Adjimuschkay Quarries (Аджимушкайские каменоломни)

Adjimuschkay

 

Location: Kerch, Crimean Peninsula Map

 

Adjimuschkay underground or Adzhimushkaysky quarries - underground quarries within the city of Kerch (named after the village of Adzhi-Mushkay), where from the second half of May until the end of October 1942, part of the troops of the Crimean Front defended against German troops. The length of the excavated passages of the central quarries is more than 8 km, many kilometers of passages are hidden under the rubble that was formed as a result of Nazi attempts to undermine the roof of the quarries. The total number of soldiers, officers, civilians (including women and children) who defended the quarry was about 13 thousand people.

Adjimuschkay Map

Map of underground passages

 

Description

Large (Central) Adzhimushkay quarries
They are located in the southwestern part of the village of Adzhi-Mushkay. The mine field is elongated in plan from northwest to southeast with a strip about 800 m long and 100 to 300 m wide (including collapsed areas). In the southern part of the quarry, a small area was excavated and fenced off, which is occupied by the exposition of the “Museum of the History of Defense of the Adzhimushkay Quarries”. The thickness of the layers above the workings is 9-10 m, the width is 4-7 m, the height is 1.6-2.7 m (up to 4 m in some places). The main part of the quarry does not have a correct plan. A small section on the south side, the so-called "Greek Quarries", has a planned structure. The quarries are mostly single-tier; in small areas, stone was mined even above the main layer, forming false tiers that had no communication with the main system. The entrances are located along the eastern and southern borders of the mine field and for the period of development there were more than 30 of them, of which 6 were entrances. Currently, there are several dozen entrances, mainly in failed funnels. The total length of the passages of the Central Quarries is about 8800 m.

Small Adzhimushkay (Jewish) quarries
They are located 300 meters east and northeast of the Central [3]. The mine field is elongated from north to south in a strip 630 m long and 100 to 230 m wide. Now it represents several isolated areas. Development was carried out in three tiers. The upper tier, the so-called "Stove quarries" runs 5-6 m above the main, middle tier. The upper and lower tiers were small and isolated from the main one. The main part of the middle tier is the result of unsystematic development. The height of the passages is 4-6 m and even 8 m, the width is 4-5 m, and in some places up to 10 m. Separate workings are often connected to each other at different levels. Several dozen inputs are currently available. Most of them are failed funnels and only a few have survived from the development period and are entry points. The length of a single section of the middle tier is 10920 m, the total length of the passages of the Small Quarries is about 12300 m.

Bykovsky quarries
They are located to the north-west of the Small Quarries, currently almost completely under the territory of the village of Adzhi-Mushkay. The mine field is oval in plan, elongated from the northeast to the southwest, about 480 m long and about 300 m wide. The development was carried out in 2 tiers, the stone was lifted through the shafts. The quarry has several sections, of different development times. The largest section began to be developed in 1890-1891 through the shaft, which is currently backfilled. The second section was also developed through the currently backfilled mine shaft. It has a less correct configuration. Developments were carried out in 1903-1914. The third backfilled shaft is located in the southern part of the mine field. It was the center of a small working, the modern size of which is 50 × 50 m, the development of which was carried out in the period 1913-1914. Locals call the development "Georgievsky quarries". In the 1920s-1940s, production at the third and second sites continued. In the northwest direction, the working is interrupted by a strip of dips from the surface, which are currently filled up. The length of the passages is 10540 m.

Grandfather's quarries
They are located 200-250 m northeast of the Small. The mine field is strongly elongated from the northwest to the southeast and is about 500 m long and 50 to 110 m wide. The development is attributed to the end of the 19th century. Currently, there is only one entrance to the main part of the system, located in the middle of the mine field. The rest of the entrances are filled up, in the north and south there is a passage to small, isolated areas: Tuboltseva, Mariichkina, Teretunskaya and Kelichkina rocks. The entrances were named after the names of the masters. In dead ends, also from north to south, graffiti of 19th century surnames are left. The quarry is of considerable size, the part available for filming is 1500 m.

Vergopolsky quarries
They are located north of the Dedushevs. There was an entrance-entrance, which was located at the intersection of the street. Kommunarov and Pozharsky and was filled in in 2004, as well as two pits under the development of a residential area. Mining has been carried out since 1895 by the Kerch resident F. P. Vergopulo. The development is in one tier, the length of the passages is 11400 m.

 

History

The use of quarries by red partisans during the Civil War
Although in the memory of the people, the defense of the Adzhimushkay quarries is associated primarily with the events of the Great Patriotic War, but for the first time they became a battlefield during the civil war in Russia. So, since the end of 1918, the red partisan detachment "Red Moles" (up to 550 people) began to operate in them, in 1919 other detachments also arose under the leadership of the Kerch underground city committee of the Bolsheviks, the total number of detachments was over 1,000 fighters. In January-May 1919, the partisans carried out over 70 combat operations, including such daring ones as a raid on the Kerch railway station and the Kerch Metallurgical Plant. On May 23, 1919, partisan detachments tried to capture Kerch, but in a heavy battle, with the support of the artillery fire of the Entente ships, the White troops managed to push them back to the quarries with heavy losses.

Adjimuschkay  Adjimuschkay

Tractor used as a power generator                                                  Remains of the make shift hospital

 

Adjimuschkay

Abandoned helmets at the water collecting posts. Once the wells outside were sealed off this was the only way to get precious water.

 

Partisan detachments of the Crimean headquarters of the partisan movement
The first period (November 6 - December 31, 1941) - three detachments operated on the Kerch Peninsula under the general command of I. I. Pakhomov, a detachment named after. V. I. Lenin (commander M. N. Mayorov, commissar S. I. Cherkez) - in the Adzhimushkay quarries, a detachment named after. I. V. Stalin (commander A. F. Zyabrev, died on November 12, 1941, S. M. Lazarev, commissar I. Z. Kotko), a detachment of the Mayak-Salyn region (commander I. G. Shulga, commissar D. K. Tkachenko) in the Karalar quarries. K. M. Simonov wrote an essay about them in March 1942 in the Red Star.

Defense of the remnants of the troops of the Crimean Front
The second period falls on the spring-autumn of 1942. During Operation Bustard Hunting in May 1942, the troops of Nazi Germany and Romania launched an offensive on the Kerch Peninsula and captured Kerch on May 16. The troops of the Crimean Front, defending the city, were forced to evacuate to the Taman Peninsula. Part of the troops (the remnants of the 83rd Marine Brigade, the 95th Border Detachment, the Yaroslavl Aviation School, the Voronezh School of Radio Specialists and other units - more than 10 thousand people in total), covering the withdrawal and crossing of the main forces, was cut off and took up defense in the Adzhimushkay quarries. Part of the local population took refuge there.

In the Central quarries, the defense was led by Colonel P. M. Yagunov, senior battalion commissar I. P. Parakhin and Lieutenant Colonel G. M. Burmin, in the Small (Jewish) quarries - Lieutenant Colonel A. S. Ermakov, Senior Lieutenant M. G. Povazhny, battalion commissar M. N. Karpekin. The Nazis surrounded the quarries with rows of barbed wire, blew up and blocked the entrances, pumped smoke into the underground adits, and made collapses. Assumptions about the use of chemical weapons by the German troops against the chemical weapons hiding in the quarries have not yet been confirmed; the Soviet side has never made accusations of such use at the official level. From the first days, the main need of the defenders was water. At first, the soldiers constantly made sorties to the surface (using more than a thousand exits from the quarries) to draw water from the wells, despite the fact that the wells were guarded by the Germans and each sortie ended in heavy losses. Then the German command decided to fill the wells with the corpses of Soviet soldiers and the remains of broken military equipment. Then the defenders created special detachments to collect water from the walls of the cave, the soldiers sucked water out of the limestone through the cuts of the German telephone cable and poured it into flasks. Thus, one person collected up to 800 ml of water in two hours. Also, a well with a depth of more than 16 m was dug in the cave. Despite the acute shortage of water, food, medicine, ammunition, the besieged made sorties.

Presumably, the last battle of the Adzhimushkais took place on October 30, 1942, as a result of which the quarries were completely captured by the Nazis. The few survivors of the battle fell into German captivity, only a few were able to survive it. Burmin G.M and battalion commissar Parakhin I.P. were tortured in a concentration camp.

Thousands of Soviet fighters and civilians died in battles, as well as from wounds, collapses, suffocation and hunger. Despite the fact that the heroic defense of the Adzhimushkay quarries did not bring an immediate victory to the Soviet side, it, like other defensive operations of the initial period of the war, made it possible to tie up significant Wehrmacht forces, disperse them across the territory of the USSR, and restrain the offensive impulse of the German army.

In the autumn of 1943, the German-Romanian occupiers committed a new crime in the Adzhimushkay quarries: over 14,000 civilians of the Crimea and those evacuated from the Taman Peninsula were shot dead.

In November 1943, the area of the Adzhimushkay quarries was liberated by units of the 56th Army during the Kerch-Eltigen landing operation.

False detachment "Red Stalingrad"
In 1943, the SD authorities, having recruited Moiseev, a former fighter of the Crimean Front, decided to conduct an operational game to identify Soviet partisans in the quarries. From the memorandum of the NKGB of Crimea to the Commissar of State Security of the USSR Merkulov on the state of work on the search for German agents and other state criminals: the same area, to eliminate them.

In October of the same year, Moiseev and his people shot two partisan liaisons who had come to them from a neighboring detachment to join forces. In November 1943, during the liberation of Kerch, the Moiseevites left the quarries to the Soviet troops. The members of the detachment were sent to the filtration camp of the village of Akhtanizovskaya in the Krasnodar Territory. In the camp, Moiseev once again instructed his people to stay in one line - we are partisans who fought for the Motherland behind enemy lines. The commander himself managed to successfully pass the filtration check and from the camp he went to the disposal of the North Caucasian Military District in Rostov. There he even received a three-month deferment from mobilization and the opportunity to go to his native village. During this time, the investigators checked a lot of materials, studied interrogation materials, testimonies of witnesses, worked with people and documents. In the same 1944, Moiseev was exposed and sentenced to death by the Military Tribunal of the troops of the NKVD of Crimea. 11 SD agents were arrested, recruited by a false commander of a false partisan detachment.

 

Research

One of the first who began searching in the catacombs was the Kerch journalist Vladimir Birschert (Spark magazine, 1961, No. 35, No. 48). Military historian Vsevolod Valentinovich Abramov made his contribution.

In the 1960s, students of the Kerch School No. 17 named after Vera Belik began to search in the catacombs, who a few years later managed to make a number of serious finds. A school museum was created.

It turned out that M. G. Povazhny survived in captivity and lives in Kerch, and there were other surviving participants in the defense.

In January 1966, the Adzhimushkay branch of the Kerch Historical and Archival Museum was established. All search work in the catacombs was headed by the head of the museum branch, Sergei Mikhailovich Shcherbak, one of the organizers of the military-historical conference dedicated to the 25th anniversary of the defense of Adzhimushkay.

In 1972, the first complex expedition began to work in the catacombs (Crimean speleologists, sappers and signalmen, a group of the Poisk detachment from Odessa and enthusiasts from Kerch). The purpose of the expedition is to find headquarters documents of military units, documents of the party organization of the underground garrison. The expedition was "speleological, the highest category of difficulty, work in the conditions of soil of the 4th-5th category (numerous landslides, talus), with explosive objects in conditions of mine lighting ...". They even found 152- and 122-mm shells, mines, grenades and hundreds of unexploded 45-mm shells. The results of the first expedition were modest.

In the summer of 1973, the most numerous expedition worked, including the military historian V.V. Abramov. Great work was done by defense veterans S.S. Shaydurov from Ordzhonikidze and F.F. Kaznacheev from Baku. With their help, the central adit of the Great Quarries was accurately determined - the main landmark of all defense sectors. Treasurers pointed out where the main radio was. In total, this expedition had about 150 items found. But one of the most significant finds of the 2nd season were 2 half-burnt gas-smoke bombs and a thin-walled body of a smoke or chemical grenade that fell apart into fragments. The analysis of the substance of the checkers was difficult (30 years have passed). The expedition members suggested that the Nazis used asphyxiating poisonous substances, letting them go with smoke, for which such gas-smoke bombs were made, but objective evidence could not be found. It should be noted that the standard smoke bombs themselves, when used against an enemy underground, can be effective under certain circumstances.

In 1974, the first detachment of Uralians arrived in Adzhimushkay - students of the Sverdlovsk Mining Institute, led by MP Vakhrushev, Candidate of Historical Sciences.

Starting from 1975, a combined detachment from the cities of the Chelyabinsk region (Miass, Zlatoust, Chebarkul) worked, as well as a detachment from Lipetsk.

Enthusiasts from the Miass detachment (1975-1976) found two adits (a dead end cut off by a dead blockage) and the headquarters of the 1st battalion. The main attention during the search was given to the area of the underground well. It was he who was the last base of the soldiers of the garrison. They could not be far from the water source. They also searched in the area of \u200b\u200bdeployment of the 3rd battalion in the western part of the quarries.

In 1982, another surprise was discovered in the quarries: it turned out that the underground well was mined (by Soviet grenades).

The student team of Rostov University has been involved in the work since 1983. It is headed by a student, future journalist V. K. Shcherbanov.

In 1987, searchers dug up a safe with documents in the quarries. Then it was possible to find out another 120 names of the soldiers of the underground garrison. To date, official historians know 323 names. Search engines call another number - 1200.

In total, 13 expeditions were carried out until 1987. Since 1989, research in the Adzhimushkay quarries was led by V. V. Simonov.

 

Subsequent events

After the end of hostilities, mine clearing of the quarries began (which continued for several decades). The demining work was headed by Major General O. B. Rogozhkin, of the sappers the most distinguished were Majors N. Nadtochia and M. Yakovlev, Senior Lieutenant A. Kushnir, Junior Sergeant V. Averin, as well as privates R. Sakhretdinov and L. Chankov.

In 1966, an underground museum of the defense of the Adzhimushkay quarries was created, in 1982 a memorial to the heroes of the Adzhimushkay quarries was opened. On May 15, 1983, the two millionth visitor visited the underground museum.

The feat of the underground garrison was not appreciated by the USSR Ministry of Defense. Despite letters from the public, none of its participants received the title of Hero of the Soviet Union, even its brightest participants - the commander of the garrison Yagunov P.M., the commissar of the garrison Parakhin I.P., Burmin G.M. Also, the underground fortress of the Adzhimushkaysky quarries was not awarded the title of "Hero-Fortress" - the highest degree of distinction, as happened with the Brest Fortress.

 

Memory

On February 20, 1976, in honor of the heroic soldiers of the Soviet Army and the Crimean partisans who fought during the Great Patriotic War in the Adzhimushkay quarries, the asteroid discovered on May 9, 1972 by T. M. Smirnova in Nauchny was given the name 1903 Adzhimushkaj.

Publications
The first scientific publications appeared in the Military Historical Journal (1962, No. 7, No. 8). The Vokrug Sveta magazine regularly published articles on the work of the expeditions of 1972-1974, and the article “Second Battalion Headquarters” was published in No. 12 for 1988 about the magazine’s expedition, during which some documents of the garrison were found. There were also two reports by V. I. Molchanov in Pravda on April 15, 1973 and February 20, 1974.

1970 - "Soldiers of the Underground" by Nikolai Arsenyevich Efremov. Memoirs of a direct participant in the defense.
1975 - "In the catacombs of Adzhimushkay" compiled by B. Serman from the Tavria publishing house. Documents, memoirs, articles.
1987 - "Valor is immortal" G. N. Knyazev and I. S. Protsenko from the publishing house "Politizdat". At that time, only 323 soldiers of the underground garrison were known to some extent.

In fiction
Poet Ilya Selvinsky and writer Sergei Smirnov were among the first to write about Adzhimushkay.
1948 - novel "Honor from a young age" by A. A. Perventsev.
1949 - the story "The Street of the Youngest Son" by L. A. Kassil.
1964 - "The Underground Fortress" by S. S. Smirnov (from the collection "Stories about Unknown Heroes").
1974 - "The Fortress of Soldiers' Hearts" by Andrey Ioannikevich Pirogov.
1981 - "The Height of Adzhimushkay" by I. I. Miroshnikov (from the collection "Fire-winged Tribe" (poetry)).
1984 - the story "Two of Twenty Million" by A. Ya. Kapler was filmed in 1986 under the title "Descended from Heaven".
2015 - the story "Light in the Darkness (dedicated to the memory of the forgotten heroes of Adzhimushkay)" by O. K. Shevchenko.
Kambulov Nikolay Ivanovich: the stories "The Underground Garrison" (the first edition was called "The Light in the Catacombs"), "Thirteen Shards", "Adzhimushkayskaya Notebook", the novel "The Breeder Has Not Come Yet".

To the cinema
1986 - Descended from Heaven (USSR) directed by N.V. Troshchenko. Screen version of the novel by A. Ya. Kapler "Two out of twenty million" (1984).
In 2015, aspiring screenwriter Roman Tenzin published on the Internet the script for the full-length feature film “Adzhimushkay. Underground garrison. To date, the script has not been filmed.