Vasily Ivanovich Bufetov

Vasily Ivanovich Bufetov was born on 15 September 1920 in the village of Luzhny in Chern uyezd of Tula governorate, now Chernsky district of Tula region. From 1928 he lived in Tula, where he finished ten years of school in 1940. He was called up in October 1940 and in November 1941 completed an accelerated course at the Odessa Artillery School, then evacuated to Sukhoi Log in Sverdlovsk region. From December 1941 he was at the front, first as a fire-platoon commander in the 430th Howitzer Artillery Regiment and, from July 1943, as a platoon and then battery commander in the 121st High-Power Howitzer Artillery Brigade. He fought on the Western, Volkhov and Leningrad Fronts, the 3rd and 1st Baltic Fronts and the 2nd and 1st Belorussian Fronts — in the defence of Leningrad and the breaking of the blockade, the liberation of Novgorod and the Baltic states, the blockade of the Courland group, the East Pomeranian operation and the Berlin operation. By April 1945 Lieutenant Bufetov commanded a battery of 203-millimetre howitzers in the 121st High-Power Howitzer Artillery Brigade of the 2nd Artillery Division, 6th Breakthrough Artillery Corps, 5th Shock Army, 1st Belorussian Front. In the Berlin operation, on 19–20 April 1945, while reconnoitring with the infantry on the outskirts of Strausberg, he located guns and heavy machine guns firing from stone buildings and destroyed them with his battery's fire. On 21 April, after a fifteen-kilometre march, his battery was the first to open fire on the Silesian Station in Berlin, and from 26 April to 2 May it destroyed enemy strongpoints with direct fire; he himself took part in the street fighting in Berlin. By decree of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet of 15 May 1946, for courage and heroism shown in the fighting, Senior Lieutenant Vasily Ivanovich Bufetov was made a Hero of the Soviet Union with the Order of Lenin and the Gold Star medal, no. 6793. After the war he served in the Group of Soviet Forces in Germany, graduated from the Higher Artillery School in Leningrad in 1948 and from the Frunze Military Academy in 1954. From 1954 to 1957 he was an operational duty officer at the command post of the 1st Special-Purpose Air Defence Army, which defended Moscow, and from 1957 to 1964 head of the 218th radio-technical centre. He retired as a lieutenant colonel in August 1964. He held four Orders of the Red Star. He died on 13 January 1965 and is buried in the Savvinskoye Cemetery in Balashikha near Moscow.