The Courier & Advertiser (Fife Edition)
Airmen’s rock of recognition
Arock monument to honour Russian airmen who came to Scotland as part of a top secret mission has been installed in the grounds of a Perthshire church.
The huge obelisk arrived at Errol yesterday following a 2,500- mile cargo ship crossing from St Petersburg.
The monument is made from rare crimson Shoksha quartzite, which was mined in Karelia in the north-west of Russia.
The same stone is used at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier in the wall of the Kremlin.
L i ke n e d to a Soviet meteorite crash-landed at Errol Parish Church, the largely unsculpted stone will act as a permanent tribute to Russian airmen who were part of the elite M o s c ow S p e c i a l Assignment Airgroup, formed in the first day’s of Hitler’s invasion, from the country’s best civil aviators.
They undertook crucial tasks for the High Command.
Flying passenger DC-3s equipped with gun turrets, they delivered food to besieged Leningrad and dropped thousands of parachute troops behind enemy lines to defend Moscow.
They also flew in supplies to armies trapped inside enemy c irc les and evacuated the wounded under direct artillery fire in the last days of the Defence of Sevastopol.
Among their numbers were Ru s s i a n airmen A leksandr Gruzd in , Aleksandr Alexeev, Vasilly Dryamin , and Czech co l league Fr a n t isek Drahovzal, who died when their plane crashed during a training flight at Fearnan in May 1943.
One of the most notable pilots was Peter Kolesnikov, whose granddaughter Anna Belorusova uncovered the airmen’s story while researching a book.
She suggested the site for the rock, based on an old postcard brought home by her grandfather.
A museum in Mr Kolesnikov’s honour, in his home village of Mitrofanovka, has opened to showcase the connection with the Errol unit.
Mikhail Shvidkoi, the special representative of the president of the Russian Federation for In t e r n a t i o n a l Cultural Co-operation, said: “Today these brave men, who had fought in the hardest battles of the Eastern Front and then arrived in Britain on an allied mission, represent the historic bond forged during the Second World War by our two countr ies , stand ing shoulder to shoulder against Nazism.
“The Errol memorial has come about as a result of the combined goodwill and personal efforts of the ordinary people of Russia and Britain, in their common aspiration to preser ve the cherished memory of our shared past and pass it on to future generations.”
The Errol Stone, which will be used for future commemorations, wa s sculpted by Aleksandr Kim, a renowned sculptor based in Petrozavodsk.
A plaque was cast based on a design by Iv a n Yudinkov, the grandson of one of the airmen, at the Petrozavodsk Foundry.
The memorial was packaged into a wooden crate and taken by truck to St Petersburg where it was loaded on to a cargo ship.
It arrived at Teesport, North Yo r k s h i r e , on October 30, and was driven to Morris Leslie’s facility at Errol Airfield, where it was stored until its installation.