In 1997 a driveway in St Petersburg was named after the commander of the 106th separate motorized engineering battalion of the 2nd shock army, a graduate of the Institute of Municipal Construction (now SPbGASU) Ivan Solomakhin (1908–1989). So the city immortalized the name of its defender, under whose leadership in the military forty-third Soviet soldiers managed to take the most fortified by the Nazis point of the Sinyavino Heights, which the soldiers called "Devil's" for its impregnability.
Ivan Solomakhin's fate is the story of a certified civil engineer who happened to go through two wars, almost all the steps of the command ladder and finish his military service with the rank of colonel.
In 1932, a talented engineer was invited to the technical supervision department in Smolny. Ivan Ivanovich stayed up late at work. Soon, the first secretary of the Leningrad Regional Committee of the All-Union Communist Party of Bolsheviks, S. M. Kirov, sent Solomakhin to the Khibiny deposits of apatite-nepheline ores in the Murmansk region, where competent and reliable specialists were in dire need. But it was here that a radical turning point would happen in the life of a civil engineer: the Soviet-Finnish war of 1939-1940 will force to change a peaceful profession to a military one. Solomakhin is drafted into the active army as head of the 128th separate engineering battalion. In June 1941, already an experienced military man, he commandsed the 106th separate motorized engineering battalion of the 2nd shock army, which was stationed near Leningrad. Throughout the war, he would serve on the Leningrad front.
In early 1943, his battalion took part in Operation Iskra on the Leningrad and Volkhov fronts to break through the blockade. And in the summer it was time for the battles for the Sinyavino Heights. At the 45th height, the Nazis were so fortified that it seemed impregnable. It was hot, the swampy terrain made it difficult to move: guns sank in the quagmire, peat smoldered from fires. The fighters nicknamed this place Devil's Hill. “We can take it by suddenly attacking at night,” Solomakhin suggested to the higher commanders. “Take by one battalion? There is no room for fantasy at the front!” - the commanders did not support his plan. But he was trusted, and soon they listened to him.
For five days, sappers worked out an attack strategy at a different height, wh ere a copy of the German fortifications was created. On 11 August, at midnight, they began the operation, skillfully sneaking up to the enemy position. During the assault, the battalion lost 16 fighters, 26 soldiers were injured, but they took the height! 200 Nazis were killed and 120 captured. “There was a lot in my front-line biography, but the most memorable battle was for this Devil’s Hill,” Ivan Solomakhin recalled. He became one of the first officers of the Leningrad Front to be awarded the Order of Suvorov. During the war years, he was also awarded two orders of the Red Banner of War and the Order of the Patriotic War of the 1st degree, and in total over the years of service he was awarded seven orders.
After the war, Ivan Ivanovich worked as chief engineer of the Defense Construction Department in Leningrad. In the 1950s he taught at LISI (now SPbGASU).
Other materials of the "Scientific Regiment" project:
Our Graduate Built the Road of Life
Front Line of the Architect Aleksandr Nikolsky
Researcher who Developed Science in Besieged Leningrad
Fights of Student Klinov
Engineer of the 3rd Belorussian Front
Nineteen-Year-Old Gunner Stormed Berlin
Path of a Volunteer: from Front-Line Roads to Space Development