Dmitry Pavlov (general)

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Dmitry Grigoryevich Pavlov (

In the fall of 1940, Georgy Zhukov started preparing the plans for the military exercise concerning the defence of the Western border of the Soviet Union, which at this time was pushed further to the west due to the annexation of eastern Poland.^[4] In his memoirs, Zhukov reports that in this exercise he commanded the Western or Blue forces—the supposed invasion troops—and his opponent was Colonel General Dmitry Pavlov, the commander of the Eastern or Red forces –the supposed Soviet troops. Zhukov describes the exercise as being similar to actual events during the German invasion. At the time, the Eastern, Pavlov's forces had a numerical advantage, but they nonetheless lost the military exercise.

On the night of 21 June 1941, Pavlov was watching a comedy in

He and his chief of staff Vladimir Klimovskikh were first accused of:

As the members of the anti-Soviet military conspiracy, betrayed the interests of the Motherland, violated the oath of office and damaged the combat power of the Red Army that are crimes under Articles 58-1b, 58-11 RSFSR Criminal Code...A preliminary judicial investigation and determined that the defendants Pavlov and Klimovskikh being: the first - the commander of the Western Front, and the second - the chief of staff of the same front, during the outbreak of hostilities with the German forces against the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, showed cowardice, failure of power, mismanagement, allowed the collapse of command and control, surrender of weapons to the enemy without fighting, willful abandonment of military positions by the Red Army, the most disorganized defense of the country and enabled the enemy to break through the front of the Red Army.

Pavlov and his deputies were accused of "failure to perform their duties" rather than treason. On 22 July 1941, the same day the sentence was handed down, Pavlov's property was confiscated, and he was deprived of military rank, shot, and buried in a landfill near Moscow by the NKVD.

Death penalties were also passed down for other commanders of the Western Front, including the Chief of Staff, Major General Vladimir Klimovskikh; the chief of the communications corps, Major General A. T. Grigoriev; the Chief of Artillery, Lieutenant General of Artillery A. Klich; and Air Force Deputy Chief of the Western Front (who, after the suicide of Major General Aviation I.I. Kopets, was, nominally at least, Chief of the Air Force of the Western Front), Major General Aviation A. I. Tayursky. Also, the commander of the 14th Mechanized Corps, Major General Stepan Oborin, was arrested on 8 July and shot. The commander of the 4th Army, Major General Aleksandr Korobkov, was dismissed on 8 July, arrested the next day and shot on 22 July. On the other hand, Pavlov's deputy commander, Lt. Gen. Ivan Boldin, at the head of a small group, became a popular hero at the time after spending 45 days fighting for survival behind enemy lines, and finally, on 10 August, leading a total of 1,650 officers and men through to Soviet lines near Smolensk. Stavka Order No. 270 praised the feat of Boldin's "division".^[5]

Pavlov and other commanders of the Western Front were rehabilitated for lack of evidence in 1956. On 25 November 1965, the title of Hero of the Soviet Union, and other honours, were posthumously returned to him. It was not until the Gorbachev era that it was declared that Pavlov was not the main culprit in the defeat and that the orders given to him could not have been fulfilled by anyone.

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