Background
Vladimir Petrovich Stavsky (real family name Kirpichniko) was born on July 30, 1900, in Penza, Russian Federation to a family of a cabinet-maker. His father died early, and his mother died in 1915.
Penza non-classical secondary school
The Order of Lenin
The Order of the Red Banner
The Order of the Badge of Honour (1939)
The Order of the Red Banner (Mongolia)
Vladimir Petrovich Stavsky (real family name Kirpichniko) was born on July 30, 1900, in Penza, Russian Federation to a family of a cabinet-maker. His father died early, and his mother died in 1915.
After his mother's death in 1915, Vladimir Petrovich went to work, in 1918 joined the Red Army, and soon became a commander of a fighting unit engaged in the suppression of numerous anti-Bolshevik mutinies. In 1918 he, now an RKP(B) member, was transferred to the Caucasian Front's First Army's HQ, joined the local military section of Cheka, and by the end of the Civil War had been a brigade commissar.
After demobilization in 1922, Vladimir Petrovich started his journalistic and literary career, starting out as a Rostov-on-Don-based Molot newspaper author. Three years later, now a secretary of the Northern Caucasian Association of Proletarian Writers, and the Communist Party official superintending the stocking up of wheat harvest in the Kuban, he joined Na Podyome (On the Rise) magazine as its editor-in-chief. In 1928 he moved to Moscow to become the Russian Association of Proletarian Writers secretary. Writing under the pseudonym Stavsky, Vladimir Petrovich published several short novels, a book of short stories, and numerous documentary sketches, highlighting collectivization, calling for ruthlessness in the class war, and singing paeans to Stalin's internal politics.
In 1932, under the guidance of the CPSU Central Committee, Vladimir Petrovich took an active part in the formation of the Soviet Union of Writers, of which he became the General Secretary in 1936, after Maxim Gorky's death. As such, Vladimir Petrovich sanctioned the prosecution and subsequent killing of many prominent literary figures. Boris Pasternak, who survived, was one of his first targets. Pasternak crossed Vladimir Petrovich by refusing to sign an Open Letter calling for death sentences for Grigori Zinoviev and the other defendants at the show trial of August 1936. Vladimir Petrovich forged Pasternak's signature on the letter and delivered a long complaint against Pasternak at a writers' meeting in December. Mikhail Sholokhov might have been the victim of his overzealousness too: after paying a visit to the And Quiet Flows the Don author on 16 September 1937, Vladimir Petrovich wrote a personal report to Stalin, accusing the latter of being 'politically misguided'. In his 1938 letter to the NKVD narkom Nikolai Yezhov, Vladimir Petrovich demanded to "resolve the question of Mandelshtam," labeling the latter's poetry as "obscene and libelous". Soon after that, the poet was arrested and sentenced to five years of hard labor. In the same letter, Vladimir Petrovich condemned Valentin Katayev and Iosif Prut for "defending Mandelshtam violently."
As World War II broke out, Vladimir Petrovich relinquished his posts and, as a war correspondent, went first to Mongolia than to the Finnish War, the Western and the Kalinin Fronts. Vladimir Petrovich, the only Soviet author to have received two Orders of the Red Banner before 1941, was lauded for bravery by colleagues. In November 1943, accompanying the Red Army sniper Klavdia Ivanova, he entered the neutral zone nearby Nevel in the Pskov region, where he was killed.
Quotes from others about the person
Georgy Zhukov: "A fine writer, propagandist, he lived one life with the soldiers. I think he was an excellent front-line correspondent... It is a great pity that this true writer of battle scenes died, died as a soldier in 1943 in the battle of Nevel."
Vladimir Petrovich was married and had a daughter, Lyudmila, a Soviet and Russian teacher, director, actress, Honored Artist of the RSFSR (1978).