Stepan Ivanovich Zdorovtsev

Fighter pilot of the 158th Fighter Aviation Regiment and one of the first three Heroes of the Soviet Union of the Great Patriotic War (8 July 1941), Junior Lieutenant. Born in 1916 in the village of Golodayevka in the Don Cossack Host territory, now Kuybyshevo in Rostov region. He worked as a fisherman on the Volga and later in Astrakhan, trained at a flying club, and graduated from the Stalingrad military aviation school. He met the war with the 158th Fighter Aviation Regiment of the air defence forces, covering the approaches to Leningrad. On 28 June 1941, near Pskov, he attacked a German Ju 88 bomber. Having used up his ammunition he closed on it and cut away its tail surfaces with his propeller. The bomber went down; Zdorovtsev nursed his damaged fighter back to the airfield and landed. By a decree of 8 July 1941 three pilots of the regiment — Stepan Zdorovtsev, Mikhail Zhukov and Pyotr Kharitonov — were made Heroes of the Soviet Union. These were the first such awards of the Great Patriotic War, and they were deliberately publicised: the first weeks of the war called for examples of successful combat. On 9 July 1941, the day after the decree appeared, he failed to return from a reconnaissance sortie towards Pskov. The circumstances of his death were never established. He was twenty-four or twenty-five.