Irbaykhan Adylkhanovich Baybulatov

Irbaykhan Adylkhanovich Baybulatov was born in March 1912 in the village of Osmanyurt in Terek region, into a peasant family. The sources also give his patronymic and surname as Adelkhanovich and Beybulatov. His nationality is disputed in the sources and the dispute is unresolved. Official documents record him as a Kumyk. The household register of the village of Osman-yurt, compiled in 1886, records Irbaykhan's family as Chechen. The sources also offer a general explanation for discrepancies of this kind: an order issued in 1942 withheld decorations from Chechens and Ingush, and commanders consequently recorded distinguished Vainakhs under other nationalities. That explanation concerns the practice in general. Whether this is what happened in his own documents has not been separately established and is not asserted here. Both records are given as they stand. He graduated from the Grozny teacher-training college in 1938 and worked as head of the school in his home village. He was conscripted into the Red Army in 1941 and completed the Buynaksk infantry school in 1942. In the fighting near the Cossack settlement of Proletarskaya, Company Commander Baybulatov was severely wounded. He was recorded as killed, awarded the Order of the Red Star and a death notice was sent to his family. He survived and returned to his unit at the front. His Hero of the Soviet Union was conferred for the fighting for Melitopol in the autumn of 1943. From 19 to 23 October the 1st Rifle Battalion under his command was among the first into the city and fought in its streets, driving the enemy out of the centre of Melitopol. According to the sources the battalion silenced more than a hundred firing positions and destroyed seven tanks and about a thousand enemy soldiers and officers, while the battalion commander himself knocked out two tanks and killed more than twenty men. Irbaykhan Baybulatov was killed in action on 26 October 1943, six days before the decree conferring the title. By decree of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet of 1 November 1943, Senior Lieutenant Irbaykhan Adylkhanovich Baybulatov was posthumously made a Hero of the Soviet Union, for breaking through a heavily fortified defensive belt and for the liberation of Melitopol. He is buried in Melitopol, in the common grave on Kirov square. The secondary school in Osmanyurt bears his name, as do streets in Grozny, Makhachkala, Melitopol and the village of Adilotar in Khasavyurt district of Dagestan. A memorial plaque was placed in 1982 on the building of the Grozny teacher-training college where he studied. In 2007 a museum devoted to him opened in Melitopol grammar school no. 5, which stands on Baybulatov street near his grave, and in 2010 a relief and memorial plaque were unveiled in the Avenue of Glory memorial complex in Grozny.