Malaya Zemlya

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Malaya Zemlya (Russian: Малая Земля, lit. "Minor Land") was a Soviet uphill outpost on Cape Myskhako (Russian: Мысхако) that was recaptured after fierce, bloody battles with the Germans during the Battle of Caucasus, on the night of 4 February 1943. The episode paved way to Soviet attack on German forces in Novorossiysk.

Cape Myskhako is still associated with a heroic stand made by the 800-strong contingent of the Soviet Naval Infantry against the Germans during the Great Patriotic War. The special forces were dropped during winter high storms by the Soviet Black Sea Fleet. After the unsuccessful landing attempt at Malajia Ozereevka. The landing at Malaya Zemlya was supposed to be a decoy, but after the landing at Bolshaia Ozereevka was lost in an ambush, the offensive plan was reworked and the landing site at Malaya Zemlya was made the main landing location. Upon landing to secure the beachhead they came under furious German counter-offensive, that utilized both the ground and airforces.

Against overwhelming forces, the marines held their ground, and the leader of the group Major Cesar Kunnikov (Tsesar Kunnikov, Цезарь Кунников) was mortally wounded, and was posthumously awarded the highest Soviet WWII title of the Hero of the Soviet Union. He is one of the few^{[citation needed]} publicly acknowledged Soviet-Jewish WWII heroes.

[edit] Brezhnev's book

Leonid Brezhnev, the future Soviet leader, served as a political commissar of the 18th Guards Army which went on to liberate the Crimean peninsula. The book Malaya Zemlya about the events of the war was published under Brezhnev's name in 1978. The book exaggerrated the role of the political commissar in raising the morale of the troops. In the early 1980s it was widely distributed throughout the Soviet Union and included in school curriculum.

According to various reports in the Russian press after the fall of the Soviet Union it was actually written by a group of ghostwriters, among them Alexander Chakovsky, editor-in-chief of the Literaturnaya Gazeta, and Konstantin Chernenko, who went on to become the leader of the Soviet Union.

The book was also adapted to film and theater. Aleksandra Pakhmutova wrote a song on the subject.