On July 3, the motorized rally took place at the Zmievskaya Balka memorial complex in the capital of the Don. The next point on the route will be the hero city of Tula. In 1941, the defenders of the city held back the advance of Guderian’s army for 45 days, preventing the Nazis from reaching Moscow. Learning about the heroic past of Tula will be the first major event on the path of patriotic action.
“29 people left Rostov – they are students of the Rostov State University of Transport, activists of youth organisations, representatives of the United Russia party,” the coordinator of the movement, Ksenia Kompaniets, told RG.
The rally route will take in the cities of Tula, Rzhev, Pskov, Vitebsk, Brest, Minsk, Grodno and Moscow. Memorial rallies and meetings with veterans’ organisations will be held in all cities. The key moment of the rally will be the musical theatre programme “From War to Peace”.
“We have been carrying out our actions for several years,” said Ksenia Kompaniets. – In 2019, our car rally ended in Belgrade, the capital of Serbia. In 2020, despite all the difficulties related to the pandemic, we dedicated the car rally to our outstanding commander and statesman Alexander Nevsky, whose birthday the country celebrated in 2021.
The Paths of Glory: Our Story movement is constantly expanding the geography of cooperation, adding new directions, including outside Russia.
“Today we saw off the guys from the Zmievskaya Balka memorial and I had the idea to introduce them to our patriotic youth search organizations in Rostov-on-Don and Kyrgyzstan,” Viktor Kharchenko, deputy head of the representative office of the Russian Foreign Ministry in the Rostov region, told RG. – As part of my job, I worked in Kyrgyzstan for many years and I know that in this country there is a very strong wing of the youth search team. I think that this cooperation will definitely be fruitful.
In the Rostov region, the diplomat said, search teams recently discovered the remains of about 30 Red Army soldiers from Kyrgyzstan. The joint work of the search teams could become a prelude to joint actions of the patriotic associations of the two countries.
The campaign “Paths of Glory – Our History” has been held since 2016 at the initiative of Rostov-on-Don youth with the help of state diplomats and with the support of the Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Rossotrudnichestvo, the Government of the Rostov Region, the Rostov City Duma, the Rostov-on-Don Administration, the Command of the Southern Military District, the Chamber of Officers of the Southern Military District and the Rostov State Transport University.
