Pavel Gayev

Pavel Vitalyevich Gayev (; 17 August 1901 5 October 1943) was a Soviet military intelligence officer, guards colonel, deputy commander of the 13th Guards Rifle Division.

Early years Gayev was born on 17 August 1901 in Nizhny Tagil (Russian Empire) in a workers family. Initially, he only completed a two-year course of a zemstvo primary school in 1913. In 1918 he volunteered to serve in the Red Army were later he completed political courses of the Kharkov Military District (1921) and the Military Political School of the Kiev Military District (Kiev, 1923).

In August 1936 he was selected to serve in the Red Army Intelligence Directorate system and in 1937 he joined the office of the Red Army Military attaché in Warsaw, Poland. Gayev was fluent in Polish and German languages.

In 1943 he graduated from a short course of the K. E. Voroshilov General Staff Military Academy For this operation he was awarded the Order of the Patriotic War, 1st Class (posthumously) for the outstanding personal commanding role in crossing the river Dnieper by the 13th Guards Rifle Division troops in early October 1943.

Initially he was buried at the city cemetery of Poltava but later his tomb was moved to the newly established military memorial in Poltava's Ivan Kotliarevsky Park (1969).

Family

Pavel Gayev was the elder of three sons in his family. His father died when Pavel was eight and his mother moved to Yekaterinburg where she worked as a railway train conductor.

Middle brother Vasily V. Gayev (1904-?) also worked on the railroad in Nizhny Tagil. During the Great Purge Vasily was arrested and sent to the Gulag camps, later rehabilitated in 1962. The youngest brother in the family was Anatoly V. Gayev (1907-1954) who lived and died in Chelyabinsk.

Pavel Gayev got married in late 1920th and his wife was Eugeniya I. Gayeva (born in 1901). During the war she lived in Chelyabinsk, after the 1945 — in Kiev.

Gleb Baklanov, commander of the 13th Guards Rifle Division in 1943-1944, in his memoir attested Gayev as:

View from another level of command expressed in 13th Guards Rifle Division guards sergeant Lipa Gurvits' memoir: