People of the older generation, of course, remember Nikita Fyodorovich Karatsupa, a border guard who became a legend, about whom much was written in his time and who was the idol of millions of Soviet boys. Only according to incomplete data, he detained three hundred and thirty-eight violators of the state border, and one hundred and twenty-nine who did not want to surrender were destroyed on the spot. A documentary film about the border guard Karatsupa was repeatedly shown on Central Television. Our story is about this unique person.
Difficult childhood and early orphanhood of Nikita
The future "thunderstorm of border violators" - that's how the Soviet press called it - was born on April 25, 1910 in a peasant family living in Little Russia in the village of Alekseevka. The childhood of the future border guard hero was not easy. The father died early, and the mother, left alone to raise three children, moved with them to the Turkestan city of Atbasar, hoping that a better life awaits them there. However, the reality turned out to be different - when Nikita was barely seven years old, she died, and he himself ended up in an orphanage.
Whatever the conditions in the orphanage, they are always, and thisquite naturally, limit the freedom of the child. Nikita did not want to endure this and soon fled from it, getting a job as a shepherd to the local bai. Here, constantly being among the dogs guarding the flocks, the future border guard Karatsupa learned the first training skills that would be so useful to him in the future. His first pet, named Druzhok, surprised everyone with his ability to independently, without additional commands, perform guard duties and protect herds from wolves.
Direction to the border troops
During the Civil War, Nikita was a liaison officer in a partisan detachment operating on the territory of their region. When in 1932 it was time for him to become a soldier, and at the military registration and enlistment office Nikita declared that he wanted to serve on the border without fail, he was refused - he was too small in stature. Only a completely reasonable argument came to the rescue - the more difficult it will be for the violator to notice it. Assessing the ingenuity and perseverance of the conscript, the military commissar sent Fedor to the border troops.
Having passed the training necessary in such cases, the young border guard Nikita Karatsupa was sent to serve on the Manchurian border, where at that time it was extremely restless. According to those years, only for the period 1931-1932, about fifteen thousand violators were detained in the Far Eastern sections of the border.
Cadet of the NKVD school
Here, more than anywhere else, the experience gained in shepherd life came in handy. Nikita was excellent at reading the tracks of people and animals, and also knew how to find a common language with dogs. Soon, by order of the head of the outpost, the young, but very promising border guard Karatsupa waswas sent to study at the district school of the NKVD, which trained junior command personnel and specialists in the field of service dog breeding.
In his memoirs, Nikita Fedorovich told how, having arrived at school with some delay, he did not receive, along with the rest of the cadets, a puppy intended for practical training in education and training. However, not at a loss, he found two young homeless mongrels and in a few months made excellent search dogs out of them. He gave one of them to his fellow cadet, and kept the other, nicknamed Hindu, for himself.
It is characteristic that all subsequent dogs of Karatsupa bore the same nickname, and appeared under it in many publications of the Soviet period. Only in the fifties, when friendly relations with India were established, the country's leadership, for ethical reasons, instructed in publications to call the dog not Hindu, but Ingus.
First self-arrests
This dog of the border guard Karatsupa was listed in the documents as a guard dog of the “local domestic breed”. However, under such a tricky name, an ordinary mongrel was hiding, but thanks to a significant admixture of the East European Shepherd Dog and the work invested in it by Nikita, she became a real guardian of the border. Already during the period of practice, the border guard Karatsupa and his dog made their first detentions of violators.
During the time spent at the district school of the NKVD, Nikita not only received serious skills in dog training, but also improved his skills in shooting andhand-to-hand combat techniques. Particular attention was paid to long-distance running. It was necessary to prepare your body to, if necessary, pursue the intruder for a long time, moving at the same pace as the dog.
Successful internship and first fame
For the period of internship, Nikita was sent to one of the most difficult areas of the Far Eastern border, where the Verkhne-Blagoveshchenskaya outpost was located. At the beginning of the thirties, attempts were regularly made to violate the state border in the area protected by it by various smugglers who penetrated from the adjacent territory, and by spy groups, the center of which was in the Manchurian city of Sakhalyan (present-day Heihe).
Here, the border guard Karatsupa with his dog became real heroes after one day the Hindu, taking the trail of a dangerous spy and chasing him for a long time through heavily trampled terrain, as a result overtook the intruder. After graduating and successfully passing the exams, Nikita, along with his pet, ended up at the Poltavka outpost of the Grodekovsky border detachment.
Border detachment in a particularly responsible area
It is known that even today this section of the border is considered especially tense, since natural conditions largely contribute to crossing the border here. In the thirties it was especially difficult there. It was the corridor through which numerous reconnaissance and sabotage groups, consisting of former White Guards trained under the guidance of Japanese instructors, tried to penetrate the territory of the Soviet Union. ATFor the most part, these people perfectly mastered the techniques of hand-to-hand combat, knew how to shoot accurately and, focusing on the terrain, evade pursuit, covering their tracks.
The statistics of his first three years of service testify to how the young border guard and his faithful dog fought them. It is known from archival documents that during this period, the border guard Karatsupa spent five thousand hours in the orders for the protection of the state border of the USSR, managed to detain more than one hundred and thirty violators and prevent the import of contraband goods worth six hundred thousand rubles. These numbers speak for themselves.
several armed opponents. There is a known case when the border guard Karatsupa and his Hindu, after a long pursuit, managed to detain a group of nine armed drug couriers.
One against nine
This episode should be told separately. He overtook the violators in the dead of night. Approaching them closely, but remaining invisible because of the darkness, Nikita Fedorovich loudly ordered the border guards who were supposedly near him to split into two groups of four people and go around the persecuted on both sides. Thus, he created the impression among the violators that a whole detachment of fighters was involved in the detention.
Dazed fromsurprise and fright, the smugglers threw their weapons on the ground, and by order of Karatsupa they lined up in a line. Only on the way to the outpost, the moon peeping out from behind the clouds illuminated the entire group, and the escorts realized that they had allowed themselves to be detained by a single border guard. One of them tried to use a hidden pistol, but a well-trained Hindu immediately grabbed his hand.
Sacks on the side of the road
Another vivid episode from his service practice is also known, testifying to what fame and authority Karatsupa enjoyed among the local population. A border guard once pursued a border violator who managed to break away from him on a ride. In order to prevent him from leaving, Karatsupa stopped a truck heavily loaded with food and, before continuing the pursuit, asked the driver to unload the bags to the side of the road for faster movement.
Such an action was fraught with considerable risk - products in those years were in short supply, expensive and almost certainly could be stolen. It seems incredible, but their complete safety was ensured by a note written and attached to the bags by Karatsupa's hand. In it, he warned would-be kidnappers that the bags were left by them, and that in case of theft, the attacker would face imminent and severe punishment. As a result, none of the bags went missing.
Saved Bridge
How high his professional level was can be judged by one seemingly inconspicuous episode, which is described in the memoirs written byNikita Fedorovich himself. Once he managed to organize the arrest of a group of saboteurs who were preparing to blow up a railway bridge and disguised themselves as fishermen for this purpose.
Checking their documents, which outwardly looked quite convincing, Karatsupa, an avid fisherman himself, noticed that they put worms on hooks incorrectly. This seemingly small detail allowed him to draw the right conclusion and save an important strategic object from an explosion.
Enemy resident miscalculation
It is impossible not to recall the events connected with the detention of Sergei Berezkin, a resident of Japanese intelligence in the Far East. This agent was elusive for a long time, thanks to the excellent training he received in one of the foreign intelligence centers. He was a real professional in his field, and in order to catch him, the NKVD leadership developed a complex operation, during which the spy was supposed to be driven into a pre-arranged ambush, where the border guard Karatsupa, the Hindu dog and cover fighters were waiting for him.
The difficulty was that the resident had important information, and, despite the vial of poison sewn into his collar, he had to be taken alive. This was done due to the fact that at the decisive moment, with his lightning-fast actions, Nikita Fedorovich did not allow the enemy to use either the machine gun or the ampoule. As a result, Soviet counterintelligence was able to use the data obtained from Beryozkin during interrogations.
Professional intuition and help from friends
It is quite clear that the sabotage centers operating in the areas where he servedthe legendary border guard, repeatedly tried to destroy him and began a real hunt against him. Several times Karatsupa was wounded, but experience and professional intuition always allowed him to emerge victorious from these fights. Invaluable help in this was provided to him and his faithful dog friends.
During the years of service on the border, he had five of them, and not one of them was destined to live to old age. All of them were called Hindu, and they all died, guarding the state border together with their master. A scarecrow of the last of them, made at the request of Nikita Fedorovich himself, is now in the Central Border Museum of the FSB of Russia.
Self-training experience
Besides performing his direct official duties, Karatsupa devoted a lot of time to summarizing his experience, which he tried to pass on to young fighters. To this end, he regularly kept notes in which he detailed the methodology of self-training, which allowed him to develop his own abilities. And there was something to write about. It is known, for example, that through training, Karatsupa achieved the ability to distinguish more than two hundred and forty smells, which allowed him to accurately find goods hidden by smugglers.
Deserved fame
In March 1936, the already famous throughout the country border guard Karatsupa Nikita Fedorovich was summoned to the capital, where at a meeting of the Central Executive Committee of the USSR he was awarded the highest award at that time - the Order of the Red Banner. Since that time, his name has not left the pages of Soviet newspapers and magazines. Articles and stories are written about him, hisset an example for the next generation. Millions of boys dreamed of being like him and serving on the border just like the border guard Karatsupa, whose biography was known to everyone in those years.
His wide fame and popularity among the people was largely facilitated by a series of articles published in those years by Moscow journalist Yevgeny Ryabchikov. By order of the commander V. K. Blucher, he was seconded to the Poltavka outpost, where Nikolai Fedorovich served.
For several weeks, the metropolitan journalist joined him in the border protection squad and after that, having studied in detail the features of his hero’s service, he wrote a book that gained great popularity in those years. In it, the border guard Karatsupa and his dog, whose photos did not leave the pages of newspapers and magazines, were presented in their entirety and expressiveness.
New Appointments
Most of his service Nikita Fedorovich spent in the Far East, but in 1944, when the territory of Belarus was liberated from the Nazis, he was sent there to restore the border service. The responsibilities of Karatsupa also included organizing the fight against the accomplices of the enemy, hiding in the forests and committing terrorist acts. And here the experience gained at the border provided him with invaluable help.
Nikita Fedorovich served in this new place for him until 1957, when he was seconded to North Vietnam by order of the commander of the border troops. There, in a distant and exotic country, the Sovietborder guard Karatsupa helped organize border protection almost from scratch. The fact that subsequently the Vietnamese border guards gave a worthy rebuff to numerous gangs trying to penetrate the country from adjacent territories is undoubtedly his merit.
A belated but well-deserved award
Colonel Karatsupa left the reserve in 1961, having behind him one hundred and thirty-eight detentions of violators of the state border, one hundred and twenty-nine destroyed enemies who did not want to lay down their arms, and participation in one hundred and twenty military clashes. He was awarded the title of Hero of the Soviet Union in June 1965. Although it was a belated, but well-deserved award to a warrior who showed extraordinary courage and heroism in carrying out tasks related to the protection of the state border of the Motherland.
An interesting detail: in one of the conversations with his friend, the famous Soviet composer Nikita Bogoslovsky, the famous border guard noticed that the detentions of violators he made were not displayed in the Soviet press quite objectively. They did not always frankly report “in which direction they fled,” Karatsupa explained bitterly.
The border guard, the film about which became his monument
Despite the enormous risk that Nikita Fedorovich was exposed to over the years of service, he lived to an advanced age and passed away in 1994. The ashes of the illustrious hero now rest at the Troekurovsky cemetery of the capital. Already today, a documentary film about the border guard Karatsupu was filmed and released. It used a lot of exclusive material andunique film documents. He became one of the worthy monuments to this unique person.
The country honorably keeps the memory of its hero. During the Soviet period, his name was given to numerous schools, libraries and river courts, and a bust was erected in his native village of Alekseevka, Zaporozhye region. By order of the commander of the country's border troops, Colonel Karatsupa was forever enrolled in the list of personnel of the Poltavka outpost, where he once served. The Grodekovsky border detachment bears his name today, near the checkpoint of which a monument to N. F. Karatsupe and his dog.
