Abram Khasin

Abram Khasin was born in 1899 in the town of Slaviansk, Ukraine.

In 1918 Abram Khasin joined the recently established Red Army. In the 1920s he specialized in artillery and mainly served in the Crimea. Between 1931 and 1936 he studied at the Military Academy of Mechanization and Motorization in Moscow. At the end of the 1930s his military carrier was very successful as he rose from commander of a battalion in January 1937 to the rank of colonel and commander of a tank regiment in July 1940.

When the Soviet-German war broke out on June 22, 1941, he was the commander of a tank brigade on the North-West Front and in July of 1942 he was promoted to major-general in the tank forces. Soon thereafter he was placed in charge of a tank corps that was involved in the street fighting during the battle of Stalingrad.

From January 1943 he held an administrative position as the head of the Red Army body in charge of training tank troops. However, in August of the same year, he returned to combat. He first commanded a tank corps and afterwards was promoted to be assistant commander of the tank troops in Leningrad and then on the 2nd Baltic Front.

For his leadership of the tank forces under his command Abram Khasin was twice (in 1941 and 1942) awarded the Order of the Red Banner.

In October 1943 an article by E. Genis, "Major-General Abram Khasin," was prepared for the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee and sent to the Jewish press abroad.

Right after the war he served as the commander of a tank division. He retired in 1946.

Abram Khasin died in 1967 in Leningrad.

Vasilii Grossman about Abram Khasin

In January 1942, being on the Southern Front with the 37th Army, the writer Vasilii Grossman visited the tank brigade commanded by Colonel Abram Khasin. When he learned of the killing of Khasin's family, it is likely that Grossman could not help thinking of the unknown fate of his own mother. Grossman wrote as follows in his diary about his meeting with Khasin:

"In the izba, surrounded by his staff, stands Khasin, with his bulging dark eyes, crooked nose and cheeks blue from recent shaving. He looks Persian. His hand moving on the map looks like the claw of a huge carnivorous bird. He is explaining to me about the recent raid carried out by the tank brigade. He likes the word 'roundabout' very much and uses it all the time: 'Tanks were moving in a roundabout way.'

I was told back at the front headquarters that Khasin's family had all been killed in Kerch by Germans carrying out a mass execution of civilians. Purely by chance, Khasin saw photographs of the dead people in a ditch and recognized his wife and children. I was thinking, what does he feel when he leads his tanks into the fighting?..."

From: Antony Beevor and Luba Vinogradova, Writer at War: Vasily Grossman with the Red Army 1941 – 1945, New York, 2005, 105.