Documentary story about the life of Semyon Kalabalin.
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Semyon Kalabalin is Anton Semyonovich Makarenko’s favorite student. This man seemed to have lived not one, but ten lives. In his youth, he was a bandit who miraculously escaped execution. Then a colony for juveniles, but not just a colony, but an institution of Anton Makarenko himself, a great teacher. Between the teacher and the student there was a bright duel, later so brilliantly described in the Pedagogical Poem. And the student, just yesterday an inveterate bandit, decides to devote himself to the cause of the teacher — the search for new methods of educating street children.
On his pedagogical path, he experienced the greatest grief — one of the difficult teenagers stabbed his three-year-old son with a knife. My father turned gray overnight, but he did not quit his job, teaching.
But this is only part of the life story of Semyon Kalabalin. In 1938 he was followed by the same people who made his students homeless. NKVD, interrogations, prison… He was accused under the terrible Article 58 — anti-Soviet propaganda among young people. A miracle saved Semyon from execution or camps.
He was released from prison on the eve of the war and soon landed in a school of saboteurs. They were dropped by parachute into the territory of Ukraine, and in the morning they were handed over to the Germans by local policemen. One day, a man in a German uniform arrived at the prisoner of war camp, who spoke Russian perfectly. He offered Kalabalin to become an agent of the Abwehr. Kalabalin nodded his head in agreement and told how he hated the Russians and all Soviet power. They believed him. Soon he was parachuted off a German plane in the vicinity of Nizhny Novgorod. He has documents in the name of Semyon Karev in his hands, and behind him is a walkie-talkie, with the key of which he is obliged to send cipher messages to Germany. Kalabalin immediately appeared at the local NKVD, where he was offered to play a double game. And the fiercest duel of two intelligence services began: German and Soviet — through him, Kalabalin. He skillfully disorients the German headquarters throughout the Battle of Stalingrad. His «information» is valued in Germany, recognizing as reliable, he is even awarded the «Iron Cross» — the highest award of valor.
And after the war, he again became a teacher. Two thousand orphans from Russia, Ukraine, Georgia consider him their father.