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.
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