Konstantin Rokossovsky

Biography

Konstantin Rokossovsky was born in 1896 into a Polish noble family of railway officials; his birthplace is given variously as Velikiye Luki, Warsaw or Telekhany. Orphaned at fourteen, he worked in a stocking factory and as a stonemason's apprentice before joining the Russian imperial cavalry in 1914. He joined the Bolsheviks and the Red Army, fought Kolchak's forces in the Civil War and in 1921 helped defeat Ungern-Sternberg in Mongolia.

Through the 1920s and 1930s he commanded cavalry formations in the Far East and backed Tukhachevsky's ideas on armoured warfare. Arrested in August 1937 during the Great Purge, he was beaten and subjected to mock executions but refused to sign a confession, and he was released and reinstated in 1940.

In the Second World War he became one of the Red Army's leading commanders: he led the 16th Army before Moscow, the Don Front at Stalingrad, the Central Front at Kursk and the 1st Belorussian Front in Operation Bagration, and was made a Marshal of the Soviet Union in 1944. His forces halted on the Vistula during the Warsaw Uprising. He ended the war with the 2nd Belorussian Front and commanded the Moscow Victory Parade in June 1945.

In 1949 Stalin installed him as Poland's minister of national defence and a Marshal of Poland, and from 1952 to 1954 he was also deputy prime minister. He oversaw the Sovietisation of the Polish army and approved the use of troops against the Poznań protests of June 1956. After the Polish October brought Władysław Gomułka to power he was forced to return to the USSR, where he served as a deputy defence minister and chief inspector of the defence ministry until 1962. He died in Moscow in 1968 and was buried in the Kremlin Wall.