Military rank is Senior Sergeant; branch of troops is Armored and Mechanized troops. Subdivision is 5th Ttank division. Vasily Alekseyevich Krotov was born on January 1, 1916 in a family of peasants. He received a good education for that time, although he wrote with errors, and worked in the Finance Regional Department (RAIFO) and it was considered to be a high position in the village. He was serious, modest and kind. His fellow villagers respected him despite his youth. Soon after his marriage in 1939, Vasily was drafted into the Workers’ and Peasants’ Red Army. Before the war he served in the Far East. In 1941, he was supposed to be demobilized, but at the very beginning of the year, on his 25th birthday, he was again mobilized without a break. He was suggested to extend his service due to the tense situation, and six months later the Great Patriotic War began. He was able to see his only son, Yuri, born in 1940, once in the winter of 1943 after being hospitalized with a second wound. For a few days, his wife and three-year-old son visited him in Elan, Sverdlovsk region, where the unit was formed before being sent to the front (30 years later, his son, a career officer Yuri Vasilyevich Krotov, served in Elan in the tank forces). My father regretted that he did not remember the only meeting with his father: the children's memory held the vague images of the soldiers and, the most vividly, the soldier's spoon, which he was taught to wear in a military way behind the shingles. A few months after that meeting my grandmother had received a death notification from the front: “Your husband, Vasily Alekseyevich Krotov, who was loyal to the military oath...". The widow had a hope that it might be a mistake. But a little bit later, she received a letter from Сaptain Zaitsev a comrade-in-arms of her husband and kept it for many decades until the old paper being fallen apart. In the letter Captain Zaitsev wrote how their offensive began on November 20th at 16.00 pm and how Commander Vasily Krotov died having raised his squad to attack. The letter described a mass grave place in the Belarusian village of Smolari where my grandfather was buried. Before the war, he left a suitcase at home, but the key to the suitcase he had hid. Upon getting the letter from Captain Zaitsev, there was no hope of waiting for her husband, and my grandmother opened the mysterious suitcase, expecting to find money or securities there. After all, my grandfather worked in the Financial department! But inside there was an unfinished manuscript. No one knew that my grandfather was trying to write stories. He was 27. In the report on irretrievable losses No. 54722, Krotov Vasily Alekseevich was one of the oldest. Many of those killed with him were born in 1925; the every one guys were 18 and the death notification was sent to their mothers, not their wives... All of them fought in the 5th Motorized Rifle Brigade, which was part of the 5th Tank Corps (since 1944 this Corps received the honorary name Dvinsky). Using archival records available on the Internet, we learned what a terrible massacre was in severe weater conditions on November 20, 1943 near the village of Smolyaki. The Germans have been pappering our soldiers with fire and with all kinds of weapons all day long, the roads were broken, there was no supply of ammunition and food. But the village was not surrendered, and towads evening soviet soldiers being hungry and exhausted went on the offensive... It is even difficult to imagine such endurance and heroism of ordinary people. In his letter, Capitan Zaitsev sent a photo which my grandfather carrying with him. On it, a young woman (my grandmother Anna Pavlovna) sits with a young boy (my future father) holding an apple from papier-mâché. This photo, which returned from the front, became our family shrine, the last thread connecting with a lost native person..