Akhromeyev, Sergei Fedorovich.

Akhromeyev, Sergei Fedorovich, born 05-05-1923, in Vindrey, Russia, was a Soviet Union Army General. His father fell under dispossession and died in the late 1940s in Central Asia. His mother, after divorcing her husband in 1928, left with her children to Moscow, where she worked at the plant in Krasny Bogatyr. Sergei joined the Soviet Union Army in 1940 and the Communist Party in 1943, attending the Frunze Military Academy and the Astrakhan Infantry School. During World War II he served on the Leningrad Front as commander of a rifle unit and motorized artillery brigade. From July 1944, he was commander of a motorized battalion of machine gunners of the 14th Self-Propelled Artillery Brigade of the Reserve of the High Command in the Kharkov and Moscow Military Districts. He graduated from the Higher Officers’ School of Self-Propelled Artillery of the Armored and Mechanized Forces of the Red Army.

Enrolled in August 1942 as a cadet in the courses of lieutenants at the 2nd Astrakhan Infantry School, which he graduated in the same year. From May to August 1942 he was a cadet with the Black Sea Fleet,

 serving as part of the gunnery unit on the ship. He then served as commander of a rifle platoon of the 197th Army Reserve Regiment of the 28th Army, and since 1943 as an adjutant senior rifle battalion of the same regiment on the 4th Ukrainian Front. under command of General Fyodor Tolbukhin. 

At one point he was ordered to guard and hold a road on which the German Army would be trying to advance. Despite a bloody battle, he was able to accomplish the task. Relating the story during a meal with Secretary of State George Shultz and Ambassador Ken Adelman in Reykjavík during the Reagan Administration, Akhromeyev told Shultz that his accomplishment was not only a great sign of his patriotism, as Shultz suggested, but also was because had he abandoned the road, Josef Stalin  would have had him shot. He was decorated for his participation in the defense of Leningrad.

He served as Chief of the General Staff of the Soviet Armed Forces, from 1984 to 1988 and as Chief Military Adviser to Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev. He was awarded the titles of Hero of the Soviet Union in 1982 and Marshal of the Soviet Union in 1983, the nation’s highest military honours. He was also the recipient of four Orders of Lenin and two Red Stars.  Akhromeyev, a hard-liner in the Cold War, resigned from a prominent position in the Soviet government. On 07-12-1988, the same day that Gorbachev announced substantial troop reductions, Akhromeyev resigned from office. He was the second of three Soviet officials to commit suicide in the wake of an unsuccessful takeover of the central government by hard-liners. The others were Interior Minister Boris K. Pugo, died 22-08-1991, who was one of the leaders of the coup and Administrator of Affairs Nikolai E. Kruchina, suicide 26-08-1991, age 63.