In the eerie calm between battles on World War 2’s Eastern Front,
two Soviet soldiers stealthily creep across no-man’s land and slip silently into a shell
crater where they will wait for endless hours in silent darkness.. One man is clearly the
leader - the other man’s eyes never stray from him, and he follows his teacher’s every move.
Finally, the teacher signals to his student that it’s time, and the young man sights his target,
slips the safety off of his rifle, and takes a steadying breath as his teacher whispers a last
bit of advice into his ear - “Remember”, he says “One shot, one kill”. The trainee pauses, full
of nervous energy - he desperately wants to live up to the expectations of his legendary teacher,
the self-taught Soviet Sniper with 500 confirmed kills - does he have what it takes?
The man who would go on to become one of the Soviet Union’s most prolific killing
machines came from a very unlikely background. Ivan Mikhaylovich Sidorenko was born in 1919
in Smolensk Oblast in Russia, near Belarus, where his parents were peasant farmers. Sidorenko was
not a good student, and he dropped out of school in the 10th grade. Young Ivan did have a gift,
though - he was a talented artist, and he eventually went on to enroll in Penza Art
College. Little did he know then that his greatest talent lay in the art of killing.
Before his artistic dreams could be realized, forces beyond his control cut Sidorenko’s art
school education short. World War 2 was raging across Europe and the ill-prepared
Soviet Union was fiercely battling to force the formidable Nazis back from their borders.
21 year-old Sidorenko once again dropped out of school and enlisted in the Soviet Army,
determined to do his part to protect his homeland.
By 1941, Sidorenko found himself at Simferopol Military Infantry School in Crimea, where he
learned the ins and outs of life in the Red Army and was trained to serve in a Mortar Unit.
As part of a gunner crew, Sidorenko helped to operate the Red Army’s heavy mortar guns,
working side-by-side with his comrades to quickly assemble, disassemble
and move the large guns, and to load, unload and reload the heavy long-range artillery.
Sidorenko got his first taste of combat in the infamous Battle of Moscow. Before the war,
the Soviets had signed a non-aggression pact with the Nazis, but in the summer of 1941,
the Germans reneged on their shaky alliance when they launched Operation Barbarossa,
the first step in their plan to invade the Soviet Union.
The Germans quickly smashed through the Soviet’s hastily assembled border defenses,
and the road to Moscow looked clear for conquest. But the Soviets wouldn’t give up without a fight.
They prepared formidable defenses around the city and brought in reinforcements from all
over the country to defend Moscow. The Germans attacked with vigour, and soon the Soviets were
overwhelmed and encircled. Still, the Soviets refused to surrender, and their sheer will
soon began to wear on the Germans - with a little help from the brutal Russian winter, of course.
By December, the Germans had been repelled sufficiently to justify
launching a counteroffensive attack. This was Sidorenko’s time to shine. Working as part of
a 4-gun battery, he and his mortar unit rained hellfire on the invading Germans.
Each unit would launch their deadly payload, before the team would quickly break down the
mortar gun and carry the pieces on foot to the next firing location,
where they would then reassemble them for the next round of shots. This hit-and-run tactic
protected them from counter artillery fire and allowed them to hit the Germans from many angles,
which also created the illusion that the Soviets had much more firepower than they really did.
The Battle of Moscow was an important victory for the Soviets and the Allied Forces.
The Germans had expected to easily overrun the Soviets, and by valiantly repelling the invaders,
the Soviets forced the Germans into the impossible position of having to fight a war on two fronts,
which turned the tide of the entire war - though there would be many more
months and years of bloodshed before total Allied victory could be claimed.
As important as his work on the mortar unit was, Sidorenko couldn’t help but become a bit bored by
the monotony of assembling, disassembling, loading and reloading the heavy guns,
and by the relative safety of his position behind the lines providing cover for infantrymen. So,
the intrepid soldier took matters into his own hands. It started with a late-night
stroll to clear his head during lulls in the action, but it quickly morphed into something
else entirely. As he prowled around in the dark behind the Soviet lines looking out at the enemy
across the battlefield, Sidorenko decided that he wasn’t content with hurling heavy
artillery at the Germans by day - he wanted to spend his nights killing Germans, too.
That fateful night during the Battle of Moscow, Sidorenko grabbed his rifle and slipped away from
camp. He moved stealthily through the dark until he found a spot with good cover and a clear view
of the enemy, and he lay down to hide and wait. After a while, his patience paid off and he
found his first target - a foolish German soldier taking a smoke break on the front lines. Sidorenko
carefully aimed his rifle, took a deep breath, and fired his shot with deadly accuracy - he saw the
light from the German’s cigarette disappear and knew he had made his first solo kill.
Before long, these late-night walks would become a nightly ritual, and after spending
his days firing mortar alongside his comrades, he would spend his nights alone in the dark,
perfecting his aim at great distances, learning to be invisible to the enemy, and killing
Germans one by one. As his kill count climbed, his Commanders took notice. Impressed with his skills,
they pulled him off of the mortar crew and set him to sniping full-time. He had received no
formal training for this dangerous role, and was using the same Russian-made Mosin-Nagant rifle
with a 5-round magazine holding the same .62 x 54R rounds used by infantrymen on the front
lines - the only improvement was the addition of a telescopic sight that improved the rifle’s
accuracy from 550 yards to 875 yards. Still, his numbers rose steadily higher,
and the self-taught sniper was eventually tasked with training others to follow in his footsteps.
Sniper trainees were hand-selected by commanders for their proficiency with
and knowledge of their firearms, and for their excellent eyesight.
Sidorenko felt that the best way for new snipers to learn was the same way
he did - through experience - and so new trainees were thrown right into the fray,
joining Sidorenko on his night-time prowls through the war zone to learn the art of sniping.
A typical trainee’s first night out with Sidorenko would be a harrowing experience, to say the least.
They would learn to identify good positions and move stealthily by following their mentor through
the battlefield, scrambling from crater to crater, taking cover where they could,
knowing all the while that one wrong move could get them both killed. They would gain experience
sighting targets and shooting from great distances by following their teacher’s silent lead. And,
they would learn to kill only by taking great risk under the imminent threat of death.
They knew they would have only one chance to prove themselves to Sidorenko,
who expected his trainees to live up to his “One shot, one kill” motto,
or else risk being sent back to the infantry - if they survived long enough.
During one training mission, Sidorenko demonstrated his marksmanship and
bravery with a daring stunt. As he and a trainee crouched in their hiding spot,
Sidorenko loaded his rifle with special explosive rounds. When his target was in sight,
he calmly took aim and fired 4 times in rapid succession, blowing up a German tanker truck
and three military tractors, stalling their advance and cutting off their supply lines.
It was a major blow to the Germans, and it all came at the hands of a single man.
Sidorenko’s actions did not go unnoticed, and he rose steadily through the ranks,
eventually becoming the Executive Officer of the 1122nd Infantry Regiment. Throughout the
war he trained more than 250 deadly snipers in his covert, hands-on style. His snipers were so
deadly that the Germans flooded the area with snipers of their own to counter the Soviets,
but to little effect - Sidorenko’s snipers were just too good - calm,
patient, stealthy and deadly accurate, they continued to plague the German lines.
Sidorenko himself continued to rack up kills on the Baltic front until 1944, though not without
risk. He sustained countless injuries during the war until finally, after a particularly close call
that landed him in the hospital for months, he was deemed too valuable to the Soviet war
effort to lose and was pulled from the front lines. He would spend the rest of
the war at Red Army headquarters, training a new generation of feared Soviet snipers.
After the war ended, Sidorenko retired from the Army with the rank of Major and was awarded the
prestigious title of Hero of the Soviet Union in 1944. The revered sniper and war hero lived
out the rest of his days in relative obscurity, working as a foreman in a coal mine and living
a quiet, modest life until his death in 1994. He was credited with 500 solo kills during the war,
making him the best Soviet sniper on record, and second in the world only to the famed White Death,
Finnish sniper Simo Haya, who had 542 confirmed kills. Historians continue
to debate the accuracy of Sidorenko’s kill count - not only did the Soviet military rely
on snipers working alone to self-report their kills, but a culture of reverence for snipers,
dubbed the “Soviet cult of the sniper”, created a tendency to inflate numbers. Nevertheless,
he was an effective sniper and a gifted trainer, making him a valuable asset to the Red Army.
Ivan Sidorenko lived by the “One shot, one kill” ethos, making him a deadly
killing machine and an invaluable part of the Soviet war effort during World War 2.
Though his first love was art, his true talent was in the art of killing,
and he more than earned his reputation as the Soviet sniper with 500 confirmed kills.
If you thought this video was fascinating, be sure and check out our other videos, like this
one called “Why Soviet Russia Invented Clear Coca Cola”, or you might like this other video.