Exactly 120 years ago, on September 30 (September 18, old style), 1895, Alexander Mikhailovich Vasilevsky was born in the small village of Novaya Golchikha in the Kineshemsky district of the Kostroma province (today as part of the city of Vichuga, Ivanovo region). The future Marshal of the Soviet Union was born into the family of an Orthodox priest. A talented general staff officer, Marshal Vasilevsky was a real conductor of the fronts of the Great Patriotic War. His day-to-day work and enormous amount of rough work have been at the heart of many of the Red Army's brilliant victories. One of the best senior strategic officers, Alexander Vasilevsky did not gain such a resounding fame as the victorious marshal as Georgy Zhukov, but his role in the victory over Nazi Germany is hardly less significant.
Alexander Mikhailovich was born into a large family. His father, Mikhail Alexandrovich Vasilevsky, was the church choir director and psalm-reader of the Nikolsky church of the same faith (the direction in the Old Believers). Mother Nadezhda Ivanovna Vasilevskaya was raising 8 children. The future marshal was the fourth oldest among his brothers and sisters. The initially famous future Soviet military leader chose the spiritual path, following the example of his father. In 1909 he graduated from the Kineshma Theological School, after which he entered the Kostroma Theological Seminary. The diploma of this seminary allowed him to continue his education in any secular educational institution. Vasilevsky graduated from the seminary at the height of the First World War in January 1915, and his life path changed dramatically. Vasilevsky did not find a serious urge to become a priest, but decided to go to defend the country.
Since February 1915, Alexander Vasilevsky has been part of the Russian imperial army. In June 1915, he completed accelerated courses (4 months) at the famous Moscow Alekseevsky military school, he was awarded the rank of ensign. Vasilevsky spent almost two years at the front. Without normal rest, vacations, the future great commander matured in battles, his character of a warrior was forged. Vasilevsky managed to take part in the famous Brusilov breakthrough in May 1916. In 1917, Alexander Vasilevsky, already in the rank of staff captain, served as battalion commander on the Southwestern and Romanian fronts. In the conditions of the total collapse of the army after the October Revolution, Vasilevsky quits the service and returns to his home.
Alexander Vasilevsky August 1, 1928
Returning home, he worked for some time in the field of education. In June 1918, he was appointed instructor of general education in the Ugletskaya volost (Kineshemsky district, Kostroma province). And since September 1918, he worked as a primary school teacher in the villages of Verkhovye and Podyakovlevo, Tula province (today the territory of the Oryol region).
He was drafted again for military service in April 1919, now into the Red Army. The head captain of the tsarist army, in fact, begins a new military career as a sergeant, becoming an assistant platoon commander. However, the knowledge and experience gained make itself felt, and soon enough he grows to the assistant regiment commander. Vasilevsky has been a participant in the civil war since January 1920, as an assistant commander of the 429th rifle regiment in the 11th and 96th rifle divisions, he fought on the Western Front. He fought against gangs operating on the territory of the Samara and Tula provinces, the detachments of Bulak-Balakhovich. He took part in the Soviet-Polish war as an assistant commander of the 96th Infantry Division from the 15th Army. But then Vasilevsky could not rise above the post of regiment commander for a long 10 years, most likely, his past affected.
The long-awaited leap in the fate of the future marshal took place in 1930. As a result of the autumn maneuvers, Vladimir Triandafillov, who was one of the greatest theoreticians of the operational art of the Red Army (he was the author of the so-called "deep operation" - the main operational doctrine of the Soviet armed forces up to the Great Patriotic War), drew attention to the capable commander. Unfortunately, Triandafillov himself, who at that time was the deputy chief of staff of the Red Army, died in a plane crash on July 12, 1931. However, before that, he managed to spot the talented regiment commander Alexander Vasilevsky and promoted him along the headquarters line. Thanks to him, Vasilevsky got into the combat training system of the Red Army, where he was able to concentrate on generalizing and analyzing the experience of using troops.
Starting in March 1931, the future marshal served in the Combat Training Directorate of the Red Army as an assistant to the head of the sector and the 2nd department. From December 1934, he was head of the combat training department of the Volga Military District. In April 1936, he was sent to study at the newly created Academy of the General Staff of the Red Army, but after completing the first course of the academy, he was unexpectedly appointed head of the logistics department at the same academy. It is noteworthy that the former head of the department, I. I. Trutko, was repressed at that time.
In October 1937, a new appointment awaited him - the head of the operational training department of the Operations Directorate of the General Staff. In 1938, by order of the People's Commissar of Defense of the USSR, Alexander Mikhailovich Vasilevsky was granted the rights of a General Staff graduate from the Academy. From May 21, 1940, Vasilevsky served as deputy chief of the Operations Directorate of the General Staff. If, in the words of another Soviet Marshal Boris Shaposhnikov, the General Staff was the brain of the army, then its operational control was the brain of the General Staff itself. Operational control was the place where all the options for conducting combat operations were planned and calculated.
In the spring of 1940, Vasilevsky headed the government commission on the demarcation of the Soviet-Finnish border, and was also involved in the development of action plans in case of war with Germany. After the start of the Great Patriotic War, already on June 29, 1941, Boris Mikhailovich Shaposhnikov again became Chief of the General Staff of the Red Army, who took the place of Georgy Konstantinovich Zhukov, who had left this post with a considerable scandal, who was uncomfortable in the staff walls and all the time wanted to break out to the front line closer to the troops. On August 1, 1941, Alexander Vasilevsky was appointed deputy chief of the General Staff, as well as the head of the Operations Directorate. Thus, one of the most fruitful officer tandems in the military administration of the Soviet Union during the war was launched. Already in 1941, Vasilevsky played one of the leading roles in organizing the defense of Moscow, as well as the subsequent counteroffensive of the Soviet troops.
It is worth noting that the former colonel of the tsarist army Boris Shaposhnikov was the only military man to whom Stalin himself always addressed exclusively by his first name and patronymic, and who, regardless of the position he held, was a personal adviser to the Soviet leader on military issues, enjoying the boundless trust of Stalin …However, at that time Shaposhnikov was already 60 years old, he was ill, and the unbearable load of the first months of the Great Patriotic War seriously undermined his health. Therefore, more and more often Vasilevsky was the main "on the farm". Finally, in May 1942, after the hardest disasters that befell the Red Army in the south - the boiler near Kharkov and the collapse of the Crimean Front, Shaposhnikov resigns. His place at the head of the General Staff is occupied by Aleksandr Vasilevsky, who officially takes up his new post only on June 26, 1942, before that he had been running along the fronts from north to south.
Alexander Vasilevsky accepts the surrender of Major General Alfon Hitter. Vitebsk, June 28, 1944
By that time, he was already a colonel general. In his new position, he received what is called a complete set in his hands: the disaster near Kharkov, the breakthrough of German troops to Stalingrad, the fall of Sevastopol, the disaster of Vlasov's 2nd shock army near the town of Myasnoy Bor. However, Vasilevsky pulled out. He was one of the creators of the plan for the Red Army counter-offensive in the Battle of Stalingrad, took part in the development and coordination of some other strategic operations. Already in February 1943, after the victory at Stalingrad, Vasilevsky became Marshal of the Soviet Union, setting a kind of record - in the rank of Army General, Alexander Vasilevsky spent less than one month.
The modest chief of the General Staff did an excellent job with the poorly visible, but very large-scale work of the conductor of a huge orchestra, which was the army in action. He made a great contribution to the development of Soviet military art, personally taking part in the planning of many operations. On behalf of the Supreme Command Headquarters, he coordinated the actions of the Steppe and Voronezh fronts during the Battle of Kursk. Supervised the planning and implementation of strategic operations for the liberation of Donbass, Northern Tavria, Crimea, the Belarusian offensive operation. On July 29, 1944, Marshal Alexander Vasilevsky was awarded the title of Hero of the Soviet Union for exemplary performance of the Supreme Command's assignments on the front of the fight against the Nazi invaders.
But you shouldn't think that Vasilevsky spent all his time at headquarters. In May 1944, after the capture of Sevastopol, he was even slightly wounded when a staff car was blown up by a mine. And in February 1945, for the first time in the war, he personally led one of the fronts. He several times asked to be relieved of his post in order to personally work in the troops. Stalin hesitated, because he did not want to let go of the chief of the General Staff, which he was used to, but in February the tragic news of the death of the commander of the 3rd Belorussian Front Ivan Chernyakhovsky comes, after which Stalin gives his consent. Leaving another talented officer, Aleksey Antonov, at the "helm" of the General Staff, Vasilevsky leads the 3rd Belorussian Front, directly carrying out the operational and strategic leadership of a large military formation. It was he who led the assault on Koenigsberg.
Alexander Vasilevsky (left) on the front line near Sevastopol, May 3, 1944
Back in the fall of 1944, Vasilevsky was given the task of calculating the necessary forces and means for a possible war with Japan. It was under his leadership that, already in 1945, a detailed plan for the Manchurian strategic offensive operation was drawn up. On July 30 of the same year, Alexander Mikhailovich was appointed commander-in-chief of the Soviet troops in the Far East. On the eve of a large-scale offensive, Vasilevsky personally visited the starting positions of his troops, got acquainted with the units entrusted to him, and discussed the situation with the commanders of corps and armies. During these meetings, the time frames for fulfilling the main tasks, in particular, reaching the Manchurian Plain, were clarified and reduced. It took the Soviet and Mongolian units only 24 days to defeat the millionth Kwantung Army of Japan.
The march of the Soviet troops "through the Gobi and Khingan", which Western historians received the definition of "August storm" is still being studied in the military academies of the world, as an excellent example of precisely built and implemented logistics. Soviet troops (more than 400 thousand people, 2,100 tanks and 7,000 guns) were transferred from the west to a theater of military operations that was rather poor in terms of communications and deployed on the spot, carrying out long marches under its own power, passing 80-90 kilometers on peak days without major delays due to a perfectly thought out and implemented supply and repair system.
On September 8, 1945, Marshal Alexander Vasilevsky was awarded the second Gold Star medal for his skillful leadership of Soviet troops in the Far East of the country during the short-lived campaign against Japan, and he became twice Hero of the Soviet Union. After the end of the war, Vasilevsky returns to the leadership of the General Staff, and then heads the military leadership of the country. Before him, the post of defense minister was occupied by Nikolai Bulganin, who, although he wore marshal weather on his shoulders, was a party functionary, not a military leader. Before them, the People's Commissariat of Defense was personally headed by Joseph Stalin. The Soviet leader was suspicious of the "Victory Marshals" and the fact that it was Alexander Vasilevsky who eventually received the War Ministry spoke volumes.
Joseph Stalin clearly saw the marshal as a replacement for Shaposhnikov, who died in 1945, at the post of conditional "leader's consultant No. 1". At the same time, all the motives of Stalin, according to the traditions of that era, remained behind the scenes. On the one hand, Alexander Vasilevsky, like Stalin, was once a seminarian. On the other hand, he was the first student of Boris Shaposhnikov, whom he respected, who during the war proved his ability to work independently at the highest level.
One way or another, under Joseph Stalin, the career of Marshal Vasilevsky went uphill, and after his death it began to crumble. A step back took place literally in the very first days after the death of the leader, when Bulganin again became the Minister of Defense of the USSR. At the same time, Vasilevsky did not have a relationship with Nikita Khrushchev, who demanded that all military men disown Stalin, but Vasilevsky, like some Soviet military leaders, did not. Alexander Vasilevsky, who of the military leaders who lived in those years, most likely more and more often than others personally communicated with Stalin during the Great Patriotic War, simply could not afford to fool around, saying that the leader was planning military operations almost according to a pack from cigarettes "Belomor". And this despite the fact that the role of Joseph Stalin himself in the history of the Soviet Union, Alexander Vasilevsky assessed is far from unambiguous. In particular, he criticized the repressions against senior command personnel, which had been going on since 1937, calling these repressions one of the possible reasons for the weakness of the Red Army in the initial period of the war.
The result of this behavior of Marshal Vasilevsky was that at first he became Deputy Minister of Defense "for military science", and in December 1957 he retired. A little later, he will become a member of the "paradise group" of inspectors general of the USSR Ministry of Defense. In 1973, Alexander Mikhailovich published a book of memoirs, which was quite rich in descriptions, entitled "The Work of a Lifetime", in which he described in detail, but rather dryly, about the work he had done during the war. At the same time, until the end of his days, the marshal refused to shoot a film about himself or write additional biographies, arguing that he had already written everything in his book. Vasilevsky passed away on December 5, 1977 at the age of 82. The urn with his ashes was walled up in the Kremlin wall on Red Square.
