Vasilii Efimovich Chernyshev

Born Aug. 13 (26), 1908, in the village of Krasnoe, in what is now Livny Raion, Orel Oblast; died Nov. 12,1969, in Moscow. Soviet party and government figure. A leader of the partisan movement in Byelorussia during the Great Patriotic War of 1941–45. Major general (1943). Hero of the Soviet Union (Jan. 1, 1944). Member of the CPSU from 1928.

The son of a worker, Chernyshev graduated from the Orel Infantry School in 1927 and Briansk Communist University in 1930. He took up party work, and in 1941 he became secretary of the Baranovichi oblast committee of the Communist Party of Byelorussia (Bolshevik). In 1942 he became the agent of the party’s Central Committee in charge of organizing the partisan movement in Baranovichi Oblast, and in 1943 he became secretary of the underground oblast party committee and commander of a partisan formation. Chernyshev became first secretary of the Brest and Minsk oblast committees in 1944, and in 1950 he became secretary of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Byelorussia (Bolshevik). From 1951 to 1959 he was first secretary of the Kaliningrad oblast party committee, and from 1959 to 1969 he was first secretary of the Primor’e Krai Committee.

Chernyshev became deputy chairman of the Party Control Committee of the Central Committee of the CPSU in 1969. He became a member of the Central Committee of the CPSU in 1952, and he was a deputy to the third through seventh convocations of the Supreme Soviet of the USSR. Chernyshev was awarded six orders of Lenin and three other orders, as well as various medals.