Aleksandr Mikhailovich Vasilevsky

Vasilevsky's historical importance lies not only in commanding armies at the front. From the interwar period he worked to connect troop training with staff practice, helping translate the principles of deep operations and cooperation among infantry, artillery, tanks, and aviation into manuals and instruction. In the early 1930s he served in the Red Army's Combat Training Directorate, contributing to guidance on deep combined-arms battle and staff service, then studied at the General Staff Academy founded in 1936 before moving into operational planning.

This career unfolded under the destructive conditions of the Great Purge. The vacuum in the command cadres accelerated his promotion, but his work was more than the filling of vacant posts. During the 1941 Battle of Moscow he led the small General Staff operations group in the capital, assessing reports from the fronts and converting Stavka decisions into operational directives. The method depended on continual reporting and adjustment, linking plans made at headquarters to command in the field.

After becoming Chief of the General Staff in June 1942, Vasilevsky worked with Zhukov to shape the Stalingrad counteroffensive and later coordinated fronts as Stavka representative in the campaigns at Kursk, in Belorussia, and in the Crimea. His strength was less a solitary hero's battlefield drama than the organizational ability to bring multiple armies and fronts under a common operational purpose. He is therefore best understood not as the single maker of Soviet victory, but as a leading representative of a staff system that combined industry, mobilization, intelligence, and frontline command in strategic planning.

Aleksandr Vasilevsky was born into a priest's family in Novaya Golchikha on the upper Volga and was studying at a seminary when the First World War broke out; an accelerated officers' course carried him to the rank of staff captain. In the Red Army his talent showed less in field command than in staff work, and he caught the eye of Chief of the General Staff Shaposhnikov, growing into a mainstay of the General Staff's operations directorate. Because of his origins as a priest's son he long broke off contact with his father; his memoirs record that it was Stalin himself who later urged him to resume relations, and father and son were reconciled.

Appointed Chief of the General Staff in June 1942, Vasilevsky reported to Stalin that autumn, together with Zhukov, the concept for a counteroffensive at Stalingrad. While the attritional battle inside the city pinned the German Sixth Army, the plan called for breaking through the weakly held Romanian sectors on both flanks and closing a vast encirclement: Operation Uranus. For two months men and materiel were concentrated in secrecy, and Vasilevsky coordinated the preparations on the spot as the Stavka representative.

The counteroffensive opened on 19 November 1942, and within four days the pincers closed at Kalach, trapping some 330,000 men of the Sixth Army. Vasilevsky went on coordinating the great operations at Kursk, in the Crimea and in Belorussia as Stavka representative at the front. Moving between the General Staff's desks and frontline command posts, he was called the quietest of the planners of the Soviet victory.

In February 1945, when the commander of the 3rd Belorussian Front, Chernyakhovsky, was killed in action, Vasilevsky took over the front and in April reduced the fortress of Königsberg. After the German surrender his next assignment lay on the other side of the globe. As commander-in-chief of the war against Japan that the Soviet Union had promised at Yalta, he directed the largest strategic redeployment in history, moving forces from Europe to the Far East. Relying on the single Trans-Siberian railway, hundreds of thousands of troops and their equipment covered nine thousand kilometres in three months.

At midnight on 9 August 1945, one and a half million men in three fronts struck the Japanese Kwantung Army in Manchuria simultaneously from three directions. The tank forces of the Transbaikal Front crossed the Greater Khingan range and the fringe of the Gobi, terrain judged impassable, and drove deep into the Kwantung Army's rear. It was the most complete realization of the deep operations theory the Red Army had developed through the whole war, and within some ten days the Kwantung Army lost the capacity for organized resistance.

The Manchurian operation is judged one of the factors that hastened Japan's decision to surrender, and it became a textbook of mobile warfare long studied by American strategists. Vasilevsky received his second title of Hero of the Soviet Union for the operation, served after the war as Chief of the General Staff and Minister of Defence, and on his death in 1977 was buried in the Kremlin Wall.

From 22 March 1946 to November 1948 Vasilevsky was Chief of the General Staff of the USSR Armed Forces and deputy minister of the armed forces, becoming first deputy minister from 1948. He was Minister of the Armed Forces from 24 March 1949 to 25 February 1950, then Minister of War until 15 March 1953; the change of title followed the February 1950 division of the Ministry of the Armed Forces into a War Ministry and a Navy Ministry. Stalin was head of government throughout. He sat on the CPSU Central Committee from 1952 to 1961 and was a deputy of the USSR Supreme Soviet of the 2nd to 4th convocations from 1946 to 1958.

After Stalin's death his military career changed sharply. When the War Ministry and the Navy Ministry were merged into the Ministry of Defence in March 1953, Bulganin became defence minister, while Vasilevsky was First Deputy Minister of Defence from 16 March 1953 to 15 March 1956. On 15 March 1956 he was relieved of the post officially 'at his own request'. According to Vasilevsky himself, Zhukov, who conveyed that wish for a 'personal request', told him plainly that it was Khrushchev's personal demand. From 14 August 1956 he was Deputy Minister of Defence for military science, and in December 1957 he was retired on grounds of illness with the right to wear military uniform. In January 1959 he became general inspector of the Group of General Inspectors of the USSR Ministry of Defence, holding that post until 5 December 1977. In 1956 he became the first chairman of the Soviet Committee of War Veterans and afterwards took an active part in Great Patriotic War veterans' organizations. He wrote the memoirs 'The Matter of My Whole Life'.

An English-language account summarizes this period as a fall from grace: the 1956 post for military science was a secondary position with no real military power, and Khrushchev pensioned him off, making him a victim of the bloodless purge that also saw the end of Zhukov. That assessment is recorded here as interpretation alongside the factual record.

Vasilevsky held that the 1937 repressions played a significant role in Soviet history: 'Without the thirty-seventh year, perhaps there would have been no war at all in forty-one. In Hitler's decision to start the war in 1941, a large role was played by his assessment of the degree to which our military cadres had been destroyed.' On his relations with Stalin, recollections of Stalin's sensitivity to his personal problems stand alongside hard telegrams over delays in sending reports; both rest on his own memoirs, and are attributed as such.