Saburov, Aleksandr Nikolaevich

Born July 19 (Aug. 1), 1908, in the village of Iarushki, now Izhevsk; died Apr. 15, 1974, in Moscow. An organizer and leader of the partisan movement in the occupied Ukraine in the Great Patriotic War. Major general (1943). Hero of the Soviet Union (May 18, 1942). Member of the CPSU from 1932.

Saburov served in the Red Army from 1931 to 1933 and then held soviet and managerial posts. He served in agencies of the People’s Commissariat of Internal Affairs from 1938. In the fall of 1941 he organized a partisan detachment that operated in Sumy and Briansk oblasts. In the spring of 1942 he assumed the command of the large partisan unit that grew from the detachment. Saburov was a member of the underground Central Committee of the CP(B) of the Ukraine from September 1942. In October 1942 the large unit, under Saburov’s command, set out on a raid into the Right-bank Ukraine and completed a 700-km march behind enemy lines. In November 1942, Saburov was appointed chief of staff of the partisan movement in Zhitomir Oblast. He was chief of the directorates of internal affairs of Drogobych and Zaporozh’e oblasts from 1944. Saburov was chief of the main directorate of the Ministry of Internal Affairs of the USSR from 1954. He was a deputy to the second through fourth convocations of the Supreme Soviet of the USSR.

Saburov was the author of Behind the Front Line (1955), Friends Travel the Same Roads (1963), The Forces Are Countless (1967), and Reconquered Spring (books 1–2, 1968). He was awarded two Orders of Lenin, the Order of the Red Banner, the Order of Suvorov Second Class, the Order of Bogdan Khmel’-nitskii First and Second Class, two Orders of the Patriotic War First Class, the Order of the Red Star, and various medals.