Ivan Bagramyan
Ivan Khristoforovich Bagramyan, born Hovhannes Baghramyan, was a Soviet military commander of Armenian origin who held the rank of Marshal of the Soviet Union. As commander of the 1st Baltic Front, he orchestrated the offensives which pushed German forces out of the Baltic countries on the Eastern Front of World War II.
Bagramyan was the second non-Slavic military officer, after Latvian Max Reyter, to become a commander of a front. He was among several high-ranking Armenian officers serving in the Soviet Army during the war. Bagramyan's experience in military planning as a chief of staff allowed him to distinguish himself as a capable commander in the early stages of the Soviet counter-offensives against Nazi Germany. He was given his first command of a unit in 1942, and in November 1943 received his most prestigious command as the commander of the 1st Baltic Front.
He did not immediately join the Communist Party after the consolidation of the October Revolution, becoming a member only in 1941, a move atypical for a Soviet military officer. After the war, he served as a deputy of the Supreme Soviets of the Latvian Soviet Socialist Republic and Armenian Soviet Socialist Republic and was a regular attendee of the Party Congresses. In 1952, he became a candidate for entry into the Central Committee and, in 1961, was inducted as a full member. For his contributions during the war, he was widely regarded as a national hero in the Soviet Union, and continues to hold such esteemed status among Armenians and Russians today.
Early life
Ivan Khristoforovich Bagramyan was born on in what was then Yelizavetpol, Russian Empire. His parents, Mariam and Khachatur Bagramyan, were ethnic Armenians originally from the village of Chardakhlu. Bagramyan's paternal grandfather came from the village of Koti. While Bagramyan's father went to work all day at the local railway station, his mother stayed at home to take care of her seven children. Bagramyan's parents decided to enroll him at a recently opened local two-year school because they could not afford to send him to the local gymnasium.Graduating in 1912, Bagramyan, whom everyone affectionately called Vanya, followed his father and his brothers in a path in rail work, attending the three-year railway technical institute located in Tiflis. He graduated with honors and was slated to become a railway engineer within a few years when events in World War I changed his life.
World War I
Bagramyan was well aware of the military situation at the Caucasus front during the first months of the world war. In the winter of 1914–15, the Imperial Russian Army was able to withstand and repel the Ottoman offensive aimed at capturing Sarikamish. Bagramyan also began reading harrowing reports in the Russian press of what was taking place against his fellow kinsmen across the border: the Committee of Union and Progress-led government had embarked on a campaign to carry out a genocide of the Ottoman Armenians. He desperately sought to join the military effort but because he was only seventeen and a railway mechanic, he was not subject to conscription. This did not dissuade him from trying, as he later remarked, "My place is at the front."His opportunity came on 16 September 1915, when he was accepted as a volunteer in the Russian army. He was assigned to the 116th Reserve Battalion and sent to Akhaltsikhe for basic training. With his training complete in December, he joined the 2nd Caucasian Border Regiment of the Russian Caucasus Army, which was sent to dislodge the Ottomans in Persia. Bagramyan participated in battles in Asadabad, Hamedan and Kermanshah, the Russian victories here sending Ottoman forces reeling toward Anatolia.
Learning about the exploits of the men in the outfit, the chief of staff of the regiment, General Pavel Melik-Shahnazarian, advised Bagramyan to return to Tiflis to enroll in the Praporshchik Military Academy. But in order to attend the school, Bagramyan needed to satisfy the academy's requirement of having completed school at a gymnasium. This did not deter him and, after preparing for the courses in Armavir, he passed his exams and began attending the academy on 13 February 1917. He graduated in June 1917 and was assigned to the 3rd Infantry Regiment, stationed near Lake Urmia. But with the overthrow of the Russian Provisional Government in the midst of the October Revolution of 1917, his unit was demobilized.
With the creation of the newly established First Republic of Armenia in 1918, Bagramyan enlisted in the newly formed 3rd Regiment. From 1 April 1918, that is, after the Ottoman Empire signed the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk with the Russian SFSR, he was in the 1st Cavalry Regiment, which took part in battles in Karaurgan, Sarikamish and Kars against units of the advancing Ottoman Third Army. Notably, he took part in the May 1918 battle at Sardarapat, where the Armenian military scored a crucial victory against Ottoman forces. He remained in the regiment until May 1920.
Interwar years
Three years after the toppling of the Provisional Government by the Bolsheviks in October 1917, the Red Army invaded the southern Caucasus republics of Azerbaijan, Georgia and Armenia. In May 1920, Bagramyan, upset with the country's social and political conditions, participated in the failed May Uprising against the Dashnak-led government of Armenia. Later that year, he joined the Red Army. He was jailed and sent to work in the fields for several months but was allowed to rejoin the military with the outbreak of the Turkish invasion of Armenia. By December 1920, Armenia was Sovietized and the national army was subsequently disbanded. Bagramyan, however, chose to join the 11th Soviet Army and was appointed a cavalry regiment commander.As life in Armenia grew relatively more stable under Soviet rule, Bagramyan sought to locate a woman he had met several years earlier, Tamara Hamayakovna. Tamara, who was at this time living in Nakhichevan with her family, had been married to an Armenian officer who had been killed during the Turkish invasion, leaving her with their one-year-old son, Movses. Bagramyan visited her and the two decided to get married at the end of 1922. In addition to their son Movses, who went on to become a painter, they had a daughter, Margarit, who later became a doctor. Tamara remained at Bagramyan's side until her death in 1973.
In 1923, Bagramyan was appointed commander of the Alexandropol Cavalry Regiment, a position he held until 1931. Two years later, Bagramyan graduated from the Leningrad Cavalry School and, in 1934, from the Frunze Military Academy. In his memoirs, Pyotr Grigorenko, a Ukrainian commander who attended the Academy, recalled how Bagramyan was expelled from the academy by his superiors after they had learned that he had been a secret member of the banned Armenian nationalist party Dashnaktsutiun for more than a decade. Pending his arrest, Grigorenko described Bagramyan "deeply depressed, saying he only wished they'd arrest him soon so that he could get it over with." Grigorenko advised that he appeal the arrest warrant, which Bagramyan reluctantly did. The arrest warrant was ultimately dropped, with the help of Armenian politburo member Anastas Mikoyan. From 1934 to 1936, Bagramyan served as the chief of staff of the 5th Cavalry Division, and from 1938, he worked as a senior instructor and lecturer at the Military Academy of the Soviet General Staff even as Stalin purged the senior Soviet officer corps. While fellow students from the military academy, Andrei Yeremenko and Georgy Zhukov, had seen their careers rise, Bagramyan's had remained stagnant.
In 1940, when General Zhukov was promoted to commander of the Kiev Military District in the Ukrainian SSR, Bagramyan wrote a letter asking to serve under his command. Zhukov agreed, and in December asked for his help writing a paper to be presented to the commanders of the Soviet Military Districts. Bagramyan's paper, "Conducting a Contemporary Offensive Operation," apparently impressed Zhukov, as he promoted Bagramyan to become the head of operations for the Soviet 12th Army based in Ukraine. Within three months, however, Bagramyan, then a colonel, was appointed deputy chief of staff of the Southwestern Front, headquartered in Kiev.
World War II
Ukraine
In June 1941, Nazi Germany invaded the Soviet Union. Unlike many of the border troops who were caught off guard by the offensive, Bagramyan and his commander, General Mikhail Kirponos, believed an invasion by Germany was inevitable. However, Kirponos chose to ignore Bagramyan's belief that the German offensive would employ the Blitzkrieg-like tactics like those seen in the campaigns in Poland in 1939 and western Europe in 1940. Since the winter of 1939–40, Bagramyan had been busy devising a battle plan that would counter threats from the direction of western Ukraine, which was approved after numerous revisions on 10 May 1940.On the morning of 22 June, he was tasked with the overseeing of a transfer of a military convoy to Ternopol. While his column was passing the Soviet airfields near the city of Brody, German air strikes hit the aircraft on the ground. Several hours later, they arrived in Ternopol, having been strafed twice by the planes. Three days after the invasion, the plans for the counter-offensive were implemented, but disorder engulfed the troops, and the counter-attack collapsed. Bagramyan took part in the great tank battles in western Ukraine and the defensive operation around Kiev, in which Kirponos was killed and the entire Front captured by the Germans. He was one of a handful of senior officers who escaped from the encircled Front.
Bagramyan was then appointed chief of staff to Marshal Semyon Timoshenko and along with future Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev, then a political officer, coordinated the fighting around Rostov. In his memoirs, Khrushchev described Bagramyan as a "very precise person who reported on everything just as it was. How many troops we had, their positions, and the general situation."
Khrushchev went on to detail an account where Marshal Semyon Budyonny, sent by the chief of the operations department from Moscow as a representative of Stavka, arrived in Kiev to preside over Bagramyan's court-martial. Bagramyan protested vigorously and said that if his competence was in question, then he should instead be given a field unit to command. To Bagramyan's incredulity, Budyonny went on to attempt to convince him to agree to his execution. Khrushchev remarked that the argument was sparked arbitrarily and had taken place after an "abundant feast with cognac" and that "in those days we didn't take that kind of conversation seriously." According to him, at the time, however, the Soviet military was especially suspicious of the men in its ranks, itself judging that there were "enemies of the people...everywhere, especially the Red Army."
Bagramyan was instrumental in the planning of two Soviet counter-offensives against the Germans, including the major push made by Soviet forces in December during the Battle of Moscow, and for this was promoted to the rank of lieutenant general. In the same month, he was made the chief of staff of a military operations group that would oversee three Army Groups: the Southern, the Southwestern and Bryansk Fronts. In March 1942, he accompanied Khrushchev and Timoshenko to Moscow to present the plans of a new counter-offensive in the direction of Kharkov to Stalin. Stalin, impressed with his plan, approved the operation and on 8 April, promoted Bagramyan as chief of staff of the Southwestern Front. On 12 May 1942, armies of the Southwestern Front attacked Kharkov but the launch of the offensive came at an inopportune moment since they were attacking from the Barvenkovo Salient, a region that German forces were near closing.
While Soviet forces were initially successful in recapturing Kharkov, they found themselves trapped by the German Army after the closing of Barvenkovo. On 18 May, Bagramyan asked Timoshenko to alter the plans but Timoshenko along with Stalin refused to approve his request. Soviet losses were heavy as the 6th, 9th and 57th armies comprising a large portion of the Southwestern Front, were all destroyed and Bagramyan was removed from his post on 28 June by Stavka. According to Khrushchev, Bagramyan was so devastated by the immense loss of men that after the operation was called off: "he burst into tears. His nerves cracked...He was weeping for our army." Held responsible for the failure of the operation and "poor staff work", he was demoted to chief of staff of the Soviet 28th Army. Several days later, he wrote a letter to Stalin asking to "serve at the front at any capacity, however modest." British military historian John Erickson contends that Bagramyan was unfairly scapegoated by Stalin in his attempts to "hunt for culprits" of the mismanagement of operations.