The 'grandfather of Soviet special forces,' a sabotage engineer who designed the radio-controlled mine and the partisan rail war
At 3:30 a.m. on 14 November 1941, Starinov transmitted an encoded radio signal from Semiluki outside Voronezh. Three hundred kilometres away in Kharkov, the German headquarters, full of officers at a banquet, exploded with its R-10 mine, burying General Georg von Braun and his staff.
He joined the Red Army early, served in the Civil War, then as a railway sapper taught himself demolition; by the early 1930s he was training partisans and saboteurs in the Ukrainian Military District. In the Spanish Civil War he organized sabotage operations for the Republican 14th Guerrilla Corps, and during the Great Patriotic War he remotely detonated the German HQ in Kharkov with his R-10 radio-controlled mine, then as the Central Partisan Staff's chief of sabotage designed the technical basis for the Rail War and Operation Concert. After the war he taught sabotage tactics at KGB academies until 1987, and as the 'grandfather of Soviet special forces' his anti-train mine (PMS) and training system became a legacy of 20th-century irregular warfare from Vietnam to Latin America.
Activities and affiliations
Career Timeline
- 1918–22Enlisted in the Red Army; Civil War on the Southern Front; 27th Sapper Battalion
- 1925–30Trained demolition specialists and sabotage instructors in Kiev
- 1930–334th Department, Ukrainian Military District: planned partisan sabotage, trained cadres
- 1936–37Spanish Civil War: adviser, 14th Guerrilla Corps; organized large-scale sabotage
- 1941–42Chief of operational-engineering groups, Western & Southwestern Fronts; Kharkov radio-mine operation; CO 5th Special Engineer Brigade
- 1942–44Asst. chief for sabotage, Central Partisan Staff; deputy chief for sabotage, Ukrainian Partisan Staff
- 1944–45Deputy chief, Polish Partisan Staff; chief of staff, Soviet military mission to Yugoslavia
- 1956–87Retired; senior researcher at IML; taught sabotage tactics at KGB officer courses; professor 1984
Related historical events
- 1918–1922The Civil War and Foreign InterventionRed Army sapperHe joined the Red Army and served on the Southern Front in the Civil War.
- 1936–1939The Spanish Civil WarRepublican partisan sabotage organiserDuring the Spanish Civil War, he organized sabotage operations for the Republican 14th Guerrilla Corps.
- 1941–1945The Great Patriotic WarDesigner of partisan sabotage techniquesHe designed the mines and sabotage techniques used by partisans in the Rail War, Operation Concert, and the Bagration offensive, and his training and devices made it possible to achieve 10,000 demolitions in a single night.
The Rostov period and the 'atomic notebook'
In December 1941 the Southern Front formed a special operational-engineering group under Colonel Starinov to lay mine and explosive barriers on the approaches to Rostov-on-Don, the "gateway to the Caucasus". Defending the city required about 70,000 mines, 56,000 of them to be made inside it, for which Starinov received the experimental workshops of Rostov State University. New types of mines were developed first, including mines able to self-destruct at a set time and non-recoverable delayed-action mines; up to 15,000 mines a month went from the workshops to the front, inflicting heavy losses on the advancing German army. Former internationalist fighters of the Spanish Republican Army who arrived with him, Komsomol women and pre-conscription-age teenagers carried out the laying. Starinov also formed a special battalion in Rostov whose sabotage groups regularly took part in the so-called "ice campaigns" across the ice of the Sea of Azov into the German rear, destroying headquarters and seizing documents.
On the night of 23 February 1942, during one such campaign, a sabotage group under Petty Officer Maxim Repin raided the German garrison at Krivaya Spit (now Sedovo, Donetsk region) on the northern shore of the Taganrog Bay, destroying the garrison and taking prisoners, trophies and documents. The thick notebook Repin brought back was read by Rostov University teachers who knew German and proved to be an "atomic notebook" containing formulas for nuclear transformations of uranium and information on German atomic-bomb development. Before leaving Rostov, Starinov showed it to Rodion Malinovsky, and on his advice handed it to the office of Sergey Kaftanov, the State Defence Committee's commissioner for science, where Doctor of Chemical Sciences Stepan Balezin examined it and confirmed its substance. Kaftanov first made the notebook public in 1985, writing that it, along with physicist Georgy Flyorov's warning, prompted him and academician Abram Ioffe to urge the State Defence Committee to create a nuclear weapons research centre urgently. On 28 September 1942 Stalin signed an order resuming work on the uranium programme, the date generally taken as the start of the Soviet nuclear project. Starinov first described the notebook's capture publicly in a January 1975 letter to the Rostov physicist Ivan Builo.