Bondarenko, Aleksei

Born July 30 (Aug. 12), 1911, in the village of Pogromets, Kursk Oblast; died Dec. 14,1956, in Tambov. One of the organizers of the partisan movement. Hero of the Soviet Union (Sept. 1, 1942). Member of the CPSU from 1932. Born into a peasant family.

While secretary of the Trubchevsk Raion committee of the All-Union Communist Party (Bolshevik) at the beginning of the Great Patriotic War of 1941–45, Bondarenko organized a partisan detachment; in the years 1941–43 he was commissar of the united partisan detachments of Briansk Oblast and one of the leaders of the partisan movement in the Briansk forests. In 1950 he became first secretary of the Briansk Oblast committee and in 1955, secretary of the Tambov Oblast Committee of the CPSU. At the Nineteenth Congress of the CPSU (1952) he was elected a candidate member of the CPSU Central Committee. He was awarded the Order of Lenin and medals.