Soviet soldier Mikhail Pelin, who went missing in 1942, has been identified after volunteer searchers discovered his remains and a pocket icon near Kaluga.
The patriotic association Poisk announced on the VKontakte social network that Pelin was identified through fragments of a passport preserved inside the small metal folding icon.
Activists from the Bezmolvie search detachment found the fallen Red Army soldier in June during an expedition organized under the national Memory Watch program. Specialists only recently succeeded in reconstructing his identity after closely analyzing the artifacts recovered from the battlefield.
Pelin was born in 1912 and vanished without a trace in late summer 1942 during the Second World War. Searchers found several personal possessions lying alongside his body, including a pocket mirror, a pencil, and a flint and steel set.
Investigators reported that Pelin had prayed shortly before his death to Saint Nicholas the Miracle Worker, who was depicted on the miniature folding icon. The metal detector used by the search team responded specifically to the icon, meaning the soldier likely would never have been located without it.
Discovery near Kaluga
The recovery took place in the forested combat zones around Kaluga, a regional capital southwest of Moscow that witnessed heavy fighting as Soviet forces defended the approaches to the capital and pushed back German units. In Russia, volunteer groups regularly organize search missions on former battlegrounds to locate unrecorded graves and determine the fates of millions of missing servicemen.
After recovering the passport remnants from inside the metal casing, volunteers successfully located Pelin's living relatives. The search group confirmed that his remains will be transported to his homeland in the Republic of Mordovia, located in the Volga river basin, for formal reburial.
Air combat over southern Russia
Search teams also reported that they are closer to resolving the mystery of a late summer 1943 air battle between an Ilyushin Il-2 ground attack plane and a German Junkers Ju-88A5 bomber over the Don region. Specialists recently uncovered aircraft debris from both planes at a single site in southern Russia.
Investigators suggested that the Soviet pilot may have deliberately rammed the German bomber midair. The heavily armored Il-2, commonly known as the flying tank, was designed for low-altitude strikes on enemy tanks and troop formations, making aerial collisions a desperate tactic used by some pilots on the Eastern Front.
Searchers at the crash site also discovered a commemorative silver ring carrying the emblem of the Condor Legion, which linked the site to Spanish dictator Francisco Franco. The Condor Legion was a German military aviation unit dispatched to fight in the Spanish Civil War during the late 1930s before its members deployed to the Soviet front.
