Thank you to Lyric1 for finding me the info for this skin.
This is the Yak-3 Major Sergei Shirov, CO of the 267th Fighter Aviation Regiment, flew in 1945. The regimental and divisional tail markings are painted on the tail, his numerous award ribbons and a HSU medal on the nose, while behind the cockpit is what appears to be art featuring an eagle savaging an ass-eared Joseph Goebbels.
At the start of the war in June 1941 Shirov was a Junior Lieutenant flying I-16s with the 87th Regiment. Over the next year he was transferred between several regiments and flew the Mig-3 and Yak-1 while amassing a score of 14 kills and another three shared. From late 1942 he had served as a training instructor for the 236th Fighter Division, teaching pilots better combat tactics while still regularly flying combat sorties. In mid- 1944 he was given command of the 267th Regiment and by the end of the war he had added another four kills and one shared to his tally. He had received numerous decorations including Hero of the Soviet Union and the Orders of Lenin, Red Banner, Kutuzov, Alexander Nevsky, Patriotic War, Red Star and the Yugoslav Order of the Partisan Star.
His war record would not save him from the fate that awaited him post war however. In 1944 Lavrentiy Beria, head of the NKVD, had forced Shirov's beautiful wife Sophia to become his mistress. This abuse continued post war and in 1949 an outraged Shirov protested publicly. To save his life senior officers dismissed him from his post in the Air Force and sent him away from Moscow to head a flying club in far off Tashkent. A further public outburst though led to him being tried on trumped up charges, stripped of his Hero of the Soviet Union award and sentenced to 25 years in a gulag. He was released in 1954 following the deaths of Stalin and Beria but he was a broken man from his harsh treatment in the gulag and died two years later. Only in 1988 after a public campaign was Shirov's Hero of the Soviet Union title restored.
