a numerical advantage, but they nonetheless lost the military exercise. On the night of 21 June 1941, Pavlov was watching a comedy in Kiev when Moscow sent a directive to all military councils in the Western Military Districts of a possible German invasion. Pavlov chose to watch the comedy to its end and this proved to be a fatal mistake in the eyes of his superiors in Moscow. During the first days of Operation Barbarossa his command, Soviet Western Front, suffered a disastrous defeat in the Battle of Białystok-Minsk. During the first days of the invasion, Pavlov was relieved of his command, replaced by Andrey Eremenko (and again by Semyon Timoshenko), arrested and accused of criminal incompetence and treason. He was the only arrested commander of any Soviet front during Operation Barbarossa. He and his chief of staff Vladimir Klimovskikh were first accused of: Pavlov and his deputies were accused of "failure to perform their duties" rather than treason. On 22 July 1941, the same day the sentence was handed down, Pavlov's property was confiscated, and he was deprived of military rank, shot, and buried in a landfill near Moscow by the NKVD. Death penalties were also passed down for other commanders of the Western Front, including the Chief of Staff, Major General Vladimir Klimovskikh; the chief of the communications corps, Major General A. T. Grigoriev; the Chief of Artillery, Lieutenant General of Artillery A. Klich; and Air Force Deputy Chief of the Western Front (who, after the suicide of Major General Aviation I.I. Kopets, was, nominally at least, Chief of the Air Force of the Western Front), Major General Aviation A. I. Tayursky. Also, the commander of the 14th Mechanized Corps, Major General Stepan Oborin, was arrested on 8 July and shot. The commander of the 4th Army, Major General Aleksandr Korobkov, was dismissed on 8 July, arrested the next day and shot on 22 July. On the other hand, Pavlov's deputy commander, Lt. Gen. Ivan Boldin, at the head of a small group, became a popular hero at the time after spending 45 days fighting for survival behind enemy lines, and finally, on 10 August, leading a total of 1,650 officers and men through to Soviet lines near Smolensk. Stavka Order No. 270 praised the feat of Boldin's "division". Pavlov and other commanders of the Western Front were rehabilitated for lack of evidence in 1956. On 25 November