Commissar who broke through to Dubno in 1941 and sat beside Katukov on the 1st Guards Tank Army's military council
Born in a village of Kherson Governorate, he joined the Red Army in 1920 and served as a cavalry corps veterinarian in the Civil War. A political officer, in June 1941 he was deputy commander for political affairs of the 8th Mechanised Corps; in the Battle of Brody he led a tank group deep towards Dubno and, once encircled, brought 1,778 men out. From January 1943 to the end of the war he was member of the Military Council of the 1st Tank Army (later 1st Guards Tank Army). After the war he wrote three volumes of memoirs, criticised for inflating his own role.
Also known as: Nikolay Popel
Activities and affiliations
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1920–
Soviet Union state institutionsMilitary and defenceMain
Military command -
1921–
Soviet Communist Party and Bolsheviks
Military command
Career Timeline
- 1920.01.30Joined the Red Army; veterinarian of the 3rd Cavalry Corps in the Civil War
- 1938Military commissar, 11th Mechanised Brigade
- 1939.11.27Head of the political department, 106th Mountain Rifle Division of the Finnish People's Army
- 1941.06Deputy commander for political affairs, 8th Mechanised Corps; Battle of Brody
- 1941.08.25–12.08Member of the Military Council, 38th Army
- 1942.09Military commissar, 3rd Mechanised Corps
- 1943.01.30–1945Member of the Military Council, 1st (Guards) Tank Army
- 1944.11.02Lieutenant general of tank troops
- 1959–1960Published In a Hard Time and two further volumes of memoirs
On the 1st Guards Tank Army's Military Council, and the dispute over his memoirs
Popel first worked with Katukov in September 1942, when he came to Katukov's 3rd Mechanised Corps as its military commissar. When the 1st Tank Army was formed on 30 January 1943 he was appointed member of its Military Council and held the post to the end of the war. According to Katukova's memoir, he and the deputy commander for the rear, Konkov, handled the army's rear services in person: fuel and ammunition supply, hospitals and tank repair. After the Battle of Kursk, while the army was in the Stavka reserve, Popel and Katukov were summoned together to a Kremlin conference of all tank army commanders and military council members. Once the army entered Germany and soldiers began shooting at windows and crockery in German homes, Katukov and Popel drafted an order on conduct in enemy territory, the author writes.
Katukova grants that Popel was energetic, a capable organiser and knew his business. Yet she judges him coarse and a formalist who never won his subordinates' respect: when word came that he was on his way, commanders hid to escape his lectures, and Katukov, who knew all this, bore it, saying, "They will sort it out, and everything will fall into place." As Katukov's wife, the author takes her husband's side. Popel is otherwise remembered as the officer who in the 1941 Battle of Brody led a tank group deep into the German rear and threatened Dubno.
After the war, with the help of the literary critic E. V. Kardin, Popel published three volumes of memoirs, In a Hard Time, The Tanks Turned West and Berlin Ahead!, in 1959 and 1960. Katukova recalls that, despite the order not to keep papers, he collected documents at the front and sent them to Moscow, and these became the basis of the books. Even the Soviet military press criticised the books for exaggerating the role of the 1st Guards Tank Army and his own, for saying almost nothing of how Katukov and his chief of staff Shalin directed the fighting, and for inventing scenes he had not witnessed. Katukova makes the same point, and records that Popel gave the books to Katukov with dedications calling him "the creator of the tank guards".