Sergei Fyodorovich Achromeev

Marshal Sergei Feodorovich Achromeev (1988)

Sergei Feodorovich Akhromeev ( Russian Сергей Фёдорович Ахромеев ; English Sergei Feodorovich Akhromeev ; born  May 5, 1923 in the village of Windrei near Spassk , Tambov Governorate , today Mordovia ; † August 24, 1991 in Moscow ) was a Soviet military and Soviet Union Marshal .

Life

Ascent

Achromeev came from a Tatar peasant family. He served in the Red Army from 1940 . After completing the first year of study at the Leningrad Naval Institute, he fought as a young officer candidate during the Second World War in enclosed Leningrad in the summer of 1941 . In 1942 he graduated from the Infantry College in Astrakhan and in 1945 from the Infantry College in Stalingrad .

From October 1942 to February 1943 he was in command of a platoon of the marine infantry, then adjutant or chief of the battalion staff. From July 1944 he was in command of a battalion of riflemen of an artillery brigade. During the Great Patriotic War he fought on the Leningrad , Stalingrad , southern and 4th Ukrainian fronts , most recently near Berlin. In 1943 he became a member of the CPSU . At the end of the war, Achromeev still weighed 38 kilograms.

After the war, he became the commander of various tank battalions before graduating from the Military Academy of Armored Forces in 1952 . After that he was chief of staff of several tank regiments and from 1955 to 1957 the commander of a tank regiment. From 1957 Achromeev was the commander of a motorized rifle division, then chief of staff of a tank division. From 1960 to 1964 he was the commander of a tank division in the Belarusian military district, then head of a training center for tank commanders. After graduating from the Academy of the General Staff in 1967, he became major general and served as first deputy commander and since 1968 as commander of an army. From 1972 to 1974 he was First Deputy Commander of the Far Eastern Military District and also Chief of Staff of the Military District.

In a leading position

From 1974 to 1977 the strategically and conceptually thinking and far-sighted Achromeev was head of the operational headquarters of the General Staff of the Armed Forces of the Soviet Union and Deputy Chief of Staff and from 1979 to 1984 First Deputy Chief of Staff as successor to Mikhail I. Koslow, the bitter resistance to the SALT II - Contracted. Achromeev remained skeptical of the Afghanistan mission . In 1982 he was awarded the title " Hero of the Soviet Union " and in 1983 he was appointed Marshal of the Soviet Union .

In 1983 Achromeev took very moderate positions in the Geneva negotiations on the disarmament of medium-range missiles , which were then broken off because of NATO's double decision . On September 6, 1984, a year after a Korean jumbo jet was shot down over Sakhalin after Marshal Nikolai Ogarkov had to resign after disputes with Defense Minister Ustinov , he succeeded him as 24th Chief of the General Staff. He was also First Deputy Minister of Defense of the USSR from 1984 to 1988 (Minister: 1984 to 1987 Marshal Sokolov , from 1987 Marshal Yasov ).

In contrast to Ogarkow, Achromeev did not believe in the possibility of waging a nuclear war and saw in its averting an important task of the great powers. As early as 1983 he is said to have communicated this opinion to the Washington Post .

He played a decisive role with the Soviet negotiator Juli Kwizinski and the US diplomat Paul. H. Nitze took part in the negotiations on nuclear disarmament for medium-range missiles ( INF Treaty ). The summit meetings in Geneva (1985) and Reykjavík (1986), the visit to Moscow by US Secretary of State George Shultz (1987) and Gorbachev's state visit to Washington (1987) enabled decisive steps towards nuclear disarmament and detente between the USSR and the USA can be reached.

After his resignation as Chief of Staff (successor: Army General Moiseyev), he was military advisor to the General Secretary of the CPSU Mikhail Gorbachev from 1990 , although he rejected his policy. During the negotiations on German reunification , he spoke out against Germany becoming a NATO member (quote from March 13, 1990: “I mean that the future united Germany must not belong to any military alliance, not to NATO or to the Warsaw Treaty Organization. The Soviet Union is against the unified Germany being a member of NATO because it is not a supporter of the strengthening of the military alliance of those states which it has previously considered to be their potential opponent. "

Sympathy with the August coup and death

During the attempted coup by a conservative leadership group from the party and government against Gorbachev in August 1991, he returned from his vacation in Sochi and offered his support to the coup plotters. After the failure of the coup in which he had, however, played no part, he committed suicide in his office in the Kremlin suicide . In one of several farewell letters, he stated that he could not live with the collapse of the system that he had served.

Shortly after his death, there was speculation that the suicide and suicide note were fake and that he was in fact murdered. Among other things, there was speculation as to why he did not shoot himself with his service weapon.

Shortly after his funeral, his grave was desecrated and his uniform and the medals with which he was buried were stolen. The perpetrators were not caught and it remained unclear whether the crime was political or just criminally motivated.

Honors

Achromeev was awarded the Lenin Prize (1981), four orders of Lenin , the Order of the October Revolution , twice the Order of the Red Star , the Order of the Patriotic War First Degree, many Soviet medals and orders from several other states.

literature

Primary

• Mikhail Gorbachev: The coup. Munich 1991, ISBN 3-570-01408-8 .
• Mikhail Gorbachev: Memories. Siedler, Berlin 1995, ISBN 3-88680-524-7 .

Secondary

• Dale Herspring: The Soviet High Command, 1964-1989: Politics and Personalities. Princeton University Press, Princeton, NJ 1990.
• Jacob W. Kipp, Bruce W. Menning, David M. Glantz, Graham H. Turbiville, Jr .: Marshal Akhromeev's Post-INF World. In: Journal of Soviet Military Studies. 1 (2), 1988, pp. 167-187.
• William E. Odom: The Collapse of the Soviet Military. Yale University Press, New Haven, CT 1998.
• Kimberly Marten Zisk: Engaging the Enemy: Organization Theory and Soviet Military Innovation, 1955-1991. Princeton University Press, Princeton, NJ 1993.
• Voennaja enciklopedija. Volume 1, Moscow 1994.
• About a lonely red marshal and three days of a forgotten revolution. In: Swetlana Alexijewitsch : Second-hand time: Living on the ruins of socialism. Hanser, 2013, ISBN 978-3-446-24150-3 .

Web links

• Sergei Fjodorowitsch Achromejew on answers.com (English)

Individual evidence

1. ^ Johannes Grotzky: Checkmate. Book on Demand 2010, p. 53 ff.