During 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 on 1 July 1941, 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 Klimovskikh were first accused of:  Pavlov and his deputies were accused of "failure to perform their duties" rather than treason. On July 22, 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 AT 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 July 8 and shot. The commander of the 4th Army, Major General Aleksandr Korobkov, was dismissed on July 8, arrested the next day and shot on July 22. 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 August 10, 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 Western Front were rehabilitated as lacking evidence in 1956. On 25 November 1965 he was returned the title Hero of the Soviet Union and other honours. It was not until the Gorbachev era that it was declared that Pavlov was not the main culprit in the defeat and that the orders given to him could not have been fulfilled by anyone.