2024-04-14 20:21:18
The last words that Red Army General Nikolai Vatutin wrote in his life were addressed to Stalin. He was in bad shape after the amputation of his leg, he was in pain. He handed the nurses a piece of paper that said, “Things are going very badly. Please help. Vatutin.”
It is not known whether anyone read the message to the then leader of the Soviet Union, Joseph Stalin, or learned about it. The day after that, General Vatutin died in a Kyiv hospital of sepsis. This happened more than two weeks after he was hit in the buttocks by a bullet fired by a member of the Ukrainian Insurgent Army, known by the acronym UPA.
The organization fought for an independent Ukraine against the Russians, Germans and Poles and committed war crimes against the Polish population in western Ukraine. It was headed by Stepan Bandera. This was a man labeled by Soviet and Russian propaganda as an ally of Hitler and the Nazis, even though he spent part of the war interned in the Nazi concentration camp in Sachsenhausen and the German Nazis murdered his two brothers.
A commando of the Ukrainian Insurgent Army surprised the column with Vatutin on February 29, 1944 near the village of Mylatyn, which lies between the cities of Rivne and Khmelnytskyi in western Ukraine. Ukrainians’ hopes for an independent state were already dying out: after the capture of Kiev in 1943, the Red Army also arrived in Ukrainian towns and villages that belonged to Poland before the start of World War II, although it entered Lviv only in August 1944. Bandera’s insurgents waged an unequal battle against the odds , which did not have much chance of success, because of course Stalin refused to allow Ukraine to secede from the Soviet Union.
General Vatutin, who at that time commanded the 1st Ukrainian Front of the Red Army, was moving from Rivne to Slavuta on the fateful day, where the Soviet infantry had their positions. But the Soviets underestimated the situation and did not check in advance whether the route was safe. They apparently did not believe that the UPA would pose a threat in these places.
The convoy consisted of four unarmored cars, Vatutin was sitting in the first. He also had secret documents from the army staff with him. At half past eight in the evening, the convoy was passing the village of Malatyn when Vatutin heard the shooting. He gave an order which in a little while became fatal to him. He told the driver to stop and tasked the accompanying Red Army soldiers with the task of seeing what was happening in the village.
As he stood next to his car, gunfire rang out from the woods by the road. Ukrainian rebels attacked the convoy and Vatutin was hit. The driver fled in panic, but another man from the escort dragged Vatutin into the other car and they managed to drive away from the scene. The general ended up at night first in a local hospital in Rivne, the next day he was airlifted to Kyiv. Secret documents and also the general’s leather coat got into the hands of the rebels.
“There were only twelve of us. We didn’t expect a convoy, we didn’t even know who was in it. We hit the first car, which then remained standing there,” UPA member Jevhen Basjuk testified later. Army documents indicate that the group did not know about Vatutin’s passage through the region and that it hit the general was a coincidence.
In the weeks that followed, Stalin’s NKVD security forces and the Red Army made several major raids in the area. They shot over a thousand people, real and imagined insurgents. Many people were executed in the prison in Rivne.
Vatutin survived, but his condition worsened. Doctors described the injuries as serious and fatal in more than a quarter of such cases. The bullet entered the right half of the buttock and exited through the thigh. The general received the best possible care at the time, the best surgeons from Moscow took care of him. Stalin and his appointed administrator of Ukraine, Nikita Khrushchev, received daily information about the progress of the treatment.
But on March 23, Vatutin was seized with a high fever and the doctors concluded that he had been poisoned. They cleaned the wound and his condition improved a bit. Khrushchev noted that the forty-two-year-old general even asked for vodka. But two weeks later, on April 5, a team of doctors had to amputate his right leg. That didn’t help either. He died on April 15, 1944 after one o’clock in the morning.
A monument to Vatutin is being dismantled in the center of Kyiv. The video was provided by Kyiv City Council member Dmytro Bilotserkovets pic.twitter.com/ubc1zAFHQP
— Ukrainian truth ✌️ (@ukrpravda_news) February 9, 2023
On Stalin’s orders, the general was buried in Marinsky Park in the center of Kyiv. In 1948, they added a monument with the inscription “To General Vatutin with gratitude, the Ukrainian people”. The monument remained in its place long after the collapse of the Soviet Union, it was taken as its own only after the Russian aggression against Ukraine, on February 9, 2023, a platoon of workers removed it and took it away.
Video: Russians commemorated the anniversary of Joseph Stalin’s death on Red Square in Moscow (March 6, 2023)
Russians commemorated the 70th anniversary of the death of Joseph Vissarionovich Stalin on Red Square in Moscow. | Video: Associated Press