Smirnov Sergey - Brest fortress. Brest Fortress Brest Fortress in peacetime

(his son), gradually faded from funds mass media, a generation has grown up that has no idea that there was such a person, there was such a book. We are talking about the "Brest Fortress". In the 1950s, Sergei Smirnov found the living heroes of the Brest stronghold, spoke about their fate, and in the 55th, on the advice of Irakli Andronikov, he made a radio broadcast that literally the whole country listened to. After Stalin's death, Sergei Smirnov was the first to say that not all prisoners of war were traitors. The writer claimed that many suffered innocently. For these efforts to restore a good name to thousands of front-line soldiers, Sergei Smirnov has already earned a low bow. As a result of many years of searches and investigations, a book was published, for which the author was awarded the Lenin Prize. But soon, at the direction of Suslov, the set was scattered, and for almost two decades "Brest Fortress" was not published ...After 18 years it was republished, I can't help but mention the people who did it: the last edition is Valentin Osipov, the publisher who ensured that this book was republished on the anniversary of the Victory. This edition was charitable, it was practically not sold, it was sent mainly to libraries, and also presented as a gift to war veterans who came to Moscow to celebrate Victory Day. And now our mother reproaches me and my brother, says: "Why don't you do anything to remember your father?" To this I answer that he did such an important deed that, I hope, perhaps, over time, it should not be erased in the memory of the Russian people. And if it is erased, then all efforts are useless.

The fact is that people who do not go to work today on May 9 and March 8 do not even suspect that they also owe this to my father.

In 1955, for the first time on the radio, in the month of August, his radio programs were called "In Search of the Heroes of the Brest Fortress." On the first traces of these searches, he managed to find and question the first living participants in the defense of Brest. I went to school in two weeks, and it turned out that the whole country was sitting at the radio, literally the whole, my father instantly became famous. But what was the most important thing in these programs? Of course, stories about the heroism of the Russian soldier, about the people who fought, continued to fight in absolutely hopeless, hopeless conditions. After all, there were still pockets of resistance in the fortress, when the Germans were already beyond Smolensk, Minsk had already been taken. Nevertheless, these people, ordinary Russian guys - and not only Russians, of course, Russian guys, because there were Tatars, and Armenians, and Volga Germans, and whoever was not there, and Kazakhs, in short, from all ends of the empire - they continued to fight, not to surrender, to kill Germans, starving ... And, naturally, all of them later - who did not shoot themselves or were not killed - were captured, fled repeatedly, then went into partisans, when they succeeded, up to what they tried to harm there, inside Germany. Yes, in fact, if there were no such soldiers, the outcome of the war would probably have been different. And all these people were denied the right to citizenship. Father was the first to talk about the fact that circumstances forced these people to be captured, that these are soldiers who have the right to the same, and perhaps even more respect than anyone else. And gradually, this was introduced not only into the consciousness of the people, but also into the consciousness of the authorities. I will never forget how we tried - when Brezhnev died, but the "living dead", the bosses, were replaced one after another, until it came to Gorbachev - once again my mother and I were on Staraya Square, in the Central Committee of the party, we talked about that it would not be bad to publish this book. And every time they promised, they said that this is our national treasure, and then in the "Young Guard" editor - I will never forget! - he said in a completely state voice, explained to me ... I remember my last name well - let this scoundrel, perhaps, or his children hear - his last name was Mashavets, Chief Editor then the publishing house "Young Guard", some sort of party or Komsomol leader. I vouch for the accuracy of the quote, because I wrote it down right there, outside the doors of his office. He explained that the book could not be in this moment republished, because it gives "an incorrect and superficial assessment of the first stage of the war, and secondly, in the event of publication, all references to those who were in captivity must be thrown out of the book." And those who were not in captivity were not mentioned in the book. It was already the time of Afghanistan, our army got stuck there, the problem of our prisoners rose to its full height, and therefore familiar guiding notes sounded. And in 1965, a decree followed that May 9, on the 20th anniversary of the victory, became a day off. I remind you that from 1945 to 1965 it was a working day. But the generous government also gave the people March 8, which was also a working day, and the decree said: as a sign of respect (something like that) to the contribution Soviet women to war and to labor in the rear. So let them know when they drink on May 9 and March 8, with whom to clink glasses.

P. Krivonogov "Defenders of the Brest Fortress", 1951

Smirnov Sergey Sergeevich (1915-1976).

Smirnov Sergey Sergeevich (1915-1976).

Prose writer, playwright, journalist, public figure. Born in Petrograd. He began his career at the Kharkov Electromechanical Plant. In 1932-1937. studied at the Moscow Power Engineering Institute. Since 1937 - an employee of the newspaper "Gudok" and at the same time a student of the Literary Institute. A.M. Gorky. “In the Great Patriotic War, he takes part first as a combat commander, and since 1943 as a special correspondent for an army newspaper.”1 After the war, he worked at the Military Publishing House, then in the editorial office of the Novy Mir magazine. In 1950-1960. - Editor-in-Chief of Literaturnaya Gazeta. Member of the Soviet Committee of War Veterans, Secretary of the Moscow branch of the Union of Writers of the RSFSR, member of the Board of the USSR Writers' Union, member of the editorial board of the magazine "Change". He was awarded two Orders of the Red Star, the Order of the Red Banner of Labor, and medals.

S. Smirnov is the author of plays and screenplays, documentary books and essays about the unknown heroes of the Great Patriotic War, including "Brest Fortress" (1957; expanded edition - in 1964), "Stories about unknown heroes" (1963), etc. For many years he led on television popular show- TV almanac "Feat".

The most important feat of S. Smirnov is the rehabilitation of the heroes of the Brest Fortress. He was one of the initiators of the creation of the fortress defense museum; the materials collected by him (more than 50 folders with letters, 60 notebooks and notepads with records of conversations with the defenders of the fortress, hundreds of photographs, etc.) were transferred to the museum. A stand is dedicated to him in the fortress museum. Smirnov recalled: “Our enemies spoke with amazement about the exceptional courage, steadfastness and perseverance of the defenders of this stronghold. And we consigned all this to oblivion ... In Moscow, in the Museum of the Armed Forces, there is no stand, no photograph, nothing about the defense of the Brest Fortress. museum workers shrugged their shoulders: “We have a museum of the history of exploits ... What heroism could be on the western border. The German crossed the border without hindrance and reached Moscow under a green traffic light. Don't you know that?". In 1965, S. Smirnov became a laureate of the Lenin Prize for the book "The Brest Fortress." On this occasion, G. Svirsky wrote:

“Until 1957, the press did not say a word about the heroism of the defenders of the Brest Fortress,2 which later, in the history of the war, became a symbol of the Resistance. A photograph of heads pressed against each other, weeping leaders of the defense of the Brest Fortress, who met in Moscow on the way from the Siberian camps - this stunning photograph, reproduced by Literaturnaya Gazeta in the Khrushchev era, has become an irrefutable document of the vile cruelty of Stalin's time. "We have no prisoners of war - said, as you know, Stalin, - there are traitors. Who needs traitors? .. The Soviet Information Bureau reported on the tragedy of the time with a fake headline: "How German generals fabricate Soviet prisoners of war."

In the mid-sixties, the history of the defense of the Brest Fortress and its heroes, who fell into German captivity(and later in Soviet camps), said Sergey Smirnov - in the documentary book "Brest Fortress" (awarded with the Lenin Prize in 1965). The book is prefaced with "An Open Letter to the Heroes of the Brest Fortress", in which the author writes: "Ten years ago, the Brest Fortress lay in forgotten and abandoned ruins, and you, its hero-defenders, were not only unknown, but, as people who, for the most part, went through Hitler’s captivity, met offensive distrust of yourself, and sometimes experienced direct injustice. Our party and its 20th Congress, having put an end to the lawlessness and mistakes of the period of Stalin's cult of personality, have opened up for you, as well as for the whole country, a new streak of life."

“Direct injustices”, “lawlessness and mistakes”, “hurtful mistrust” - all these euphemisms mean that the heroes who bravely fought in the fortress, which turned out to be in the rear of the German troops, were arrested by the Soviet security forces only because they turned out to be prisoners of war, and what these war heroes did post-war years in the camps. But even at that time of the Khrushchev “thaw”, their chronicler, writer S.S. Smirnov, could not tell the whole truth about them without resorting to shameful, false substitutions: “concentration camp” is replaced by the phrase “direct injustice”, the words “crimes” and "terror" - with the words "lawlessness" and "mistakes", the words "Stalin's despotism" - with the stereotype "the period of Stalin's personality cult"" (Svirsky G. S. Na frontal place. Literature of moral resistance. M., 1998. S. 471-472).

The work of the writer S.S. Smirnov ended with the rehabilitation of A. Fil, the release of P. Klyp, the removal of all suspicions from majors P. Gavrilov and S. Matevosyan and other surviving defenders of the Brest Fortress. Those expelled from the party were reinstated and properly employed (Viktorov B.A. Without the stamp “secret”. Notes of the military prosecutor. Issue 3. M., 1990. P. 286).

Son of S.S. Smirnova - Konstantin Smirnov (b. 1952) in many ways continues the work of his father. He is the host of the Big Parents Sunday TV show, which has a consistently high rating. In one of the interviews, to the question "What main idea did you get great parents out of communicating with children? he replied: “I realized that the Soviet government was so anti-human that even its beloved children, those who served it not out of fear, but out of conscience, she ate like a pig eats its piglets. IN own life or in the lives of their loved ones they must have had some kind of tragedy, which often no one knows at all” (NTV: hunting for children// Arguments and Facts. 2000. No. 9. P. 8). The eldest son of S.S. Smirnova - Andrei Smirnov (b. 1941) - film director, author of the films "Belorussky Station" (1971), "Autumn" (1975), etc.

Notes

1) These data are taken from the reference book "Scriptwriters of Soviet Artistic Cinema" (M., 1972, p. 336). In a different

And now the ruins of the Brest Fortress rise above the Bug, ruins covered with military glory, every year thousands of people from all over our country come here to lay flowers on the graves of fallen soldiers, to pay tribute to their deep respect for the selfless masculinity and steadfastness of its defenders.
The defense of the Brest Fortress, as well as the defense of Sevastopol and Leningrad, became a symbol of the resilience and fearlessness of Soviet soldiers, forever entered the annals of the Great Patriotic War.
Who can remain indifferent, having heard today about the heroes of the Brest defense, who will not be touched by the greatness of their feat?!
Sergei Smirnov first heard about the heroic defense of the Brest Fortress in 1953. Then it was believed that all participants in this defense died.
Who are they, these unknown, nameless people who have shown unparalleled resilience? Perhaps one of them is alive? These are the questions that worried the writer. The painstaking work began collection of materials requiring a lot of effort and energy. I had to unravel the most complex interweaving of destinies and circumstances in order to restore the picture of heroic days. The writer overcomes difficulties step by step, unraveling the threads of this tangle, looking for eyewitnesses, participants in the defense.
Thus, originally conceived as a series of essays, The Brest Fortress turned into a grandiose historical and literary epic in terms of coverage of events. The novel combines two time planes... Days gone by and modernity stood side by side, revealing all the beauty and grandeur of the Soviet man. The heroes of the defense pass before the reader: Major Gavrilov, amazing in his perseverance and stamina, who fought to the last bullet; full of bright optimism and fierce fearlessness, Private Matevosyan; little trumpeter Petya Klypa is a fearless and selfless boy. And next to these heroes, miraculously surviving, the images of the dead pass before the readers - nameless fighters and commanders, women and teenagers who took part in battles with enemies. Very little is known about them, but even these meager facts make one marvel at the resilience of the Brest people, their selfless devotion to the Motherland.
The strength of the work of Sergei Smirnov is in the rigor and simplicity with which the writer expounds dramatic events. His harsh, restrained manner of narration further emphasizes the significance of the feat accomplished by the defenders of the Brest Fortress. In every line of this work one feels deep respect writer to these simple and at the same time extraordinary people admiration for their courage and bravery.
“I was a participant in the war and saw a lot in those memorable years,” he writes in an essay prefixed to the novel, “but it was the feat of the defenders of the Brest Fortress, as if with a new light, illuminated everything I saw, revealed to me the strength and breadth of the soul of our man, forced me with special sharpness to experience the happiness and pride of the consciousness of belonging to a great, noble and self-sacrificing people...”
The memory of the feat of the heroes of Brest will never die. Book by S.S. Smirnova, awarded the Lenin Prize in 1965, returned to the country the names of many dead heroes, helped restore justice, reward the courage of people who gave their lives for the Motherland.
Each historical era creates works that reflect the spirit of his time. Heroic Events civil war found their embodiment in Furmanov's Chapaev, in Ostrovsky's crystal clear novel How the Steel Was Tempered. Many wonderful books have been written about the Great Patriotic War. And among them, a worthy place belongs to the strong and courageous book of S. S. Smirnov. The heroes of the "Brest Fortress" will stand next to the immortal images created by D. Furmanov and N. Ostrovsky, as a symbol of unparalleled devotion to the Motherland.

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Sometimes, probably, everyone sadly feels imperfection human memory. I'm not talking about sclerosis, which we all approach with the passing years. Sad is the imperfection of the mechanism itself, its inaccurate selectivity...

When you are small and clean, like a white sheet of paper, the memory is only preparing for future work - some hardly noticeable events pass by the consciousness, due to their familiarity, but then you suddenly realize with bitterness that they were significant, important, otherwise and the most important. And you will be tormented by this incompleteness, the impossibility of returning, restoring the day, the hour, resurrecting a living human face.

And it's doubly insulting when we are talking O close person- about his father, about those who surrounded him. Unfortunately, I am almost deprived of the usual childhood memories of him in normal families: childhood left few clues, and when the memory mechanism worked, we rarely saw each other - either the door to the office was closed and through the corrugated glass his silhouette at the table vaguely darkened, or a long-distance call crushed the peace of the apartment, which had quieted down in his absence, and the impassive voice of the telephone young lady told us where, from which corner of the country or the world, the hoarse paternal baritone would now come ...

However, it happened later, after the Lenin Prize for the Brest Fortress, after the incredible popularity of his television Tales of Heroism. It was later...

And at first there was a small apartment in Maryina Roshcha, where in the mid-fifties - at the time of my childhood - some unattractive personalities came every day and nightly, with their very appearance arousing suspicion among the neighbors. Some in a quilted jacket, some in a darned overcoat with torn insignia, in dirty boots or knocked down tarpaulin boots, with grated fiber suitcases, official-looking duffel bags or simply with a bundle, they appeared in the hall with an expression of submissive hopelessness on their earthy faces, hiding their rude rough hands. Many of these men were crying, which did not fit in with my then ideas about masculinity and decency. They used to stay overnight on the fake velvet green couch where I actually slept, and then they would throw me onto a cot.

And after a while they reappeared, sometimes even managing to replace the tunic with a Boston suit, and the quilted jacket with a gabardine coat to the heels. Both of them sat badly on them - it was felt that they were not used to such outfits. But, despite this, their appearance subtly changed: stooped shoulders and bowed heads suddenly rose for some reason, their figures straightened. Everything was explained very quickly: under the coat, on the ironed jacket, the orders and medals that found them or returned to their owners burned and tinkled. And, it seems, as far as I could judge then, my father played some important role in this.

It turns out that these uncles Lesha, uncle Petya, uncle Sasha were wonderful people who did incredible, inhuman feats, but for some reason - which did not seem surprising to anyone at that time - were punished for this. And now the father explained everything to someone, somewhere “above”, and they were forgiven.

…These people entered my life forever. And not just as permanent friends at home. Their fates became for me fragments of a mirror that reflected that terrible, black era, whose name is Stalin. And then there's the war...

She stood behind their shoulders, having collapsed with all her monstrous mass, with all the load of blood and death, the burnt roof of her native home. And then another and captivity ...

Uncle Lesha, who carved for me a luxurious pistol with a patterned handle from a lime block of wood, and could make a whistle from any knot, is Alexey Danilovich Romanov. I will never forget this living embodiment of kindness, spiritual meekness, mercy towards people. The war found him in the Brest Fortress, from where he ended up - neither more nor less - in concentration camp in Hamburg. His story about the escape from captivity was perceived as a fantasy: together with a friend, miraculously slipping away from the guards, spending two days in ice water, and then jumping from the pier onto a Swedish cargo ship that was standing five meters away, they dug into the coke and sailed to neutral Sweden! Jumping then, he hit his chest against the side of the ship and appeared after the war in our apartment as a thin, transparent tuberculosis patient, breathing heavily. And where could the forces to fight tuberculosis come from, if all these post-war years they told him in the eye that, while others were fighting, he “sat out” in captivity, and then rested in Sweden, from where, by the way, Alexander did not let him go to the front Kollontai - then soviet ambassador. It was he who "rested" - a half-dead man, removed from the hold along with a dead man in the same camp clothes! .. He was not restored to the party, he was not given work, there was practically nowhere to live - and this was in his homeland, on his own land ... But there was a telegram from my father...

Petka - that's what he was called in our house, and needless to say, what kind of bosom friend he was to me. Peter Klypa is the youngest among the defenders of the fortress, during the defense a twelve-year-old pupil of the music platoon - he appeared to us as a thirty-year-old man with a timid, suffering smile of a martyr. Of the 25 years (!) assigned to him by the authorities, he served seven in Kolyma for a fault incommensurable with the punishment - he did not inform on a friend who committed a crime. Not to mention the imperfection of this criminal code on non-information, let's ask ourselves a question: the boy, yesterday's kid, but who had the Brest citadel behind him, should be hidden for half his life for such an offense ?! Is it his, about whom experienced soldiers almost told legends? .. Many years later, in the seventies, when Pyotr Klypa (whose name was given to pioneer squads throughout the country and who lived in Bryansk and, as it was then said, worked hard at the factory ) collided in some unkind way with the former secretary of the Bryansk Regional Committee of the CPSU Buivolov, again they began to recall his “criminal” past, again they began to ruffle his nerves. I don’t know what he didn’t please, and there’s no one to know: this whole campaign was not in vain for Petya - he died only in his sixties ...

Uncle Sasha - Alexander Mitrofanovich Fil. He was one of the first to appear on Oktyabrskaya, although he traveled the longest. From the Nazi concentration camp, he went by direct message along the stage to the Stalinist one, to the Far North. After serving 6 years for nothing, Fil remained on Aldan, believing that with the stigma of "Vlasov" on the mainland he would not live. This "Vlasovite" was casually hung on him by an investigator at a filtration checkpoint for prisoners, forcing him to sign the protocol without reading it.

... The details of these three and many other no less dramatic destinies are recreated on the pages of my father's main book, Sergei Sergeevich Smirnov, "The Brest Fortress". The main one, not only because she is in memorable year The 20th anniversary of the Victory was awarded the Lenin Prize, and not even because he devoted most of his life to literature to work on the Brest Fortress. As far as I can tell, it was during the period of work on this book that he formed as a person and as a documentary writer, laid the foundations of his somewhat unique creative method who returned from oblivion the names and destinies of the living and the dead. Nevertheless, for nearly two decades, "Brest Fortress" was not reprinted. The book, which, like no other, spoke about the feat of the Soviet soldier, Soviet power seemed to be harmful. As I found out much later, military doctrine communists, who were preparing the population for war with the Americans, did not agree with the main moral content of the Brest epic - the need to rehabilitate prisoners. So Dzhugashvili's catchphrase "We have no prisoners - there are traitors and traitors" was still in service with the party apparatus in the late 80s ...

"Manuscripts don't burn," but they die without a reader. And until the beginning of the 90s, the book "Brest Fortress" was in a dying state.

There are writers of “one book”, and Sergei Sergeevich Smirnov was a writer of one topic: in literature, in cinema, on television and on the radio, he spoke about people who died heroically in the Great Patriotic War, and after that - forgotten. Few people know that May 9 became a holiday only in 1965, 20 years after the Victory. This was achieved by the writer Sergei Smirnov. His speeches on radio and television made the victorious country remember those to whom it owed both peace and life.

Sergei Sergeevich Smirnov (1915 - 1976) - prose writer, playwright, journalist, public figure. Born in Petrograd, in the family of an engineer. He spent his childhood in Kharkov. He began his career at the Kharkov Electromechanical Plant. In 1932-1937. studied at the Moscow Power Engineering Institute. Since 1937 - an employee of the newspaper "Gudok" and at the same time a student of the Literary Institute. A.M. Gorky.

With the beginning of the Great Patriotic War, S. Smirnov joined the ranks of the fighter battalion, graduated from the school of snipers. In September 1941, a group of graduate students from the Literary Institute were demobilized in order for them to pass the state exam. In the summer of 1942, Sergei Smirnov was drafted into the army and sent to an artillery school. After graduating from college, he received the rank of lieutenant, became the commander of a machine-gun platoon.

He began to write to the army newspaper "Courage", after some time he was seconded to serve in its editorial office. Captain Smirnov met the end of the war in Austria. He was awarded two Orders of the Red Star and a medal "For the Victory over Germany in the Great Patriotic War of 1941-1945".

After the war, he worked for some time in the same newspaper, and then returned to Moscow and became the editor of the Military Publishing House of the Ministry of Defense. Until 1954, he worked for the Novy Mir magazine.

S. Smirnov said: “I had already begun to think about writing a book dedicated to the defense of the hero cities of Odessa and Sevastopol, when suddenly one random conversation forced me to change my plans.

One day my friend, the writer German Nagaev, came to me. He asked me what I was going to work on in the future, and suddenly said:

– If only you could write a book about the defense of the Brest Fortress. It was an unusually interesting episode of the war.

And then I remembered that a year or two ago I came across an essay by the writer M.L. Zlatogorov about the heroic defense of the Brest Fortress. It was published in Ogonyok, and then placed in one collection published by the Military Publishing House of the USSR Ministry of Defense. After a conversation with Nagaev, I found this collection and re-read Zlatogorov's essay again.

I must say that the theme of the Brest Fortress somehow immediately captured me. It felt the presence of a large and not yet revealed secret, opened up a huge field for research, for difficult, but exciting research work. It was felt that this theme was thoroughly imbued with high human heroism, that the heroic spirit of our people, our army was somehow especially clearly manifested in it. And I started working."

First visit to the Brest Fortress, 1954

S. Smirnov conducted painstaking research work to establish the fate of the participants in the defense and the events of 1941 in the citadel over the Bug for about 10 years. The writer came to Brest, met with the defenders. He was one of the initiators of the creation of the fortress defense museum; the materials collected by him (more than 50 folders with letters, 60 notebooks and notepads with records of conversations with the defenders of the fortress, hundreds of photographs, etc.) were transferred to the museum. A stand is dedicated to him in the fortress museum.

S. Smirnov recalled: “Our enemies spoke with amazement about the exceptional courage, stamina and perseverance of the defenders of this stronghold. And we consigned all this to oblivion ... In Moscow, in the Museum of the Armed Forces, there is no stand, no photograph, nothing about the defense of the Brest Fortress. Museum workers shrugged their shoulders: “We have a museum of the history of exploits ... What heroism could be on the western border. The German crossed the border without hindrance and reached Moscow under a green traffic light. Don't you know that?"

S. Smirnov's speeches in the press, on radio and television, in the TV almanac "Feat", made a huge contribution to the search for those who disappeared during the war years and its unknown heroes. His books are devoted to the topic of war: "On the fields of Hungary" (1954), "Stalingrad on the Dnieper" (1958), "In Search of the Heroes of the Brest Fortress" (1959), "Were great war» (1966), "Family"(1968) and others.

S. Smirnov did not claim to create artwork. He worked as a documentary filmmaker with purely documentary material. According to the correct statement of Nyota Thun, in his "Brest Fortress" most clearly reflected "a characteristic trend of the late 60s ... towards documentary accuracy."

Speaking later about the method of his work, S. Smirnov wrote: “I may be rigoristic about the documentary basis of a work of art. I strive to ensure that not a single fact cited in a documentary book written by me could be disputed by an eyewitness and participant. Artistic work, in my opinion, here lies in understanding, in highlighting these facts. And here the documentary writer must rise above petty factography, so that the real facts cited by him are comprehended and illuminated so that even the participants and eyewitnesses of these events suddenly see themselves in the right light and in that understanding, which, perhaps, they themselves they didn’t assume ... In my book “Brest Fortress”, as you know, I kept the real names of the heroes. I strictly adhered to the facts even in detail, and none of the facts stated in the book can probably be disputed by the defenders of the fortress, but none of them in their stories showed me the defense of the fortress as it appears in my book. And it's completely natural. Everyone saw only a piece of this picture, and even saw it subjectively, through the prism of their experiences, through the layers of their subsequent fate with all the complexities and surprises. My job as a researcher, as a writer, was to collect all the scattered pieces of the puzzle, arrange them correctly so that they give a broad picture of the struggle, remove subjective layers, true light illuminate this mosaic so that it appears as a wide panel of an amazing national feat.

The book is prefaced with an “Open Letter to the Heroes of the Brest Fortress”, in which the author writes: “Ten years ago, the Brest Fortress lay in forgotten and abandoned ruins, and you, its hero-defenders, were not only unknown, but, as people who for the most part went through Hitler’s captivity, met offensive distrust of yourself, and sometimes experienced direct injustice. Our party and its 20th Congress, having put an end to the lawlessness and mistakes of the period of Stalin's personality cult, have opened a new era of life for you, as well as for the whole country.

For a documentary story - a book "Brest Fortress", published twice (1957, 1964), - S. Smirnov received the Lenin Prize in Literature. On the basis of the award materials prepared by him, about 70 defenders of the Brest Fortress were awarded state awards.