Andrey Borzenko

Andrey Andreyevich Borzenko (Андрей Андреевич Борзенко; December 4, 1920, Tashkent, USSR —  February 21, 1993, Tashkent, Uzbekistan) was a  Soviet boxer, Honored Trainer of Uzbekistan, Master of Sports, referee, two-time heavyweight boxing champion of the Uzbek SSR (1938, 1939).

The prototype of the main character of Georgy Sviridov’s novel The Ring Behind Barbed Wire.

Biograрhy
Borzenko was born in Tashkent in 1920.

He began boxing in the Sidney Jackson section in the mid-1930s. Twice, in 1938 and 1939, he won the heavyweight boxing championship of the Uzbek SSR.

He was called up to serve in the artillery unit of the Red Army on September 24, 1941, with the rank of Red Army soldier. Participated in hostilities and was wounded twice. He was captured during the retreat of Soviet troops across the Dnieper in 1941.

At first he was kept in a prisoner of war camp near Dresden, and after two escape attempts he was sent to the Buchenwald concentration camp.

The German officer who selected athletes for the Buchenwald amateur ring from among the newly arrived prisoners, having learned about Borzenko's sports past, forced him to participate in exhibition boxing fights for the entertainment of the camp staff. In total, before his liberation on April 11, 1945, Borzenko fought more than 80 fights in Buchenwald, winning all of them.

According to his son, after his release he served for some time in Smersh.

After the Great Patriotic War he returned to Tashkent. He graduated from the Tashkent Medical Academy, became a surgeon, and worked at the City Clinical Hospital No. 6 of Tashkent.

He was married and had two children  a son, Andrey, and a daughter, Olga.

Andrey Borzenko died in 1993. He was buried at the Botkin Cemetery in Tashkent.

In culture
Borzenko did not talk about his stay in the Buchenwald concentration camp for a long time. However, Georgy Sviridov, a writer and the first head of the USSR Boxing Federation, who had personally known Borzenko since 1947, persuaded him to make his life story public. In the book The Ring Behind Barbed Wire (1960), Sviridov wrote the heroic image of Andrey Borzenko (in the text of the book   Burzenko)   an active participant in the anti-fascist underground of Buchenwald, forced to enter the ring to stop beating defenseless comrades and give the underground members the opportunity to collect and test weapons.

In 2022, the documentary film Borzenko: Ring Behind Barbed Wire  was released (directed by  Aleksey Degtyarev and  Elena Moshtal-Geladze, narrated by Sergey Garmash).