Sabir Akhundzhanov

Sabir Sabirovich Akhundzhanov was born on 10 October 1919 in Tashkent. He served in the army from 1938, graduated in 1940 from the Lenin Tashkent Red Banner Military School and became a commander of a cadet machine-gun platoon at the Akhtyrka infantry school in Ukraine.

He was at the front in the Great Patriotic War from 3 September 1941. He began as a lieutenant in the special-purpose detachment of the 40th Army of the South-Western Front and was lightly wounded in mid-September during the defence of Kyiv. After recovering he was posted to the Central Asian Military District, where he commanded cadets in Namangan, and from January 1942 a submachine-gun company of the 94th Separate Rifle Brigade, formed in Fergana. The brigade took part in the defence of Moscow, then in the battle for Stalingrad and in the breakthrough of the German defences on the Don near Serafimovich.

From January 1943 Captain, later Major, Akhundzhanov served on the staff of the 3rd Guards Army, first as commandant of its field headquarters and from August 1943 as assistant head of the operations section. The army advanced from the Donbas and Zaporizhzhia across the Dnieper and through Nikopol to Poland. On 22 January 1945 he was seriously wounded in the leg near Łask, returned to duty and took part in the fighting near Berlin, the Dresden operation and the liberation of Prague. For the war he received the Order of the Red Star (1943), the Order of the Red Banner (1945) and the Order of the Patriotic War, 1st class (1945).

After the war he served on the staffs of the Central Group of Forces in Prague and of the Volga and Turkestan military districts, and in 1946 carried out a special assignment of the Soviet government in China. From 1947 to 1951 he was military commissar of the Baysun district of the Surkhandarya region, and in 1955 he graduated from the Frunze Military Academy. He then commanded a regiment in Kattakurgan and Samarkand, was military commissar of the Fergana region in 1964–1967 and deputy military commissar of the Uzbek SSR in 1967–1971. In 1966 he completed, by correspondence, the Fergana Pedagogical Institute.

From 1971 to 1986 he headed the staff of civil defence of the Uzbek SSR (later also serving as deputy head of the republic's civil defence); he became a lieutenant general in 1973. In these years his books on civil defence and the history of the war were published. He was named Honoured Worker of Culture of the Uzbek SSR (1982) and Honoured Youth Mentor of the Uzbek SSR (1989).

After retiring in 1986 he worked in the veterans' movement: in 1987–1991 he chaired the Tashkent city council of war and labour veterans, and in 1991–1997 he was deputy chairman of the council of the union of veterans' organisations of Uzbekistan. He died in Tashkent on 13 April 2012. His name is entered in the Book of Memory of Uzbekistan, and his parade uniform and orders are part of an exhibition at the State Museum of the Armed Forces of the Republic of Uzbekistan.