order of Hero of the Soviet Union occurred on August 6, 1941; they were given to detachment commanders Pavlovsky and Bumazhkov. Throughout 1941, the core of the partisan movement consisted of the straggling remains of the Red Army units destroyed in Operation Barbarossa, personnel of the destruction battalions, and local Communist Komsomol and Soviet apparatchiks. The most common unit of the period was the detachment. The "seed" partisan detachments, diversionist and organizational groups were actively formed and inserted into German-occupied territories beginning in the summer of 1941. Urban underground groups were formed as a force complementing the activities of partisan units, which operated in rural terrains. Organization As a controlling body, a network of underground Communist structures was actively developed on German-occupied territories, and it received an influx of specially picked Communist activists. By the end of 1941, more than two thousand partisan detachments (with more than 90,000 personnel) operated in German-occupied territories. However, the activities of the partisan forces weren't centrally coordinated or logistically provided for until spring of 1942. In order to coordinate partisan operations, the Central Headquarters of the Partisan Movement, headed by Panteleimon Ponomarenko, the Russian-born former head of the Byelorussian Soviet Socialist Republic, was organised on May 30, 1942. The Staff had its liaisons in the Military Councils of the fronts and armies. The territorial Staffs were subsequently created, dealing with the partisan movement in the respective Soviet Republics and in the occupied provinces of the Soviet Russia. Later, the NKVD, SMERSH and GRU began to train special groups of future partisans (effectively special forces units) in the rear and dropping them in the occupied territories. The candidates for these groups were chosen among volunteers from regular Red Army, the NKVD's Internal Troops, and Soviet sportsmen. When dropped behind German lines, the groups were to organize and guide the local self-established partisan units. Radio operators and intelligence gathering officers were the essential members of each group since amateur fighters could not be trusted with these tasks. Some commanders of these special units (like Dmitry Medvedev) later became well-known partisan leaders. Logistics difficulties The Soviet authorities considered Belarus to be of the utmost importance to the development of the Soviet partisan war from the very beginning. The main factors were its geography, with many dense forests and swamps, and its strategic position on the communications going from West to Moscow. In fact, Belorussian Communist bodies in