This year marks the 60th anniversary of the death of Mikhail Ilyich Koshkin, the chief designer of the best tank of the Great Patriotic War T-3. Until about the mid-80s, little was said about his bright, amazing, but short life. Now the situation has changed. Our senior permanent correspondent for the Siberian Military District, Colonel Viktor Saidakov, met with his daughter Elizaveta Mikhailovna Koshkina, who lives in Novosibirsk.
Indeed, why was so little written and talked about about Mikhail Ilyich Koshkin before? After all, his name wasn't banned. And suddenly, as if a dam had burst, after several significant events, which I will describe later, rarely has a newspaper not made an attempt to even touch on this great and somewhat tragic name. Although there was a lot of unconscious lies and deliberate distortion of facts in publications about Koshkin, but more, of course, sincere and kind words. In many articles, the authors made an attempt to study such a phenomenon as the famous Russian character.
And the events that caused an avalanche of publications were as follows. The opening of the monument to M. I. Koshkin in 1985 - on the fortieth anniversary of the Victory, posthumously awarded the title of Hero of Socialist Labor to the chief designer of the T-34 tank in 1990. And one last thing. In 1998, the 100th anniversary of the birth of our great compatriot was duly celebrated. That was two years ago. Then in the small homeland of M. I. Koshkin, in the village of Brynchagi, near Pereslavl, a bust of him was installed, and in Pereslavl itself the famous thirty-four was raised on a pedestal. What's the bill? Historians claim that more than 500 of these famous combat vehicles have become monuments of the invincibility of the Russian spirit and the courage of our people. This received a significant response in the press.
And yet, one cannot avoid the question: why do some journalists deliberately
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did you distort the events related to the chief designer, ...
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