Aleksandr Ivanovich Babayev

Aleksandr Ivanovich Babayev was born on 6 September 1923 in Kaluga into a worker's family and lived in Voronezh from 1930. He finished eight years of school in 1940 and worked as a loader at a procurement depot while training at the Voronezh flying club. He joined the Red Army in December 1940 and graduated from the Serov military aviation school for pilots at Bataysk in 1941. In 1941-42 he was a pilot with the 16th and 27th reserve aviation regiments in the Volga and Arkhangelsk military districts. He reached the front in April 1942 and spent his whole war in one regiment, the 196th Fighter Aviation: pilot, senior pilot, flight commander, and from November 1944 deputy squadron commander. The regiment served with the 13th Air Army on the Leningrad Front and, from September 1944, with the 7th Air Army on the Karelian Front. He flew the Kittyhawk, the Airacobra and the Yak-1. By the end of the war Captain Babayev had flown 260 combat sorties and 48 air battles, shooting down nine enemy aircraft alone and one shared. He received the Medal for Courage in February 1943 and two Orders of the Red Banner for the fighting of 1944. His Hero of the Soviet Union was conferred not during the war but thirty-three years after it. The decree of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet of 21 February 1978 names three grounds at once: personal courage shown during the Great Patriotic War; high results in the combat training of troops and in mastering complex equipment; and the sixtieth anniversary of the Soviet Army and Navy. Gold Star no. 11288. By that date Babayev was a Colonel General of Aviation commanding the 16th Air Army in the Group of Soviet Forces in Germany. The decree names no single wartime action: it refers to the war as a whole, and no specific deed for which the title was given appears in the document. His wartime record is marked instead by the awards of the war years listed above. Babayev went on serving for forty years after the war. In 1947 he completed the air force's senior officers' flying and tactics course at Lipetsk and converted to jets. From 1948 he commanded a squadron in his own 196th Regiment, from 1950 in the 274th Fighter Aviation Regiment of the Moscow Military District, and soon became its deputy commander. From May 1951 he commanded the 234th Guards Fighter Aviation Regiment, and from 1954 was deputy commander of the 9th Fighter Aviation Division. He graduated from the General Staff Academy in 1958. From December 1958 he commanded the 126th Fighter Aviation Division in the Group of Soviet Forces in Germany, then served as deputy and first deputy commander of the 24th and 26th Air Armies. He commanded the 76th Air Army in the Leningrad Military District in 1968-73 and again in 1978-80, and the 16th Air Army in 1973-78. After the 76th was disbanded he commanded the air forces of the Leningrad Military District until January 1985. He was made a Distinguished Military Pilot of the USSR in 1965 and was a deputy of the ninth Supreme Soviet of the RSFSR (1975-80). From January 1985 he was a consultant to the faculty training doctors for the air force at the Kirov Military Medical Academy. He lived in Leningrad and died on 22 May 1985, buried at Bogoslovskoye cemetery in St Petersburg.