Yekaterinburg hosted a ceremony of the Memory Watch Handover «We Are Millions of Panfilov Guardsmen» at the monument to Marshal of the Soviet Union Georgy Zhukov on Feb. 16. The event was held as part of the rally devoted to the heroic feat of the Panfilov guardsmen who died defending Moscow in November 1941.
The International Memory Watch was launched in October 2015 in Orenburg. After that, the flag traveled to Chelyabinsk, Novossibirsk and Almaty. In Almaty, the flag was handed to Yekaterinburg by the granddaughters of the legendary Commander of the 316th Infantry Division Ivan Panfilov.
Yekaterinburg became the fifth city to take part in the watch. The watch will end in Moscow in the autumn of 2016 marking the 75th anniversary of the Red Army counter-offensive around Moscow.
The ceremony was attended by the heads of the Ural Federal District and the Sverdlovsk oblast, leadership of the Central Military District, representatives of the diplomatic corps, diaspora of the peoples of Kazakhstan and Central Asia, veterans and non-governmental organizations and members of a search group Styx of the Ural State Pedagogical University.
During the event, the head of the Sverdlovsk division of the All-Russian Movement Search Movement of Russia Tatyana Khardina handed over to the relatives archival documents and the medallion of soldier Peter Yabekov, born in 1919, a native of the Nizhneserginsk region of the Sverdlovsk oblast, who was considered missing. His remains were found by a search group Pobeda (victory) in the village of Solomino of the Rzhevsk region of the Tver oblast.