Mikhail Ivanovich Bushilov

Mikhail Ivanovich Bushilov was born on 17 November 1924 in the village of Isakovka, now in Ostrovsky district of Kostroma region, into a peasant family. After seven classes at the school in Ostrovskoye he trained as a tractor driver and worked at the Semyonovskaya machine and tractor station in Ivanovo region; in the first months of the war, before he reached call-up age, he worked in the collective-farm fields. He was called up in August 1942, trained at a tank school and became driver-mechanic of a T-34 in the 67th Guards Tank Regiment. He was in action from March 1943 and received the medal For Courage for the fighting at Kursk in July 1943. In the advance into right-bank Ukraine the crew of Guards Lieutenant Pyotr Gribolev, in which Bushilov was the driver, often worked with the forward detachment of the 19th Guards Mechanised Brigade. Beating off a counter-attack by some 30 enemy tanks, he changed firing position five times in a few minutes while the crew knocked out two tanks and held the attackers until the main force arrived. At the end of December 1943, when the regiment was sent into a breakthrough on the Berdichev axis, the tank broke into a village and destroyed a mortar battery with its crews; it was set on fire, but the crew did not leave the field until the task was done. In the battle for Kazatin in Vinnytsia region, the sources say, Gribolev's tank was the first in the regiment into the town, and the crew destroyed 4 tanks, 5 self-propelled guns, 3 heavy guns, some 250 vehicles and about 150 enemy soldiers. The nomination for Gribolev and Bushilov was signed on 31 December 1943. By decree of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet of 10 January 1944 Guards Starshina Bushilov was made a Hero of the Soviet Union, with the Order of Lenin and the Gold Star medal; the army commander Mikhail Katukov presented the awards on 23 February 1944. After the war he became an officer, graduating from the Ulyanovsk Tank School in 1946 and the Vystrel courses in 1964. He left the army as a lieutenant colonel in 1967, lived in Odesa and worked at the regional military commissariat. He died on 16 May 1974 and is buried at the Tairove Cemetery in Odesa. He also held the Order of the Patriotic War 2nd class and the Order of Glory 3rd class.