Dmitry Pavlov

Dmitry Grigoryevich Pavlov was one of the fastest-rising commanders of the Red Army at the turn of the 1930s and 1940s – and the highest-ranking Soviet general to be shot for the defeats of the first weeks of the war with Germany. A peasant’s son, an NCO in the Tsarist army and a cavalryman in the Civil War, he made his name in Spain as commander of a tank brigade, and on his return took charge of the Soviet armoured forces just as the Great Purge was decimating the officer corps. In June 1941 he commanded the Western Front, which covered the shortest route from Germany to Moscow. Within a week his forces had been encircled and destroyed at Białystok and Minsk, and he himself had been arrested; he was soon tried and shot. His fate became a symbol both of the Red Army’s unpreparedness for war and of the Stalinist way of finding culprits.

Youth, war and captivity

He was born on 4 November 1897 (23 October in the Julian calendar) into a peasant family in the village of Vonyukh in the Kologriv district of Kostroma Governorate. He completed a parish school and a two-class school in the village of Sukhoverkhovo, and passed the examination for four years of secondary school as an external student. As soon as the First World War broke out he volunteered for the Russian army. He served in several infantry regiments and in a hussar regiment, rising to senior NCO. In June 1916, in the fighting on the Stokhid during the offensive towards Kovel, he was wounded and taken prisoner by the Germans. In Germany he worked in the mines; he did not return home until January 1919.

Civil War and Central Asia

In August 1919 he was called up into the Red Army and that same year joined the Bolshevik party. He started out in a food-requisitioning battalion; in 1920 he completed a commanders’ course in Kostroma and commanded a platoon, then a cavalry squadron, in the 8th Red Cossack Cavalry Division on the Southern Front. After graduating from the infantry school in Omsk (1922) he fought the remnants of White units in the Altai, and from 1923 the Basmachi in Central Asia: first near Khujand, then in eastern Bukhara as commander of the 77th Cavalry Regiment, which pursued the bands of Ibrahim Bek.

From 1925 to 1928 he studied at the Frunze Military Academy. He then took over the 75th Cavalry Regiment in the brigade commanded in Transbaikalia by Konstantin Rokossovsky, and distinguished himself in the Sino-Soviet conflict over the Chinese Eastern Railway in the autumn of 1929, when his regiment took part in a deep outflanking of the Chinese forces at Manzhouli and Jalainur.

Tank commander

In the early 1930s, as the Red Army was forming its first mechanised formations, Pavlov moved to the armoured forces. After a course at the Military Technical Academy he commanded a mechanised regiment in Gomel from 1931, and from 1934 the 4th Mechanised Brigade in Bobruisk, which was regarded as one of the best in the army and distinguished itself in the great Kiev manoeuvres of 1935. In 1936 he was awarded the Order of Lenin for it.

From October 1936 to June 1937 he fought in the Spanish Civil War on the Republican side as one of the Soviet “volunteers”, under the pseudonym “Pablo”. He commanded a tank brigade and larger, improvised armoured groupings in the defence of Madrid, at the Battle of Jarama and at the Battle of Guadalajara in March 1937, where the Republicans routed the Italian expeditionary corps. On 21 June 1937 he was made a Hero of the Soviet Union. He returned home with the aura of an able commander of the modern battlefield.

Head of the armoured forces

In the summer of 1937 Pavlov became deputy head, and in November head, of the Red Army’s Automobile and Armoured Directorate; from 1938 he also sat on the Main Military Council. He owed his promotion largely to the purge: the arrests and executions of 1937–1938, which claimed Marshal Mikhail Tukhachevsky and a large part of the senior officer corps, opened the way for young commanders with combat experience. Unlike many veterans of Spain, Pavlov himself escaped repression. In 1937 he was elected a deputy to the Supreme Soviet of the USSR, and in 1939 a candidate member of the party’s Central Committee.

As head of the armoured forces he had real influence on their development. Drawing on his experience in Spain, where light Soviet tanks had fallen easy prey to anti-tank guns, he called for vehicles with thicker armour, a diesel engine and a gun capable of piercing the enemy’s armour, and he supported the work that led to the T-34 and KV-1 tanks. His views on organisation are judged less kindly. He believed that large tank corps would not prove their worth in a breakthrough, and after the experience of the Soviet invasion of Poland, in which the tank corps had trouble with command and supply, he backed the Main Military Council’s decision in November 1939 to disband them and replace them with smaller motorised divisions and tank brigades. A few months later, impressed by the German successes in France, the Red Army began hastily forming even larger mechanised corps – in June 1941 most of them were still being formed.

In the summer of 1939 Pavlov served as adviser on armoured forces in the Battle of Khalkhin Gol, in which the troops of Georgy Zhukov routed the Japanese. In the Winter War he was inspector of the use of armoured forces, and from 17 January to 29 February 1940 he commanded the Reserve Group, which was to outflank the Mannerheim Line across the ice of the Gulf of Finland; after a first, unsuccessful attempt the plan was abandoned.

On the western frontier

In June 1940 Pavlov took command of the Belorussian Special Military District, renamed the Western Special Military District (PL) in July, with its headquarters in Minsk. At the very start of this posting his troops were preparing to occupy Lithuania should it reject the Soviet ultimatum; Lithuania accepted it, and on 15 June the Red Army entered the country without a fight. On 4 June 1940 Pavlov was made a Colonel General of Tank Troops, and on 22 February 1941 – as one of the first – a General of the Army, the rank second only to marshal.

The district included the lands seized from Poland in September 1939, with the Białystok salient jutting out between East Prussia and the General Government. Pavlov, who had never commanded anything larger than a brigade in battle, was now responsible for four armies, more than 600,000 soldiers and some 450 kilometres of frontier, across which ran the shortest route to Moscow. In January 1941, in the map war games played after a conference of the top commanders, he commanded the “eastern” (Soviet) side in the first of them against Zhukov, who led the attacking “western” side. The scenario assumed an enemy offensive from East Prussia and from the Brest area; according to Zhukov’s memoirs his side gained the upper hand, which later authors often presented as a foreshadowing of June 1941, although the course and outcome of the games remain disputed among historians. The games led to Zhukov’s appointment as Chief of the General Staff in place of Kirill Meretskov. Pavlov, like the entire army leadership, was bound by the ban imposed by Joseph Stalin on any step that might be seen as a “provocation” towards Germany. In June 1941 the fortification of the new frontier, the relocation of airfields and the formation of the mechanised corps were far from complete.

The disaster of June 1941

On the evening of 21 June 1941, according to the account of his deputy, Lieutenant General Ivan Boldin, Pavlov was watching an operetta at the House of Officers in Minsk and, despite disturbing reports from the frontier, did not cut the evening short. That day the district was renamed the Western Front, and the directive putting the troops on alert did not reach the headquarters until the night. At dawn on 22 June Field Marshal Fedor von Bock’s Army Group Centre attacked the USSR. In the first hours the front’s air force lost hundreds of aircraft on the ground, communications with the armies were cut, and the 4th Army near Brest disintegrated within a single day under the blows of Heinz Guderian’s panzer group.

Carrying out Moscow’s directive to go over to the offensive, Pavlov threw his mechanised corps into a counter-attack near Grodno, which collapsed under the blows of the German air force and for lack of fuel. Meanwhile the German panzer groups were outflanking the Białystok salient from the north and the south. Pavlov issued the order to retreat behind the Shchara on 25 June, too late for his troops to escape the trap. On 28 June the Germans took Minsk, and three of the front’s armies were caught in the Białystok and Minsk pockets. In the Battle of Białystok–Minsk the Western Front lost, according to Russian figures, nearly 418,000 men, while the Germans announced the capture of between 290,000 and 324,000 prisoners.

On 30 June Pavlov was relieved and summoned to Moscow, where he was questioned by Zhukov and Vyacheslav Molotov. He was sent back to the front as deputy to the new commander, who from 2 July was the People’s Commissar for Defence, Semyon Timoshenko. On 4 July Pavlov was arrested; sources differ as to where – Russian studies name the village of Dovsk in the Gomel region, Polish ones Smolensk. Arrested with him were the front’s chief of staff, Major General Vladimir Klimovskikh, its chief of signals, Major General Andrei Grigoryev, the commander of the 4th Army, Major General Aleksandr Korobkov, and several other generals.

Investigation and execution

Investigators of the NKVD, headed by Lavrentiy Beria, at first tried to make Pavlov a participant in an “anti-Soviet military conspiracy” and to link him to the Tukhachevsky affair. Although in his first interrogations Pavlov admitted to errors of command, he denied the charges of treason. In the end the treason charge was dropped. On 22 July 1941, after a brief hearing, the Military Collegium of the Supreme Court of the USSR sentenced him – together with Klimovskikh, Grigoryev and Korobkov – to death, loss of rank and confiscation of property for “cowardice, failure to exercise authority, breakdown of command, and abandoning weapons and depots to the enemy”. In court Pavlov pleaded not guilty. The sentence was carried out the same day; his body was buried at the NKVD execution ground at Kommunarka near Moscow. His family was sent into exile.

Order No. 0250 of the People’s Commissar for Defence of 28 July 1941, signed by Stalin, announced the sentence to all commanders from regimental commander upwards as a warning to “cowards and panic-mongers”. Pavlov was the only front commander arrested and executed in that period; the same fate befell, among others, the front’s chief of artillery, Lieutenant General Nikolai Klich, and the commander of the 14th Mechanised Corps, Major General Stepan Oborin. The commander of the district’s air force, Major General Ivan Kopets, had taken his own life on the very first day of the war (according to some sources, the day after).

Rehabilitation and assessment

On 31 July 1957 the Military Collegium of the Supreme Court of the USSR quashed the sentence and closed the case for lack of evidence of a crime; Pavlov’s military rank was restored posthumously, and in 1965 his title of Hero of the Soviet Union and his decorations. Some sources give 1956 as the year of his rehabilitation. Nikita Khrushchev admitted in his memoirs that there had formally been grounds for the verdict, but agreed to the rehabilitation because the guilty party was not Pavlov but Stalin, who had entrusted so responsible a post to a man unprepared for it.

For a long time assessments of Pavlov were one-sided. In Soviet historiography and cinema – as in the 1985 epic Battle of Moscow – he appeared as an incompetent commander, the chief culprit of the June 1941 disaster. Since the 1980s historians have pointed out that his mistakes, above all the belated retreat and the squandering of the mechanised corps in ill-prepared counter-attacks, compounded causes beyond his control: Stalin’s ban on defensive preparations, the deployment of troops in an exposed salient, the unfinished rearmament and reorganisation of the army, the destruction of the officer corps in the purge, and orders from Moscow to attack just as the front was falling apart. The defeat of his front opened the road to Smolensk and Moscow for the Germans, and his execution showed that in Stalin’s state it was above all those who carried out orders who paid for catastrophe.