Anton Yefimovich Buyukly

Anton Yefimovich Buyukly was born in 1915 in the village of Aleksandrovka, now in Yakymivka district of Zaporizhzhia region of Ukraine, into a peasant family. He was a Gagauz — by other accounts a Bulgarian. He had a primary education and worked on the collective farm in his village. The sources differ on what followed: by one account he went to Central Asia and drove a tractor near Khujand; by another he worked on building sites in Pavlodar and at a plant in Dniprodzerzhynsk, did his service in 1936–39 in the NKVD's 52nd Sakhalin maritime border detachment and stayed on Sakhalin afterwards. He was called up in July 1941 and spent the war years in the Far East, joining the Party in 1944. In August 1945, in the Soviet–Japanese war, Senior Sergeant Buyukly commanded a machine-gun crew in the 165th Rifle Regiment of the 79th Rifle Division, which attacked in the first echelon against the Koton (Haramitogi) fortified area on southern Sakhalin. Near Koton railway station, now the settlement of Pobedino in Smirnykhovsky district, the advance was halted by heavy machine-gun fire from a bunker. Buyukly volunteered to silence it and crawled towards it with a grenade. A few paces short he was badly wounded, but he rose and threw himself onto the embrasure, and the attack went on. The reference works date this to 14 August 1945; the warheroes biography, revised from the irrecoverable-loss report, gives the evening of 13 August. He was buried where he fell and at the end of 1945 reburied in a mass grave in Leonidovo in Poronaysk district. Veterans recalled that he had been put forward for the title in August 1945, but no award followed. Twenty years later, by decree of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet of 6 May 1965, Senior Sergeant Buyukly was posthumously made a Hero of the Soviet Union and awarded the Order of Lenin. He was entered permanently in the rolls of his unit. A village and a railway station on Sakhalin bear his name, as do streets in Yuzhno-Sakhalinsk, Poronaysk and other towns. Monuments stand at the place of his death, in his native district and in Comrat, and a cargo ship named Anton Buyukly sailed from 1969.