In the congratulations on the 55th anniversary of the Great Victory, an elderly resident of the small Siberian station of Tyazhin, Nikolai Ivanovich Masalov, among other messages, said: "You are like an Honorary Citizen of Berlin... Sergeant Nikolai Masalov fought in the Guards Rifle Regiment of the 8th Guards Army. He fought well, for which he was awarded and appointed as the regiment's standard-bearer. During the Battle of Berlin, the standard-bearers were increasingly required to unfurl the banners, as commanders demanded that they be hoisted over captured heights. However, a figure carrying a red banner was an easy target for the enemy. But God spared Masalov, and by April 29, 1945, when the regiment was engaged in the most difficult offensive battle for the Seelow Heights, he was alive and well. The facts tell us how bloody the battles were in these places. In East Germany, in Seelow, there is a memorial to the 30,000 Soviet soldiers and officers who died. In the mass graves in Treptow Park, 7,200 participants of the assault on Berlin are buried, in Schönholz, 13,200 are buried, and in Weißensee, 1,100 are buried. Before East Germany was united with West Germany, there were about 200 memorial cemeteries in East Germany where Soviet soldiers were buried. The main life-affirming monument symbolizing the victory of the Soviet Union over Nazi Germany is the monument to the Soviet soldier in Treptow Park. At a height of thirty meters, there stands a victorious warrior, clutching a sword in his right hand that has cut down the Nazi swastika, and gently holding a rescued German girl to his chest with his left hand. What happened to Sergeant Nikolai Masalov on April 29, 1945, is directly related to this monument. "On the morning of April 29," recalls Nikolai Ivanovich Masalov, a veteran of the Great Patriotic War, "an hour before the assault on Tiergarten began, I was ordered to bring the regiment's banner. I remember a brief period of relative calm, and in that s ... Read more