This man lived a difficult life. Time itself was difficult. Lieutenant-General of Russia of our time have a different reputation, however, without understating the unconditional merits, the share of a few of them fell from what the officers of the Soviet state of the first period of their existence lived. And it is not Only about the Great Patriotic War. The Lieutenant-General of the USSR and representatives of other posts of the cadre officers of those times were from the Russian Empire. Many of them had to serve in the ranks of the tsarist army. Among them are Konstantin Rokossovsky, Georgy Zhukov, and our hero. They fell through the civil war, the party war, and then the public purge of 1920-30. Lieutenant-General Vlasik became one of the symbols, even if little known, of the Stalin era. And his time was gone with the death of his leader.
Childhood and youth of Nikolai Vlasik
The future lieutenant-general was born into a poor family of one of the Belarusian peasants in 1896, in the Grodno province. After graduating from only three classes of the church school, he was forced to start his career at the age of thirteen. The young man got a job as a laborer to a local landowner. Already at an early age he happened to try several specialties at once, he worked as a digger on the railway, an employee at a paper factory. At the age of 19, a young man is called up for military service. There was the First World War. During the fighting, he already showed remarkable bravery, was awarded the St. George Cross and promoted to non-commissioned officers. However, Nikolai Vlasik was not fated To serve in the tsarist army even before the end of the war. Already in the first days of the October Revolution he takes a fateful decision for himself and moves to the side of the Bolsheviks. And in February 1918 the future Lieutenant-General of the Red Army is included in its composition. So far only in the post of assistant commander. In September 1919 a promising young man was transferred to the structure of the Cheka, where he worked in a special department under the direct supervision of Felix Dzerzhinsky. In the 1920s, his career was on an ascending path. In 1926 he became the senior operative authority of the department by that time OGPU, and in 1930 the assistant to the chief of the department.
Stalin's guard
In fact, in the guards of the "leader of the peoples" he appears in the mid-twenties. In the mid-1930s, he received the post of chief of the first department and on his shoulders lay the immediate responsibility of protecting the highest state officials, in particular Joseph Stalin. Despite the massive personnel cleansing, which particularly affected the army officers , the lieutenant-general is longer than the others Held out on his post. The secret of his success was the highest degree of confidence on the part of the head of state. According to the memoirs of Stalin's wife, Nadezhda Sergeevna, over time he turned from a personal bodyguard to a real family member. In addition to his immediate duties, he became the de facto majorord of the family, raising children, managing finances, economic issues and so on. Large-scale repressions reached Nikolai Vlasik only at the very end of Stalin's reign. He was arrested in December 1952. He was charged with plundering the state budget. By a court decision, he was exiled for ten years. The former lieutenant-general, who had been removed from the ranks, returned to another country after five years (the term was shortened by an amnesty). He died in Moscow in 1967.