What do you do when you see through something that you are extremely reluctant to do in front of you, but no matter how hard you try to stop it? This answer is different for everyone, and the most extreme method is to die, as was the case with Marshal Akhromeyev of the Soviet Union.
He saw before the collapse of the Soviet Union that the tide was gone, and he could no longer do anything for the country, but Akhromeyev did not want to see the collapse of the country for which he had struggled all his life, so it was heroic enough to hang himself when the "August coup" was about to fail.
Looking at the life of this old marshal, it is also lamentable.
Born in Tambov in 1923, Akhromeyev joined the Red Army at the age of 17, and during the difficult and great Patriotic War he fought in important battles such as Leningrad, Stalingrad, and southern Ukraine, and was an iron-blooded veteran who climbed through the sea of corpses and blood.
The reason why he wanted to join the army in the first place was very pure, that is, to defend his family and defend the country. In 1942, Akhromeyev, then company commander, applied to join the party in Leningrad, and after receiving permission, applied again to become a political commissar.
Don't think that he is afraid to hide in the rear, on the contrary, during World War II, the Soviet political commissar was the one with the highest death rate, because it was often the political commissar who led the charge.
Akhromeyev himself said: I am not going to go to the headquarters or find a job in the rear, but to stay on the front line, so that the soldiers around me can trust me more. This shows the purity of his human being.
After the end of World War II, Akhromeyev began to work hard to supplement his military theoretical knowledge, and successively studied at the Military Academy of the Armored Mechanized Corps and the Military Academy of the General Staff. After graduating in 1967, he became chief of staff of the army group, and since then his position and rank have been in a straight line.
After becoming a general in 1975 and joining the High Command, he began to have a great influence throughout the army.
The Soviet Invasion of Afghanistan in 1979, which quickly eliminated Afghan President Hafizora Amin and occupied all the major cities within a week, was tactically perfect. And this perfect plan for the invasion was formulated by Akhromeyev.
Originally, after taking Afghanistan, Akhromeyev believed that it was necessary to continue to move east to occupy western Pakistan, first, to make the Afghan guerrillas lose their logistics base, and second, to allow the Soviet Union to gain access to the sea in the Indian Ocean, thus threatening the oil-producing areas of the Middle East and encircling Europe in a roundabout way.
Akhromeyev made a careful analysis that the Soviet Military Was at its peak and that neither the United States nor international powers could intervene. His claim won the unanimous support of the young and strong faction in the Soviet Union, even the old marshals Trikov and Moskalenko said.
But Brezhnev, who usually likes to show off his strength, retreated and eventually rejected his plan.
From the perspective of our latter, Akhromeyev's unfulfilled step was actually very beneficial to the Soviet Union, and if it had been done, the world structure would have been very different, and perhaps not so quickly toward disintegration.
Of course, this can only be a hypothesis.
In 1983, Akhromeyev was promoted to the rank of field marshal and served as first deputy minister of defense of the USSR and chief of the general staff of the armed forces. After the further expansion of his power, he still maintained a strong patriotic feeling, and whenever someone insulted or criticized the Soviet Union, he always stood up to refute it.
White House intern Condoleezza Rice asked him a question during negotiations between the Two Countries: How many Soviet spies were sent to the United States? Is there as many staff as the Pentagon?
The question was obviously not well-intentioned, and Akhromeyev was not angry, but simply smiled and replied with a "yes", answering the question both contemptuously and confusing the other party.
Later, after Gorbachev came to power, he deliberately smeared the history of the Soviet Union, and openly declared at the meeting that the Soviet Union built too many tanks in the 70s, which was a manifestation of reckless disregard for the people's livelihood.
After hearing this, Akhromeyev immediately stood up and retorted: Then do you want to let my soldiers go to the battlefield with their bare hands the next time war breaks out? We don't want to die anymore!
In the Soviet Union at that time, most of the high-level people were already thinking about how to obtain and stabilize more interests, and there were not many people who cared about glory and loyalty, and Akhromeyev could do this only because he was a pure soldier and wanted to defend his motherland with a gun!
The 'confrontation' at the meeting made Akhromeyev quickly lose his position and retire, but he has been trying to save the Soviet Union in his own way.
Gorbachev's reforms made the Soviet Union more and more unstable, and anti-military movements were launched throughout the country, and even official newspapers such as the Soviet Russian Newspaper blatantly denigrated some of the soviet heroes in history. Akhromeyev was extremely angry about this, and soon wrote an article to fight back, and at the end of the article he also put out harsh words:
I have made my position publicly clear, I support the socialist way of life, and if anyone attempts to divide the country by force or other unconstitutional acts or to change its social system, the President and the Soviets may decide to use force to ensure the unity of our homeland and to preserve its constitutional social system.
Later, Yeltsin and others seized real power in Russia, and their political attacks became more violent, and Akhromeyev angrily approached Yeltsin and accused him in person: You are too rash in your treatment of the Soviet Constitution. For you, socialism may be just a few words, but for me and many soviet people, it is 70 years of life and struggle.
Yeltsin naturally did not care about such a statement, but only casually perfunctorily said a few words, and did not speculate on the sample, and Ahromeyev did not say much, and before leaving, he said a cruel sentence again:
Have you ever wondered what happens to the army when it comes to the fate of the motherland and the army itself? I can tell you that the army will never stand idly by!
If you push forward a few years, the Soviet forces may still have some scruples, but at this moment, Akhromeyev's words, they have completely ignored it, and the world has changed.
On June 19, 1991, the Soviet Union held a press conference to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the Great Patriotic War, and Akhromeyev said bitterly to all the media:
"The situation in the SOVIET Union today is very similar to the Nazi invasion in 1941, and I already believed in 1990 that the country was about to perish, that the Great Patriotic War had sacrificed 27 million people, that the socialist edifice they had defended with their lives would collapse, and that the results that Hitler had failed to achieve 50 years ago by tens of millions of troops would now be achieved."
He hoped to use his remarks to arouse the last patriotic feelings in the hearts of the people, but unfortunately there was no effect.
On August 19 of that year, Conservatives such as Soviet Defense Minister Yazov and KGB leader Kryuchkov launched a coup d'état in an attempt to save the Soviet Union by force. Akhromeyev was not informed to participate because he had long since lost real power, but he knew that he was very supportive of these people's actions.
Only the next day, Akhromeyev saw through the fact that this final struggle would not succeed, because the main figure of the coup, Yazov, gave an order not to open fire, which made Akhromeyev particularly puzzled.
In Akhromeyev's mind, those who try to split are already the tumor of the country, the enemies of the country, and should be suppressed by force, but Yazov wants to say "do not shoot his own people", which is doomed, on August 21, the coup was disintegrated, and no one could stop Yeltsin anymore.
On 22 August, Akhromeyev, who knew the end but did not want to see it with his own eyes, put on his military uniform and medal, raised a gun to himself in his office, and next to him was a suicide note that read:
When the motherland is about to perish, the full meaning of my life is destroyed, I can no longer live, my age and the course of life I have traveled give me the right to die, I fight until the last breath of life...
The old marshal ended his life in extreme ways, but not many people cared, so his funeral was very deserted, only a few former comrades attended, and his wife said bitterly in front of the coffin: He has participated in the battle against the German fascists since he was 18 years old, and he has come so dangerously, but now our country has been conquered from the inside.
Unfortunately, the marshal, who loved the country purely, did not find peace after his death, and his cemetery was destroyed a few days later, and a second funeral was carried out.
Akhromeyev did not have to commit suicide at all, and even if the Soviet Union collapsed, he would at least not have had a bad time with his former influence (referring to several of the main figures of the August coup, they all survived the rest of their lives).
But for this pure soldier, the country is gone, and the goal that he fought for and defended desperately is gone, which is equivalent to denying his life. He was powerless to stop all this, and the only thing he could do was to accompany the country to the death, and such feelings were touching!