Leonty Anisiforovich Butkov

Leonty Anisiforovich Butkov was born in 1907 in the village of Zaselye, in what is now Mykolaiv region of Ukraine, into a peasant family. The exact day of his birth is not given in the sources. He had primary schooling. Until 1928 he worked as a farm labourer, then served in the NKVD, and from 1935 worked as a fitter and later head of the tool shop at the André Marty works in Mykolaiv, now the Black Sea Shipyard. In August 1941 he was called up by the Baku city military commissariat and sent to the front as a submachine gunner in the separate reconnaissance company of the 296th Rifle Division. With the 9th and 18th Armies of the Southern Front he fought on the Molochnaya river and in the defence of the Donbas, and for his reconnaissance work in the autumn and winter of 1941 he received the Medal for Courage. In February 1942, near the Vyemka siding in Donetsk region, he took over a platoon whose commander had fallen, and was awarded the Order of the Red Star. He joined the Communist Party in 1942. As a platoon and then company commander he fought in the North Caucasus and Transcaucasus, and received the Order of the Red Banner for the liberation of Novorossiysk. By his biographer's count he was wounded seven times, four of them severely, and concussed three times. On the night of 3 November 1943, during the Kerch–Eltigen landing operation, Guards Senior Lieutenant Butkov led a landing party of about thirty men across the Kerch Strait near the village of Opasnaya, now within the city of Kerch. He was the first of his party ashore and put the crew of an enemy heavy machine gun out of action, opening the way for the others. The party took a height and held a bridgehead, covering the landing of the division's main forces. By decree of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet of 16 May 1944 he was made a Hero of the Soviet Union with the Order of Lenin and the Gold Star medal, no. 3632. He went on to fight in Belorussia and Poland and was wounded twice more. In 1945 he served as military commandant at Poznań station and received the Order of the Patriotic War, 2nd class. He was transferred to the reserve as a captain in 1945, lived and worked in Mykolaiv and later in Moscow, and died on 16 November 1975. He is buried in the Kuzminskoye Cemetery in Moscow.