Alexander Pavlovich Chekalin

Alexander (Shura) Pavlovich Chekalin ( _ru. Александр Павлович Чекалин; March 25 1925 – November 6 1941), was a Russian teenager, Soviet partisan, and Hero of the Soviet Union.

Chekalin was captured, tortured, and hanged for partisan activities in Tula Oblast near Moscow during the Great Patriotic War.

Biography

Sixteen-year-old Shura Chekalin engaged in underground resistance activities in the region of Tula near Moscow. In the first days of November 1941, he took part in an ambush of German vehicles, destroying one vehicle with a hand-grenade. After becoming ill, Chekalin was bedridden, and his location was betrayed to the Germans by an unknown informant. When Germans approached to arrest him, he threw a hand grenade at them, but it failed to explode. He was brutally tortured , and hanged on November 6, 1941. His body was left hanging for twenty days, taken down only after the area had been retaken by the Red Army.

He was posthumously made a Hero of the Soviet Union on February 4 1942. The town of Chekalin was renamed for him in 1944.

External links

*ru icon [http://www.warheroes.ru/hero/hero.asp?Hero_id=297 War Hero Alexander Chekalin]