Ilya Starinov
Soviet partisan (1900–2000)
Colonel Ilya Grigoryevich Starinov (Russian: Илья Григорьевич Старинов; 2 August [O.S. 20 July] 1900 – 18 November 2000) was a Soviet military officer, the most famous Soviet saboteur.
Career
Starinov joined the Red Army in 1918 and participated in the Russian Civil War. In 1921 he attended a military college for railway troops and served with the Soviet railway troops in the 1920s. He joined the staff of the Ukrainian Military District in 1930 and took part in planning partisan warfare. In 1933 he was posted to Moscow and joined the staff of the GRU. In September 1933 he attended the Military Transport academy where he became acquainted with Mikhail Svechnikov.
He served with the Republican forces during the Spanish Civil War and was one of the leaders of the Soviet partisan movement during the Great Patriotic War of 1941–1945. He is known as the "grandfather of the Russian Spetsnaz".
The Russian military theorist Mikhail Svechnikov, executed by Stalin in 1938, had previously proposed the use of very well-trained forces in unequal combat situations. This idea was realised by Ilya Starinov. The two men thought similarly about the use of such forces.
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Vocabulary and entity names are the principal evidence signals here, because they determine the precision of every later search. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 16, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q1964854. VIAF identifies the subject as 42928555. The Library of Congress control number is no98086171. 3 of 3 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1900, 2000, 1918 and 1921.
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This entry incorporates text from “Ilya Starinov” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.