse. The civilian population is not far from us. We are separated by a recently built wall, but I still check on them and often ask about their mood. It's a bad thing. If you had at least a hundred grams of water, you could still live, but the children, the poor, cry and give no rest. And we can’t do it ourselves either: our mouth is dry, and we can’t eat without water. Those who could share what they could. The children were given drinks from flasks and given their own rations of crackers...
May 24. Something squeezed my chest so much that I couldn’t breathe at all. I hear a scream, a noise... I quickly grabbed hold of it, but it was too late.
Humanity of the entire globe, people of all nationalities! Have you seen such brutal reprisals as those carried out by the German fascists? No... I declare responsibly: history nowhere tells us about these monsters. They've gone to extremes! They started gassing people! The catacombs are full of poisonous smoke. The poor children screamed and called their mothers for help. But, alas, they lay dead on the ground with their shirts torn on their chests, blood pouring from their mouths... Kolya and I were also without gas masks. We pulled four guys to the exit, but in vain. They died in our hands.
I feel like I’m already suffocating, losing consciousness, falling to the ground. Someone picked me up and dragged me to the exit. I came to my senses. They gave me a gas mask. Now let's quickly get down to business, saving the wounded who were in hospitals...
A blond woman of about 24 years old was lying face up on the floor. I lifted her, but to no avail. Five minutes later she died. This is a hospital doctor. Until her last breath, she saved the sick, and now she, this dear person, is strangled. Earthly peace! Motherland!
We will not forget the atrocities and cannibalism. If we live, we will avenge the lives of those suffocated by gases!.. I make my way to the central exit. I think there are less gases there, but this is just a guess. Now I believe that a drowning man clutches at straws. On the contrary, there is a larger hole here, and therefore more gas is released here. Almost every hole has 10-20 Germans, who continuously blow poisonous gases and smoke. Eight hours have passed, and they are still choking and choking. Now gas masks already let smoke through, for some reason they don’t retain chlorine...
I will not describe what was done in the hospital on the central one. The same picture as ours. There were horrors in all the passages, many corpses were lying around, along which the still half-dead were rushing in one direction or the other. All this, of course, is hopeless. Death threatened everyone, and it was so close that everyone felt it...
July 3. The whole day of July 2 I walked like a shadow. Sometimes I wanted to at least end such torment with death, but I thought about home, I wanted to see my beloved wife again, hug and kiss my beloved little children, and then live with them.
The disease is increasing. Strength is falling. Temperature up to 40o. But the next day brought great joy: in the evening, a military technician of the 1st rank, Comrade, came to our headquarters. Trubilin. He spoke for a long time with the captain, after which I heard him say:
- By God, there will be water.
I didn’t understand what kind of water it was and where it came from. It turns out that this Trubilin took the day to dig an underground passage to the outer well and get water... The picks began to knock again, the shovels began to work. But no one believed that there would be water. What happened to the well? The Fritzes first threw boards, wheels from carts, and large stones and sand on top. In the depths it was free, and it was possible to take water. Trubilin confidently reached the well underground during 36 hours of his hard work, punched a hole in the well, discovered that water could be taken, quietly collected a bucket of water and drank it for the first time himself with his workers, and then quietly brought it to our battalion headquarters. Water, water. They knock with mugs. They drink. I'm going there too. The captain handed me a full mug of clean well water...
I don’t know how I drank it, but it seems to me that it was as if it wasn’t there. By morning there was already water in the hospital, where they gave 200 g. What joy - water, water! 15 days without water, and now, although not yet enough, there is water. The boilers began to knock and ring. Porridge! Porridge! Soup! ABOUT! Today is a mess! So we will live.
Today we already have 130 buckets of water in stock. This is the value by which the lives of up to 3,000 people are weighed. She, water, decided the fate of life or death. The Fritz thought that the well was clogged, and they removed their posts from there, so they took water with great noise. But we need to make a reservation, it was very difficult to get water through the underground passage, you can only go on all fours...”
The defense of the Adzhimushkai quarries showed that a fairly large, armed and well-organized group of fighters and commanders can provide stubborn resistance to the enemy in underground structures for a significant period of time. Almost all the methods used by the Germans turned out to be ineffective, and the garrison could not be broken by force of arms. The Nazis were never able to defeat the underground garrison in open battle or force them to capitulate. People fought in the most severe conditions and until the last hoped for the arrival of their own and the victory of the Motherland. It is necessary to emphasize the role of the garrison command staff; they acted at a very high level. The struggle of the isolated underground garrisons in the Adzhimushkaya area once again showed the highest combat and moral qualities, greatness of spirit, stamina and courage of the soldiers and commanders of the Red Army. These were real heroes, men of steel...
In 1944, the writer Mark Kolosov published a series of articles about the defense of the Adzhimushkai quarries, and the poet Ilya Selvinsky, who visited the quarries, dedicated a poem to the participants in the defense. At the same time, excerpts from the diary of a defense participant, marine Alexander Sarikov, were published.
In the first years after the end of the war, the defense of Adzhimushkai did not receive wide coverage, but already in the 1960s, the Adzhimushkai quarries were taken under state protection as a historical monument, and a museum dedicated to the struggle of the underground garrison was created in the city of Kerch.
In 1966, a museum opened in the catacombs.
In 1975, the publishing house “Young Guard” published the book by V. A. Kondratyev “Heroes of Adzhimushka. Tales of the courage of the underground garrison."
In 1982, the Adzhimushkay quarries memorial complex was opened.
The article was prepared based on materials:
Film TK "STAR" Adzhimushkay. Underground fortress of the site TO THE TRUTH
In May 1942, a strike group of fascist German troops under the command of Field Marshal E. Manstein managed to break through the Crimean Front, and Soviet troops, under continuous enemy bombing, had to evacuate from the Kerch Peninsula. Day and night, cannonade thundered over the steppe and the sea, the sky was obscured by the smoke of fires, and under bomb attacks and artillery and mortar fire, Soviet units began to cross over to the Taman coast.
After leaving Kerch, the struggle against the Nazis continued, although combat units and units as such ceased to exist, and the defense was mainly held by hastily formed consolidated detachments and groups.
In the area of the village of Adzhimushkai, one of these detachments was commanded by Colonel Pavel Maksimovich Yagunov, head of the Combat Training Department of the Crimean Front headquarters. The disparate rearguard units, detachments and combat groups of commanders and privates, border guards and marines, cavalrymen and tankmen, sappers and signalmen united by him found themselves on the path of the fascist tank corps, successfully repulsed all enemy attacks and played an important role in the defense of the eastern tip of the Kerch Peninsula.
Taking the brunt of the attack, they ensured the evacuation of more than 100,000 Soviet soldiers to the Taman Peninsula. They had a difficult fate - to cover the retreat of the army, and they fought to the death as long as they had the strength. If they had only accomplished this in the war, they would still have deserved immortal glory. But on May 18, 1942, the Nazis, bypassing Adzhimushkai, surrounded P.M.’s detachment. Yagunov, and the soldiers and commanders went to the quarries. They continued their feat, hiding under multi-meter layers of limestone rock, and they had another 170 days of struggle and defense ahead of them...
In the summer there is a viscous heat on this land, the bitter smell of wormwood on the Tsar’s Kurgan, the walls of the white houses of Adzhimushka are blinding to the eyes, the breeze from the Kerch Strait every now and then brings in the thick smell of cumin. The path from the Tsarsky Mound leads to the opening of the Central adit of the Great Adzhimushkay quarries. For hundreds of years, generations of stone cutters sawed dry white limestone in these rocks, from which the entire Crimea, and not only the Crimea, was built. Cutting down layer after layer, the stone miners went further and further underground, leaving behind entire labyrinths. The passages converged and diverged, bending in the same way as the layers of stone were bending. Thus, an intricate underground city gradually grew up, which “those who did not want to surrender,” as they were reported to Hitler’s headquarters, turned into centers of resistance.
Previously, this underground labyrinth housed the headquarters of the Crimean Front; there are warehouses with weapons and ammunition, an army hospital and a front-line club. Soldiers and commanders of the Red Army who were unable to cross to the Caucasian coast flocked here; local residents were drawn in who did not want to remain on the occupied land. In conditions of almost constant darkness and dampness, half-starved, deprived of water and medicine, they showed amazing resilience and courage. The metal could not stand it, the weapons rusted and failed, but the people fought to the death!
Thus began the underground defense of Adzhimushkai, the second in half a century, since even during the Civil War, partisans operating against the troops of P.N. were based in the quarries. Wrangel. And this time the damp, gloomy dungeon adits received thousands of fighters. Above there is light, sun, spring, life, but below there was not enough of the most necessary things - water and food. No one was waiting for people to come here, no one was preparing supplies for them. They had to get all this themselves in order to live and fight.
Daring forays, daring reconnaissance operations, the destruction of enemy soldiers and officers, constant psychological impact on the enemy... The Kerch land literally burned under the feet of the invaders, and they sought to destroy the underground garrison with inhuman cruelty. The Nazis mined, filled with stones and braided with barbed wire all the exits to the surface known to them, and then began to carry out explosions along the main drifts, and the fighters of the underground garrison had to retreat to distant adits. They say that the Germans had plans and diagrams of the quarries, but, being at the top, it was still impossible to accurately guess and trace all the branches and turns of the passages on the surface. Therefore, many of their explosions did not reach their target, leaving only shallow craters on the surface, since the explosives did not take strong stone. German sappers managed to blow up and fill up several passages near the Central adit, but not a single explosion was carried out above it. However, where the explosion occurred exactly above the entrance, the destruction was enormous: then a crater 10-20 meters deep was formed on the surface.
At the entrance to the quarries, the Germans installed loudspeakers, the croaking voice of which could be heard underground, promising life, water, food... But the quarries were silent in response, and none of them came out. When the Nazis tried to get inside, they were met with fire. Convinced of the futility of their attempts to “smoke out” the “fanatical commissars” from the ground, the Nazis used gas attacks with explosions. German sappers knocked out deep holes in the stone and planted landmines and aerial bombs in them: explosions thundered, detonation caused vaults and walls to collapse in adits and drifts, and collapses gave birth to new collapses. It was a terrible day - May 24th. The quarries filled with gas, but the half-suffocated radio operator Kaznacheev was able to broadcast a radiogram signed by Colonel P.M. in clear text. Yagunov:
To all the peoples of the Soviet Union! We, the defenders of the defense of Kerch, are suffocating from the gas, dying, but not giving up!
By this time, the fuel had already run out and the engine in the adits did not work. And then the defenders began to make torches from pieces of car tires, cut into long strips. They gave a dim and smoky, but long-lasting light. The main concern and the main value in the quarries was water. People sucked stones, the limewater corroded the skin, caused gums to bleed... And yet it was water! Precious drops were collected in cauldrons to give drink to those who were in the underground hospital, who guarded the entrances to the dungeon.
The commander of the underground garrison, the soul of defense from the first to the last hour, P.M. Yagunov died in the quarries in July 1942. Examining the weapons and ammunition obtained by the soldiers during a successful night raid, he took a grenade, and it exploded... All the soldiers and commanders of the underground garrison buried him: he lay in a coffin made from the sides of a semi-truck, which was then buried in one of the underground halls. There was heavy rubble in this area, and now it is not known exactly where the grave of the famous hero of the Adzhimushkai defense is located. What is known is that a metal sheet was placed on the hill, on which someone inscribed his name with single machine gun shots.
stood late autumn 1942. The July battles in Sevastopol and on Cape Chersonesus, where the last defenders of the heroic city fought, died down. The Nazis temporarily occupied Taman and Kuban, occupied Novorossiysk... And in the Big and Small Adzhimushkai quarries near Kerch, deep in the German rear, a piece of Soviet land remained impregnable, defended by soldiers and commanders of the Red Army.
There are legends about the last battle of the quarry defenders. The soldiers and commanders of the Crimean Front entered their last battle after a five-month heroic defense as soldiers of the regular army - in uniform and with insignia. Bearded, black, in tattered clothes, they walked, supporting their wounded comrades, squinting from the bright, unbearable daylight. It was a terrible and incomprehensible sight for the enemy...
But the quarries did not remain empty for long. Soon, new detachments of fighters filtered in there, like water through stones, and again the Kerch quarries began to inspire superstitious horror on the Nazis...
The underground garrison of Colonel P.M. Yagunov was not the only one. In the Bulganak quarries, several dozen wounded soldiers, officers and the entire staff of the medical battalion of the Azerbaijani division of the Crimean Front were surrounded. When the Nazis approached, the doctors took the wounded into the depths of the catacombs, setting up duty posts, which with their fire prevented the enemy from immediately penetrating down.
And in the Small Adzhimushkai quarries, part of the personnel of the 1st reserve regiment and other units of the Red Army took refuge. The organizer and leader of the defense in these catacombs was Lieutenant M.G. Povazhny is the commander of one of the batteries of this regiment. From the first days of defense, he took into account all available food and established a strict distribution rate, but despite this, people sometimes died from hunger and lack of water. This is what was written in the diary of Senior Lieutenant Klabukhov, found in early 1944.
June 30, 1942 Three died only because they ate horse skins: they roasted them on a fire and ate them, and then sucked water for hours, and that was the end.
July 26. I feel weak. This is because I ate too much boiled grass... Don’t eat grass: your teeth are loose, your gums hurt. There is no salt, 3 grams per day, and they dissolve imperceptibly. It's difficult, but what to do? You have to endure and fight. Only struggle and willpower will help the cause...
Being completely surrounded, without communication with the mainland, the garrison for several months chained huge enemy forces to itself, pulling them away from the front line. They did not lose heart, always hoping for liberation from the underground fortress. They were known and remembered! The Soviet posts at Cape Chushka reported them to the command, and they were radioed by reconnaissance sailors from the half-submerged steamships Shakhtar and Gornyak. Explosions, missiles and luminous tracks were observed by Soviet submarines, raising their periscopes. We saw crews of night bombers flying out on missions...
In November 1943, units of the Separate Primorsky Army crossed the Kerch Strait and liberated the village of Adzhimushkay. The soldiers and commanders who descended into the quarries silently walked along the underground adits: near the smoky walls, among the multi-ton stone rubble, lay the remains of the heroes who died but did not surrender to the enemy. On the wall of one room there is a drawing scratched with something sharp: a Red Army soldier and a fascist are standing in profile to each other. The fascist has a characteristic helmet on his head, a holster on his left side, and a rifle with a wide bayonet in his hands; the Red Army soldier is dressed in a tunic and a cap with an asterisk... Which unknown artist left this memory and on which of the 170 days?
The Adzhimushkay catacombs kept many secrets, and one of them was about the existing archive of the underground fortress, which was spoken about by the surviving participants in the defense, Soviet documents of those years, and even evidence from the enemy. The defenders of Adzhimushkai would hardly have decided to part with the chronicle of their struggle forever, and a search expedition organized in the 1960s found a safe with part of these priceless documents. There were award sheets, notes and reports about the heroism and courage of the garrison soldiers and other military relics of the 15,000 defenders of Adzhimushkay, of whom only 49 people remained alive.
The Adzhimushkai quarries are an interlacing of adits and drifts. They stretch underground for many tens of kilometers. The network of underground passages under Adzhimushkai appeared in ancient times: shell rock was mined there - one of the main building materials on the peninsula and beyond. Shell rock is still used today: it is actively used in construction.
Today's Adzhimushkay is one of the microdistricts of Kerch. But this village with a Turkic name appeared on maps back in 1772. “Khadchimyshkai, where the Circassians live,” the Russian military said about it in their reports. There are two versions of the translation of the name: “The Gray Stone” or “The Man Who Performed the Hajj” - and both are quite plausible. Not many residents of Crimea made a pilgrimage to Mecca, and the presence of such a person could well be reflected in the name of the village.
The “gray stone” was shell rock mined near Adzhimushkay: over time it darkened under the influence of weather conditions. In Soviet times, the village was renamed Partisans, however, when it became part of Kerch, the previous name returned.
Of interest to travelers is not so much the city itself as its underground - literally and figuratively, a real underground world, in the labyrinths of which Red Army soldiers hid, who offered fierce resistance to the Nazis. The extensive system of underground galleries and passages is conventionally divided into Central (large) and Small Adzhimushkay quarries.
Defense of the Adzhimushkay quarries
The central adit is quite wide: before the Great Patriotic War, a narrow-gauge railway was laid in it, and when the soldiers of the Crimean Front descended into the catacombs, army trucks and cars, carts and staff buses freely drove into the adit.
The Germans captured the Kerch Peninsula in May 1942. The troops of the Crimean Front were forced to evacuate to the Taman Peninsula. Their withdrawal was covered by troops under the command of Colonel Pavel Yagunov - his detachment included the 1st front-line reserve regiment, military school cadets, soldiers and commanders of the 276th NKVD Infantry Regiment and the 95th Border Regiment. Cut off from retreat, they descended into the quarries, from where they made forays into German troops. The Nazis discovered a shelter, but were unable to break through - then a grueling 170-day siege began. The defense of Adzhimushkai was held by about 13 thousand people, of whom only 48 survived.
Traces of military life are still preserved in the quarries. In the walls of the niche rooms there are rusty nails and push pins, and here and there there is a wire stretched: it looks like a curtain used to hang on it. On the ceiling, coils of wires have been preserved in places, and on the wall of one of the deepest branches the inscription “Headquarters” made in chemical pencil is still visible.
The conditions in which the defenders of Adzhimushkai lived for 170 days are scary to even imagine. Without fresh air and daylight, with virtually no water: the Nazis watched the exits, and every attempt to get to the well turned into a fierce battle. There was practically no water in the quarries themselves.
It became a little easier when the soldiers managed to dig a passage to the trunk of one of the dilapidated wells, and then get to the water.
The shooting continued unabated upstairs. The entrances to the dungeons were guarded by the most steadfast soldiers and SS men - they experienced an almost mystical horror of the defenders. Hoping to collapse the underground passages, the Nazis first blew up all the known passages, and then tried to carry out explosions along the main drifts - most likely they had a plan for the catacombs. But it is difficult to trace all the underground passages on the surface, and the explosives did not always take strong stone. Therefore, many explosions left behind only shallow craters. But there were also successfully placed bombs that brought down the walls of underground corridors.
Trying to flush the military out of hiding, the Nazis pumped smoke and poisonous gases into the quarries. They say that the smell of gas and burning has not yet disappeared from the deepest drifts. In mid-October 1942, most of the defenders of the underground fortress died, but the surviving soldiers continued to resist the enemy. The shots stopped on October 31, 1942, and the last Red Army soldiers were captured. Kerch and its surroundings were liberated from fascist occupation only in April 1944.
Museum of Defense of Adzhimushkay Quarries
Currently, the Adzhimushkay quarries defense museum operates in the catacombs. Its employees show visitors the underground life of the city’s defenders, the preserved remains of defensive walls and gas-protective fabric partitions, gas shelters, signal installations, a well dug by soldiers and their mass graves. The excursion takes place at a depth of 7-11 m, where even on the hottest summer days the air temperature does not exceed 11 degrees. Therefore, it is recommended to take a sweater or jacket with you to stay warm. However, for the most forgetful, there is a rental of warm clothes at the entrance to the museum.
The Adzhimushkai quarries have long been turned into a museum - austere, mournful, uncrowded. The vaults here are low; The tallest of the visitors are forced to bow their heads as they follow the guide and check their every step with his instructions, so as not to stumble, hurt themselves, or disturb the dilapidated exhibits. These are defensive structures, living quarters with beds and utensils, an underground hospital with medical instruments, and even “children’s rooms” in which seventy-year-old toys remain. There was not enough water, and people dug a well 14 meters deep. More precisely, they dug it into the limestone with sapper shovels and bayonets. And with what pains they went to get the water, what was it worth! As local guides say, “Adzhimushkay residents would give a bucket of blood for a bucket of water.”
In 1982, a memorial to the defenders of the Adzhimushkai quarries was erected above the entrance to the dungeon - this is a majestic two-pillar sculptural composition. On one of the pylons, Soviet soldiers are carved against a background of boulders - they are eager to fight. On the second - women with children in their arms. This pylon is located a little deeper than the first, and the women seemed to be hiding behind the backs of the warriors.
Adzhimushkay feat described in literature
Many books have been written about the heroic defense of Adzhimushkai. These are works of historians, memoirs of surviving defenders of quarries, and fiction.
Andrey Pirogov “Fortress of Soldiers’ Hearts.” The author of the book, one of the participants in the heroic defense, fought for almost six months in the depths of the Crimean land captured by the enemy. In the book, he talks about the life of the dungeon and the life of his colleagues.
Alexey Kapler “Two out of twenty million.” The heroes of the story are a married couple, Masha and Sergei. They go to work, solve everyday problems, raise children and grandchildren. This is the most ordinary life - life as it could have developed if the heroes had not been killed in 1942 in Adzhimushkai. In 1986, this plot formed the basis of Natalya Troshchenko’s film “Those Who Descended from Heaven,” in which the main roles were played by Alexander Abdulov and Vera Glagoleva.
Adzhimushkay quarries - video
Many thanks to Vladimir Shcherbanov,
who provided these invaluable materials for the site
Paradoxes of the Adzhimushkay tragedy
Shcherbanov V., expedition member
1. Paradoxes that precede tragedy
In the fall of 1941, during the first occupation of Kerch, a base was prepared in the Small Adzhimushkay quarries and a small partisan detachment was left named after. V.I. Lenin. And although the base was staffed with the expectation that the detachment would have to fight for several months, and the occupation lasted a little more than a month, active actions were extremely limited by the difficult conditions of the quarries.
Analysis of the actions and life of the detachment was of little comfort: even for a small detachment based in the “rocks”, options for movement and active actions were complicated. The possibility of blocking a detachment and not letting it leave the quarry area is very great... The idea of specially training and leaving partisan detachments in underground workings is not very effective...
Being in Kerch in February 1942 on the instructions of “Red Star”, Konstantin Simonov for the first time (!) in his entire journalistic practice did not bring a single material needed on the topic. Later he told the editor of the newspaper “Red Star” and his friend D. Ortenberg
admitted that “this trip was a moral test,” and feels that a tragedy is approaching on the Crimean front...
If we admit that Konstantin Simonov’s “premonitions” were not based at all on emotions, but on the facts of what he saw and heard, then the Orders of the Crimean Front command and what they led to certainly played a significant role in this...
Since the winter of 1942, the command (primarily the representative of the Headquarters, Army Commissar of the 1st Rank L.Z. Mehlis) forbade soldiers to dig full-profile trenches, build layered defenses and throw fragmentation “shirts” to hand grenades, used to increase the striking area.
The basis was ideological thought, so as not to undermine the offensive spirit of the army. “Dumps” of such fragmentation “shirts” for RGD-33 grenades were discovered by search teams in quarries on the Ak-Monai Isthmus, in areas where the defense line of the armies of the Crimean Front ran from January to May 1942.
2. Reality and paradoxes of defense
At the entrance to the bay, along the banks of which the city of Kerch is located, the embrasures of the old fortress look towards the Black Sea. The Ak-Burun fortress, built a couple of centuries ago and occupying a strategically advantageous place on the Kerch Peninsula, was and is a fortification structure, two or three levels of premises of which were hidden underground.
As of May 1942, the fortress housed a garrison of more than two thousand people. On the territory there were warehouses for artillery shells, torpedoes, depth charges, various calibers and types, as well as warehouses for equipment and food. Some of the warehouses have been stocked since the First World War. The garrison had ground and anti-aircraft artillery.
In the twentieth of May, after Kerch had already been occupied, having received an order from the command to retreat, the fortress was organizedly abandoned by the garrison with the exception of a covering group.
On these same dates, the Special Detachment of Colonel P.M. Yagunov, just formed by order of the commander of the Crimean Front, Lieutenant General D.T. Kozlov. to cover crossings and evacuate units of the front, continued to hold the defense in the area of the village of Adzhimushkay. But the “special order” to leave the position was not transmitted to Colonel Yagunov either a week or a month later.
Fulfilling the last order “Hold on...”, the soldiers and commanders who found themselves surrounded near the village of Adzhimushkai were forced to descend into the lifeless emptiness of the quarries and create from them a military fortress, impregnable to the enemy for six (!) long months...
Crimean Front Command (commander Lieutenant General D.T. Kozlov, representative of the Supreme High Command Headquarters, 1st Rank Army Commissar Mehlis L.Z., member of the Military Council, divisional commissar F.A. Shamanin, chief of staff, Major General Vechny P. .P.) fled across the strait ahead of his troops, forgetting to give the Special Cover Detachment the order to retreat. But already on May 20, across the strait (and even after the war), the command announced that “all troops and equipment were withdrawn from the Kerch Peninsula...”.
The commander of the Transcaucasian Front, Marshal Budyonny S.M. (criticized in recent years by military historians as an inept and short-sighted commander) turned out to be one of the few major military leaders of the Great Patriotic War who tried to provide assistance and ease the fate of our units that remained surrounded near Kerch in May 1942. On his orders, for several months, planes with food, ammunition and reconnaissance groups were sent to the Adzhimushka area to communicate with the underground garrison.
German historians and eyewitnesses of those events would later write about the unforeseen difficulties that awaited Hitler’s troops, even after the capture of the Kerch Peninsula. From F. Pico’s book “The Lost Infantry” (Frankfurt am Main, 1957): “...The cleansing of the city lasted a longer time, because significant units of Russians, turning into miners, went underground and turned the underground labyrinth into nests of resistance, from where they continuously and unexpectedly attacked...”
“They blew up the quarries above us for several months,” recalls N.D. Nemtsov, a defense participant from Donetsk. “At first they tore up the exits from the quarries, trying to wall them up alive in the dungeons. Later, throughout the entire area of the quarries... Every explosion, collapse is a mass grave.”
When blowing up quarries, the Nazis mainly used Soviet (!) aerial bombs, which were thrown at the airfields of the Crimean Front near Kerch...
The Adzhimushkai quarries became a good testing ground for the Nazis and the use of chemical weapons and toxic substances. It was no coincidence that the 88th sapper battalion of the Nazis was called here, and at the Vladislavovka station there were cars with chemical shells and grenades. Even the Chemical Defense Academy (Moscow) could not identify one of the unused German-made gas and smoke bombs, discovered by searchers from Rostov in 1986, since this marking does not appear in the Reich catalogs (possibly an experimental batch).
But the command of the Red Army, neither in forty-two nor in forty-three, made statements to the world community about the Nazis’ use of chemical and gas weapons on the Crimean Front, prohibited by international convention, since... our side officially declared that Soviet regular troops were in May 1942 near Kerch was not surrounded. This means there was no reason to protest!..
The logic of a criminal’s actions is not always clear. Until there is accurate and complete information, events and actions become a mystery. Here is one of them... The most severe destruction of the quarries was carried out by the Nazis not in the Central Quarries, where about 10 thousand defenders were located, but in the northern and northeastern parts of the Small Quarries, where, according to available data, there were only about 3 thousand soldiers and commanders.
We assume that it was no coincidence that the Nazis blew up this part of these quarries so intensively. Apparently during the first period of defense (until the end of May, beginning of June 1942), a group under the command of Colonel S.A. offered fierce resistance in this area. Ermakova. To the group of Colonel Ermakov S.A. included fighters and commanders of the 291st mountain rifle regiment of the 63rd mountain rifle division, cavalrymen of the 72nd and 40th cavalry divisions and sailors. Most of them remained under multi-meter rubble of quarries.
Accurate and detailed information about this group and the complexities of relationships with the group Art. Lieutenant M.G. Povazhny - no... There are no names of the majority who remained under the collapses of the northern and northeastern parts of the Small Quarries...
3. And the main paradox...
The fact was and remains obvious - the conditions in the quarries are not suitable for life: the temperature on the hottest days does not rise above +6 - +8 degrees Celsius, humidity up to 80%, constant drafts, limestone dust at the exits... Even rats make nests on the surface , and the dungeon is made only forays; dogs and cats are afraid of Adzhimushkai’s workings at the physiological level.
During the winter expedition of 1985, the Rostov group conducted a psychological experiment - they lived underground and searched for 10 days in full autonomous mode, without going to the surface... Upon completion of the work, all participants had inflamed eyes that were watery on the surface for 3 days. After the expedition, the searchers were forced to spend several days in a hotel with the windows closed in order to gradually relieve eye strain and adapt them to the light...
Despite the impossibility of long-term life underground, the garrison commanders Colonel Yagunov P.M., Lieutenant Colonel Burmin G.M., Colonel Ermakov S.A. and senior lieutenant M.G. Povazhny. were able not only to improve the lives of thousands of people, but also to organize a circular, active defense of underground Soviet territory!
They were able to turn lifeless quarries into a fortress for 170 days. As a reproach to all those who betrayed them and to the fear of the enemy, the soldiers and commanders of the Crimean Front, crossed out from the lists of the living, crushed by explosions and poisoned by gases, even in such conditions, fulfilled their duty!..
The beginning of July, when Sevastopol fell, deprived the defenders of Adzhimushkay of their last hope for a quick offensive. The hope for a quick liberation has become unrealistic!.. The belief (all this time cementing discipline and giving strength to people) that during the advance of the Red Army the defenders would strike the enemy from the rear and speed up the breakthrough was dying!..
And a few days later, fate prepared another test of Spirit and Will for the soldiers and commanders of the underground fortress - the commander of the garrison, Colonel Yagunov P.M., tragically died when he was blown up in the headquarters by a booby trap!...
Psychologists believe that in such conditions the strongest people give up and lose their nerve...
The new garrison commander, Lieutenant Colonel G.M. Burmin, who previously headed the 2nd battalion, broke out of the basements of the plant named after. Voykov, was able not only to increase the discipline of the defenders, but to intensify fighting against the Nazis.
Several times the village of Adzhimushkay was captured by dungeon soldiers, and the Nazis were forced to call for reinforcements and heavy artillery fire from Mount Mithridates!
The actions of the garrison forced the German command until the end of October 1942 (!) to keep several regiments around the quarries, so necessary at the front...
And although all the surviving defenders of the Central Adzhimushkay quarries claimed that Colonel Yagunov P.M. was the only person buried in the quarries in a coffin, and he was the only one buried after the explosion at the headquarters. However, when in 1988, while clearing the workings, the coffin with the remains of the commander was finally found, the remains of another officer lay nearby!..
Shortly before the discovery of the remains of Colonel P.M. Yagunov, an elderly man with order bars appeared at the Kerch Historical and Archaeological Museum in the Adzhimushkay Defense Department, introduced himself as a participant in the defense, Dmitry Sergeevich Rykunov from the Odessa region and left short memories, which were quickly recorded by an employee during the conversation museum.
In his memoirs, he is the only one (!) who said that Colonel Yagunov P.M. was buried along with Major Lozinsky, whose remains were placed next to the commander’s coffin. Neither before nor after this, neither the search engines-researchers nor the reserve staff were able to obtain any information about Major Lozinsky!..
Find veteran Rykunov D.S. Neither the address he left, nor through the address bureau, nor through the Central Archive has so far been successful...
The central quarry is in no hurry to reveal its secrets. Some of them are still unsolved...
In the eastern part of the Central quarries, a vast place has long been known, the floor of which is covered with a meter-long (!) layer of burnt casings and bullets of the Soviet pre-war model and nearby a burnt warehouse of artillery shells. The Rostov search group, which explored these places together with sappers, neutralized a total of thirteen thousand (!) shells only in 1989.
“The largest ammunition depot on the Crimean peninsula since the war,” as “Evening Odessa” wrote then. There, mixed with shells and burnt cartridges, the remains of several people, the frames of four rifles and a soldier’s bowler hat with the inscription: “Salty Viktor Petrovich” were found there. August 1942.” This find confirms the assumption that these are warehouses of the Crimean Front, which were apparently used by the defenders of Adzhimushka from May-October '42.
But... none of the participants in the defense of the quarries who remained after the war ever recalled the fire or explosions of the warehouses... The history of these underground warehouses, as well as the cause and time of their fire, remains one of the mysteries - a “blank spot” for defense researchers ...
4. Are there paradoxes in post-war research?..
Without knowing your past, you may not have a future - this is the meaning of well-known wisdom.
Therefore, fifteen years of search work forced me to look for an answer to the question: when and on what topic of the Great Patriotic War were the very first search and research started? No, not investigations and proceedings by “competent authorities” and not propaganda campaigns of journalists ordered by the state. And the collection of information, documents and an unbiased assessment of the events of outsiders who were “hurt” by the tragedy of the topic even with a cursory acquaintance with it...
Over the years, I have become acquainted with the history of studying the defense of the Brest Fortress and the death of the 2nd Shock Army, the defense of Smolensk and the Vyazemsky encirclement, the inglorious abandonment of the Rostov fortified area, which was the most prepared during the war years, and the search for the remains of captain “Gastello”...
And today there are serious reasons to believe that the first tragic page of the war, which gave the first research experience of front-line History, and subsequently became the beginning of the entire search movement of the former Soviet Union, was Adzhimushkai. Here, in November 1943, Ilya Selvinsky, together with the paratroopers, breathed in the bitter air during a short exploration of the quarries, after which the poem “Adzhimushkay” was born.
And in January 1944, the command of the 414th Infantry Division, units of which occupied the front line in Adzhimushkay and took refuge in quarries, was forced to appoint a special commission in order to somehow reveal the secret of the tragedy, to which the soldiers and commanders of this division became unwitting witnesses.
The work of that commission can be considered the “first search expedition”, which discovered and noted in its Survey Report not only traces of the events of May-October 1942, but also documents found then in the dungeons. Even those that were later seized by military censorship “correctors” and destroyed. For example, the original of Serikov-Trofimenko’s diary and those documents, the contents of which we will never know...
About that first letter in 1958, which attracted the attention of one of the most famous early explorers and major search engines, S.S. Smirnov on the topic of Adzhimushkai can be read in the books of the researcher himself.
Less known is the fact that although a few years later Sergei Sergeevich admitted that “the history of Adzhimushka is the second Brest Fortress, only larger in scale and duration,” nevertheless, this topic, like the topic of the 2nd Shock Army, he for some reason (?) he was urgently forced to leave... In his works it remained only in “trial versions...”.
Fool's fate... For almost twenty years after the war, in official history the topic of the defense of Adzhimushkai was considered shameful and closed...
Most of the surviving defense participants went through Soviet filtration camps, prison camps and numerous checks... Many for this reason, until their last days, tried not to remember their participation in the Kerch events of May-October 1942 or gave superficial information...
Back in the fall of 1960, a young unknown artist N.Ya. came to Kerch. Booth. One cloudy day he found himself in the village of Adzhimushkai, went down to the quarries and... “I was depressed, defeated, sank down on the stones and sat for several hours,” Nikolai Yakovlevich told the author of these lines in 1985. For the next two weeks before leaving, I came to Adzhimushkai every day. A lot of ideas were born for ten years ahead... Now I can say that I have done only a small fraction on the topic...” All subsequent work of N.Ya. Buta will be marked by pain Adzhimushka...
3a 1986-1989, during the search expeditions of the magazine “Around the World”, the Rostov group discovered several different gas smoke bombs and cylinder systems used by the Nazis against the defenders of the underground garrison and civilians located in the quarries.
Experts from the Ministry of Internal Affairs studied the chemical composition and gave a conclusion. One of the conclusions contained the following line: “Composition chemicals, used in a gas-smoke bomb, is not noted in the catalogs of German troops available to the USSR Ministry of Internal Affairs and the USSR Ministry of Defense... Possibly a prototype”...
This phrase “prototype” gave us the idea that everyone who went through Adzhimushkai’s hell were some kind of “prototypes” of the use of chemical weapons. But even among them there was only one person - a specialist in military chemistry, Colonel Verushkin F.A., who graduated from the Academy of Chemical Defense in 1940, and in forty-two he tested the gases on himself and saw their results. The fate of Colonel F.A. Verushkin himself. and to this day is not fully known.
Having weighed all the information we had and consulted with the director of the museum, we decided to propose to the leadership of the Academy of Chemical Defense to open a section in their museum dedicated to the Adzhimushkay defense, their graduate, Colonel F.A. Verushkin. and transfer the rarest samples of chemical weapons to them for safekeeping.
Imagine my surprise when, having familiarized the leadership of the Academy in Moscow with the information, examination reports, photocopies of samples, we heard: “Thank you, this is not interesting for us...” (!)
In 1986, a search engine from Odessa, Sergei Konovalov, was included in the expedition from the Rostov region. They continued to develop one of the extensive rubble in the eastern region of the Central quarries - the “Four Cadets” or “Grobovoy” rubble. Rostovites have already been exploring this area for the third year, and each time it has yielded interesting finds, as its name partially suggests.
The senior group here was Alik Abdulgamidov, the commissioner of the expedition. But this year the group worked for two weeks, and there were practically no finds - the blasted soil was being cleared.
Konovalov worked furiously, even in dangerous areas. It was as if something was pushing him. When the possibility of a collapse arose, wooden fasteners were made. The day before the end of the expedition, although they came across the whitewashed masonry and rails that once secured the ceiling, which provided “food” for bold proposals, they were forced to “mothball” the blockage and tunneling until next year. But in 1987, Alik, who “mothballed” the excavation and knew the specifics of the fastening, was not there. Sergei Konovalov was also late for the expedition.
Having learned that the expedition took place without him, he could not stay in Odessa for long; he came to Kerch together with a friend in November. And although there is an unspoken law - not to work outside of expeditions and not to open places “preserved” by the expedition alone, something still pushed and urged him...
On the third day, they discovered a safe with papers (!) - a metal box with documents from the headquarters of the 2nd battalion of the underground garrison. Since the war, this was the first and only such find!.. And again Sergei commits a gross violation of the search engine rules and another illogical act - he does not inform the museum and takes the documents to Odessa...
If at that time we did not attach importance to some coincidences and parallels, then as the years pass, we who knew and participated in that story are increasingly surprised...
Finding himself in Odessa with damp, crumbling papers from the safe, Sergei Konovalov was really scared. He was afraid neither of the police, who were already planning to be involved in order to return the documents to the museum, nor of the opinion of us - the search engines, although he knew that if the documents were lost, those who had been fighting their way under the rubble of Adzhimushkai for ten to fifteen years would not forgive him in order to find at least one document.
He was afraid that he would not be able to delaminate and secure the fragile sheets of compressed paper, and the documents would be irretrievably lost!.. This prompted him to search for someone and those to whom he could give the documents for study. And so Sergei contacted then police major Viktor Mikhailovich Sokolov, who was familiar with the history of Adzhimushkai and with expeditions in quarries through the Odessa group “Search” of Konstantin Pronin.
After a month of difficult and tedious work, Viktor Mikhailovich Sokolov was able to separate, secure and read 106 (!) documents from the headquarters of the 2nd battalion for the period July-August 1942. One hundred and six documents: minutes of party meetings, acts of discharge of the wounded from the underground hospital, acts of the dead and dead, and even nominations for the next military ranks and government awards (and this is three months (!) after the start of the underground epic!)...
But this is not the main thing (now this is the opinion of everyone in Kerch, and Rostov, and Odessa, and Moscow, who have devoted years to researching Adzhimushkai). Despite (or thanks to) all the wrong and inexplicable actions of Sergei Konovalov, the documents fell into the hands of, perhaps, the only person in the entire Union at that time who could and had the desire to do even the impossible in order to save everything that was possible from those documents!.. This is a happy coincidence or Fate.
And Sergei Konovalov?.. “Anarchist”, as we called him, an extremely enthusiastic and devoted excavator, a simple and ingenuous “silversmith” died in 1990, blown up by an anti-tank mine in Odessa...
What gave him the strength to search when his wife left him, when he was forced to quit his job? What ignited and pushed him during his work is still not clear to us...
Now I remember how once, in great secrecy, I was shown a typewritten version of a book about Adzhimushkai by one of the first quarry explorers, a Kerchan resident, a journalist, someone who, as a boy, ran through the dead workings of dungeons in the post-war years - V.V. Birchert. In the few hours that I had at my disposal, I quickly familiarized myself with the contents.
It must be said, both at that time and now, this book is one of the few more objective and interesting stories about the tragedy near Kerch. It includes documents not only little-known to the reader, but also unknown even to researchers - from the personal archives of the author. This book was written more than fifteen years ago.
It was repeatedly forbidden to publish, and Bershert V.V. they even recommended destroying it...
But that was at that time - censorship. Now the book... has also not been published... Are those still alive today who are bothered by the truthful information on the defeat of the Crimean Front?..
That's how it happens. After the retirement of the first director of the Adzhimushkay defense department, who had worked continuously in this post for almost twenty years (!), a participant in the Great Patriotic War, retired aviation lieutenant colonel Sergei Mikhailovich Shcherbak, directors changed almost every year. And it was a difficult time of perestroika and shift changes, and most importantly, the work was complex, intense, ambiguous, requiring not only knowledge and interest, but also the soul.
Therefore, when the new head of the department arrived, young, far from military topics, having worked for many years in the department of ancient history, a taciturn skeptic, the leaders of the Adzhimushkai search expeditions from Rostov-on-Don and Odessa, who come every year to conduct expeditions in the quarries of Kerch , were sure that this one would not last long.
But Vladimir Vladimirovich Simonov did something that he probably didn’t expect from himself - he stayed and “plunged” so deeply into this complex topic that within two years he became a specialist in the defense of Adzhimushkai in 1942. And now he is still that person and that “thread” that, even in our wrong and moneyless times, finds ways to unite forces both in Ukraine and in Russia of those few for whom Adzhimushkai of 1942 is not history, but an example of Life, human will, duty and honor...
Irony of fate. Over the years of search expeditions, many teams of enthusiasts came to Adzhimushkay: from Lipetsk, Simferopol, Miass, Odessa, Saransk, Astrakhan, Rostov-on-Don... but only two teams come constantly. And why be surprised - there are very few finds, and in order to get to them, you need to throw over tons of stone and tens of cubic meters of soil, constant dampness, drafts and the “pressure” of the “stone bag”.
One way or another, in recent years, groups of “three Vladimirs” have been constantly working - employees of the Adzhimushkai Defense Museum (head of the department Vladimir Simonov), Vladimir Vasiliev has been coming with a detachment from the city of Odessa for twenty years, and Vladimir Shcherbanov has been searching with a detachment from the Rostov region for fifteen years.
Ten years ago it was much easier to work - there was support, there was some help from the state and the museum... Now the museum is not able to provide assistance to expeditions, sometimes the opposite happens. Interest in excavations among our fellow citizens has also decreased, but how could it be otherwise - if every day you have to think about your daily bread...
But, nevertheless, every year on the first of August, the combined expedition “Adzhimushkay”, under the leadership of the “three Vladimirs” and Viktor Mikhailovich Sokolov, leaves Odessa for an underground search! Don’t ask what makes them do this, don’t try to get an answer... And it’s almost impossible to answer. Adzhimushkai simply won’t let them go...
I am not inclined towards the occult and mysticism, but there are moments in life where science and logic are powerless... Over the years of work in the Adzhimushkaya quarries I had to meet many, see a lot and face a lot.
In quarry areas far from the exits, or on quiet nights above the quarries, I sometimes felt an unpleasant feeling... a foreign presence. In some places, this restless feeling takes on more specific forms - a feeling of a close, searching gaze, the gaze of calm, moist eyes...
Naturally, a person is not inclined to share such sensations, since all this is not too real and not too normal. I didn’t talk about this either, until at the beginning one of my colleagues, who worked for more than five years in Adzhimushkai, and then another, as if by chance, asked: “Kirillovich, do you think it’s unpleasant to feel the gaze from the outside?.. Just mystic...”
I’ve already heard about twenty people about these staring eyes in the quarries. Unpleasant feeling. But is it mysticism or mass paranoia, or...
During the Nazi occupation of Crimea, the Adzhimushkai quarries became a shelter for thousands of soldiers and commanders who fought the enemy until their last breath. It was the largest underground battle in human history.
Monument to the defenders of the Adzhimushkai quarries. Hero City Kerch / TASS
In Adzhimushkai, limestone was mined in ancient times. This village, five kilometers from the center of Kerch, was famous for its quarries. Taking refuge in them, the soldiers and commanders of the Red Army from May 14 to October 30, 1942 offered heroic resistance to the Germans. The personnel of the garrison, according to various sources, numbered from 5 thousand to 15 thousand people.
Light in pitch darkness
After completing the task of covering and ensuring the crossing of the Crimean Front troops from the Kerch Peninsula to the Taman Peninsula, the combined detachments located in the Adzhimushkai area, without receiving an order to withdraw, descended into the quarries. A garrison was formed in the Central Adzhimushkai quarries under the command of Colonel Pavel Yagunov consisting of three battalions. Having taken positions along the line of entrances, the Adzhimushkays stopped the enemy’s assault attempts and switched to active defense, regularly making forays to the surface.
In the very first days of defense, an underground garrison headquarters was organized, reconnaissance, anti-tank units and a medical service were created, and strict military discipline was established. Until September, political information, tactics and combat training classes were held almost daily in the quarries; Sovinformburo reports were distributed to units, which were received by radio and printed out at headquarters on a typewriter.
Colonel Pavel Yagunov became the commander of the underground garrison
From our time, this may even seem almost romantic: an unbroken garrison in the catacombs, in an occupied region, not far from the Sea of Azov. But for the soldiers, commanders and ordinary residents who found themselves underground at that time, it was resistance in inhumane conditions.
Now, when tourists descend into the Adzhimushkai quarries, they are not plunged into darkness - there is electric lighting there. And then there is a feeling of heavy underground darkness. And those who took up defensive positions here in 1942 had practically no lights. There is pitch darkness all around. Car tires were cut into thin strips to create torches. They smoked, leaving marks on the walls, the acrid smoke filling the lungs with fumes. But the torches provided at least some light. And light is life. Still, moving around in the quarries was not easy. The soldiers attached wires to the walls so that in the darkness they could move unerringly from one compartment to another. Moreover, everyone in the garrison knew exactly his maneuver. For almost six months Adzhimushkai did not die and did not give up.
At first, the Germans could not understand where the soldiers were suddenly appearing from, but they were coming out of the ground. The occupiers tried to take the quarries by storm, but each time they met desperate resistance. In fierce battles, the Adzhimushkas gained the upper hand, and the enemy retreated. But soon a tense siege of the quarries began.
| DESPITE SIGNIFICANT LOSSES DURING THE FIRST GAS ATTACKS, THE GARRISON WAS ACTIVE COMBAT FOR ABOUT TWO MONTHS |
Underground well in Adzhimushkai quarries
For a bucket of water...
From the very beginning of the defense, there was an acute shortage of water and food. The wounded (and there were hundreds of them in the garrison) were given only two tablespoons of drink per day, and those who could move independently had to get their own water. They collected moisture from the walls and made forays to wells. Uneven battles ensued there. “We pay for a bucket of water with a bucket of blood,” the soldiers said.
All water was subject to the strictest accounting and distribution. The special water supply service was headed by a senior political instructor Nikolay Goroshko. In the last days of May, the command decided to build underground wells. It was work beyond the bounds of human strength. The stone had to be chiseled with picks, crowbars, and shovels, although blasting work was also carried out. The fighters constantly replaced each other, trying to get to the water faster. It happened that all many days of work were undone by explosions and collapses. As a result, they managed to dig and save a single well: it was located in the depths of the quarries, the approaches to it were carefully guarded. The construction of this well was apparently completed by mid-July 1942.
The tractor that was used by the defenders as a generator / RIA Novosti
There was a connection with the local population. Through secret passages, residents passed food to the garrison. But the Nazis tightened their grip, and by mid-summer, famine began in the quarries. Since July, there was no bread in the garrison; later, the daily ration included 150 grams of sugar and 20 grams of “soup products,” and the surviving defenders cooked stew from the bones, skins and hooves of horses slaughtered back in May. Cut into pieces and boiled leather belts, boot tops. They started eating rats. Fortunately, sugar reserves were preserved in the quarries. Moonshine, needed for medical purposes, was also distilled from it.
"Better death than captivity"
Convinced of the courage of the garrison, the Nazis decided to commit a war crime. On May 24, 1942, they launched their first gas attack. Panic arose in the quarries, and the victims of suffocation were added to those crushed in the dark underground galleries.
Sergeant Vasily Kozmin, one of the participants in the defense, later recalled: “The gas fired by the Germans caught me guarding the entrance.<…>I was sitting on a stone facing the exit, I heard a noise (hum) behind me, and looking back I saw a dark wall moving towards me. There were no people visible. I didn’t immediately understand what was happening, but when the first clouds of smoke covered me, I realized... I fell behind a stone, covering my nose with my cap. At this time, the rumble grew into the stomping of feet and heavy breathing. By evening the gas had dissipated." Pavel Yagunov ordered a radiogram to be broadcast: “To all peoples of the Soviet Union! We, the defenders of the defense of the city of Kerch, are suffocating from gas, dying, but not surrendering.” The victims of gas attacks numbered in the thousands.
In the Museum of the History of Defense of the Adzhimushkay Quarries
And in July, the garrison was shocked by tragic news: the commander, Colonel Yagunov, was killed... The day before, the defenders managed to organize a major foray and returned underground with trophies. The colonel tried to understand the structure of the fascist grenade of a rare system, but its explosion ended his life. The commander was seen off on his final journey with honors: of the thousands who fell in the quarries, only he was buried in a coffin made from boards from the body of a truck... The lieutenant colonel took command Grigory Burmin.
“Death, but not captivity! Long live the Red Army! We will stand, comrades! Better death than captivity." These inscriptions, preserved on the walls of the quarries, embodied the spirit of the underground garrison. After the fall of Sevastopol in early July 1942, German propaganda became more active. The radio blared loudly, and leaflets flew underground: “Red Army soldiers and commanders! For a month and a half you have been waiting in vain for help. The landing of Red Army forces on Crimea will not be repeated a second time. You hoped for Sevastopol, but from today it is in German hands. Your comrades raised a white flag there and surrendered. Many of your soldiers tried to leave the quarries, but not one could get to the other side. Your situation is hopeless, your resistance is useless. If you leave the quarries unarmed, we guarantee your life and good treatment. No one needs to fear death - neither Red Army soldiers, nor commanders, nor communists. Give up your useless resistance and surrender!”
But the garrison did not surrender. In conditions of famine, gas attacks and psychological pressure, the headquarters, political department and other services worked clearly underground, daily combat notes, checklists, lists of the dead and dead were compiled. The commanders managed to rally the garrison with faith in victory, for which it was worth paying with their lives. In vain did the enemies crucify themselves in endlessly broadcast radio broadcasts, calling on the Adzhimushkais to stop resistance. Neither sugary promises, nor native songs in Russian and Ukrainian, nor threats of destruction of quarries, nor the explosions that followed them, broke the underground garrison.
Despite significant losses during the first gas attacks, the garrison continued active combat operations for about two months, and then switched to passive defense. Disease and hunger exhausted the defenders of Adzhimushkai. Nevertheless, resistance in the quarries continued. The Adzhimushkais died, but did not give up. Only on October 30, 1942, the invaders managed to capture the catacombs. After a 170-day siege, a handful of wounded soldiers remained in the quarries...
“Something squeezed my chest”
From the diary of Adzhimushkai’s defender, junior lieutenant Alexander TROFIMENKO
May 16. The Germans surrounded our catacombs on all sides. In the church there is a firing point, machine guns, machine guns. B O Most of the houses in Adzhimushkai were captured by the Germans, and machine gunners were stationed in almost every one. Movement in the yard becomes difficult. It's difficult to get water.
However, life goes on as usual. The morning was indeed the best, the east breeze barely stirred the air, but the cannonade did not subside. The air is filled with smoke...
May 17. Everything was already prepared for the attack. I walk through for the last time, checking my eagles. Morale is good. I'm checking my ammunition. Everything is there. One hundred people were ordered by the command to lead the attack. One hundred eagles pay attention to who will lead them into battle for their homeland. I'm thinking through a plan for the last time. I divide it into groups of twenty people. I single out the older groups. The task is clear to everyone, we are waiting for a general signal.
I met with Verkhutin, who will give the signal for a general attack. I climb to the surface and take a look. It turned out that about a hundred meters away, near the sweet well, there were two tanks.
I order the anti-tank crew to destroy it. Five or six shots, and the tank caught fire, and the other took flight. The way is clear.
I hear a signal.
- Attack!
I grip the machine gun tighter and stand up to my full height.
- Follow me, comrades, for the Motherland! Forward!
Shots rang out. The sky was covered with smoke. Forward! The enemy wavered and began to retreat in disarray.
I see that from behind the monument two machine gunners are standing and firing at our people. I fall to the ground. I give two turns. Good, by God, good! One fell to the side, the other remained in its place. The machine gun shoots nicely - a formidable Russian weapon.
And the guys from the right flank had long since made their way forward, shouting “Hurray!” smash the enemy...
May 20. As for water, things have gotten completely worse. The civilian population is not far from us. We are separated by a recently built wall, but I still check on them and often ask about their mood. It's a bad thing.
If you had at least a hundred grams of water, you could still live, but the children, the poor, cry and give no rest. And we can’t do it ourselves either: our mouth is dry, and we can’t eat without water. Those who could share what they could. The children were given drinks from flasks and given their own rations of crackers...
May 24. Something squeezed my chest so much that I couldn’t breathe at all. I hear a scream, a noise... I quickly grabbed hold of it, but it was too late.
Humanity of the entire globe, people of all nationalities! Have you seen such brutal reprisals as those carried out by the German fascists? No…
I declare responsibly: history nowhere tells us about these monsters. They've gone to extremes! They started gassing people!
The catacombs are full of poisonous smoke. The poor children screamed and called their mothers for help. But, alas, they lay dead on the ground with their shirts torn on their chests, blood pouring from their mouths.
Screams all around:
- Help!
- Save me!
- Show me where the exit is! We're dying!
But behind the smoke it was impossible to make out anything.
Evgeniy Trostin
