The army general who survived Kolyma, took Berlin, and testified to Stalin-era repression
Told of the wartime case in which he had timber shipped out in defiance of a ban to supply pit props for the Donbas mines, Stalin is reported to have said 'Only the grave will correct Gorbatov' and then closed the matter because no personal gain was involved.
Born in 1891 into a peasant family in Pakhotino, Vladimir Governorate, he entered the Imperial Russian Army in 1912 and in World War I won two Crosses of St. George, rising to senior non-commissioned officer. He joined the Red Army in 1919 and in the Civil War commanded a cavalry regiment and a Bashkir cavalry brigade; removed from his post in 1937 and arrested in 1938, he was tortured yet refused to admit guilt. Convicted in May 1939 and sentenced to 15 years at the Kolyma camp, he was released in March 1941, then led the 3rd Army from 1943 to the war's end and became commandant of Berlin in 1945. He later commanded the Airborne Forces and the Baltic Military District and became General of the Army in 1955; his 1964 Novy Mir memoir made him one of the first Soviet state figures to describe the Great Terror in detail.
Activities and affiliations
Career Timeline
- 1912–1817th Chernigov Hussar Regiment, WWI — Crosses of St. George 3rd & 4th class, Medals of St. George
- 1919–21Joined Red Army; CO 58th Cavalry Regiment, Bashkir Cavalry Brigade — Order of the Red Banner
- 1933–37CO 4th Turkestan Mountain Cavalry Division, then 2nd Cavalry Division (Kombrig 1935)
- 1938–41Arrested, tortured; sentenced 15 years Kolyma (1939); rehabilitated and released March 1941
- 1941–43CO 226th Rifle Division; Dep. CO 24th Army; CO 20th Guards Rifle Corps
- 1943–45CO 3rd Army — Orel, Bryansk, Bagration, East Prussia, Berlin; Hero of the Soviet Union (Apr 1945)
- 1945–46Commandant of Berlin; CO 5th Shock Army; Chief of Soviet Military Administration, Mecklenburg
- 1950–58C-in-C Airborne Forces (1950–54); C-in-C Baltic Military District (1954–58); Army General 1955
- 1958–73Inspector-Counsellor, Group of Inspector-Generals, MoD; memoir Years Off My Life published 1964
Related historical events
1937-1941: Dismissal, Torture and Kolyma
In 1937, after marshals and commanders were accused in the 'military-fascist conspiracy', Gorbatov spoke publicly at a meeting in defence of his arrested corps commander Grigoryev, saying he did not believe in his guilt. He was relieved of divisional command and soon expelled from the party by the staff party organization 'for ties with enemies of the people', the typical path of the Great Terror in the military leadership.
He was unexpectedly restored to the VKP(b) in March 1938 and appointed deputy commander of the 6th Cavalry Corps, commanded by Zhukov, but in October of that year he was dismissed to the reserve and, on the first night after arriving in Moscow to clarify the reasons, was arrested. In his memoirs he later recorded that at the Lubyanka and then Lefortovo prison he was put through five 'interrogations with passion' at intervals of two to three days, sometimes being carried back to his cell on a stretcher. He refused to confess, telling his cellmates he would rather die than slander himself and others. His later account naming his interrogator as Stolbunsky, and the tracking down after the memoir's publication of a man living in Moscow who was not prosecuted but only expelled from the party at a housing-office meeting, are retrospective recollections rather than archival findings. The trial lasted four to five minutes. The court verified his name, patronymic, year and place of birth and asked why he had not confessed, then on 8 May 1939 sentenced him under Article 58 of the RSFSR Criminal Code to 15 years in prison and camp plus 5 years' loss of rights. After waiting in Butyrka prison, prisoners were loaded into the holds of the steamship Dzhurma for Magadan, and he was sent to the gold-bearing Maldyak mine on Kolyma, part of the North-Eastern Corrective Labour Camp (Sevvostlag): a newly founded, unbuilt and overcrowded camp where convicts under Article 58 were given the heaviest work and where few survived more than two to three months.
At Maldyak his legs began to swell and his teeth to loosen. A convict medical orderly registered him as an invalid and made him a watchman at a summer washing site; later certified fully disabled, he was transferred to a camp 23 km from Magadan, which he credited with saving him from certain death. He reached it in late March 1940 and worked at logging. In August 1940 he was unexpectedly summoned to Moscow for review of his case, arriving only on 25 December, and again entered Butyrka prison. By then he weighed 64 kg at a height of 177 cm.
His conviction was quashed after his wife repeatedly petitioned the NKVD, the procuracy, the Supreme Court and the Defence Commissariat. On 20 March 1940 she received notice that the plenum of the Supreme Court had annulled the sentence and ordered the case reviewed, and Marshal Budyonny's testimony that he knew Gorbatov as an honest commander and communist played a large part in the decision. A historian of the repressions places the review within the wave of rehabilitations of commanders that began in 1939 amid the failures of the Soviet-Finnish war, and notes that Gorbatov was one of only 34 commanders from komkor to kombrig identified by Nikolai Cherushev who were unjustly repressed and gave no incriminating testimony.
He was released on 5 March 1941, the day he called his 'second birthday', and immediately reinstated in the Red Army. Reporting his return to Marshal Timoshenko as coming from 'a long and dangerous business trip', he was first sent to a sanatorium in Kislovodsk to recover and only afterwards received the appointment as deputy commander of the 25th Rifle Corps near Kiev.
After the war his camp past became testimony. Shalamov, who followed him on the same Kolyma road, called Gorbatov's memoirs 'the most truthful, the most honest about Kolyma that I have read'. According to Shalamov, the invalid Gorbatov passed from the hospital on the 23rd kilometre of the Magadan highway to a rescue fishing detail on the Okhotsk coast and worked on the Ola. The memoir 'Years and Wars' appeared in the journal Novy Mir in 1964 and as a book from the military publisher Voenizdat in 1965; because this came after Brezhnev's rise and the winding down of de-Stalinization, the parts touching the repressions were substantially cut by the censors, and a fuller second edition appeared only in 1989, after Gorbatov's death.