Georgy Arturovich Bayevsky

Georgy Arturovich Bayevsky was born on 11 July 1921 in Rostov-on-Don, the son of a Soviet intelligence officer, Abram Moiseyevich (Artur Matveyevich) Bayevsky. His father's work meant a childhood abroad: the family moved to Berlin in 1930, where he learned German, and in 1933 his father was posted to Sweden, where he learned Swedish. The family returned to Moscow at the end of 1937. While in his ninth year at school he joined a flying club, and went on to the Serpukhov school for pilots. He was commissioned junior lieutenant in November 1940 and kept at the school as a flying instructor. In 1941 the school was moved to Vyazniki and merged with the Central Flying Club. On an attachment to the front he shot down an aircraft within a month; the source records that a regiment commander helped him leave the school for the front, and calls that move an "escape" in quotation marks - an instructor leaving a training school outside the usual posting procedure. He was at the front from April 1943 with the 5th Guards Fighter Aviation Regiment, and fought at Kursk, in the battle of the Dnieper and in the Vistula-Oder and Berlin operations. By the end of 1943 he had flown 144 combat sorties and shot down 16 enemy aircraft in 45 air battles. He was made a Hero of the Soviet Union on 4 February 1944, as squadron navigator of the 5th Guards Fighter Aviation Regiment (11th Guards Fighter Aviation Division, 1st Guards Composite Aviation Corps, 17th Air Army), with the Order of Lenin and Gold Star no. 2805. The decree uses the general formula about exemplary performance of combat tasks and the courage shown in them; it names no single episode, and the basis is the accumulated record set out above. Over the war Bayevsky flew 252 combat sorties and shot down 19 aircraft in 52 air battles. After the war he studied at the Zhukovsky air force engineering academy, and on graduating in 1951 was posted as a test pilot to the air force research institute, where he flew 77 types of aircraft. He graduated from the General Staff Academy in 1962. As deputy commander of the air forces of the Moscow Military District, with the rank of major general of aviation, he organised and personally conducted the service trials of the MiG-25 in Egypt in the 1970s. From the late 1970s he turned to research and teaching, and until 1985 was deputy head of a department at the Zhukovsky academy. He was made a Distinguished Military Pilot of the USSR in 1971, was a first-class military test pilot and held a doctorate in military science. He chaired the veterans' council of his own 5th Guards Fighter Aviation Regiment. He died on 6 May 2005 and is buried at Troyekurovskoye cemetery in Moscow.