‘Among the faded lines of the Combat Leaflet...’. Yury Inge

Abstract

The article is dedicated to the pre-war poet Yury Inge, who was killed at the very start of the German invasion of the USSR. A war correspondent during the Winter War (1939–1940), Inge joined the newspaper Krasnoznamyonniy Baltiyskiy Flot in 1941 at its headquarters at the new Soviet naval base in Tallinn. Inge took part in the so-called Tallinn disaster, a tragedy yet to be fully explained: the Soviets lost two-thirds of their Baltic Fleet ships during evacuation to Kronstadt. Inge was leaving on the icebreaker Valdemārs, when it was sunk by a naval mine placed by the Soviet military just days before. A witness account describes the poet, wearing a long black naval coat and equipped with a gas mask and a pistol, helping women and children into a lifeboat, while remaining on board of the damaged ship the entire time. Inge died before reaching his 36th birthday. The article offers a first estimation of the tragedy’s scale and lists all literary workers attached to the Baltic Fleet who met their end on the 28th–29th of August, 1941.