Not always the heroes are those who sharply shoot the enemy. Sometimes a hero can become a military who refused to obey an order. This is the story of a general who became a hero because he refused to fight.

In the first photo below is the hero of the Kursk Arc and many other key battles of the Second World War, Lieutenant General Matthew Shaposhnikov. But his name entered history not because he bravely fought under Kursk, and not because his brigade first forced Dnieper. His main feat was and will forever remain the refusal to shoot a peaceful demonstration of workers in Novocherkassk in June 1962. Despite the repeated orders of the chiefs to shoot at demonstrators on the bridge across the Tuslov River, Shaposhnikov categorically prohibited subordinate tankers and motorcars to open fire. “I don’t see in front of me such an enemy that should be attacked by our tanks,” he replied to Mikoyan, a member of the Politburo of the CPSU Central Committee, and switched off the raid.

Workers of the Novocherkassk power plant went on a demonstration because the day before they were announced a reduction in wages by 30 percent, at the same time the radio an increase in the price of products in the USSR by 30 percent too. On their way to the CPSU, the demonstrators carried posters with Lenin’s portraits and communist slogans.

The only “crumble” slogan was the poster “Khrushchev – on sausage!” When the gunmen who guarded the hill opened fire on the people, Shaposhnikov tried to stop the slaughter, but these shooters were personally ordered by the district commander General Pliev and the shooting continued until the square was literally overwhelmed by bodies of men, women and children. It was almost a complete analogue of the Nicholas Bloody Sunday. One of the junior officers, realizing the scale of the tragedy, immediately shot himself on the square.

Shaposhnikov was dismissed from the army for not obeying the order and expelled from the CPSU, but after that he began to spread letters with information about the Novocherkas tragedy in the country and the world. Thanks to him, the shootings of workers were learned abroad.

The party is transformed into a car driven by a bad driver, often drunk violating the rules of street traffic. It is time for this driver to take away the rights and thus prevent the disaster.”

It is extremely important for us now that the working people and the industrial intellectuals understand the essence of the political regime in which we live. They must understand that we are under the worst form of self-government, relying on enormous bureaucratic and armed force.”

“We need people to think instead of the blind faith that turns us into living machines. “Our people, in short, have become a politically unrighteous international fool, as they have never been.”

These words sentenced him to a long opal and even prison. Shaposhnikov was accused of treason to his homeland, and only thanks to the patronage of Marshal Malinovsky, who fought with him on the Kursk Arc, the charges were lifted. All his life the general executed himself for not turning his weapons against the murderers in military uniform and not standing on the side of the workers. He was the only Russian officer who refused to shoot at his own people.

General Lieutenant Shaposhnikov survived the Soviet Union, was fully rehabilitated and in his last years great respect from colleagues and residents of Novocherkassk. He remained in the people's memory as a war hero who for the first time in his life refused to execute an order. The one who did not shoot.