Kuznetsov, Vasilii

Kuznetsov, Vasilii Ivanovich 

Born Jan. 3 (15), 1894, in the village of Ust’-Usolka, in present-day Usolie Raion, Perm’ Oblast; died June 20, 1964, in Moscow. Soviet military commander, colonel general (1943), Hero of the Soviet Union (May 29, 1945). Became a member of the CPSU in 1928. The son of a worker.

Kuznetsov fought in World War I as a second lieutenant. In the Red Army from 1918, he was a deputy commander and commander of a regiment in the Civil War of 1918–20. Kuznetsov graduated from Vystrel, the higher infantry school of the Soviet Army, in 1926 and from the M. V. Frunze Military Academy in 1936 and served as a regimental, division, and corps commander. In the Great Patriotic War (1941–45) he fought on the Western, Southwestern, Northwestern, Stalingrad, Third Ukrainian, First Baltic, and First Byelorussian fronts in the posts of commander of the Third, Twenty-first, Fifty-eighth, First Shock, Sixty-third, First Guards, and Third Shock armies. From December 1943 to March 1945 he was deputy commander of the First Baltic Front. In command positions after the war, Kuznetsov was chairman of the Central Committee of the All-Union Voluntary Society for Cooperation with the Army, Air Force, and Navy from 1948 to 1953 and commander of the troops of the Volga Military District, after which he held high positions in the central apparatus of the Ministry of Defense. He retired in 1960.

A deputy to the second and fourth convocations of the Supreme Soviet of the USSR, Kuznetsov was awarded two Orders of Lenin, five Orders of the Red Banner, two Orders of Suvorov First Class, medals, and four foreign orders.