On March 23, the hero of the Great Patriotic War, the famous sniper Vasily Grigorievich Zaitsev, would have celebrated his birthday.

Vasily was born in 1915 in the village of Eleninka, Polotsk village, Verkhneuralsky district, Orenburg province (now Kartalinsky district, Chelyabinsk region) in the family of a peasant, a commercial hunter. Vasily’s grandfather, Andrei Alekseevich Zaitsev, taught his grandchildren, Vasily and his younger brother, Maxim, to hunt from early childhood.

The shooter recalled: “In my memory, my childhood is marked by the words of my grandfather Andrei, who took me hunting with him, there he handed me a bow with homemade arrows and said: “You must shoot accurately, in the eye of every animal. Now you are no longer a child... Use your ammunition sparingly, learn to shoot without missing a beat. This skill can be useful not only when hunting for four-legged animals...” It was as if he knew or foresaw that I would have to carry out this order in the fire of the most brutal battle for the honor of our Motherland - in Stalingrad... I received from my grandfather a letter of taiga wisdom, love of nature and worldly experience.”

At the age of 12, Vasily received his first hunting rifle as a gift. On March 23, the hero of the Great Patriotic War, the famous sniper Vasily Grigorievich Zaitsev, would have celebrated the birthday.

Sniper Vasily Zaitsev

After finishing seven classes of high school, the young man left the village and entered the Magnitogorsk Construction College, where he studied to become a reinforcement worker. Then he completed accounting courses.

Since 1937, Vasily served in the Pacific Fleet, where he was assigned as a clerk in the artillery department. After studying at the Military Economic School, he was appointed head of the financial department in the Pacific Fleet, in Preobrazhenie Bay. The Great Patriotic War found him in this position.

By the summer of 1942, the foreman of the first article, Zaitsev, submitted five reports with a request to be sent to the front. Finally, the commander granted his request, and Zaitsev left for the active army, where he was enlisted in the 284th Infantry Division.

Throughout the war, the hero did not part with his sailor vest. “Blue and white stripes! - He remembered. - How impressively they emphasize in you the feeling of your own strength! Let the sea rage on your chest - I will endure it, I will stand. This feeling did not leave me either in the first or in the second year of service in the navy. On the contrary, the longer you live in a vest, the more familiar it becomes to you; sometimes it seems that you were born in it and are ready to thank your own mother for this. Yes, indeed, as Sergeant Major Ilyin said: “There is no sailor without a vest.” She always calls you to test your own strength.”

On a September night in 1942, together with other Pacific soldiers, Zaitsev, after short preparation for battles in urban conditions, crossed the Volga and took part in the battles for Stalingrad.

The sniper shows his rifle to the division commander

The baptism of fire took place in fierce battles. In a short period of time, the fighter became a legend among his fellow soldiers - he killed 32 Nazis with an ordinary Mosin rifle. They especially noted how a sniper from his “three-line rifle” hit three enemy soldiers from 800 meters.

Zaitsev received a real sniper rifle personally from the commander of the 1047th regiment, Metelev, along with the medal “For Courage”. “Our determination to fight here, in the ruins of the city,” said the commander, “under the slogan “Not a step back,” is dictated by the will of the people. The open spaces beyond the Volga are great, but with what eyes will we look at our people there? To which the fighter uttered a phrase that later became legendary: “There is nowhere to retreat, there is no land for us beyond the Volga!”

The art of a sniper is not only to accurately hit the target, like a target at a shooting range. Zaitsev combined all the qualities inherent in a sniper - visual acuity, sensitive hearing, restraint, composure, endurance, military cunning. He knew how to choose the best positions and disguise them; usually hid from enemy soldiers in places where they could not even imagine a Soviet sniper. The famous sniper hit the enemy mercilessly. Only in the period from November 10 to December 17, 1942, in the battles for Stalingrad, V.G. Zaitsev destroyed 225 enemy soldiers and officers, including 11 snipers, and his comrades in arms in the 62nd Army - 6000.

Zaitsev was especially glorified by a sniper duel with a German “super sniper”, whom Zaitsev himself calls Major Koenig in his memoirs (according to Alan Clark - head of the sniper school in Zossen, SS Standartenführer Heinz Thorwald Koenig), sent to Stalingrad with a special task of fighting Soviet snipers, and The first priority was the destruction of Zaitsev. Zaitsev, in turn, received the task of destroying Koenig personally from commander N.F. Batyuk. After one of the Soviet snipers had his optical sight broken by a bullet, and another in the same area was wounded, Zaitsev managed to establish the enemy’s position. About the fight that followed, Vasily Grigorievich wrote:

“It was clear that an experienced sniper was operating in front of us, so we decided to intrigue him, but we had to wait out the first half of the day, because the glare of the optics could give us away. After lunch, our rifles were already in the shadows, and direct rays of the sun fell on the fascist positions. Something glittered from under the sheet - a sniper scope. A well-aimed shot, the sniper fell. As soon as it got dark, our people went on the offensive and at the height of the battle we pulled out the killed fascist major from under the iron sheet. They took his documents and delivered them to the division commander.”

“I was sure that you would shoot this Berlin bird,” said the division commander.

Unlike all standard German and Soviet rifles of that time, which had a scope magnification of only 3-4 times, since only virtuosos could work with high magnification, the scope on the rifle of the head of the Berlin school had a magnification of 10 times. This is precisely what speaks about the level of the enemy that Vasily Zaitsev had to face.

Awarding sniper Zaitsev

In his book “Beyond the Volga there was no land for us. Notes of a Sniper” Vasily Grigorievich wrote about his fight with Koening: “It was difficult to say in which area he was located. He probably changed positions often and looked for me as carefully as I did for him. But then an incident happened: the enemy broke my friend Morozov’s optical sight, and wounded Sheikin. Morozov and Sheikin were considered experienced snipers; they often emerged victorious in the most difficult and difficult battles with the enemy.

Now there was no doubt - they had stumbled upon exactly the fascist “super sniper” that I was looking for... Now it was necessary to lure out and “put” at least a piece of his head on the gun. It was useless to achieve this now. Need time. But the character of a fascist has been studied. He will not leave this successful position. We definitely had to change our position... After lunch, our rifles were in the shade, and direct rays of the sun fell on the fascist position. Something glittered at the edge of the sheet: a random piece of glass or an optical sight? Kulikov carefully, as only the most experienced sniper can do, began to lift his helmet.

The fascist fired. The Nazi thought that he had finally killed the Soviet sniper, whom he had been hunting for four days, and stuck half his head out from under the leaf. That's what I was counting on. He hit it straight. The fascist’s head sank, and the optical sight of his rifle, without moving, sparkled in the sun until the evening...”

In January 1943, following the order of the division commander to disrupt a German attack on the right-flank regiment by Zaitsev’s sniper group, which at that time consisted of only 13 people, Zaitsev was seriously wounded and blinded by a mine explosion. Only on February 10, 1943, after several operations performed in Moscow by Professor Filatov, his vision returned.

Vasily Zaitsev

By decree of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet of the USSR of February 22, 1943, for courage and military valor shown in battles with the Nazi invaders, junior lieutenant V. G. Zaitsev was awarded the title of Hero of the Soviet Union, with the presentation of the Order of Lenin and the Gold Star medal. .

Throughout the war, V.G. Zaitsev served in the army, headed a sniper school, commanded a mortar platoon, and then was a company commander. He has 242 enemy soldiers and officers killed. He took part in the liberation of Donbass, in the battle for the Dnieper, and fought near Odessa and on the Dniester. Captain V.G. Zaitsev met May 1945 in Kyiv - again in the hospital.

During the war years, Zaitsev wrote two textbooks for snipers, and also developed the still used technique of sniper hunting with “sixes” - when three pairs of snipers (shooters and observers) cover the same battle zone with fire.

After the end of the war, he was demobilized and settled in Kyiv. He was the commandant of the Pechersk region. He studied in absentia at the All-Union Institute of Textile and Light Industry. He worked as director of a machine-building plant, director of the Ukraina clothing factory, and headed the light industry technical school. Participated in army tests of the SVD rifle. The war hero met his wife Zinaida Sergeevna while holding the position of director of an automobile repair plant, and she worked as the secretary of the party bureau of a machine-building plant.

Zaitsev rifle in the museum

By the decision of the Volgograd City Council of People's Deputies of May 7, 1980, for special services shown in the defense of the city and in the defeat of Nazi troops in the Battle of Stalingrad, Vasily Grigorievich Zaitsev was awarded the title “Honorary Citizen of the Hero City of Volgograd.”

Zaitsev retained his accuracy into old age. One day he was invited to evaluate the training of young snipers. After the shooting, he was asked to demonstrate his skills to the young fighters. The 65-year-old warrior, taking a rifle from one of the young fighters, hit the “ten” three times. That time the cup was awarded not to excellent marksmen, but to him, an outstanding master of marksmanship.

Vasily Grigorievich died on December 15, 1991. He was buried in Kyiv at the Lukyanovsky military cemetery, although his will was to be buried in the Stalingrad land, which he defended.

Monument at the hero's grave

On January 31, 2006, the ashes of Vasily Grigorievich Zaitsev were solemnly reburied with full military honors in Volgograd on the Mamayev Kurgan.

Remember the shocking opening of the movie Enemy at the Gates? One rifle for two, a security detachment and a full-length attack on German machine guns - a bloodbath that so outraged the Russian viewer, who claims to know history. And indeed, the war for Vasily Zaitsev began quite differently from how it was shown in Hollywood. In fact, everything was much worse.

The 284th Rifle Division, where Chief Petty Officer of the Pacific Fleet Vasily Zaitsev was enlisted along with three thousand volunteer sailors, crossed the Volga at night, very successfully, the Germans did not even notice it (in the film, the division was shot at the crossing by Ju 87 Stuka attack aircraft). But it was as if they were not expected on the right bank. There were no contacts from the command, no one had set the division’s combat mission, and its officers were afraid to aimlessly lead soldiers into an unfamiliar labyrinth of flaming ruins. So thousands of Red Army soldiers remained idle in the open space near the piers.

“We’re lying face to face. An hour passed, two. The night is ending. It is clear: we must enter into battle soon. But where is the enemy, where is his leading edge? No one then thought to take the initiative to reconnoiter. Early morning. Distant objects began to emerge more clearly. The gas tanks are clearly visible to our left. What's behind them, who's there? Above the tanks there is a railway track, there are empty carriages. Who is hiding behind them? - Zaitsev recalls in “Notes of a Sniper.”

Battle of Stalingrad, 1942

This couldn't end well. As soon as it was dawn, German observers noticed them, and such a senseless massacre began that Hollywood screenwriters, familiar with Zaitsev’s memoirs, did not even dare to show it. Zaitsev describes: “Mines flew onto the bank of the Volga, right into our cluster. Enemy planes appeared in the air and began throwing fragmentation bombs. The sailors rushed about the shore, not knowing what to do.”

Several hours passed like this. Mines and bombs fell, the sailors rushed about, there was no order. In the end, the junior commanders could not stand it. The lieutenants and captains raised their thinned units and, without orders, led them to attack what they saw in front of them - the gas tanks.

But this position turned out to be not the best. When the Germans transferred the fire to it, all hell broke loose: “Flames shot up over the base, gas tanks began to burst, and the ground caught fire. Giant flames darted over the chains of the attacking sailors with a deafening roar. The soldiers and sailors engulfed in fire tore off their burning clothes as they walked, but did not drop their weapons. Attack of naked burning people... I don’t know what the Nazis thought of us at that moment.”

You saw this attack in Bondarchuk's recent film. Like many things in that movie that seem like the scriptwriter's nonsense, it actually happened. So on September 22, 1942, his Stalingrad epic began for Vasily Zaitsev. Ahead lay a month of the most brutal street fighting in military history - the last German offensive towards the Volga.

Zaitsev's division was stationed at the hardware plant and Mamayev Kurgan. The Germans knocked them out of the mound, but they defended the plant. On October 16, Zaitsev was the first in the division to receive the medal “For Courage,” by which time he had already been wounded several times and was mistakenly buried twice in a mass grave.

By November, the German offensive ran out of steam, and Soviet counterattacks began. “The warriors successfully use new close combat tactics - small assault groups... The enemy also presented his own tactical novelty: he created a greater density of fire with the help of “roaming” light machine guns. At the right moment, light machine guns were thrown onto the parapet and unexpectedly overwhelmed the approaches to their trenches with concentrated fire. For our assault groups, they were more dangerous than any pillbox or bunker, because they suddenly appeared and disappeared just as quickly.”

This tactical confrontation changed the fate of the warrior Zaitsev. The Soviet commanders decided to fight the “roaming machine guns” with the help of snipers, and he, a fighter of a machine gun company who had proven himself to be a marksman, was offered to change his military specialty and create a sniper group.

Spring on Mamayev Kurgan

Zaitsev’s group entered the first sniper duel on the southern shoulder of Height 102, the famous Mamayev Kurgan, along the slope of which the front line then ran. The Germans who held the peak suffered greatly there without drinking water - they could not reach the Volga. We were saved by a small spring almost in neutral. The Chief (Zaitsev’s nickname, short for chief foreman) brought a dozen of his snipers there and one day committed a small genocide to the Wehrmacht, shooting several dozen soldiers and officers.

Sniper of the 203rd Rifle Division (3rd Ukrainian Front), senior sergeant Ivan Petrovich Merkulov at a firing position. In March 1944, Ivan Merkulov was awarded the highest award - the title of Hero of the Soviet Union. During the war, the sniper killed more than 144 enemy soldiers and officers

Even animals do not hunt each other at a watering hole, but the ferocity of the Stalingrad battles was such that people became worse than animals. Soldiers of both armies shot at orderlies, finished off the wounded, killed and tortured prisoners. Once Zaitsev and machine gunners crept into an enemy trench, went into a dugout and shot point-blank German soldiers who were sleeping after the battle. In his memoirs, Zaitsev admits that after this he felt somehow uneasy for a long time, this action was too reminiscent of a vile murder.

The next day, Zaitsev’s group noticed in the area of ​​the spring a new communication route that the Germans were digging, and it was laid unsuccessfully: from the Soviet positions it was convenient to throw grenades at the working soldiers. Sniper Alexander Gryaznov volunteered. When he approached the place convenient for throwing and began to take out grenades, a shot rang out. It was a trap: a German sniper figured out how to lure the Soviet into a firing position.

Zaitsev spent three days at the stereo tube, looking for the enemy. The German was in front of him, every now and then he fired at the Red Army soldiers, often successfully, but there was no glare or flash. The enemy sniper was let down by a support company soldier who brought him hot food to the front line. When Zaitsev noticed a German with a smoking pot near a broken anti-aircraft gun, around which dozens of spent cartridges were lying, the search for the enemy position was narrowed to a few square meters. It was soon discovered that one of the cartridges had no bottom. It turned out that the German was looking through the sight through it, so the optics did not glare in the sun. The rest was a matter of technique: the partner raised his helmet over the parapet, the German fired and Zaitsev killed him with a hit through the cartridge case.

This is how the confrontation began in Stalingrad, which rewrote all sniper textbooks and regulations. In constant battles, tactics evolved at an accelerated pace, every day required fresh decisions, stereotyped thinking was punished with a bullet to the head.

German snipers came up with the idea of ​​working in tandem with artillery and machine guns. They hid their shots in their roar, and for a long time the Red Army soldiers could not understand that they were being killed by a sniper, and not by random bullets and shrapnel. And having entered into a sniper duel, the German directed artillery fire at the position of the Soviet opponent with a tracer (then they said - a ignition) shot (however, with the same shot he gave away his own rookery). Zaitsev responded by coming up with a “sniper salvo”: his group occupied all the positions dominating the terrain, provoked the Germans to open fire, and then shot everyone at once: the sniper, the artillerymen, and the machine gunners.

The Germans then changed their fundamental tactical habits. Since the First World War, their snipers preferred to work from their trenches (the Soviets usually hid in no man's land), but in Stalingrad they suddenly moved their positions beyond the front line and began to camouflage them with many false rookeries and dummies, which confused the Soviet snipers for a long time and killed many of them. And at that time, Soviet snipers came up with a decoy made from tin cans: at night they hung them in front of the German trenches and pulled a rope into their trench. In the morning, a partner pulled at it, the cans rattled, a German soldier looked out to see what was going on there in neutral, and received a bullet in the forehead.

Snipers of the unit of Senior Lieutenant F.D. Lunina fire volleys at enemy aircraft

All these evolutions took place not over months, but over one or two weeks in November. By the end of the Battle of Stalingrad, the confrontation with Soviet snipers had so developed the art of sniper in the Wehrmacht that when the Allies landed in Normandy in 1944, the Americans, famous for their accuracy, and the British, who fought with dignity against German snipers in the First World War, described what was happening in two words: sniper terror. However, the Germans did not come close to the Soviet level of sniper craft. The personal scores of Soviet snipers are superior to those of German ones as much as German tank aces were superior to Soviet ones. The top German sniper, Matthias Hetzenauer (345 confirmed kills), would not have made the Soviet top ten.

Legendary fight

The main sniper story from Stalingrad is, of course, the duel between Zaitsev and the German sniper ace who arrived from Berlin to kill him.

This is how he describes the culmination of this confrontation in his “Notes of a Sniper”: “Kulikov carefully, as only the most experienced sniper can do, began to lift his helmet. The fascist fired. Kulikov stood up for a moment, screamed loudly and fell. Finally, the Soviet sniper, the “main hare” he had been hunting for four days, was killed! - the German probably thought and stuck half his head out from under the sheet. I hit. The fascist’s head sank, and the optical sight of his rifle still sparkled in the sun.”

In his memoirs, Zaitsev names the name and rank of the German - Major Konings. In other versions of this story, the major is called Koenig, Koenings, and also Hines (sometimes Erwin) Thorwald. He usually serves as the head of a sniper school in Berlin, less often in Zossen, and sometimes turns out to be an Olympic champion in bullet shooting. All this is very strange, because Zaitsev claims in his book that he took documents from the murdered major.

In the USSR (and in modern Russia) questioning the stories of heroes was considered unacceptable sacrilege, so the first objections were voiced in the West. British historian Frank Ellis in his book “The Stalingrad Cauldron” said that there is no documentary evidence of the existence of sniper major Konings in the Wehrmacht, as well as Koenig, Koenings, etc. Moreover, there was not even a Berlin sniper school, which he allegedly headed. And it’s very easy to verify that there were no Olympic champions with that last name. Ellis went further and found an inconsistency in the description of the sniper duel: if the sun was shining in the face of a German sniper in the evening, then he should have been facing the west, where German, not Soviet, positions were located.

Russian historian Alexey Isaev suggested that Zaitsev actually killed a German sniper who turned out to be with the rank of major. This is quite possible, since in the Wehrmacht there was a practice of free hunting: a major could be a signalman, an artilleryman, or even a logistics officer, and his free time from service would be spent on the front line with a sniper rifle, hunting Red Army soldiers like deer in his Bavaria, for the sake of leisure. When the Soviet headquarters learned about the rank of the German killed by Zaitsev, they decided to use the case for propaganda. According to the law of the genre, the story was embellished, making the fight as epic as possible.

It turns out that the hero lied in his book? No, because he hardly wrote it. For this purpose there were special comrades, politically literate and literary gifted. And Vasily Zaitsev himself, in a television interview at a spring on Mamayev Kurgan, told this story completely differently. According to him, he did not hear anything about this major until he took the documents from the corpse. And only then was he informed at headquarters that this turned out to be the head of the Berlin sniper school, who had flown in to study the experience of Stalingrad sniper duels (the option - to kill the “main hare” - was apparently invented after the war, making the story even better).

The problem with propaganda is that the stories are promoted by the state media so much that they overshadow the real story in the public consciousness, just as 28 mythical heroes overshadowed thousands of real heroes of Panfilov’s division. And this is disrespect for their memory.

However, not everything is clear in this story. The sniper’s wife, after his death, spoke in a television interview about Zaitsev’s trip to the GDR. The Germans themselves invited him, they wanted to talk with him about the past war. The visit ended in a scandal: a woman rose from the hall and accused Zaitsev of murdering either her husband or her father (Zaitsev’s wife did not remember exactly), insulted him, and shouted threats. The Soviet guards took the veteran out, put him on a plane and sent him to the Union. The most interesting thing is that the German woman named the name, rank and military specialty of the deceased: Major Konings, ace sniper. So the legendary fight is not a fiction after all?

Sniper records and historical shots

Shot range

In November 2009, British sniper Craig Harrison in Afghanistan using an L115A3 Long Range Rifle from a distance of 2475 meters killed two Taliban machine gunners with two shots, and destroyed the machine gun itself with the third. The bullets fired by Harrison took approximately 6 seconds to reach the target, while their speed dropped from 936 m/s to 251.8 m/s, and the vertical deflection was about 120 meters (that is, if the sniper was at the same altitude as the targets , he would have to aim 120 meters higher).

Number of killed

Finnish sniper Simo Häyhä, nicknamed the White Death, killed 542 Red Army soldiers (according to confirmed data) or more than 700 (according to unconfirmed data) in 110 days during the Winter War. On December 21, 1939, he killed 25 Soviet soldiers (this record was supposedly broken in Korea by Australian Ian Robertson, who killed 30 Chinese soldiers in one morning, but he did not keep an official count and his record is considered unconfirmed).

Hero of the Soviet Union, sniper of the 25th Chapaev Division Lyudmila Mikhailovna Pavlichenko (1916-1974). Destroyed over 300 fascist soldiers and officers

Nice shot

American Marine sniper Carlos Hascock, nicknamed White Feather, won a duel with a Viet Cong sniper in Vietnam, hitting the enemy rifle's optical sight from a distance of about 300 meters. Steven Spielberg has confirmed that the sniper duel scene in Saving Private Ryan is based on this episode from the biography of Carlos Hascock.

Antisniper

Zaitsev Vasily Grigorievich sniper of the 1047th Infantry Regiment (284th Infantry Division, 62nd Army, Stalingrad Front) junior lieutenant. Born on March 23, 1915 in the village of Elino, now Agapovsky district, Chelyabinsk region, in a peasant family. Russian. Member of the CPSU since 1943. Graduated from a construction technical school in Magnitogorsk. Since 1936 in the Navy. Graduated from the Military Economic School. The war found Zaitsev in the position of head of the financial department in the Pacific Fleet, in Preobrazhenye Bay.

In the battles of the Great Patriotic War from September 1942. He received a sniper rifle from the hands of the commander of his 1047th regiment, Metelev, a month later, along with the medal "For Courage". By that time, Zaitsev had killed 32 Nazis from a simple “three-line rifle”. In the period from November 10 to December 17, 1942, in the battles for Stalingrad, he killed 225 soldiers and officers of the pr-ka, including 11 snipers (among whom was Heinz Horwald). Directly on the front line, he taught sniper work to soldiers in the commanders, trained 28 snipers. In January 1943, Zaitsev was seriously wounded. Professor Filatov saved his sight in a Moscow hospital.

The title of Hero of the Soviet Union with the presentation of the Order of Lenin and the Gold Star medal was awarded to Vasily Grigorievich Zaitsev on February 22, 1943.

Having received the Star of the Hero of the Soviet Union in the Kremlin, Zaitsev returned to the front. He finished the war on the Dniester with the rank of captain. During the war, Zaitsev wrote two textbooks for snipers, and also invented the still used technique of sniper hunting with “sixes” - when three pairs of snipers (a shooter and an observer) cover the same battle zone with fire.

After the war he was demobilized. He worked as director of the Kyiv Machine-Building Plant. Died on December 15, 1991.

Awarded the Order of Lenin, 2 Orders of the Red Banner, Order of the Patriotic War 1st degree, and medals. The ship plying along the Dnieper bears his name.

Two films have been made about the famous duel between Zaitsev and Horvald. "Angels of Death" 1992 directed by Yu.N. Ozerov, starring Fyodor Bondarchuk. And "Enemy at the Gates" 2001, directed by Jean-Jacques Annaud, in the role of Zaitsev - Judy Lowe.

The famous memoirs of the Soviet sniper Vasily Zaitsev, who became famous during the Battle of Stalingrad, were published in Spain. They caused a controversial reaction in society, and the film “Enemy at the Gates” was made based on them.

“Use every cartridge wisely, Vasily,” the father instructed his son when they went together to hunt wolves in the taiga. He used the experience acquired then in Stalingrad in relation to other wolves - in human form, but also gray. “Every day I killed 4 to 5 Germans,” he would write later. Chilling memoirs of sniper Vasily Zaitsev (1915-1991), Hero of the Soviet Union, one of the most famous representatives of this difficult and terrible profession. Published in Spain by Crítica, they tell the reader about the brutal battle waged by snipers during the Second World War. We find ourselves in the very heart of a brutal battle when a gunman sitting in cover sees the eyes of the man he is about to kill. Memories of a direct participant in those events allow us to look into the inner world, follow the actions of the fighters, who always inspired insurmountable fear and some kind of unhealthy worship. In a word, to lift that mystical veil that always surrounds the sniper.

The memoirs of Vasily Grigorievich Zaitsev tell how a sniper acted during the Battle of Stalingrad, on whose personal account there were 242 killed Germans, including 11 enemy snipers (the destruction of enemy snipers was one of the priorities). The dramatic events in which Zaitsev participated formed the basis of the film “Enemy at the Gates,” directed by Jean-Jacques Annaud. Historians such as Antony Beevor believe that some of the sniper's story, including the lengthy and intense duel with an experienced German sniper sent specifically to eliminate Zaitsev (which is the basis of the plot), is pure fiction. Be that as it may, the memoirs are a most interesting description of the brutal and bloody battle in Stalingrad and are read with bated breath.

In one episode, Zaitsev orders his group, consisting of three pairs of snipers, not to shoot at German officers who, thinking that they are safe, are washing themselves near a trench. “They’re just lieutenants,” he says. “If we swat a small fish, a fat fish will never stick its head out.” The next day they returned to their original position. We decided not to touch the soldier who was leaning out. And this is where those they were waiting for appear. A colonel accompanied by a sniper with a wonderful rifle, a major with a Knight's Cross framed by oak leaves and another colonel smoking cigarettes with a long and elegant cigarette holder. “Our shots rang out. We aimed for the head, as it is written in the training manual, and four fascists fell to the ground, giving up the ghost.” There was also a case when he shot at a German officer who had an Iron Cross on his chest. “I pulled the trigger and the bullet went through the award. The German fell back, spreading his arms wide.”

Zaitsev begins his memoirs with a story about his childhood. His grandfather was a hereditary Ural hunter and gave him his first gun. When going hunting, he lubricated himself with badger fat so that he wouldn’t smell it. While hunting wolves, he learned to follow the scent and sit in ambush, which would later help him “in the fight against other two-legged predators that invaded our homeland.” The future sniper had a good education. He graduated from a construction technical school and accounting courses, and worked as an insurance inspector.

In 1937 he was drafted into the army and assigned to the Pacific Fleet as a sailor, and from then on he always proudly wore his vest under his military uniform. Zaitsev was eager to go into battle, asked to be assigned to a sniper company and, already as a foreman, on September 21, 1942 he ended up in Stalingrad. It was like hell. He will write in his diary that there was a thick smell of fried meat in the air.

In his first fight, when he runs out of ammunition, the short and broad-faced Zaitsev, not at all like Jude Law, who played him, engages the German in hand-to-hand combat and kills him. Here we see the war exactly as it is: “Eventually he stopped resisting and I smelled a sickening smell. By dying, the fascist also shit himself.”

During the defense of the famous Red October plant, it experiences difficult moments. There is a so-called “war of the rats”, when the enemy is hiding in the basements and sewers of the destroyed city. At the end of October, a colonel saw how Zaitsev destroyed an enemy machine gun crew consisting of three people with three shots from an ordinary soldier’s rifle. “Give him a sniper rifle,” the colonel ordered. They brought Moisin Nagant 91/30 to Zaitsev, and the colonel told him: “There are already three of them. Now keep score." So he became a sniper and got a taste for it: “I liked being a sniper and having the right to choose an object; when fired, it seemed to me that I heard the bullet piercing the enemy’s skull.” Zaitsev hits from a long distance - 550 meters or more. The sight allows you to clearly see the target.

“You know if he shaved, you see the expression on his face, you watch him hum something to himself. And while your subject runs his hand across his forehead or tilts his head to adjust his helmet, you look for the best point to shoot. He doesn’t even suspect that he only has a few seconds left to live.” There are no doubts, no remorse. “Getting the sight between his eyes was easy. I pulled the trigger, it twitched for a few seconds and froze motionless.”

Zaitsev portrays Soviet soldiers exclusively in a heroic and noble light, and the Germans as cruel: they finish off the wounded with flamethrowers or throw them to be eaten by dogs. For a sniper, fascists are “snakes” that wriggle when he presses them to the ground with his foot.

The memoirs contain a lot of advice to snipers (Zaitsev later became an instructor). A spring or spring is a good place to shoot at the enemy. After the shot, immediately change your position to avoid detection.

It takes no more than two seconds for a shooter to aim and pull the trigger, but surveillance and camouflage can take hours or even days. You have to become invisible. Patience is the key to success. Contrary to popular belief, snipers do not act alone, but in pairs and even groups, using various kinds of bait and dummies to lure the enemy into a trap.

An entire chapter of the book is devoted to the famous duel, which is about in the film Enemy at the Gates. The memoirs say that a captured German soldier reported that the German High Command, worried about the mounting losses, sent a certain Major Koenings, director of the Wehrmacht sniper school located near Berlin, to Stalingrad with the sole task of eliminating the famous Russian marksman.

A German and a Russian sniper (played by Ed Harris in the film) play a deadly game. As a result, Zaitsev manages to outwit and kill the German ace. He drags his corpse out of hiding and hands it over to the division commander along with the rifle and documents. The supposed sight of this alleged (and defeated) German sniper is on display at the Museum of the Armed Forces in Moscow.

“There has never been a German sniper major named Koenings,” Beevor, who studied this issue in detail in his famous book “Stalingrad,” said in a conversation with me. He is not mentioned either in official German or Soviet sources. “I have studied all the sniper reports about the Battle of Stalingrad available in the Central Archives of the Ministry of Defense in Podolsk, and I can say with complete confidence that the famous duel between a German and a Soviet sniper never happened. If it really took place, it would certainly have been reflected in the reports, since Soviet propaganda would certainly have taken advantage of such an opportunity. The whole story was invented after the Battle of Stalingrad.”

Beevor recalls that Anno invited him to view his painting “in the vain hope that I would not be too critical; I warned him in advance about my position. The French director bought the rights to the book by William Craig, which formed the basis of the film. And Craig believed the propaganda story about the sniper duel and the stories of Tanya Chernova (played by Rachel Weiss in the film) that she, too, was a sniper and the shooter’s lover. Poor Zaitsev, the army political workers used him for their own purposes, completely rewriting his biography and turning it into a legend. All this led to the fact that after the war he became depressed and began to drink.”

In reality, the historian notes, Zaitsev's exploits were greatly exaggerated, and he was not even the best Soviet sniper at Stalingrad. And the best was Sergeant Anatoly Chekhov (not the most suitable surname for someone engaged in such a dangerous profession), another hero of the urban war, whom Vasily Grossman interviewed and even accompanied during a combat mission on Mamayev Kurgan, where the most fierce battles took place to see how it works. Unlike Zaitsev, whom Grossman also knew personally, Chekhov, who used something like a silencer, looked not at faces, but at insignia. On the first day of fighting he killed nine Germans; in the second - 17, and in eight days - 40. In total, during the Battle of Stalingrad, Chekhov eliminated 256 enemy troops. In 1943, near Kursk, he lost both legs. Other famous Soviet snipers were Ivan Sidorenko, who set a kind of record by eliminating 500 German soldiers. Five more shooters accounted for more than 400 killed Germans. The famous female sniper Lyudmila Pavlichenko destroyed 309 enemy soldiers and officers. After the end of the war she became a historian.

Grossman did not write anything about any long duel, but he did describe a fight between Zaitsev and a German sniper, which lasted... 15 minutes. It was this episode, according to Beevor, that was inflated to the scale of the legend about the dramatic battle between Zaitsev and Major Koenings, whom no one had ever heard of, allegedly sent to eliminate the Soviet sniper.

At the end of his memoirs, Zaitsev writes about the injuries received at the end of the Battle of Stalingrad. He lost his sight from German shrapnel and spent a lot of effort trying to restore it. He was not allowed to return to the front in order to preserve such a vivid example of Soviet patriotism, and the famous sniper began to train new generations of soldiers. The manuals he wrote are still used in Russian military schools. At the end of the war, Zaitsev was demobilized with the rank of captain and worked at a textile factory in Kyiv, constantly remembering combat missions. He died ten days before the collapse of the USSR, he is buried on Mamayev Kurgan, where fierce fighting took place. Perhaps even now the spirit of the great shooter continues to observe his objects from there among the ruins of Stalingrad that have dissolved in time.

Lurking Death

Other famous snipers include:

- Finn Simo Haiha ("White Death"), the best sniper of all time, who killed 505 Soviet troops during the Finnish-Soviet War (he did not use a telescopic sight).

Hero of the Soviet Union Vasily Grigorievich Zaitsev became a legend during his lifetime. Accustomed to the taiga, to hunting, and to weapons since childhood, in Stalingrad, Sergeant Major 1st Article Zaitsev destroyed 225 enemy soldiers and officers in a month and a half of fighting. Ten of them, the same snipers, were hunting for him and his partners. The eleventh, who arrived from Germany itself specifically to please Zaitsev, settled down forever there, in Stalingrad. The Russian hunter always emerged victorious from deadly duels...

“For us, the soldiers and commanders of the 62nd Army, there is no land beyond the Volga. We have stood and will stand to the death!” V. Zaitsev

short biography

Childhood

Vasily Grigorievich Zaitsev was born on the twenty-third of March 1915 in the village of Elenkina, Orenburg province (Chelyabinsk region), into an ordinary peasant family. From early childhood he was taught to shoot a hunting rifle by his grandfather Andrei Alekseevich, and at the age of 12 he received a rifle as a gift. Vasily recalled: “In my memory, my childhood is marked by the words of my grandfather Andrei, who took me hunting with him, there he handed me a bow with homemade arrows and said:

“You have to shoot accurately, in the eye of every animal. Now you are no longer a child... Use your ammunition sparingly, learn to shoot without missing a beat. This skill can be useful not only when hunting for four-legged animals...”

It was as if he knew or foresaw that I would have to carry out this order in the fire of the most brutal battle for the honor of our Motherland - in Stalingrad... I received from my grandfather a letter of taiga wisdom, love of nature and worldly experience.”

Vasily's incomplete secondary education fit into seven classes, after which the guy entered the construction technical school in Magnitogorsk, which he graduated in 1930. In 1937, he entered service in the Pacific Fleet as a clerk in the artillery department.

Years of war

The Great Patriotic War found him in the post of head of the financial unit in Preobrazhenie Bay. In the summer of 1942, after several reports with a request to be sent to the front, Vasily Zaitsev ended up in the 284th Infantry Division. And in September 1942 he took part in the battle for Stalingrad.

From the very beginning, Vasily Grigorievich showed himself to be a skillful and extraordinary sniper, from a distance of 800 meters he could destroy three opponents at once from an ordinary soldier’s rifle

For his courage and outstanding sniper abilities he was awarded the medal “For Courage” and a sniper rifle. The fame of the outstanding sniper spread on all fronts. The sniper rifle handed to the shooter that day is now exhibited in the Volgograd State Panorama Museum “Battle of Stalingrad” as an exhibit. In 1945, the rifle was made personalized. After the Victory, an engraving was attached to the butt: “To the Hero of the Soviet Union, Guard Captain Vasily Zaitsev. He buried more than 300 fascists in Stalingrad.”

Post-war years

Vasily Grigorievich Zaitsev, post-war years

Vasily Zaitsev finished his military career in the post-war years, studied at the All-Union Institute of Textile and Light Industry, worked in Kyiv as director of the Ukraina clothing factory, and headed the light industry technical school. The war hero met his wife Zinaida Sergeevna while holding the position of director of an automobile repair plant, and she worked as the secretary of the party bureau of a machine-building plant.

By the decision of the Volgograd City Council of People's Deputies of May 7, 1980, for special services shown in the defense of the city and in the defeat of Nazi troops in the Battle of Stalingrad, V. G. Zaitsev was awarded the title “Honorary Citizen of the Hero City of Volgograd.” The hero is depicted in a panorama of the Battle of Stalingrad.

Zaitsev retained his accuracy into old age. One day he was invited to evaluate the training of young snipers. After the shooting, he was asked to demonstrate his skills to the young fighters.

A 65-year-old warrior, taking a rifle from one of the young fighters, knocked out a “ten” three times.

That time the cup was awarded not to excellent marksmen, but to him, an outstanding master of marksmanship.

Vasily Zaitsev died on December 15, 1991. He was buried in Kyiv at the Lukyanovsky cemetery. Subsequently, the will of the heroic warrior was fulfilled - to bury him in the blood-soaked soil of Stalingrad, which he so heroically defended. And on January 31, 2006, the last will of the legendary sniper was fulfilled; his ashes were solemnly reburied on Mamayev Kurgan in Volgograd.

Vasily Zaitsev - hero of the Battle of Stalingrad

From Vasily’s memoirs: “At night we crossed the Volga to Stalingrad. The city was burning... Near the ruins of houses I saw the corpses of women and children. That night I arrived at the front for the first time. And I immediately saw a terrible picture of the crimes of Hitler’s bandits... I am a simple person, of a gentle character. Born in the Urals, worked as an accountant. In my life I have never felt such anger as I was inflamed that night. And I decided to take merciless revenge on the enemy.”

Already in the first battles with the enemy, Zaitsev showed himself to be an outstanding shooter. Once Zaitsev, from a distance of 800 meters from a window, shooting from an ordinary three-line rifle, destroyed three enemy soldiers. As a reward, Zaitsev received a cash prize, a sniper rifle with an optical sight, and a medal “For Courage.” By that time, Zaitsev had killed 32 enemy soldiers using a simple “three-line rifle”. Soon people in the regiment, division, and army started talking about him. Zaitsev combined all the qualities inherent in a sniper - visual acuity, sensitive hearing, restraint, composure, endurance, military cunning. He knew how to choose the best positions and disguise them; usually hid from enemy soldiers in places where they could not even imagine a Soviet sniper. The famous sniper hit the enemy mercilessly.

Only in the period from November 10 to December 17, 1942, in the battles for Stalingrad, Zaitsev destroyed 225 enemy soldiers and officers, including 11 snipers

In total, Zaitsev’s group destroyed 1,126 enemy troops in four months of fighting. Zaitsev's comrades-in-arms were Nikolai Ilyin, who had 496 Germans on his account, Pyotr Goncharov - 380, Viktor Medvedev - 342. It should be noted that Zaitsev's main merit is not in his personal combat account, but in the fact that he became a key figure in deployment of sniper movement among the ruins of Stalingrad. Zaitsev was especially glorified by a sniper duel with a German “super sniper”, whom Zaitsev himself calls Major König (Heinz Thorwald) in his memoirs.

The legendary fight with the German “super sniper”

In order to reduce the activity of Russian snipers and thus raise the morale of their soldiers, the German command decides to send the head of the Berlin sniper squad, SS Colonel Heinz Thorwald, to the city on the Volga to destroy the “main Russian hare.” Torvald, transported to the front by plane, immediately challenged Zaitsev, shooting down two Soviet snipers with single shots. Now the Soviet command was also worried, having learned about the arrival of the German ace. The commander of the 284th Infantry Division, Colonel Batyuk, ordered his snipers to eliminate Heinz at any cost.

The task was not easy. First of all, it was necessary to find a German, study his behavior, habits, handwriting. And this is all for one single shot. Thanks to his vast experience, Zaitsev perfectly studied the handwriting of enemy snipers. By the camouflage and firing of each of them, he could determine their character, experience, and courage. But Colonel Thorvald puzzled him. It was impossible to even understand in which sector of the front he was operating. Most likely, he changes positions quite often, acts with great caution, tracking down the enemy himself.

One day at dawn, together with his partner Nikolai Kuznetsov, Zaitsev took a secret position in the area where their comrades had been wounded the day before. But the whole day of observation did not bring any results. But suddenly a helmet appeared above the enemy trench and began to slowly move along the trench. But her swaying was somehow unnatural. “Bait,” Vasily realized. But for the whole day not a single movement was noticed. This means that the German lay in a hidden position all day without giving himself away. From this ability to be patient, Zaitsev realized that in front of him was the head of a sniper school. On the second day, the fascist again showed nothing of himself. Then we began to understand that this was the same guest from Berlin. The third morning at the position began as usual. A battle was breaking out nearby. But the Soviet snipers did not move and only observed the enemy positions. But political instructor Danilov, who went with them into the ambush, could not stand it. Having decided that he had noticed the enemy, he leaned out of the trench quite a bit and just for a second. This was enough for the enemy shooter to notice him, take aim and shoot him. Fortunately, the political instructor only wounded him. It was clear that only a master of his craft could shoot like that. This convinced Zaitsev and Kuznetsov that it was the guest from Berlin who fired and, judging by the speed of the shot, was right in front of them. But where exactly?
There is a bunker on the right, but the embrasure in it is closed. There is a damaged tank on the left, but an experienced shooter will not climb there. Between them, on a flat area, lies a piece of metal, covered with a pile of bricks. Moreover, it has been lying there for a long time, the eye has become accustomed to it, and you won’t even notice it right away. Maybe a German under the leaf? Zaitsev put his mitten on his stick and raised it above the parapet. A shot and an accurate hit. Vasily lowered the bait in the same position as he raised it. The bullet entered smoothly, without drift. Like a German under a sheet of iron. The next challenge is to get him to open up. But today it is useless to do this. It’s okay, the enemy sniper will not leave the successful position. It's not in his nature. The Russians definitely need to change their position.

The next night we took a new position and began to wait for dawn. In the morning, a new battle between infantry units broke out. Kulikov fired at random, illuminating his cover and piqued the interest of the enemy shooter. Then they rested throughout the first half of the day, waiting for the sun to turn around, leaving their shelter in the shadows, and illuminating the enemy’s with direct rays. Suddenly, right in front of the leaf, something sparkled. Optical sight. Kulikov slowly began to lift his helmet. The shot clicked. Kulikov screamed, stood up and immediately fell without moving. The German made a fatal mistake by not counting the second sniper. He leaned out a little from under cover right under Vasily Zaitsev’s bullet. Thus ended this sniper duel, which became famous at the front and was included in the list of classic techniques of snipers around the world.