Vasily Grigoryevich Zaitsev

Sniper of the 1047th Rifle Regiment, 284th Rifle Division, Hero of the Soviet Union (22 February 1943), Captain. Born on 23 March 1915 in the village of Yeleninka, Orenburg province (now Chelyabinsk region), into a family of hunters, he learned to shoot as a child. Before the war he served in the Pacific Fleet as a finance clerk; in 1942 he obtained a transfer to the front and was sent to Stalingrad. His credited score during the Battle of Stalingrad is 225 enemy soldiers and officers, including 11 snipers; a number of publications give 242 as his total for the war. The two figures cover different periods, and conflating them is a common error. He set up sniper training within the 62nd Army: his pupils formed a sniper movement credited with several thousand enemy casualties. He developed methods of group sniping — teams of six with overlapping fields of observation. The widely known episode of a duel with the head of a German sniper school comes from Zaitsev's own memoirs; researchers have found no confirmation in German records, and it remains unverified. He was severely wounded in January 1943 and temporarily lost his sight. He died on 15 December 1991 and was reinterred on Mamayev Kurgan in Volgograd in 2006.