Georgy Danilovich Butayev

Georgy Danilovich Butayev was born on 25 December 1910 in the village now named after Kosta Khetagurov, in Karachayevsky district of the Karachay-Cherkess Republic, into a miner's family; he was Ossetian. His father died in the year of his birth, and from the age of fifteen he worked as a shepherd while attending school. In 1929 he entered the Karachay teacher-training college and in 1932 a workers' faculty in Moscow, which he did not complete. Called up in August 1933, he was sent to the Luhansk flying school, but after an illness a medical board found him unfit for flying. In 1935 he returned to his village as a schoolteacher and in 1937 completed the Ossetian teacher-training college in Tbilisi by correspondence; when the war began he was deputy head of the school. He joined the party in 1941 and that autumn was called up by the Karachayevsky district military commissariat. He served in the 132nd Rifle Division, first in action in March 1942. After a course for political officers at the Saratov military-political school he became political officer of a mortar company and fought with the Voronezh and Central Fronts at Ostrogozhsk, Rossosh and Kastornoye and in the liberation of Kursk. In June 1943 Lieutenant Butayev became Party organiser of a battalion of the 712th Rifle Regiment; he fought at Kursk, on the Seym and at Konotop. At dawn on 24 September 1943 his battalion crossed the Dnieper about 100 km north of Kyiv, near Staroglybov in Kozelets district of Chernihiv region. A political report recorded that on the right bank, at a critical moment, he took command of the battalion and led it in a counter-attack against superior forces supported by a company of tanks. On 5 October 1943, in the fighting at Gornostay-Pole in Chernobyl district of Kyiv region, he led the battalion into the attack four times, was wounded and concussed, and was then killed by machine-gun fire while repelling a counter-attack. By decree of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet of 17 October 1943 Lieutenant Georgy Danilovich Butayev was posthumously made a Hero of the Soviet Union for courage and heroism in crossing the Dnieper and in the fighting to widen the bridgehead. He also held the Order of Lenin and the medal For Courage; some publications name the Order of the Red Banner instead of the medal. He was buried in a mass grave at Paryshev, a village in Ivankiv district of Kyiv region that no longer exists. Busts stand in Kosta Khetagurov and in Alagir, and streets in Chernobyl and Cherkessk bear his name.