Konstantin Rokossovsky

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Konstantin Rokossovsky : biography

21 December 1896 – 03 August 1968

Early military career

On joining the regiment, Rokossovsky soon showed himself a talented soldier and leader; he ended the war in the rank of a junior non-commissioned officer, serving in the cavalry throughout the war. He was wounded twice during the war and awarded the Cross of St George.http://www.rokossowski.com/bio.htmhttp://english.ruvr.ru/radio_broadcast/2248959/4515909/index.html | Voice of Russia in New York City In 1917, he joined the Bolshevik Party and soon thereafter, entered the ranks of the Red Army. During the Russian Civil War he commanded a cavalry squadron of the Kargopolsky Red Guards Cavalry Detachment in the campaigns against the White Guard armies of Aleksandr Kolchak in the Urals. Rokossovsky received Soviet Russia’s highest (at the time) military decoration, the Order of the Red Banner.

In 1921 he commanded the 35th Independent Cavalry Regiment stationed in Irkutsk and played an important role in bringing Damdin Sükhbaatar, the founder of the Mongolian People’s Republic, to power in Ulan Bator. THE HISTORY OF KYAKHTA It was here that he met his wife Julia Barminan, whom he married in 1923. Their daughter Ariadna was born in 1925.http://russiapedia.rt.com/prominent-russians/military/konstantin-rokossovsky/ | Russiapedia In 1924 and 1925 he attended the Leningrad Higher Cavalry School and then returned to Mongolia where he was a trainer for the Mongolian People’s Army. Soon after, while serving in the Special Red Banner Eastern Army under Vasily Blücher, he took part in the Russo-Chinese Chinese Eastern Railroad War of 1929-1930 when the Soviet Union intervened to return the Chinese Eastern Railway to joint Chinese and Soviet administration, after Chinese warlord Zhang Xueliang of the Republic of China attempted to seize complete control of the railway.

It was in the early 1930s that Rokossovsky’s life first became intertwined with Georgy Zhukov (later Marshal of the Soviet Union), when Rokossovsky was the commander of the 7th Samara Cavalry Division, and Zhukov a brigade commander under him. A sense of the nature of the beginning of their famous World War II rivalry can be gathered from reading Rokossovsky’s comments on Zhukov in an official report on his character:Soviet strategic thought, 1917-91 By Andreĭ Afanasʹevich Kokoshin. Page 43

"Disciplined. Demanding and persistent in his demands. A somewhat ungracious and not sufficiently sympathetic person. Rather stubborn. Painfully proud. In professional terms well trained. Broadly experienced as a military leader."

Rokossovsky was among the first to realise the potential of armoured assault. He was an early supporter of the creation of a strong armoured corps for the Red Army, as championed by Marshal Mikhail Tukhachevsky in his theory of "deep operations".

Great Purge, trial, torture and rehabilitation

Rokossovsky held senior commands until 1937, when he became caught up in Joseph Stalin’s Great Purge and accused of being a Polish spy. His association with the cutting edge methods of Marshal Tukhachevsky may have been the real cause of his conflict with more traditional officers such as Semyon Budenny, who still favoured cavalry tactics, and whose policy disagreements with Tukhachevsky triggered the Great Purge of the Red Army, which resulted in the execution of the latter and many others. Rokossovsky, however, survived.

It is reported that he escaped the fate of so many other officers caught up in the purge by proving to the court that the officer whom his accusers claimed had denounced him had been killed in 1920 during the civil war. According to Alexander Solzhenitsyn he endured two mock shooting ceremonies where people were shot dead around him.

In his famous "secret speech" of 1956, Nikita Khrushchev, when speaking on the subject of the purges, mentioned Rokossovsky, saying, "suffice it to say that those of them who managed to survive, despite severe tortures to which they were subjected in the prisons, have from the first war days shown themselves real patriots and heroically fought for the glory of the Fatherland.".http://www.marxists.org/archive/khrushchev/1956/02/24.htm | Speech to 20th Congress of the C.P.S.U.