The best Soviet sniper’s 8 tips for taking the lives of hundreds of Nazis

But beneath them all, and above even the most experienced troops, were Stalin’s silent assassins: the Red Army’s fearsome snipers. Men with excellent aim, trained to camouflage themselves among the ruins of buildings and the white snow that fell on the region, instilled real fear in the Germans. “Snipers were hiding in half-destroyed buildings across the city […] They could maintain accurate and debilitating fire against almost anyone moving almost anywhere. “Actions against snipers became part of the Stalingrad myth because their detection was costly and difficult,” explains the historian. Andrew Roberts in his work “The Storm in War”.

Soviet snipers, who usually acted in tandem or in small groups, acquired a fearsome legend. And not only because they were able to destroy the servants of the Germans’ heavy machine guns – the well-known MG-42, which could destroy an entire Russian unit thanks to its shots of between 1,200 and 1,800 per minute – but because they showed no mercy whatsoever the enemies nor with the alleged traitors of Russia. “When the Germans persuaded starving Russian children to fill up their water bottles in the Volga in exchange for a piece of bread [para evitar a los tiradores rusos]“The Red Army snipers killed these traitors when they returned from the river,” the expert adds in his work.

But among them there was one who stood out from the rest: Vasili Záitsev, who was remembered for the film “Enemy at the Gates” and for what he did thanks to the lessons his father and grandfather gave him in his childhood , had destroyed a long list of enemy soldiers.

The deadliest sniper is born

The Russian steppe witnessed the birth of Vasily Grigoryevich Zaitsev, one of the most prominent snipers of the USSR, on March 23, 1915. The region in which he was born was the city of Yeléninskoye in the Urals, an area in the southeast of the country, the very edge of which this Soviet has endured cold since childhood. As the last member of a long family of hunters, they didn’t have to spend many winters before our protagonist was taught the art of shooting and camouflage by his grandfather. Andrei Alexeyevich. However, the age at which he fired his first shot is completely unknown, as he does not mention it in his memoirs. In it he simply points out that his childhood ended when they placed a bow in his hands. “Shoot with a fixed aim and look your prey in the eyes, you are no longer a child,” his mentor told him at the time.

From that moment on, little “Vasia” began to practice the art of “making himself invisible” (as he himself claimed) in order to pursue and kill his prey, be it with arrows or shotgun shells. His small stature and small wingspan helped him and he soon developed into a true hunting master. “Let’s say we want to catch a glimpse of a goat, to do this we must disguise ourselves so that the animal looks at us as if we were a bush or a stalk of hay.” You must remain still without breathing or blinking. “If we want to get close to a rabbit hole, we have to crawl in the direction of the wind so that not a single blade of grass creaks under our weight,” explains Zaitsev himself.

In the following years, Vasili learned the rules of a good hunter, tricks that he later put into practice when he became a sniper. However, in these cases, fascists were killed instead of deer. At just ten years old, he acquired the ability to interpret animal tracks like someone reading a book and managed to build hiding places so well camouflaged that even his grandfather went unnoticed.

He learned so quickly that Andréi gave him his first hunting shotgun when he was just twelve years old. “I stood at attention and he threw it over my shoulder. “I was so small that the butt of the shotgun touched the ground, but at least I was no longer a child,” Zaitsev adds. That was also the day in Stalingrad that his father gave him advice he would never forget: “Use every bullet wisely, Vasili.” Learn to shoot and never miss anything.

In addition to learning to shoot like a real expert, Vasili gradually learned so much in the Urals that at the age of 13 and 14 he spent several nights outside his home hunting for prey. For example, he once slept outside for two nights to kill a wolf that had escaped after falling into one of his traps. All with the sole aid of his shotgun, his dogs, and a campfire that prevented the beasts from finishing him off after dark. When he returned home with his victim’s body on his shoulders, his relatives not only did not congratulate him on his capture, they did not even turn their heads. For her it was something normal.

All of this helped him become a master sniper. And don’t think that he is an empty phrase. After he was recruited and demonstrated his skills during the Battle of Stalingrad, his officers tasked him with training a group of skilled riflemen capable of sowing panic among enemy soldiers. His story as a soldier between reality and exaggerated fiction also ended with an epic battle to the death against a German officer, which earned him numerous medals after the Second World War. Today, however, we look at his teachings through some of his most famous phrases. Maxims he left blank in his diary:Memoirs of a sniper in Stalingrad“, the bestseller that catapulted him to fame inside and outside of Joseph Stalin’s rule.

They are not everything he gave, but they are the most remarkable thing.