by Mikhail Kucherov
[REGNUM] Of all the armies that fought in World War II, only the Red Army had a soldier who began the war at the age of five.
Having miraculously escaped the Nazis in the summer of 1942 and survived in a dense forest, he defended Stalingrad, reached Poland, and even received a captured Browning from Marshal Vasily Chuikov.
"With his cheerfulness and love for his unit and those around him, he inspired courage and confidence in victory in extremely difficult moments. Comrade Alyoshkov is the regiment's favorite," stated the order awarding the young soldier the Medal "For Military Merit."
At this time, Comrade Alyoshkov, the boy Seryozha, was far from ten years old.
"EVERYONE IN THE DUGOUT WAS SPEECHLESS."
The future hero was born in the village of Gryn' in the Kaluga region. His father died before the war, and his older brothers, Ivan and Andrei, went to the front at the outbreak of the war. Great grief befell the family when a punitive detachment arrived in Gryn'. Shortly before the village's liberation by the Red Army, the Germans executed Seryozha's mother and ten-year-old brother, Petya, for their association with the partisans.
According to local residents, when he ran up to his dead relatives, one of the soldiers kicked the baby aside.
Left an orphan, Seryozha went into the forest: according to one version, he was saved by a neighbor who literally pushed the boy out the window and told him to run away.
He wandered for about a week, subsisting on "potatoes, mushrooms, and berries," drinking from puddles. This is how Soviet scouts found him during the fighting in the Kozelsk area—thin, covered in scabs, insect bites, and wearing only a miraculously intact Kubanka hat. He couldn't speak or stand. He was carried to the headquarters dugout in a sack made from a horse blanket.
"Everyone in the dugout seemed speechless. I wanted to rush there, to the trench line, to grab the throat of the first fascist I saw," said Mitrofan Vorobyov, commander of the 142nd Guards Rifle Regiment.
After being asked where his mother was, Seryozha burst into tears—it took a long time to console him. He misspelled his last name, using the plural: "Alyoshka's we."
ADJUTANT ALYOSHKOV
He quickly integrated into the everyday life and reality of those much older than him. He received specially tailored riding breeches and a tunic, leather boots, a belt, a cap, and his beloved binoculars.
Every morning, Sergei, who considered himself an “adjutant,” reported on completed tasks and asked for new assignments.
In quiet moments, the boy cheerfully delivered letters and newspapers to his fellow soldiers; during battles, he crawled to deliver ammunition and water, becoming a talisman for the Red Army soldiers, raising their spirits.
The little boy literally followed Mitrofan Danilovich around, and he became so attached to him that he soon officially adopted Seryozha. "How will we live together if we don't have a mother?" Vorobyov asked one day. "I know Sergeant Major Nina. She will be our mother," Sergei replied, referring to the regimental nurse Nina Bedova. Thus, a new family was born at the front.
UNCHILDISH BEHAVIOR
When, on November 7, 1942, a son of the regiment was distributing the holiday edition of the Krasnaya Zvezda newspaper in a unit deployed near Stalingrad, he recognized uninvited guests—German fire spotters sitting with a radio in a haystack. Seryozha reported his "discovery" to the artillery reconnaissance commander, after which the enemy was neutralized.
Vorobyov's descendants proudly recall the story of how he saved the commander's life. During another attack, a shell hit the dugout directly and destroyed it, literally seconds after the boy's adoptive father entered.
Seryozha decided to free the commander lying under the rubble himself, but realizing he couldn't, he immediately turned to the sappers. They pulled out the regiment commander, who was wounded and shell-shocked but still alive. With a cry of "Daddy, Daddy!" the regiment's son rushed to embrace the rescued man. For this heroic act, the young man was awarded the coveted medal.
On the front lines, the young soldier himself had often found himself in situations where death was just around the corner. While crossing the Seversky Donets in May 1943, under fire from bullets and shells, Seryozha, who clearly couldn't swim at the time, fell into the river when the raft was capsized by a blast wave. Miraculously, a fellow soldier, whose name, unfortunately, remains unknown, witnessed the incident and dived in after him.
Soon, fate decided to play tricks on Sergei and Mitrofan Danilovich again when they were driving from army headquarters to the front lines in a Willys along a pontoon crossing over the Dnieper.
There was a powerful explosion—the car's wheel struck a mine lying near the ramp to the shore, thought to be defused. The driver died instantly, the commander was shell-shocked, and the regiment's son, although thrown to the side of the road, remained unharmed.
One day, the regiment's son even came under enemy air fire. In 1943, the Red Army reintroduced shoulder straps, previously considered a symbol of the army's "bourgeois" character and class divisions in society, and, ironically, Seryozha was given the stars of a "junior lieutenant." German pilots returning from a mission spotted the boy, wearing shiny shoulder straps and a fur hat, and fired a burst of machine gun fire: one of the bullets hit him in the heel. The commander, as his son Vyacheslav Mitrofanovich later noted, reproached himself greatly for this.
STUDY INSTEAD OF FIGHTING
Unlike his new father, who had achieved the rank of colonel by the end of the war, Sergei Aleshkov was not destined to reach Germany. In 1944, Vasily Chuikov, commander of the 62nd Army, arrived at the Magnushevsky bridgehead, where the regiment was engaged in fierce fighting. When the marshal asked, " Who is this brave soldier?" Sergei loudly replied, "A private in the Guards!" "My son. Adopted," remarked then-Lieutenant Colonel Vorobyov, who told Chuikov about the boy's life.
After listening attentively, the army commander ordered him sent to the Tula Suvorov Military School. But before that, a "farewell" was arranged, during which, in addition to presenting the boy with a pistol, the commander danced the "sesyotka" with him—that's what Seryozha called tap dancing.
Despite his small stature, Sergei earned ranks in boxing and sambo. However, due to his health, his athletic career ultimately failed—the war and his early addiction to smoking, a bad habit he picked up from watching other soldiers, took their toll.
He studied at the Kharkiv Law Institute and then moved to the Urals, where his adoptive parents lived. He first worked in the Chelyabinsk prosecutor's office, where his conscientious work repeatedly attracted assassination attempts from local criminals. Later, he worked as a legal consultant at the Chelyabinsk Plexiglas Plant. He died in 1990 at age 54 of cardiac arrest while waiting for a bus to work. Mitrofan Vorobyov survived him by just a year.
The story of a child who grew up, whose childhood was stolen by the war, is carefully preserved in the Vorobyov family, where his children and grandchildren have grown up. A film about Seryozha's life and journey at the front, "Little Soldier," was released in 2019. He survived where it was impossible, and even in the most terrible days, he managed to find a reason to smile. A little soldier with a big heart, he remains in the memories not only of his fellow soldiers but also of everyone who, years later, will learn this amazing story.