This man lived a difficult life. The time itself was difficult. The lieutenant generals of Russia of our time have a different reputation, however, without underestimating the unconditional merits, few of them fell out with what officers of the Soviet state lived in the first period of its existence. And this is not about
only about the Great Patriotic War. The lieutenant generals of the USSR and representatives of other posts of personnel officers of those times came from the Russian Empire. Many of them had to serve in the ranks of the tsarist army. Among them are Konstantin Rokossovsky,
Georgy Zhukov, and our hero. They had to survive the civil war, the party, and then the public purge of 1920-30. Lieutenant General Vlasik became one of the characters, albeit today a little-known, of the Stalin era. And his time passed with the death of his leader.
The childhood and youth of Nikolai Vlasik
The future lieutenant general was born in a poor family of one of the Belarusian peasants in 1896, in the Grodno province. After graduating from only three classes of a church school, he was forced to begin his career at the age of thirteen. The young man got a job as a laborer to the local landowner. At an early age he had a chance to try several specialties at once, he worked as a digger on the railway, a worker in a paper mill. At the age of 19, a young man is called up for military service. The First World War was on. In the course of hostilities, he already showed remarkable courage, was awarded the St. George Cross and promoted to non-commissioned officer rank. However, Nikolai Vlasik was not destined
to serve in the tsarist army even until the end of the war. Already in the early
days of the October Revolution, he makes a fateful decision for himself and goes over to the side of the Bolsheviks. And in February 1918, the future lieutenant general of the Red Army was included in its composition. So far, only in the position of assistant commander. In September 1919, a promising guy was transferred to the structure of the Cheka, where he worked in a special department under the direct supervision of Felix Dzerzhinsky. In the 1920s, his career went upward. In 1926, he became the senior detective of the department at that time, OGPU, and in 1930, the assistant to the head of the department.
Stalin's guard
In fact, in the guards of the "leader of the peoples" he appears in the mid-twenties. In the mid-1930s, he received the position of head of the first department, and he was directly responsible for protecting the highest state officials, in particular Joseph Stalin. Despite the massive personnel purges, which especially affected the officers of the army, the lieutenant general was longer than others
held on to his post. The secret of his success was in the highest degree of trust on the part of the head of state. According to the recollections
of Stalin’s wife, Nadezhda Sergeevna, over time he turned from a personal bodyguard into a real family member. In addition to his immediate responsibilities, he became the de facto mayor of the family, raising children, managing finances, household matters and so on. Large-scale repressions reached Nikolai Vlasik only at the very end of Stalin's reign. He was arrested in December 1952. He was charged with embezzlement of the state budget. By court order, he was exiled for a ten-year term. The former lieutenant general, removed from the ranks, returned to a completely different country five years later (the term was reduced by amnesty). He died in Moscow in 1967.