With the participation of the Council of War and Labor Veterans of Mosmetrostroy, a collection of documentary stories about three heroes of the Soviet Union who went to the fronts of the Great Patriotic War in 1941 from the military registration and enlistment office of the city of Kandalaksha, Murmansk region, was created and published on the Internet. One of the Heroes is Ivan Vasilyevich Shabunin, a metro builder.
In essence, this is a scientific research - the restoration of the names of Heroes and their biographies, which was scrupulously carried out by local historian Vladimir Sergeevich Braersky.
In 1940, a group of metro construction workers was sent to the city of Kandalaksha to build cascades of the Niva hydroelectric power stations. Among them was Ivan Vasilyevich Shabunin, a Stakhanovite tunneler. There is a note about his impact work in the newspaper “Polyarnaya Pravda” for 1941, which states that the link team of drifters, driller I. Shabunin, fulfilled the norm for drilling the mine shaft by 737 percent (mine No. 1 of Metrostroy at Niva HPP-III: construction manager Medvedev, chief engineer Stepko, chief mechanic Kuraev).
Ivan Shabunin was mobilized into the Red Army in June 1941, selflessly fought on the fronts of the Great Patriotic War, and was wounded four times.
Sergeant Shabunin especially distinguished himself on October 13, 1944 during the Petsamo-Kirkines offensive operation. His feat is described, in particular, in the book “Heroes of Metro Builders. Front and Rear”, released by Mosmetrostroy in 2018. For this feat, Ivan Vasilyevich was awarded the title of Hero of the Soviet Union.
On October 23, Shabunin was seriously wounded in a fierce battle, as a result of which he lost his leg and was discharged from the army in February 1945.
Having healed his wounds, the courageous war invalid returned to Mosmetrostroy, worked at Woodworking Plant No. 9 of Metrostroy, and in the 1950s, among the ten thousand communists, he was sent by the chairman to a lagging collective farm near Moscow. And he also successfully coped with this difficult work.
Before his departure in 1978, Ivan Shabunin participated in the public life of Mosmetrostroy and in the work of the Veterans Council.
You can get acquainted with the biography of an extraordinary person - a metro builder, Hero of the Soviet Union atlink.