Gastello Street
In 1947, a new section of the city territory began to be built, to the right of the Chervishevsky tract, and the first streets were named in honor of the war heroes. This is how Nicolai Gastello Street appeared.
Starting from Zoya Kosmodemyanskaya Street, almost from the Moskovsky Tract, it ends at the intersection with Zakaluzhskaya Street, and reaches the bypass road.
For all the time, little has changed on the street, all the same huts from the 50s: then there was an active construction of the private sector. Rooted into the ground, they are adjacent to high-rise buildings and single-storey new buildings.
The name of Nicolai Gastello has become a symbol of courage and self-sacrifice. His feat, accomplished in the early days of the Great Patriotic War, inspired many and became a legend. However, behind the heroic image there is a real person, about whom it is worth telling in more detail.
A descendant of Belarusian peasants, Franz Pavlovich Gastello (actually, Gastello, but Moscow officials once simplified the surname), moved to the capital to earn money. He worked as a foundry worker on the Kazan Railway, and was used to handling fire and molten metal. It was said that he could distinguish good iron by ear. Nikolai’s mother, Anastasia Semyonovna Kutuzova, worked as a seamstress. Brother Viktor died in the battle for the village of Dybalovo in the Rzhevsky district of the Tver region.
Nikolai was born on May 6, 1907 in Moscow. After the fifth grade of gymnasium, the family moved to Murom; there, fifteen-year-old Kolya became a carpenter’s apprentice, later a locksmith at locomotive and machine tool factories. In the workers' dormitory, he read the magazine "Airplane" and admired the posters of the first aviation holiday, but there was no money for an airplane club.
In 1932, the Moscow City Council sent him to the Red Army for special training. The Lugansk school of pilots gave a diploma and a friendly nickname Nail: thin, hardy, "he scored any flight" — that is, he carried out the program without question.
In Murom, he met Anna Petrovna, the daughter of a train driver. Her grip helped Nikolai — at the age of 21, he was already a rationer, the favorite of the chief engineer, and in the evenings he learns German: the threat of Hitler’s aviation was already tangible.
Son Victor later wrote: "My mother, knowing German well, persistently practiced this language with my father."
Starting from Zoya Kosmodemyanskaya Street, almost from the Moskovsky Tract, it ends at the intersection with Zakaluzhskaya Street, and reaches the bypass road.
For all the time, little has changed on the street, all the same huts from the 50s: then there was an active construction of the private sector. Rooted into the ground, they are adjacent to high-rise buildings and single-storey new buildings.
The name of Nicolai Gastello has become a symbol of courage and self-sacrifice. His feat, accomplished in the early days of the Great Patriotic War, inspired many and became a legend. However, behind the heroic image there is a real person, about whom it is worth telling in more detail.
A descendant of Belarusian peasants, Franz Pavlovich Gastello (actually, Gastello, but Moscow officials once simplified the surname), moved to the capital to earn money. He worked as a foundry worker on the Kazan Railway, and was used to handling fire and molten metal. It was said that he could distinguish good iron by ear. Nikolai’s mother, Anastasia Semyonovna Kutuzova, worked as a seamstress. Brother Viktor died in the battle for the village of Dybalovo in the Rzhevsky district of the Tver region.
Nikolai was born on May 6, 1907 in Moscow. After the fifth grade of gymnasium, the family moved to Murom; there, fifteen-year-old Kolya became a carpenter’s apprentice, later a locksmith at locomotive and machine tool factories. In the workers' dormitory, he read the magazine "Airplane" and admired the posters of the first aviation holiday, but there was no money for an airplane club.
In 1932, the Moscow City Council sent him to the Red Army for special training. The Lugansk school of pilots gave a diploma and a friendly nickname Nail: thin, hardy, "he scored any flight" — that is, he carried out the program without question.
In Murom, he met Anna Petrovna, the daughter of a train driver. Her grip helped Nikolai — at the age of 21, he was already a rationer, the favorite of the chief engineer, and in the evenings he learns German: the threat of Hitler’s aviation was already tangible.
Son Victor later wrote: "My mother, knowing German well, persistently practiced this language with my father."
From 1933 to 1938, he served in the 82nd Heavy Bombardment Squadron of the 21st Heavy Bombardment Aviation Brigade based in Rostov-on-Don. Having started flying as a co-pilot on the TB-3 heavy bomber, N. F. Gastello piloted the aircraft independently from November 1934, becoming the commander of the ship.
In 1938, as a result of the reorganization of the unit, Nikolai Gastello ended up in the 1st heavy Bomber Aviation Regiment. In May 1939, he became a flight commander, and a little over a year later, he became deputy squadron commander. He participated in the battles on Khalkhin Gol, in the Soviet-Finnish War of 1939-1940 and the annexation operation Bessarabia and Northern Bukovina to the USSR. In the fall of 1940, the aviation unit in which N. F. Gastello serves was relocated to the western borders of the USSR, to the city Velikiye Luki, and then to aviagorodok Borovskoye near Smolensk. In 1940, N. F. Gastello was awarded the rank of captain.
Khalkhin Gol (1939): Nikolai, flight commander of the 150th high-speed bomber Aviation Regiment, flew on SB-2: the squadron stormed Japanese crossings.
In 1938, as a result of the reorganization of the unit, Nikolai Gastello ended up in the 1st heavy Bomber Aviation Regiment. In May 1939, he became a flight commander, and a little over a year later, he became deputy squadron commander. He participated in the battles on Khalkhin Gol, in the Soviet-Finnish War of 1939-1940 and the annexation operation Bessarabia and Northern Bukovina to the USSR. In the fall of 1940, the aviation unit in which N. F. Gastello serves was relocated to the western borders of the USSR, to the city Velikiye Luki, and then to aviagorodok Borovskoye near Smolensk. In 1940, N. F. Gastello was awarded the rank of captain.
Khalkhin Gol (1939): Nikolai, flight commander of the 150th high-speed bomber Aviation Regiment, flew on SB-2: the squadron stormed Japanese crossings.
Soviet-Finnish war (1939-1940): in a forty-degree frost, the Gastello crew bombed the fortified areas of Mannerheim. During one flight, the heating of the lamp failed, the glass was covered with frost. The navigator offered to return, but the commander did not allow it. The operational summary noted the "incredibly accurate" hit of a 500-kilogram bomb on the Kiviniemi Bridge. Gastello also participated in the operation to annex Bessarabia and Northern Bukovina to the USSR.
"Nikolai had a thick common notebook with the inscription "Mistakes that pay with your life." He wrote notes about plane crashes in it" — mentioned in an interview with fellow soldiers, which appeared in V. Vasiliev's book "The Life and Feat of Gastello".
Colleague Mark Lanovenko defined his character with the formula: "Demanding of himself and subordinates, but a universal favorite. Tactful, easy to handle, did not tolerate injustice."
On June 24, 1941, a Junkers 88 multirole aircraft was shot down by heavy machine gun fire from a rifle turret at the DB-3f Gastello airfield.
According to the memoirs of Air Marshal Nikolai Skripko, at a military rally on June 26, he said: "Whatever awaits us ahead, we will pass everything, we will endure everything. No storm can break us!" "Nothing, not even the threat of death, can make him submit to the enemy. Until the last minute, he remembers his duty to the Motherland...", is another quote from the marshal's memoirs.
On the same day, the crew under the command of Captain Gastello took off to bomb a German mechanized column on the Molodechno-Radoshkovichi road as part of a flight of two bombers.
Gastello's plane was hit by enemy anti-aircraft artillery fire. An enemy shell damaged the fuel tank, the plane caught fire, and Gastello made a "fire ram" — he sent the burning car directly into a cluster of enemy vehicles. Photographic reconnaissance the next day recorded twelve burnt-out tanks and eight tanker trucks.
All the crew members died. The crew was international: Burdenyuk was Ukrainian, Kalinin was Nenets, Skorobogaty was Russian, and Gastello himself was Belarusian. At night, peasants from the nearby village of Dekshnany removed the corpses of the pilots from the plane and, wrapping the bodies in parachutes, buried them near the crash site of the bomber.
Here are the lines from a letter from Frantz Pavlovich Gastello's father, sent to the regimental commander four days after his son's death: "My sons, Nikolai and Viktor, have been taught since childhood not to be afraid of fire. Metal flows from father to son."
On July 10, 1941, an essay "Captain Gastello" was published in the newspaper Pravda. Here are quotes from it: "...The car is on fire. There is no way out. But Captain Gastello doesn't unbuckle his seat belts. Down to the crowded tanks, he rushes the fiery lump of his plane ...", "Hundreds of people in different parts of the front repeated this name...".
Son Victor received a funeral in the school corridor: "Dad will now live in the stars, look for him in the Big Dipper." This metaphor later opened his book "The son flies to the father." Until the end of her life, Anna Petrovna held her husband's saber and a forest basket, symbols of war and peaceful Sundays.
"I lived with him for twelve years. …Our whole life was spent at the airfield under the wave of the starter flag." "When he went to bed, he always sang: "My beloved city can sleep in peace"... It means: Kolya has finished his working day." These lines appeared in the August 1941 issue of Smena magazine, a month and a half after Gastello's death.
In the 1990s, a different version of events appeared in the media. Its author is retired Major Eduard Kharitonov. The data on the exhumation of the alleged grave of Gastello in 1951 were published. The remains of Maslov's crew were found there, and it was suggested that it was Maslov who carried out the "fire ram". Later, there were reports that the wreckage of the original Gastello aircraft was located near the place of Maslov's death, in the Matskovsky swamp near the village of Matsky, where locals found a fragment identified as part of the Gastello aircraft — a tag from the M-87B engine with serial number 87844.
It was suggested that Gastello was chosen out of two equally likely candidates for the feat at that moment for several reasons: he is an ethnic Belarusian; his crew is international, and he has already had a Junkers 88 shot down.
A number of researchers (first of all, retired Colonel Victor Gastello, the hero's son) reject this version. In their opinion, the testimony from Vorobyov and Rybas' reports is the main and irrefutable fact of Gastello's feat. The discovered remains of Maslov and his crew indicate that his plane did not ram, but crashed into the ground in low-level flight." The absence of Gastello's remains indicates that he really committed a "fire ram" — as a result of the explosion of a convoy with fuel and ammunition, neither the aircraft nor the remains of the crew can be identified.
Both during the war and in the post-war period, Gastello's feat stood out from among many similar ones. Newspapers published the headings "New Gastello of the front", frontline radio stations included the phrase "Strike like Gastello!" on the air. "Gastello went to his death — we'll go too!" — a verse of the frontline ditto.
Nikolai Gastello's feat became one of the most famous in the history of the Great Patriotic War, and his surname became a household name. "Gastellians" began to be called pilots who committed a "fire ram". In total, 595 classic aerial ramming (by airplane), 506 ramming by land target aircraft, 16 sea ramming and 160 tank ramming were carried out.
The first documented "fire ram" before the Great Patriotic War was carried out by Mikhail Yuyukin — his plane crashed into a cluster of Japanese troops on August 5, 1939 at Khalkhin Gol. Four days before Gastello, Peter Chirkin sent a downed fighter into a column of tanks near Stryi.
Isaac Preseisen hit a convoy on the Minsk highway on June 27, stopping traffic on it for three days. Pyotr Igashov, after an aerial ram, also brought down a burning plane at the crossing — June 30, Dvinsk.
Viktor Nosov crashed into a ship with a displacement of six thousand tons, the ship sank on February 13, 1945, Baltic. Oleg Matveev sent a plane into a group of tanks near Schneidemuhl — February 14, 1945, Poland. Boris Kovzan survived four aerial ramming attacks. Ekaterina Zelenko remains the only woman who has performed an aerial ram.
In 1941, Captain Nikolai Frantsevich Gastello was posthumously awarded the title Hero of the Soviet Union. Maslov and all members of his crew were awarded the title of Heroes of the Russian Federation (posthumously) in 1996.
More than forty cities in Russia have Gastello Street; Belarus and Kazakhstan have two dozen more such streets.
Moscow renamed the Third Sokolnicheskaya already in August 1941. In Ufa, the hero's name was given to a football club that existed until 1992. The Gastello-1 aircraft models were sold in the Union. The Gastello draughts club is still operating in Rostov-on-Don.
"Nikolai had a thick common notebook with the inscription "Mistakes that pay with your life." He wrote notes about plane crashes in it" — mentioned in an interview with fellow soldiers, which appeared in V. Vasiliev's book "The Life and Feat of Gastello".
Colleague Mark Lanovenko defined his character with the formula: "Demanding of himself and subordinates, but a universal favorite. Tactful, easy to handle, did not tolerate injustice."
On June 24, 1941, a Junkers 88 multirole aircraft was shot down by heavy machine gun fire from a rifle turret at the DB-3f Gastello airfield.
According to the memoirs of Air Marshal Nikolai Skripko, at a military rally on June 26, he said: "Whatever awaits us ahead, we will pass everything, we will endure everything. No storm can break us!" "Nothing, not even the threat of death, can make him submit to the enemy. Until the last minute, he remembers his duty to the Motherland...", is another quote from the marshal's memoirs.
On the same day, the crew under the command of Captain Gastello took off to bomb a German mechanized column on the Molodechno-Radoshkovichi road as part of a flight of two bombers.
Gastello's plane was hit by enemy anti-aircraft artillery fire. An enemy shell damaged the fuel tank, the plane caught fire, and Gastello made a "fire ram" — he sent the burning car directly into a cluster of enemy vehicles. Photographic reconnaissance the next day recorded twelve burnt-out tanks and eight tanker trucks.
All the crew members died. The crew was international: Burdenyuk was Ukrainian, Kalinin was Nenets, Skorobogaty was Russian, and Gastello himself was Belarusian. At night, peasants from the nearby village of Dekshnany removed the corpses of the pilots from the plane and, wrapping the bodies in parachutes, buried them near the crash site of the bomber.
Here are the lines from a letter from Frantz Pavlovich Gastello's father, sent to the regimental commander four days after his son's death: "My sons, Nikolai and Viktor, have been taught since childhood not to be afraid of fire. Metal flows from father to son."
On July 10, 1941, an essay "Captain Gastello" was published in the newspaper Pravda. Here are quotes from it: "...The car is on fire. There is no way out. But Captain Gastello doesn't unbuckle his seat belts. Down to the crowded tanks, he rushes the fiery lump of his plane ...", "Hundreds of people in different parts of the front repeated this name...".
Son Victor received a funeral in the school corridor: "Dad will now live in the stars, look for him in the Big Dipper." This metaphor later opened his book "The son flies to the father." Until the end of her life, Anna Petrovna held her husband's saber and a forest basket, symbols of war and peaceful Sundays.
"I lived with him for twelve years. …Our whole life was spent at the airfield under the wave of the starter flag." "When he went to bed, he always sang: "My beloved city can sleep in peace"... It means: Kolya has finished his working day." These lines appeared in the August 1941 issue of Smena magazine, a month and a half after Gastello's death.
In the 1990s, a different version of events appeared in the media. Its author is retired Major Eduard Kharitonov. The data on the exhumation of the alleged grave of Gastello in 1951 were published. The remains of Maslov's crew were found there, and it was suggested that it was Maslov who carried out the "fire ram". Later, there were reports that the wreckage of the original Gastello aircraft was located near the place of Maslov's death, in the Matskovsky swamp near the village of Matsky, where locals found a fragment identified as part of the Gastello aircraft — a tag from the M-87B engine with serial number 87844.
It was suggested that Gastello was chosen out of two equally likely candidates for the feat at that moment for several reasons: he is an ethnic Belarusian; his crew is international, and he has already had a Junkers 88 shot down.
A number of researchers (first of all, retired Colonel Victor Gastello, the hero's son) reject this version. In their opinion, the testimony from Vorobyov and Rybas' reports is the main and irrefutable fact of Gastello's feat. The discovered remains of Maslov and his crew indicate that his plane did not ram, but crashed into the ground in low-level flight." The absence of Gastello's remains indicates that he really committed a "fire ram" — as a result of the explosion of a convoy with fuel and ammunition, neither the aircraft nor the remains of the crew can be identified.
Both during the war and in the post-war period, Gastello's feat stood out from among many similar ones. Newspapers published the headings "New Gastello of the front", frontline radio stations included the phrase "Strike like Gastello!" on the air. "Gastello went to his death — we'll go too!" — a verse of the frontline ditto.
Nikolai Gastello's feat became one of the most famous in the history of the Great Patriotic War, and his surname became a household name. "Gastellians" began to be called pilots who committed a "fire ram". In total, 595 classic aerial ramming (by airplane), 506 ramming by land target aircraft, 16 sea ramming and 160 tank ramming were carried out.
The first documented "fire ram" before the Great Patriotic War was carried out by Mikhail Yuyukin — his plane crashed into a cluster of Japanese troops on August 5, 1939 at Khalkhin Gol. Four days before Gastello, Peter Chirkin sent a downed fighter into a column of tanks near Stryi.
Isaac Preseisen hit a convoy on the Minsk highway on June 27, stopping traffic on it for three days. Pyotr Igashov, after an aerial ram, also brought down a burning plane at the crossing — June 30, Dvinsk.
Viktor Nosov crashed into a ship with a displacement of six thousand tons, the ship sank on February 13, 1945, Baltic. Oleg Matveev sent a plane into a group of tanks near Schneidemuhl — February 14, 1945, Poland. Boris Kovzan survived four aerial ramming attacks. Ekaterina Zelenko remains the only woman who has performed an aerial ram.
In 1941, Captain Nikolai Frantsevich Gastello was posthumously awarded the title Hero of the Soviet Union. Maslov and all members of his crew were awarded the title of Heroes of the Russian Federation (posthumously) in 1996.
More than forty cities in Russia have Gastello Street; Belarus and Kazakhstan have two dozen more such streets.
Moscow renamed the Third Sokolnicheskaya already in August 1941. In Ufa, the hero's name was given to a football club that existed until 1992. The Gastello-1 aircraft models were sold in the Union. The Gastello draughts club is still operating in Rostov-on-Don.
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