At the age of four he was left without parents and alternately lived with different relatives. During the famine of the first half of the 30s he was forced to forage in the forests. From school he knew German well, the teacher was German. These circumstances largely determined the future fate of Clavdy Ivanovich during the war. At the very beginning of 1924 he was called up into the Red Army and at the end of his training he was assigned to the guards. The war began for the hero from the very inferno - his regiment was sent to the defense of Stalingrad, on the very narrow strip of land beyond which was the Volga. In the first battle just 4 men remained from the regiment. Then there was a sign that if a soldier survived three battles in a row, it was likely to survive in the rest. Grachev, a red army guardsman, was just one of them. Little is known about how events in the battle of Stalingrad developed for him in the future and he did not like to talk about the war. However, it is known for sure that in the summer of 1943 he was on the Kursk bulge as a scout and translator, extracted prisoners because of just useful knowledge of the German language. One of the captured Germans even noted that the hero had an excellent Berlin accent and, at first, even took it for his own. Later there were battles as part of the 198th artillery regiment of the 93rd guards rifle division of the 2nd Ukrainian front for the liberation of Ukraine, the capture of Bucharest, Budapest. Clavdy Ivanovich met the news of the Victory in Potsdam, Germany. He went through the war without injuries, there was only a concussion, but he did not escape his bullet. After the war as part of the NKVD units Clavdy Ivanovich took part in the fight against Lithuanian nationalists and in those battles he received two bullet wounds. Like many other soldiers of the Soviet Army our hero had nowhere to return after the Victory and the army became his home for many years in which he served until 1973 as a political instructor, retired with the rank of a major. After the army he taught at an institute for 10 years. After retirement he was actively engaged in educational activities until the end of his life. He died at the age of 86.