Urinboy Abdullayev

Urinboy Abdullayev was born on 18 April 1912 (5 April in the old style) in the village of Bagyab in the Syr Darya Oblast, in what is now the Turtkul (To'rtko'l) District of Karakalpakstan. After primary schooling he worked on a collective farm. Sources disagree about his ethnicity: a 1984 reference book calls him Karakalpak, a 1987 encyclopedia calls him Uzbek.

He was drafted into the Red Army in January 1943 and was at the front from May of that year. He served as a private in the 1st Rifle Company of the 375th Rifle Regiment, 219th Idritsa Rifle Division, 3rd Shock Army (2nd Baltic Front).

On the night of 18 July 1944 he was one of ten men sent behind enemy lines under Senior Sergeant Khakimyan Akhmetgalin. Near Ludza in Latvia, on Height 144.0 close to the village of Sunuplyava, the reconnaissance group was surrounded, fought a much larger force and held the hill. Command believed that everyone had been killed. Concussed in the fighting, Abdullayev was taken prisoner and held in a camp near Magdeburg.

A decree of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet of the USSR of 24 March 1945 made the defenders of the height, Abdullayev among them, Heroes of the Soviet Union; the decree counted them among the dead. His Gold Star medal (No. 11152) and the Order of Lenin were presented to him in 1961, once it was known that he was alive.

After the war he lived for a time in Ufa, then returned to the Karakalpak ASSR and worked on a collective farm, as foreman of the cotton growers on the farm named after the 22nd Party Congress. He visited Height 144 in May 1962 and again in November 1963, and joined the Communist Party in 1965. He died on 15 August 1989 in the Turtkul District.

A memorial to the defenders of Height 144, in which eleven nationalities are named, stands at Sunuplyava.