Kronid Oboyshchikov was a Kuban poet, veteran of the Great Patriotic War, with more than 30 poetry collections depicting events, personalities, atmosphere of the era.
The name of the boy born in a rural village on the Don river just as the revolution triumphed in the South of Russia, this amazing name Kronid - the Son of Time - accurately defined his life path. He absorbed the romance of building a new life, which called him to the sky, to defend his beloved homeland.

Even if one does not know the beginning of Kronid Alexandrovich's biography, it can be reconstructed by simple and clear, absolutely ingenuous verses.

From the fifth grade onwards, the future poet's school years were spent in Kuban - in Bryukhovetskaya, Kropotkin, Armavir, Novorossiysk. The first poem of eighth-grader Oboyshchikov was published in the newspaper “Armavir Commune” in 1936. It was dedicated to the high-altitude balloon. Soon after graduating from high school, Kronid entered the Krasnodar Military Aviation Academy.

In the autumn of 1940, in the rank of junior lieutenant, he was sent to the bomber regiment of the Odessa Military District. As a career officer of the Air Force Oboyshchikov came to face the war on the South-Western Front. As a navigator of SU-2 aircraft he made more than 30 combat sorties in the days of the defense of Kiev.
Soon he was transferred to the Northern Fleet aviation. He provided cover for Allied convoys. Those who saw Alexei German's movie “Torpedo Bomber” will know what it means. By the fall of 1944, Kronid Oboyshchikov made 34 successful combat sorties, personally overpowered 11 aircraft, each time leading a group of 6-11 winged vehicles. The lives of his fellow soldiers were the price paid for these victories:

His poems about the war read like diary entries. Brotherhood at the battlefront, the lure of heights, the endless love for the homeland reclaimed at such a terrible cost - these were the main themes of Oboyshchikov's poems with which he did not part until the very end.

For his military services Kronid Aleksandrovich was awarded two orders of the Patriotic War of the II degree, the Order of the Red Star and seventeen medals.
The beginning of the creative biography of Oboyshchikov belongs to the postwar years, when the poet began to systematically publish in army and navy newspapers, in the magazines “Znamya”, “Soviet Warrior”.

Later in her recommendation for his admission to the USSR Writers' Council Rimma Kzakova will write:

Until 1960, K.A. Oboyshchikov served in the Baltic, Northern and Pacific Fleet in the Air Force and Air Defense units.

Mikhail Dudin wrote about him:

Following the poet's first collection of poems “ Trembling Happiness” (1963), more than thirty books by Oboyshchikov have been published, seven of them being for children. His works were translated into Adygean, Ukrainian, Estonian, Estonian, Tatar and Polish.

Of course, the main subject of his books was a very real connection to the people and events of the war years. This connection was one that recognized neither geographical nor temporal boundaries. It was something that could not be forgotten, as his 1991 poetic letter to Richard Squires - a participant of the Allied convoys, head of the international club of sailors “Northern Russia”, and other poems testify.

As a retired lieutenant colonel, on the eve of his 90th birthday in March 2010, Kronid Aleksandrovich Oboyshchikov was invited to England for a historical meeting with the participants of the northern naval convoys. But he was affected not only by their heroism and fate. For many years as a member of a team of authors he searched for materials about Kuban heroes of the Soviet Union. These materials were used in the creation of albums “Golden Stars of Kuban”, four-volume anthology of biographies “Kuban glorious sons” and three-volume “Poetic wreath to the Heroes of Kuban”, as well as in the documentary films “Roads of fathers”, “Military doctors” and “Son of a combatant.
Kronid Aleksandrovich believed in serving their memory and did so through his numerous meetings with readers, constantly cooperating with the Pushkin Krasnodar Regional Universal Scientific Library and other libraries, as well as other libraries, veterans' councils, schools and universities. This was the front line which the poet did not leave for as long as he had enough strength.