Sergei Nikolayevich Butyakov

Sergei Nikolayevich Butyakov was born on 28 September 1916 in the village of Nizhneye Anchikovo in Cheboksary uyezd of Kazan governorate, now Kozlovsky municipal district of the Chuvash Republic, into a poor peasant family. He was Chuvash by nationality. He spent his childhood in Zvenigovo in the Mari region, a settlement that became a town in 1974. After the sixth class of the Zvenigovo school he went to a factory apprenticeship school, trained as a blacksmith and worked at the Krasny Volgar ship-repair works. He was a member of the Komsomol. In 1937 he was called up to the Red Army and sent to a tank school, and on completing it was appointed a tank commander in the 398th Tank Battalion of the 50th Rifle Division. He took part in the Soviet entry into Western Belorussia in 1939. In the Soviet–Finnish War of 1939–1940 his battalion fought on the Karelian Isthmus in the breakthrough of the Mannerheim Line. His award sheet records that between 8 and 11 February 1940 he and his crew took part in six attacks. On 11 February 1940 his tank was among the first to break onto Height 48.5, which dominated the surrounding ground. When the driver was wounded, Butyakov took his place and continued the attack. When the tank was hit and immobilised, the crew, though wounded, went on firing from its machine guns and gun. A further hit set the tank on fire, and the whole crew was killed. By decree of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet of 7 April 1940, for exemplary performance of combat tasks on the front against the Finnish White Guard and the valour and courage shown, Junior Lieutenant Sergei Nikolayevich Butyakov was made a Hero of the Soviet Union posthumously, with the Order of Lenin. He was the first Chuvash to receive the title. He was first buried on the battlefield, by the shore of Lake Krasnoye near the village of Sarkola, and was later reburied in mass grave no. 14, 1.5 kilometres north-east of Krasnoozyornoye in Priozersky district of Leningrad region. Streets in Zvenigovo and Cheboksary and the Zvenigovo shipyard where he worked bear his name; busts of him stand in Zvenigovo, and memorial plaques have been placed on the house where he lived and on the house where he was born.