Description

City of Military Glory is an honorary title bestowed upon the citizenry of Russian cities, where defenders had displayed courage, steadfastness, and mass heroism in the fight for their Fatherland’s freedom and independence during the Second World War.

Vyazma was first mentioned in a chronicle under the year of 1230, although it is believed to be much older than that. The town was named after the river, whose name was from Russian word vyaz, meaning "bog" or "swamp". At the time, the town belonged to a lateral branch of the Rurikid House of Smolensk. In 1403, the local princes were expelled by Lithuanians to Moscow, where they took the name of Princes Vyazemsky. The most notable among them were Pyotr Vyazemsky, an intimate friend of the poet Alexander Pushkin and a poet himself, and Sophie Viazemski, a French writer, for a time married to Jean-Luc Godard.

In 1941, during World War II, Vyazma was the scene of a battle of encirclement. Red Army units were trapped in the town after it was surrounded by the German Third and Fourth Panzer armies. Vyazma was occupied by German forces between 7 October 1941 and 12 March 1943.

The town was heavily damaged in the fighting, then rebuilt after the war. U.S. journalist Quentin Reynolds, of Collier's Weekly, visited Vyazma shortly after the German withdrawal in 1943 and gave an account of the destruction in his book The Curtain Rises (1944), in which he stated that the town's population was reduced from 60,000 to 716, with only three buildings remaining. The Nazis also established two concentration camps in the town, Dulag 184 and Dulag 230. About 80,000 people died there and were buried in mass graves. The victims included Jews, political officers, and prisoners of war.