Nikolai Ivanovich Kuznetsov

Николай Иванович Кузнецов

1911 – 1944

Archival copy held by MoyPolk UK. Photograph dated March 1940; the source records no author. The file cites an online archive exhibition at komi-permarchiv.ru (http://www.komi-permarchiv.ru/exhib/pobeda/index_1_IE.html) — a web page, not an original publication. Immediate source: Wikimedia Commons, File: Николай Кузнецов, 1940.jpg (retrieved 2026-10-18). The ORIGINAL source is not established, so none is attributed here and none is supplied by inference. Shown with source attribution, as the permission held by the project for publicly available material about its veterans requires.

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Biography

Intelligence officer of the 4th Directorate of the NKGB, attached to the "Pobediteli" partisan detachment, Hero of the Soviet Union (posthumously, 5 November 1944). Born on 27 July 1911 in the village of Zyryanka, Perm province. He spoke fluent German from youth and studied its dialects, which shaped the work he was later given. From 1942 he operated in occupied Ukraine with the special-purpose detachment "Pobediteli" near Rovno, the seat of the Reichskommissariat Ukraine. He worked under the identity of a German officer, Oberleutnant Paul Siebert, gathering intelligence inside the occupation administration. He obtained information on German preparations for the Kursk offensive and on the location of Hitler's "Werwolf" headquarters near Vinnitsa, and carried out a series of actions against officials of the occupation administration in Rovno and Lvov. He was killed on 9 March 1944 near the village of Boratyn, Lvov region. Accounts of the circumstances differ between sources and some details rest on post-war reconstruction; this page does not present any one version as settled. He is buried at the Hill of Glory in Lvov.