Vasily Dmitrievich Gulyaev was born on January 8, 1912, in Vladimir. In September 1912, the family moved to Penza. The bust of the pilot is not accidentally located in the courtyard of the 26th school. Vasily Dmitrievich spent his entire childhood in the Manchzhuriya district. In 1928, Gulyaev enrolled in the construction faculty of the workers' faculty. In 1933, he entered flight school, and a year later went to Engels for flight practice. In 1936, he was sent to Gomel in the Belarusian military district, going there with his wife Zoya. In 1937, Gulyaev was transferred to the Sesch station in the Oryol region, and in 1938 he was transferred to Smolensk. In 1940, Vasily Dmitrievich was transferred to Ukraine, to the city of Proskurov (now Khmelnytskyi).
In August 1941, the regiment in which Vasily Gulyaev served was sent to the Bryansk front.
On October 3, 1941, the commander of the second aviation squadron, Captain Vasily Dmitrievich Gulyaev, did not return from a combat mission. On that unusually warm, slightly cloudy autumn day, pilot Gulyaev received an assignment. At noon, he appeared over the village of Shepetlevo. A German column of tanks and motorized infantry was steadily advancing toward Bryansk, crushing resistance on the ground. Suddenly, a nimble Yak-1 burst out from behind the clouds and began a rapid descent. Vasily Gulyaev opened a burst of fire on the fascist column. One truck flared up, then another, tank tracks were damaged, and the infantry scattered into the bushes. Gulyaev made another pass and hit another heavy enemy vehicle, but the plane was hit.
According to eyewitness Nikolai Akimovich, then a fourteen-year-old boy from a neighboring village, no shots were heard, but vehicles in the fascist column exploded one after another. Both local peasants and fascists watched the deadly duel. Some with joy in their eyes, others with gritted teeth. But suddenly the little hawk began to turn. The fascists rushed to the anti-aircraft machine gun and began firing at the plane. And it, making one last pass, began to fall. Then came the swampy Sevsk marsh. Twenty-three years of darkness at a depth of six meters...
The fighter pilot’s wife, Zoya Mikhailovna Gulyaeva, and his mother, Olga Ivanovna, received the typical notification of the time about the death of their son and husband: “Captain Vasily Dmitrievich Gulyaev died defending the Motherland.” According to G. Kuzmin, “Fighter pilot, squadron commander of the N-th regiment, Captain V.D. Gulyaev did not return from a combat mission on October 3, 1941.” That was all the family knew about the hero. No place of death, no grave—nothing for a long 23 years.
The story of V.D. Gulyaev’s death and heroism became known largely due to a coincidence of circumstances. In 1963, General Kuzovkov was traveling with district military commissar Lieutenant Colonel Ivan Maksimovich Sanin through the battlefields of his division. In 1943, his division, having driven the Germans out from under Sevsk, was named the Sevsk division. They often stopped. The general took out a map from his case, covered with thick red and blue arrows and various markings. They reached the village of Shepetlevo. Then they got out of the car, and General Kuzovkov suggested a short walk. They walked along the bank of a shallow stream, and the general spoke about the bloody battles that took place in this area. With a sharply pointed pencil, he showed the positions of our troops and the fascists’. Two military men, closely examining the map, attracted the attention of local residents. First, boys appeared, then adults approached. One man, greeting them, said in a military manner: “Allow me to report, Comrade General, right here nearby in the swamp is our medical plane. It’s been here for 22 years. At the very beginning of October 1941, the Germans shot it down. It crashed into the swamp.”
As it turned out later, the villagers, together with the chairman, repeatedly tried to pull the plane out of the swamp. But without a large excavator, nothing could be done. Cables and tractors alone were not enough. General Kuzovkov instructed the district military commissar to take measures to extract the plane from the swamp. But retrieving the plane from the Sevsk swamps in the summer of 1963 was unsuccessful. All attempts ended in failure. Bulldozers themselves got stuck in the swamp and had to be pulled out by tractors. In the summer of the following year, 1964, attempts to retrieve the plane from the swamp resumed. On June 23, 1964, an excavator with a large boom was brought to Shepetlevo. Several times the excavator scooped out one layer of silt. Only when the bucket reached a depth of six meters did the tail of the fighter appear, then the cockpit was extracted. Inside was the pilot’s corpse: the uniform was perfectly preserved. Captain’s insignia “sleepers” were sewn onto the shoulder straps. In the cockpit’s backpack were a bag with linen and a suitcase containing shaving equipment and cologne. The parachute, map case, watch, and two notebooks were well preserved. A machine gun and pistol with cartridges were also found. Examining the papers found in the cockpit, Ivan Maksimovich Sanin found a flight sheet dated July 22, 1941. It stated: “Unit - 20th IAP. Pilot Gulyaev. Navigator (dash), gunner-radio operator (dash), plane Yak-1 No. 1908.” The sheet reported from which airfield the pilot was to take off, at what altitude, cloud cover, wind speed, number of cartridges, fuel. Continuing the search, Sanin found a document that established the captain’s name and that he was a squadron commander.
Gulyaev’s remains were buried with honors in the cemetery of the village of Shepetlevo, and the captain’s belongings were handed over to the Sevsk local history museum. After the plane was raised, the boys of Shepetlevo often came to the ditch from which the plane was lifted. The large six-meter pit was half filled with water. The boys played in the duralumin scraps clogged with silt. They carefully examined every detail. Once, Volodya Gritsunov stumbled upon a round item rolled in mud, resembling a large coin. Volodya quickly began to clean the item. The cleaned item turned out to be the Order of the Red Banner. On the reverse side, the number 20759 was clearly visible. The boy initially decided to keep the order as a memento, but his father, Frol Dmitrievich Gritsunov, convinced him to take the order to the district military commissariat. The order was later also transferred to the Sevsk local history museum.
After the plane was raised, Lieutenant Colonel Sanin sent a letter to Lieutenant General I.A. Kuzovkov, informing him about the found plane and pilot. Two days before Volodya Gritsunov’s discovery, Ivan Maksimovich Sanin received a reply. General Kuzovkov wrote: “...The fate of Vasily Dmitrievich Gulyaev is being clarified. He was the flagship navigator of the 20th Fighter Aviation Division. Captain. Shot down on enemy territory on October 3, 1941. Vasily Dmitrievich was a native of the city of Vladimir. Member of the CPSU since 1931. In the Soviet Army since 1932. His mother, Olga Ivanovna Gulyaeva, lives in the Sverdlovsk region... Married. No information about the wife.”
