Lydia Litvyak was posthumously promoted to the rank of Hero of the Soviet Union by the regiment command. But soon one of the previously shot down pilots returned from enemy territory. He reported that, according to local residents, fighter had landed on the road near the village of Marinovka. The pilot turned out to be a girl – blonde, short. A car with German officers approached the plane, and the girl left with them … Most of Lydia's colleagues did not believe this rumor and continued to try to find out the fate of Lydia. But the shadow of suspicion had already gone beyond the regiment and reached the higher headquarters. The division command, showing "caution", did not approve Litvyak submission to the title of Hero of the Soviet Union, confining itself to the Order of the Patriotic War of the 1st degree.
There were good reasons for such concern. Lida's father was arrested and shot as an "enemy of the people" in 1937.
But they searched for Lydia, they searched hard. Back in the summer of 1946, the commander of the 73rd Guards Fighter Aviation Regiment, Zapryagaev, sent several people to the Marinovka area by car to look for her trail. Unfortunately, Litvyak's fellow soldiers were literally several days late. The wreckage of Lidia's "Yak" had already been destroyed … In 1968 the newspaper "Komsomolskaya Pravda" made an attempt to restore the pilot's honest name. In 1971, young search engines from school No. 1 in the city of Krasny Luch joined the search.
In the summer of 1979, their search was crowned with success. While in the area of the Kozhevnya farm, the guys learned that in the summer of 1943, a shot down Soviet fighter had fallen on its outskirts. The pilot, wounded in the head, was a woman. It was established that the famous pilot Lydia Litvyak was buried in a mass grave in the village of Dmitrievka, Shakhtyorsky district, Donetsk region.
In July 1988, in the personal file of Litvyak, the entry "missing" was finally replaced by "died while performing a combat mission." And the veterans of the regiment in which she fought renewed their petition to confer the title of Hero of the Soviet Union on the pilot.
By the decree of the President of the USSR of May 5, 1990, for the exemplary performance of the command assignments and the courage and heroism shown in the battles with the Nazi invaders, the Guard Junior Lieutenant Litvyak Lydia Vladimirovna was posthumously awarded the title of Hero of the Soviet Union. The Order of Lenin No. 460056 and the Gold Star medal No. 11616 were transferred for safekeeping to the relatives of the deceased Heroine.
I think that the regiment headquarters feared that after Litvyak was awarded the Star of the Hero, she could appear in the Nazi press with anti-Soviet appeals. Given that she, for obvious reasons, was widely known, such a possible development of events was considered undesirable. On the side of the Nazis in the Vlasov army, two former pilots have already appeared – the hero of the Soviet Union.
ponders nirvana.
