Pavel Ivanovich Batov

In autumn 1943, after the Battle of Kursk, Batov's 65th Army advanced 300 kilometers in a single month, forcing crossings of the Desna and Sozh rivers before reaching the middle Dnieper. Rokossovsky later wrote: "The success of the entire front now depended on the actions of the 65th Army." Preparing the crossing near Loyev, Batov gathered every available boat and improvised raft, and employed deception: floating dummy crossing preparations downstream at night to mislead the Germans about the true assault point. At dawn on October 15, 1943, after a powerful artillery barrage, four assault battalions crossed the Dnieper and seized a bridgehead on the western bank; the main force followed through the night. By October 27, after fierce fighting, the army had expanded the bridgehead to 35 kilometers wide and 20 kilometers deep. For this operation, 183 soldiers of the 65th Army were awarded the title Hero of the Soviet Union, and Batov himself received his first Gold Star.

Batov's command style, dubbed the "Batov style" by his comrades, was defined by meticulous preparation and direct personal engagement. He insisted on visiting front-line battalions to study terrain and men himself rather than relying solely on staff maps, and demanded direct radio links with assault detachments to "feel the pulse of battle." He lived by the conviction that "no hero should remain nameless": after the Dnieper crossing, he tasked his political officers with identifying every soldier whose valor deserved recognition, and 183 received the nation's highest honor. Though exacting, he never raised his voice to a subordinate; his natural simplicity, deep cultivation, and genuine respect for ordinary soldiers won him fierce loyalty throughout the army. Batov later distilled his wartime experience into the treatise "River Crossings, 1942–1945" (Форсирование рек, 1942-1945 гг.), which remains a reference work on the subject.

After the war Batov commanded the 7th Mechanized Army, then the 7th Separate Tank Division from October 1946. Having completed the Higher Academic Courses at the Voroshilov Higher Military Academy, he took command of the 11th Guards Army in March 1950, became first deputy commander-in-chief of the Group of Soviet Forces in Germany in June 1954, and was appointed commander of the Carpathian Military District in March 1955.

While commanding the Carpathian Military District, which he held from 1955 to 1958, Batov took part in the suppression of the 1956 Hungarian events. The sources record that two armies of the district, the 8th and the 38th, were committed to the operation in Hungary in November 1956, carried out under the overall command of Marshal I. S. Konev together with the Special Corps under the name "Whirlwind," and that armed resistance across Hungary was broken by 11 November. The accounts of the operation do not specify Batov's individual role or span of command within it.

He became commander of the Baltic Military District in April 1958, then senior military adviser to the Chinese People's Liberation Army in November 1959, and in January 1961 moved to the General Inspectors Group of the USSR Defence Ministry as military inspector-adviser. In August of that year he was appointed commander of the Southern Group of Forces stationed on Hungarian territory, and in September 1962 became first deputy chief of the Soviet General Staff and chief of staff of the Warsaw Pact Joint Armed Forces, serving until 1965. In October 1965 he returned to the General Inspectors Group as military inspector-adviser, and from 1970 to 1981 he chaired the Soviet War Veterans Committee.

Batov died in Moscow on 19 April 1985 and was buried in Moscow. In his lifetime he was an honorary citizen of many cities, among them Rybinsk, Kalach-on-Don, Bobruisk, Rechitsa, Svetlogorsk, Gdansk and Szczecin, but after 1989 the new Polish authorities stripped him of his honorary citizenship of Gdansk and Szczecin.