Vasily Grigoryevich Zaitsev (Russian: Васи́лий Григо́рьевич За́йцев, IPA: [vɐˈsʲilʲɪj ɡrʲɪˈɡorʲjɪvʲɪdʑ ˈzajtsɨf]; 23 March 1915 – 15 December 1991) was a Soviet sniper during World War II.

Zaitsev was born in Yeleninskoye, Orenburg Governorate in a Russian peasant family and grew up in the Ural Mountains, where he learned marksmanship by hunting deer and wolves with his grandfather and older brother.

[3][4] He brought home his first trophy at the age of 12, a wolf that he killed with a single bullet from his first personal gun (given to him by his grandfather), a single-shot 20-gauge shotgun.

He rose to become the director of a textile factory, where he remained until his death on 15 December 1991 in Kiev, at the age of 76, just 11 days before the dissolution of the Soviet Union.

[8] On 31 January 2006, Vasily Zaitsev was reburied with full military honors at the Stalingrad memorial at Mamayev Kurgan in Volgograd, Russia.

[1] A feature-length film, Enemy at the Gates (2001), starring Jude Law as Zaitsev, was based on part of William Craig's book Enemy at the Gates: The Battle for Stalingrad (1973), which includes a "snipers' duel" between Zaitsev and a Wehrmacht sniper school director, Major Erwin König.

[9] Russian researcher Oleg Kaminsky suggests that the duel could have been between Zaitsev and the German corporal Hermann Stoff of the 295th Infantry Division, who was responsible for 103 killed Red Army soldiers and commanders and who died in Stalingrad at this time.

[10] David L. Robbins's historical novel War of the Rats (1991) includes a sniper duel in Stalingrad, but between Zaitsev and a German adversary named Colonel Heinz Thorvald, identified in the author's introduction as an actual combatant.