Born on to a peasant family in the village of Kislyanskoye (now in the
Kurgan Oblast of the
Russian Federation), Cherepanov received a basic education in the town of
Kurgan and was a factory worker and vocational school student in
Yekaterinburg and
Omsk before being drafted into the
Imperial Russian Army in Omsk in 1915. He graduated from a junior officers' school in
Irkutsk and fought in
World War I as a
platoon commander in the 8th
Company of the 56th Infantry Regiment of the Russian Army's
Northern Front in 1916–1917. Cherepanov joined the
Red Guards soon after the
October Revolution of 1917. He entered the newly formed
Red Army of
Soviet Russia in 1918, in which he served as
regimental commander, a regimental
chief of staff, and a
brigade commander during the
Russian Civil War and concurrent
Polish-Soviet War. Selected to attend the
Red Army Military Academy at the concluding phase of the Civil War, Cherepanov was one of five volunteers selected from the cadets of the 1923 graduating class to serve as
military advisers in
China following
Foreign Affairs Commissar Joffe's signing of a friendly treaty with China's
Kuomintang leader
Sun Yat-sen in January 1923, and arrived in
Peking on 21 June. A personal acquaintance of Sun Yat-sen between February 1924 and Sun's death in March 1925, Cherepanov taught at the
Whampoa Military Academy alongside
Vasily Blyukher, and took part in the campaigns against the
regional warlords, joining China's famed
Northern Expedition as a senior Soviet adviser. He joined the
Soviet Union's Communist Party in 1926. Cherepanov returned to the Soviet Union in 1927, following Sun's death in 1925 and subsequent breakdown in Sino-Soviet relations with the Kuomintang's new leader,
Chiang Kai-shek. (In spite of the ongoing Soviet assistance to the Kuomintang, the anti-communist Chiang had arranged a
massacre of communists in Shanghai and expelled his Soviet advisers.) Cherepanov took part in the
1929 Soviet intervention in
Manchuria as commander of the Red Army's
39th Rifle Division in the
Soviet Far East. With relations between Chiang and the Soviet Union dramatically improved due to the attack on China by
Japanese forces in the
Second Sino-Japanese War, Cherepanov returned to China as chief military adviser to Chiang's government in
Nanking from August 1938 to September 1939 and helped organize the 1938
defense of Wuhan – although the city fell to the combined might of the Japanese troops, planes, and ships. Assigned to the Red Army's
General Staff Academy as a senior instructor after returning from China, Cherepanov was next named Chief Inspector for the Northwestern Direction following the
June 1941 German invasion of the Soviet Union in July 1941. He subsequently led the
23rd Army from September 1941 until July 1944, and was promoted in rank to
lieutenant-general on 1 September 1943. His troops took part in the defense of
Leningrad and joined in the summer 1944 breaking of
the siege and forcing of
Nazi Germany's
co-belligerent partner
Finland to relinquish its positions
Karelian Isthmus near Leningrad. The combined Soviet gains compelled Finland to negotiate the
Moscow Armistice in 1944. Recalled from command of the 23rd Army with the turning of the tides of war across the
Eastern Front, Cherepanov was sent as a member of the
Allied Control Commission in
Bulgaria in 1944 and became the commission's chairman in 1947. He was named deputy chief in the Department of Military Colleges of the
USSR Ministry of Defense upon returning to
Moscow in 1948. Cherepanov retired from active duty in the armed forces after forty years in the military in 1955. He died in Moscow on 8 July 1984, aged eighty-eight. A prolific memoirist in the 1960s–1980s, he authored a number of memoirs about his military career, including
As Military Adviser in China (Moscow:
Progress Publishers), a 1982
English-language translation (). ==Works==