Daniil Ivanovich Bushtruk

Daniil Ivanovich Bushtruk was born on 6 April 1909 in the Ussuri district of Primorye, into a peasant family; the sources name either the village of Vozdvizhenka or the village of Pokrovka. He finished nine classes in 1925, worked on the railway and from 1929 as a master saddler at a tannery at Aksayskaya station. In September 1930 he went into the Red Army on a Komsomol call-up, joined the Party in 1931 and graduated from the Vladivostok Infantry School in 1933. For the next nine years he served in the Far East — in Krasnoyarsk, in the Lower Amur fortified district and at Blagoveshchensk — rising from platoon commander to battalion chief of staff and head of a regimental school. In March 1942 he became chief of staff of the 1384th Rifle Regiment, 96th Rifle Division. The division reached the front in August 1942. In November Captain Bushtruk took command of the regiment, which fought at Serafimovich, in the counter-offensive at Stalingrad and in the destruction of the encircled German 6th Army; in February 1943 it became the 200th Guards Rifle Regiment of the 68th Guards Rifle Division. In August 1943 it fought in the Belgorod–Kharkov and Sumy–Pryluky operations. On the night of 24–25 September 1943 the regiment crossed the Dnieper under fire on gathered fishing boats and makeshift rafts near Balyko-Shchuchynka in Kaharlyk district of Kyiv region, seized a bridgehead and in a night action took a commanding height. For five days it held the bridgehead against repeated counter-attacks, killing up to 700 enemy soldiers and officers; on 28 September it took a second height from which the enemy had been directing artillery fire on the crossings. By decree of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet of 23 October 1943, for the crossing south of Kyiv and the holding of the bridgehead, Guards Lieutenant Colonel Bushtruk was made a Hero of the Soviet Union, with the Order of Lenin and the Gold Star medal. He was seriously wounded on the Dnieper in October 1943. From January 1944 he commanded the 8th Army Reserve Rifle Regiment and from December 1944 the 121st Rifle Division, 38th Army, in the Western Carpathian and Moravian-Ostrava operations, until he was wounded again on 3 April 1945. After the war he served in the Transcaucasian Military District and retired as a colonel in January 1956. He lived in Blagoveshchensk and then Kuibyshev, where he died on 19 September 1958; he is buried at the Samara city cemetery.