World Battlefronts: Soviet Immortal

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In the spring of their victory, came a moment of deep sadness for Russian military men. In the great Hall of Columns at Moscow lay the body of Marshal Boris Mikhailovich Shaposhnikov, the Tsarist colonel who had turned to the Soviets in 1918, served as one of the few professional midwives at the birth of the Red Army.

Shaposhnikov had helped steady the amateur soldiers of the civil war. As chief of the Frunze Red Banner Military Academy, he had created a Red officers corps. He planned the 1939 move into Poland and the winter war with Finland. He was Chief of Staff at the beginning of the present war, played a major role in setting Soviet strategy, of trading space for time, of counterattacking when the Germans were most extended. Then illness forced him to the sidelines.

In death, as in life, his colleagues honored Boris Shaposhnikov. Headed by Marshal Joseph Stalin and Foreign Commissar V. M. Molotov, Red marshals, generals and high Soviet officials shouldered his flag-draped, flower-draped coffin and carried it down the dimly lit Okhotny Road to a waiting car which took it to the crematorium.

Later the Soviet Government will erect a memorial to Marshal Shaposhnikov, architect of victory. For the present, the Government awarded 200,000 rubles cash to his pretty actress wife, Marie Shaposhnikova of the Bolshoi Theater, plus 5,000 a month for life.