Pictured: Twice Hero of the Soviet Union, Marshal V. I. Chuikov
Authentic leadership involves being self-aware and drawing from personal experience to shape one’s thoughts and activities. It requires quiet reflection on past events to learn and grow both as a person and as a leader. It is evident through his writings, military service, and civic work that Marshal Chuikov was introspective about his role as a leader. During his stellar career, Vasily Ivanovich ascended to a high military rank and position, yes—but it was a rank and a position involving consistent effort and public service built upon a foundation of years of responsibility and trust. And his work also caused him to remember past events to consider future ramifications. In his book titled From Stalingrad to Berlin, he shared the following opening thoughts:
“Memory… What a powerful force it is--you can't order it, you can't refuse it. Sometimes she resurrects before her mind's eye such pictures of what she has seen and experienced that her heart shrinks and cold sweat comes out. This happens both night and day. Sometimes I am ready to reproach myself, my heart for such a reaction to the memory of the past: after all, the reality of the current days, today's events, is far from those tests. Far away, but the memory brings you back to them--and the distant becomes close.
... Hundreds of dive-bombers are circling over the city, the walls of houses and factory buildings are collapsing from explosions of bombs and shells, the earth is heaving, the air is filled with the whistle of bullets and fragments, torn fittings, twisted rails of tram tracks, crushed stones, funnels, pits, and ahead, before your eyes, the top of the mound... There is the command post of the army, and you go there through the cycle of fire. You go, having received an order to lead the defense of the center and the factory district of the city. You go, forgetting about the danger, thinking about how to stop and defeat the enemy divisions that have broken through to the city.”
And in the closing paragraphs of his work titled The Fall of Berlin:
“We know and believe that the freedom-loving peoples wish to live in peace, to create, to work towards universal prosperity through peaceful labour. I am nearing three score years and ten now. I have worn a soldier’s uniform for almost fifty years, and I say with a full sense of the responsibility of my words: we, Soviet soldiers—other ranks, officers, generals, and marshals—will be the most reliable and faithful of supporters of any union of countries and peoples striving to avert war.
Reason demands that the bitter lessons of the bloody history of the last war must not be forgotten. And if men will follow the dictates of common sense, there is every reason to hope that the last world war was indeed the last" (273).