Kliment Voroshilov

Biography

Kliment Voroshilov was born in 1881 in the Yekaterinoslav Governorate of the Russian Empire, the son of a railway worker. He went to work young, joined the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party in 1903, and as a Bolshevik in Lugansk led strikes during the 1905 revolution. In the following years he was repeatedly arrested and exiled.

In the Civil War he commanded Red forces at Tsaritsyn, where he formed a lasting alliance with Joseph Stalin, and later served as political commissar of Budyonny's First Cavalry in the Polish-Soviet War. In 1925 he succeeded Mikhail Frunze as people's commissar for military and naval affairs, later renamed defence, and he joined the Politburo in 1926. A loyal Stalinist, he took part in the Great Purge of the Red Army's command, and in 1940 he was among the signatories of the order that led to the Katyn massacre of Polish prisoners.

The poor Soviet performance in the Winter War cost him the defence commissariat in 1940. In the Second World War he commanded the Northwestern Direction and then the Leningrad Front in 1941, and he attended the Tehran Conference in 1943. After Stalin's death in 1953 he became chairman of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet, the formal head of state. His influence waned with the rise of Nikita Khrushchev; he resigned in 1960 and left the party in 1961, but returned and rejoined it in 1966. He died in Moscow in 1969 and was buried in the Kremlin Wall Necropolis.