Legendary man from OMSBON
On February 10, the famous Soviet intelligence officer and saboteur Alexei Nikolaevich Botyan turned 101 years old. The colonel of the Russian Foreign Intelligence Service was congratulated by his colleagues and the leadership of the SVR: “Today, February 10, we congratulate you not just on your next birthday, but on the first anniversary of the second century! – noted the director of the Foreign Intelligence Service. – We are proud of you, we follow your example! I am very glad that you are cheerful, energetic, surrounded by the care and love of your family and colleagues! And in chess you still have the first youth rank!
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The cheerfulness and energy of Alexei Nikolaevich, who lived to an old age, is not at all a form of speech. Not long ago, journalists invited the old intelligence officer to talk and shoot with Walther-PPK, Stechkin and special forces "Vul" pistols along with young military intelligence officers, and everyone was surprised by Botyan’s sharp eye and steady hand.
Alexey Nikolaevich Botyan was born on February 10, 1917 (new style) in Poland, in the Belarusian village of Chertovichi, Vilna region. Now it is the Volozhin district of the Minsk region of Belarus. Botyan, by the way, means “stork” in the local Belarusian dialect. After graduating from school in 1939, Botyan was drafted into the Polish army and ended up serving in the anti-aircraft artillery in Vilna, where he rose to the rank of non-commissioned officer.
From the beginning of September 1939, after Hitler's attack on Poland, Botyan took part in the war against the Nazis. While defending the skies of Warsaw, his crew shot down three Junkers bombers.
After the Nazis captured Poland and the flight of the Polish government to Romania, Botyan, together with his military unit, entered the territory of Western Belarus liberated by the Red Army, where he surrendered.
If anyone is expecting stories about painful interrogations and repressions that befell a Belarusian from the Polish army, then there were none. Alexey Botyan received Soviet citizenship, completed teacher courses and returned to teach in his native village.
In May 1940, a sharp and unexpected turn took place in the life of the young teacher Alexei Botyan: he was sent to serve in the NKVD to study at an intelligence school. At the height of the July battles of 1941, Botyan was enlisted in the legendary NKVD special forces - the Separate Motorized Rifle Brigade for Special Purposes (OMSBON). Since November 1941, Alexey Nikolaevich has been participating in the battle for Moscow and is repeatedly transferred behind the front line to the enemy’s operational rear as the commander of a sabotage and reconnaissance group.
At the beginning of 1943, Botyan’s reconnaissance group was transferred deep behind enemy lines - to conduct partisan special operations in the occupied territories of Central Ukraine, for sabotage work both as part of partisan formations and autonomous actions.
In the Zhitomir region, Botyan’s group carried out a daring operation - the German Gebietskommissariat in the city of Ovruch was blown up. Botyan’s scouts managed to find and win over to their side the worker Kapluk, who was responsible for the Germans’ inspection of heating communications. Botyan personally trained Kapluk to use explosives and detonators. The explosives were delivered piece by piece to the Gebitskommissariat building by Kaplyuka’s wife Maria, who, along with her children, carried lunches for her husband to work. In total, at least 100 kg of explosives were placed under the occupation administration.
The sabotage was scheduled for September 13, since on that day Mr. Gebietskommissar was supposed to visit Ovruch personally, and besides him, the occupiers were really waiting for some kind of very secret Jagd-team to fight the partisans from Berlin itself. Worker Kapluk, on command, connected a clock mechanism to the explosives, after which he and his family were sent to a partisan detachment. The arriving Jagd team settled in the barracks, where before them lived captured Red Army soldiers, used for hard and dirty work inside the territory of the Gebietskommissariat. Late in the evening the building blew up. The explosion destroyed Mr. Gebietskommissar, the head of the local security police and 80 other occupiers, including the highly secret Jagd-team.
This special operation saved the lives of tens of thousands of Soviet people and had a huge propaganda effect. And it was even included as an example in special forces textbooks on “discipline D”. At the same time, Alexei Nikolaevich Botyan was first nominated for the title of Hero of the Soviet Union. They didn't give me a hero. The reason for the refusal is still unknown.
In 1944, Botyan’s group of 30 people, by order of the Center, made the transition to Poland, to the Krakow region. Thanks to their excellent knowledge of the Polish language and customs of the Poles, and organizational skills, Botyan’s group managed to organize interaction with the working detachments of the Ludowa Guard and even such, to put it mildly, controversial forces as the peasant Battalions of Chlopske and the London Poles from the Home Army.
In Poland, Botyan and his group had to engage not only in sabotage, but also in saving people. In the city of Ilzha, together with soldiers from the Ludova Guard, a Soviet intelligence officer managed to raid the prison from which Polish patriots were freed, and at the same time seize rich trophies.
As you know, a group of scouts under the command of Alexey Botyan made a huge contribution to the salvation of Krakow. Botyan himself claims that there was no special operation to prevent the explosion of Krakow - it happened incidentally. In the vicinity of the city, many Soviet reconnaissance and sabotage groups of the GRU and NKVD operated, performing a wide variety of tasks. Their joint work together with Polish patriots led to the fact that the fascists failed to carry out their planned barbaric act of destroying one of the ancient centers of Slavic culture.
The contribution of Botyan's group to the salvation of Krakow was that his scouts managed to capture the Polish cartographer Ogarek, who was mobilized to serve in the German rear units. It was Ogarek who provided valuable information about the explosives warehouse in the Jagiellonian Castle, which the Germans planned to use to create impassable rubble and destroy urban infrastructure in the path of the advancing Red Army.
One of the Polish patriots, who worked closely with Botyan’s group, was introduced into the warehouse under the guise of a loader and set up a “delayed-action surprise” for the Germans. On the morning of January 18, 1945, a monstrous explosion destroyed the explosives warehouse and the Germans simply had nothing to lay down for the objects chosen for destruction.
In modern Poland, the role of Botyan and his reconnaissance group in saving Krakow is questioned. They say that the Poles themselves have mustaches without any Russian-Soviet ones.
Alexey Nikolaevich Botyan is often called the prototype of the legendary “Major Whirlwind”. In fact, this is not so, despite the fact that he was more than worthy of becoming the prototype of a movie hero. The prototypes for Yulian Semyonov’s story were two other Soviet GRU intelligence officers - Evgeniy Stepanovich Bereznyak with the agent nickname “Voice” and Ovidiy Aleksandrovich Gorchakov, who also took an active part in the rescue of Krakow.
Many scenes in the book and in the movie, such as the capture of the “Whirlwind” SD and his escape at the Krakow market, were copied from the biography of Yevgeny Bereznyak. Yulian Semyonov simply could not have known Alexey Botyan at the time when the book was written and the film was shot: until 1983, he was an active employee of the illegal intelligence department “S” of the KGB of the USSR and until 1989 he was a civilian consultant to the Vympel group. Moreover. Only his immediate superiors and comrades in the reconnaissance group knew about Botyan’s military exploits, and his colleagues in peacetime did not have the slightest idea about his merits.
In the last months of the war, Botyan's group gave heat to the Germans in Czechoslovakia. Alexey Botyan finished the war with the rank of lieutenant. In Czechoslovakia, the Center naturally lost its famous intelligence officer and Botyan, taking advantage of the respite, studied at a Prague technical school to become a design engineer. It was only when he was in his second year that “the right people” found him and established contact with him. Alexey Botyan married a Volyn Czech woman, a Komsomol member, and together with her, under the guise of Czech immigrants, he went to illegal service in Czech Silesia, on the border with West Germany.
Little is known about this episode in the life of illegal intelligence officer Botyan. But it is well known what happened to him after returning to Moscow after Stalin’s death. At this time, the front-line commanders Botyan, Sudoplatov and Eitingon were arrested, and Khrushchev’s proteges who had overrun the MGB/KGB, dispersed the special forces, asked the intelligence officer to leave, leaving him without an apartment and a means of livelihood. Botyan was helped out by his former front-line comrade by getting a job as an administrator with knowledge of foreign languages in the capital's Prague restaurant. The intelligence officer and saboteur Botyan worked conscientiously in the service sector, was characterized positively by his superiors, and his photograph was on the Mosrestorantorg Honor Board.
In 1957, they remembered him and invited him to the Lubyanka with an offer to continue his service as an illegal intelligence officer. Having agreed, Alexey Botyan was reinstated in the state security agencies with the rank of major. It is known that later Botyan worked together with the MGB of the GDR, training their illegal intelligence officers for operational work who opposed the West German BND, in which the fascist General Reinhart Gehlen gathered the undead agents of the Abwehr, SD and Gestapo.
In 1965, Alexey Botyan’s comrades in arms, who had reached certain heights in the KGB of the USSR, petitioned their superiors to award the intelligence officer the title of Hero of the Soviet Union, but something at the top again stalled and misfired.
In 1983, Colonel Alexey Nikolaevich Botyan was transferred to the reserve due to age, but for another six years he advised the special forces of the KGB of the USSR.
And only in May 2007, by Decree of the President of the Russian Federation, the legendary special-purpose intelligence officer was awarded the long-deserved title of Hero of Russia.
Alexey Nikolaevich Botyan considers saving Krakow his most important act in life. He treats his legendary status with a fair amount of irony. Of the entire reconnaissance group, he was the only one left alive...
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