Vasily Zaitsev learned to shoot in the Ural Mountains, hunting deer and wolves with his grandfather; he brought home his first wolf at twelve, killed with a single shot from a 20-gauge his grandfather had given him. By 1941 he was a chief petty officer in the Pacific Fleet, keeping the artillery department's books in Vladivostok. When Germany invaded he volunteered, again and again, until they let him go west.
He reached Stalingrad in September 1942 with the 1047th Rifle Regiment and found a landscape made for him: a city ground into rubble, where a man could lie in a water pipe, under a sheet of iron or inside a heap of bricks and watch a single street for a day. Between 10 October and 17 December 1942 he was credited with 225 German soldiers. He rarely fired more than a few shots from one place before moving.
His larger contribution was the school. Zaitsev trained snipers by the dozen and sent them out in pairs — his zaichata, the leverets — and they in turn trained others, until the 62nd Army had a sniper movement rather than a handful of marksmen. He worked out the three-position ambush, the trick of leaving a helmet where the enemy would shoot at it, and the discipline of patience that beginners always underestimate.
The duel that made him famous in the West — days of stalking a German master sniper sent to Stalingrad expressly to kill him — comes from his own memoir and was retold by William Craig and then by Hollywood in Enemy at the Gates. Historians have never found the German in any German record, and many now treat the story as wartime legend. What is documented is that in January 1943 a mortar round nearly blinded him, that an eye surgeon in Moscow saved his sight, and that he went back to the front.
He was made a Hero of the Soviet Union, survived the war, ran a factory in Kyiv and died in 1991. His rifle is in the Stalingrad museum. In 2006 he was reburied on Mamayev Kurgan, on the hill he had spent the autumn of 1942 watching.
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