Russia's first memorial to power engineers - heroes of the Great Patriotic War was opened in Tula

The complex was built on the initiative of Pavel Livinsky, the General Director of Rosseti, and Alexey Dumin, the Governor of the Tula Region. It immortalized the memory of power engineers who fought on the fronts of the Great Patriotic War and provided electricity to the rear.

The opening ceremony was attended by Yuri Borisov, Deputy Prime Minister of the Russian Federation, Igor Shchegolev, Plenipotentiary of the Russian President in the Central Federal District, Alexei Dumin, the Governor of the Tula Region and Pavel Livinsky, the General Director of Rosseti.

The construction of the memorial began in 2019 in preparation for the celebration of the 75th anniversary of Victory. The project of the architectural solution was chosen by the employees of the power grid complex - 16,467 people took part in the online voting.

The 1-hectare complex consists of five sites dedicated to each year of the war. The central alley leads to an obelisk in the form of support for a high-voltage transmission line. Its height is 14.18 m - the same number of days the war lasted. There is the Eternal Flame in front of the obelisk, a part of which was delivered from Moscow from the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier.

The monument is crowned with the image of the Order of Victory, the highest award of the Great Patriotic War. There are thematic plot bas-reliefs and granite steles with the names of 72 power engineers on both sides of it. Among them are two Heroes of the Soviet Union who worked in Mosenergo, the successor of which became the Moscow United Power Grid Company and now PJSC "Rosseti Moscow Region". They are Zaitsev Dmitry Alexandrovich, an electrician of the laboratory for repairing electric meters, and Runov Boris Alexandrovich, an electrician of the 5th district of the air high-voltage networks.

Also on the memorable granite steles immortalized the names of 10 veterans of the "Rosseti Moscow Region" company - Cavaliers of the Order of Glory and the Order of the Patriotic War: Andrey Ananyevich Ponomarev, Nikolay Pavlovich Blokhin, Pyotr Stepanovich Korolkov, Nikolay Dmitrievich Piskaev, Grigory Ivanovich Shuvalov, Ilya Ilyich Minkin, Alexander Konstantinovich Chugunov, Dmitry Markovich Shurko, Nikolay Ivanovich Khovansky and Alexey Yakovlevich Vilkov, Full Cavalier of the Order of Glory of first, second and third class.

"During the war, many industry workers had to become soldiers. Power engineers, who remained in their places, had to go through no less hard times. This is the first massive memorial in Russia, dedicated to the exploits of all front-line power engineers and homefront workers. It is symbolic that it is located in Tula. After all, the power supply of the Armory Capital was maintained even during the days of heavy combat," said Pavel Livinsky.

Currently, the "Rosseti Moscow Region" company supervises 20 monuments of the Great Patriotic War in Moscow and the Moscow region. On June 22, 2013 at the initiative, a monument was erected in the village of Nefedyevo in the Krasnogorsk district to the "Defenders of Moscow - the specialists of engineering troops and Mosenergo", which became part of the memorial complex "Moscow Line of Defense" and dedicated to the feat of military engineers who created electrical fences at the approaches to the capital.