Aleksandr Ivanovich Cherepanov (Russian: Александр Иванович Черепанов; 21 November 1895 [O.S. 9 November] – 6 July 1984) was a Soviet military leader and lieutenant general of the Red Army.
Appointed a senior instructor at the General Staff Academy after returning from China, he was named commander of the 23rd Army in 1941 and promoted to lieutenant-general in 1943. A member of the Allied Control Commission in Bulgaria in 1944–1947 and the commission's chairman in 1947, he returned to the Soviet Union to become deputy chief in the Department of Military Colleges of the USSR Ministry of Defense in 1948–1955.
Biography
Born on 21 November 1895 [O.S. 9 November] to a peasant family in the village of Kislyanskoye (now in the Kurgan Oblast of the Russian Federation), Cherepanov received a basic education in the town of Kurgan and was a factory worker and vocational school student in Yekaterinburg and Omsk before being drafted into the Imperial Russian Army in Omsk in 1915. He graduated from a junior officers' school in Irkutsk and fought in World War I as a platoon commander in the 8th Company of the 56th Infantry Regiment of the Russian Army's Northern Front in 1916–1917.
Cherepanov returned to the Soviet Union in 1927, following Sun's death in 1925 and subsequent breakdown in Sino-Soviet relations with the Kuomintang's new leader, Chiang Kai-shek. (In spite of the ongoing Soviet assistance to the Kuomintang, the anti-communist Chiang had arranged a massacre of communists in Shanghai and expelled his Soviet advisers.) Cherepanov took part in the 1929 Soviet intervention in Manchuria as commander of the Red Army's 39th Rifle Division in the Soviet Far East.
With relations between Chiang and the Soviet Union dramatically improved due to the attack on China by Japanese forces in the Second Sino-Japanese War, Cherepanov returned to China as chief military adviser to Chiang's government in Nanking from August 1938 to September 1939 and helped organize the 1938 defense of Wuhan – although the city fell to the combined might of the Japanese troops, planes, and ships.[2]
Recalled from command of the 23rd Army with the turning of the tides of war across the Eastern Front, Cherepanov was sent as a member of the Allied Control Commission in Bulgaria in 1944 and became the commission's chairman in 1947. He was named deputy chief in the Department of Military Colleges of the USSR Ministry of Defense upon returning to Moscow in 1948.
Cherepanov retired from active duty in the armed forces after forty years in the military in 1955. He died in Moscow on 8 July 1984, aged eighty-eight.
A prolific memoirist in the 1960s–1980s, he authored a number of memoirs about his military career, including As Military Adviser in China (Moscow: Progress Publishers), a 1982 English-language translation (ISBN978-0-8285-2290-8).
Works
«Боевое крещение». М., 1960;
«Первые бои Красной Армии». М., 1961;
«Под Псковом и Нарвой. Февр. 1918 г». М., 1963;
«Северный поход Национально-революционной армии Китая. (Записки воен. советника)». М., 1968;
«В боях рожденная». Изд. 3-е. М., 1976;
«Записки военного советника в Китае». Изд. 2-е. М., 1976;