Ivan Ulyanovich Butyrin

Ivan Ulyanovich Butyrin was born on 19 January 1919 in the village of Zarubyata in Perm governorate, now Ilyinsky district of Perm Krai, into a peasant family. He finished four classes at the village school in Filatovo. When the family moved to the village of Visim in Dobryansky district he went on to school in the town of Chermoz, but because of the family's hard circumstances left in the sixth class to work as an apprentice tree-feller at the Visim timber enterprise. He was then a stoker on the steamer Pamyat V. Baranova, assistant skipper of the barge Volga, and a loader and later foreman at the Chermoz metallurgical works. In 1940 he was called up by the Chermoz district military commissariat. He served in the armoured troops and became a junior commander. He was at the front from the autumn of 1941 and fought on the Western, Bryansk, Southern, Stalingrad, Don and Voronezh Fronts, and became an officer and a tank commander at the front. He joined the Communist Party in 1942. By the summer of 1943 he had been awarded three combat orders. By July 1943 Guards Lieutenant Butyrin commanded a tank in the 1st Tank Battalion of the 27th Guards Separate Tank Brigade, 7th Guards Army, Voronezh Front. On 5 July 1943, in the battle of Kursk, his unit fought near the villages of Rzhavets and Maslova Pristan, now in Shebekino district of Belgorod region. When the infantry, pinned down by heavy fire, went to ground, Butyrin got out of his tank and led the men forward into the attack. He was killed by an enemy bullet. He was first buried where he fell near the village of Voznesenovka and later reburied in the mass grave in Voznesenovka. By decree of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet of 26 October 1943 Guards Lieutenant Ivan Ulyanovich Butyrin was made a Hero of the Soviet Union posthumously. He had also been awarded the Orders of Lenin, the Red Banner, the Patriotic War, 2nd class, and the Red Star. A tug of the Kama River Shipping Company was named after him. His name is on the memorial to the Heroes of Perm region, on a plaque at the shipping company's building in Perm and on the Kursk Bulge memorial at Yakovlevo; in 2019 a bas-relief was unveiled on the school in Filatovo where he studied.