Nikolai Erastovich Berzarin was born in Saint Petersburg on 1 April 1904, the son of a Putilov Factory lathe operator and a seamstress.

During the Russian Civil War he fought on the Northern Front against Allied troops in Archangelsk and in the suppression of the Kronstadt rebellion.

Berzarin rose to command a platoon in the regimental school in March 1924, and fought in the destruction of Zazeyskoye uprising in Amur Oblast that year as assistant chief of a machine gun detachment.

[2] In July, freshly appointed commander of the 32nd Rifle Division the previous month, Berzarin took part in the Battle of Lake Khasan.

The army entered action in July and was forced to retreat to the lines of the Western Dvina, Velikaya, and Lovat rivers under the pressure of the German advance.

The 27th Army counterattacked near Kholm in August and subsequently fought in defensive actions near Demyansk, stopping the German advance on the line of Lakes Velye and Seliger in early October.

He led the army as part of the 1st Baltic and 3rd Belorussian Fronts in the Smolensk operation and the winter offensive battles of 1943 and 1944 near Vitebsk.

He worked to re-establish order in the ruined German capital, creating a city police force and supplying the population with food, water, gas and electricity, as well as re-opening schools and theatres.

Detractors of the re-awarding claimed that Berzarin was a Stalinist and involved in Soviet war crimes being responsible for the deportation of 47,000 Balts in 1940.

In April 2005, a road bridge in Berlin-Marzahn was named after Berzarin,[5] in the area where his army reached the Berlin city limits in 1945.