Konstantin Rokossovsky
Konstantin Konstantinovich Rokossovsky was a Soviet and Polish general who served as a top commander in the Red Army during World War II and achieved the ranks of Marshal of the Soviet Union and Marshal of Poland. He also served as Defence Minister of Poland from 1949 to 1956.
Rokossovsky was born to a Polish noble family in Warsaw in present-day Poland, then part of the Russian Empire, or according to other sources in Velikiye Luki in present-day Russia. He served in the Imperial Russian Army during World War I, and in 1918, joined the Red Army and fought with distinction during the Russian Civil War. Rokossovsky rose to hold senior Red Army commands by 1937, when he fell victim to Joseph Stalin's Great Purge and was branded a traitor, imprisoned and tortured. After Soviet failures in the Winter War, Rokossovsky was released from prison in 1940 and returned to command of an army corps.
Following Germany's invasion of the Soviet Union in June 1941, Rokossovsky played key roles in the Battle of Smolensk and defense of Moscow, where he led the 16th Army to victory. He was commander of the front that defeated the Axis at the Battle of Stalingrad in early 1943, and that summer played a vital role in the Battle of Kursk. In 1944, Rokossovsky was instrumental in planning and executing parts of Operation Bagration, and was promoted to Marshal of the Soviet Union that June. His 1st Belorussian Front reached the outskirts of Warsaw by July 1944, when its command was transferred to Georgy Zhukov. Rokossovsky commanded the 2nd Belorussian Front during the Vistula–Oder Offensive into Germany and final victory.
After the war, Rokossovsky was the commander of the Soviet forces in Poland from 1945 to 1949, when he was given the title of Marshal of Poland and became the Defence Minister of the newly-established Polish People's Republic. He also served as deputy chairman of its Council of Ministers from 1952 to 1954. After being forced out of his post in 1956 when Władysław Gomułka became leader during the Polish October, Rokossovsky returned to the Soviet Union, where he lived out the rest of his life until his death in 1968.
Early life
Konstanty Ksaweriewicz Rokossowski was born either in Velikiye Luki; or in Warsaw, then part of Congress Poland under Russian rule; or in the village of Telekhany, Brest Region in modern Belarus. His family had moved to Warsaw following the appointment of his father as the inspector of the Warsaw Railways. The Rokossovsky family were members of the Polish nobility, and over generations had produced many cavalry officers. But Konstantin's father, Ksawery Wojciech Rokossowski, worked as a civil railway official in the Russian Empire. His mother, Antonina Ovsyannikova, was Russian and a teacher.Orphaned at 14, Rokossovsky started working in a stocking factory. In 1911, at age 15, he became an apprentice stonemason. Much later in his life, the government of the Polish People's Republic used this fact for propaganda, claiming that Rokossovsky had helped to build Warsaw's Poniatowski Bridge.
When Rokossovsky enlisted in the Imperial Russian Army at the start of the First World War, his patronymic Ksaveryevich was Russified to Konstantinovich. This was easier for his fellow troops to pronounce who were in the 5th Kargopol Dragoon Regiment.
Early military career
On joining the Kargopolsky 5th Dragoon Regiment, Rokossovsky soon showed himself a talented soldier and leader. He served in the cavalry throughout the war, ending with the rank of a junior non-commissioned officer. He was wounded twice during the war and awarded the Cross of St George. In 1917, he joined the Bolshevik Party. Soon thereafter, he 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. In November 1919, he was wounded in the shoulder there by an opposing officer whom he later killed when his cavalry overran an enemy headquarters. Rokossovsky received Soviet Russia's highest military decoration at the time, 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.
Roman von Ungern-Sternberg, a legendary "White Russian" general, adventurer and mystic, allegedly believed he was the reincarnation of Genghis Khan and had driven Chinese occupying forces out of Mongolia in 1920. He set himself up as dictator in Outer Mongolia. The next summer, when Ungern-Sternberg moved to capture the border town of Troitskosavsk, he appeared headed north and threatened to cut off the Soviet far east from the rest of the Soviet Union. Rokossovsky quickly moved south from Irkutsk and met up with allied Sükhbaatar Mongol forces; together the units defeated Urgern-Sternberg's army, which retreated in disarray after a two-day engagement. Rokossovsky was again wounded, this time in the leg. The combined Mongol and Soviet forces soon thereafter captured Ulaanbaatar.
Rokossovsky met his future wife in Mongolia: Julia Barminan was a high school teacher who was fluent in four languages and who had studied Greek mythology. They married in 1923. Their daughter Ariadna was born in 1925.
In 1924 and 1925 Rokossovsky attended the Leningrad Higher Cavalry School, where he first met Georgy Zhukov. He was reassigned to Mongolia, where he was a trainer for the Mongolian People's Army. Soon after, while serving in the Special Red Banner Far Eastern Army under Vasily Blyukher, he took part in the Russo-Chinese Eastern Railroad War of 1929–1930. 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 military career first became closely intertwined with those of Semyon Timoshenko and Georgy Zhukov: when Rokossovsky was the commander of the 7th Samara Cavalry Division, Timoshenko served as his superior Corps commander and Zhukov was a brigade commander under Rokossovsky in his division. Both became principal actors in his life during World War II, where he served directly under each at different times. Rokossovsky was noted for having a rivalry with Zhukov throughout World War II. He commented on Zhukov's character in an official report :
Has a strong will. Decisive and firm. Often demonstrates initiative and skillfully applies it. 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... Absolutely cannot be used in staff or teaching jobs because constitutionally he hates them.
Rokossovsky was among the first to realize 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".
Purge and rehabilitation
Rokossovsky held senior commands until he was arrested on 17 August 1937 when he became caught up in Joseph Stalin's Great Purge and was accused of being a spy. His association with the cutting-edge methods of Marshal Tukhachevsky may have been the cause of his conflict with more traditional officers such as Semyon Budenny, who still favoured cavalry tactics over Tukhachevsky's mass armour theories, but few historians believe that the purge of the Red Army was solely a dispute over policy. Most attribute the purges to political and military rivalries as well.Some officers were swept up on suspicion due to past associations; in Rokossovsky's case his Polish ancestry, association with the Special Red Banner Far Eastern Army, and the intrigues surrounding Marshal Vasily Blyukher may have been enough to cause his arrest. Blyukher was arrested shortly after Rokossovsky and died in prison without 'confessing'.
Rokossovsky, however, survived. He was variously accused of having links to Polish and Japanese intelligence and having committed acts of sabotage under Article 58, section 14; "conscious non-execution or deliberately careless execution of defined duties", a section added to the penal code in June 1937.
The charges against Rokossovsky stemmed from the case of the "Anti-Soviet Trotskyist Military Organization of the 11th Mechanized Corps". Rokossovsky was implicated after the arrest of Corps Commander Kasyan Chaykovsky who, like Rokossovsky, served in the Far East in the early 1930s. The Intelligence Chief of the Transbaikal Military District accused Rokossovsky of meeting with Colonel Komatsubara, the head of the Japanese military mission in Harbin in 1932, when he was commander of the 15th Cavalry Division in Trans-Baikal. Rokossovsky did not dispute the fact of the meeting but said that it was to resolve issues regarding Chinese prisoners. Material charges against him claimed various acts of negligence of command that were interpreted as deliberate acts of sabotage, such as allowing the quarters of his division to become slovenly, failing to conduct training, and leading his division out into bad weather causing losses of horses and encouraging sickness among his troops.
When Rokossovsky was arrested by the NKVD, his wife and daughter were sent into internal exile. His wife Julia took odd jobs to support her and their daughter, but she was repeatedly fired when it was discovered that her husband had been arrested as a "traitor".
V. V. Rachesky, a cell mate of Rokossovsky, wrote in his memoirs that Rokossovsky blamed the persecution of innocent people on the NKVD. He thought the officer to be "naive", refusing to acknowledge Stalin's role in creating the treacherous environment. He described Rokossovsky's refusal to sign a false confession:
Those who refused to sign a false statement were beaten up, as long as the false statement was not signed. There were steadfast people who stubbornly did not sign. But there were relatively few. K. K. Rokossovsky, as he sat with me in the same cell, did not sign a false statement. But he was a brave and strong man, tall and broad-shouldered. He too was beaten.
His grandson, Colonel Konstantin Rokossovsky Vilevich, later said that his grandfather escaped execution because he refused to sign a false statement and proved to the court that the officer who his NKVD accusers claimed had denounced him had in fact been killed in 1920 during the civil war:
The evidence was based on the testimony of Adolph Yushkevich, a colleague of my grandfather in the Civil War. But my grandfather knew very well that Yushkevich died in Perekop. He said that he would sign if Adolph was brought for a confrontation. They looked for Yushkevich and found that he had died long before.
Alexander Solzhenitsyn reports that Rokossovsky endured two mock shooting events, where he was taken out at night by a firing squad as if to be executed, but then returned to prison. Living relatives say that Svetlana Pavlovna, wife of Marshal Kazakov, confirmed that Rokossovsky sustained severe injuries, including broken and denailed fingers and cracked ribs, in addition to the psychological torture of mock shooting ceremonies. Rokossovsky never discussed his trial and imprisonment with his family. He told his daughter Ariadne that since then, he always kept a gun, because he would not surrender alive if they came to arrest him again. He was reinstated in the Communist Party in 1940.
In his famous "secret speech" of 1956, Nikita Khrushchev, spoke about the purges and was likely referring implicitly to Rokossovsky when he stated, "suffice 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".