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The Son of Sholokhov’s Comrade-in-Arms

On May 15, 2016, it is the 90th anniversary of Vladlen Tikhonovich Logachov (1926–2014), the former First Secretary of the Millerovo Town Committee of the Communist Party, a veteran of the Great Patriotic War, the awardee of 18 medals and 6 orders.

Vladlen Tikhonovich began his working activity at the Stalingrad Railway after graduation from the Rostov Railway Institute. He worked as train driver, dispatcher and senior dispatcher. By the political department of the Railway he was sent to the High Party School. After graduation from it in 1955, he was sent to Millerovo. He worked as head of the organization department of the CPSU Town Committee combining his duty with the post of Secretary of the Railway Communist Party organization. Then he was deputy chairman of the Town Executive Committee, chairman of the Party and State Control Commission. For about ten years he had worked as the Second Secretary, and from March 1973, until December 1987, he was the First Secretary of the Town Communist Party Committee.

In 1986, Millerovo was awarded the Challenge Red Banner of the CPSU Central Committee, the Council of Ministers and the All-Union Central Committee of Trade Unions. That very year V.T.Logachov was elected delegate of the XXVI Congress of the Communist Party.

One of the brightest impressions in the life of Logachov was the meeting and long-term friendship with the family of Sholokhov and, in particular, with Mikhail Alexandrovich himself. Vladlen Tikhonovich told:

“For the first time I met with Mikhail Alexandrovich in the 1930s, when I was a boy. I remember we had just moved from Stanitsa Karghinskaya to Vyoshenskaya, where my father was appointed chairman of the district executive committee. The next morning a man came to us: a field shirt is under a wide belt, trousers tucked into the boots; curly fair haired. He asked how we had settled. It turned out that our neighbour was writer Sholokhov.”

The friendship of Tikhon Andreyevich, V.T.Logachov’s father, with M.A.Sholokhov was not only time-tested, it was also well-tried by the ordeals of the repression period of the 1930s. When Logachov the elder was arrested as an “enemy of the nation”, Sholokhov did his best to release him and other countrymen of Vyoshenskaya.

Vladlen Tikhonovich grew up together with the children of the writer, he studied from his fifth to eighth years at school together with Svetlana, the elder daughter of M.A.Sholokhov. Svetlana Mikhailovna told: “He did not show any particular school grades; he was an ordinary pupil, but he wasn’t a bully. He was good at swimming. He was a friend of Sasha, my brother. Years later he often visited my father’s house. It was a steady, fair and kind man. My father respected him greatly.”

V.T.Logachov always met M.A.Sholokhov in Millerovo, when the latter was on his way to Vyoshenskaya from Moscow or vice versa, and invited him to come round to him.

M.A.Sholokhov supported the initiatives of V.T.Logachov on social and economic development of Millerovo. As the deputy of the USSR Supreme Soviet he made for construction of roads, schools, kindergartens and enterprises.

For the people of Millerovo the name of Sholokhov is close and dear, they consider him their countryman, and Vladlen Tikhonovich Logachov is always remembered as a good and prudent manager, who tried to improve the people’s life in the town and in the district. On the wall of the Logachovs’ house there is a memorial plaque: “In this house the great Russian writer M.A.Sholokhov always stayed when passing through.”

Larisa Bukina