Konstantín Rokossovski

Konstantin Ksaveryevich Rokossovsky was born on 21 December 1896, according to most historians in Warsaw, the capital of what was then the Russian part of Poland. His father Ksawery, a Polish railway official from an impoverished noble family, died while he was still young, his Russian mother a few years later. At fourteen he went to work, first in a stocking factory and later as a stonemason in an uncle's workshop.

In August 1914 he enlisted in the 5th Kargopol Dragoon Regiment. He fought at the front for three years, received the Cross of St George and became a non-commissioned officer. When the tsarist army fell apart in 1917 he joined the Red Guard with part of his regiment. In the Civil War he rose to regimental commander in the fighting against Admiral Kolchak in the Urals and Siberia and against Baron Ungern in Mongolia.

Rokossovsky was a cavalryman who quickly grasped mechanised warfare. His hallmark was careful preparation: reconnaissance, deception and artillery in great concentrations. At Moscow he held the road to the capital with an exhausted army; at Stalingrad his Don Front destroyed the encircled German 6th Army; at Kursk he let the German attack break on a defence in great depth and then went over to the offensive himself.

For Operation Bagration he proposed making not one but two main attacks at Bobruisk, partly through marshes the Germans considered impassable. According to his memoirs Stalin twice sent him out of the room to think it over and then gave way; historians doubt that it happened so dramatically. Within a week the attack encircled a large part of the German 9th Army and opened the road to Minsk and the Polish border.

His career mirrors the history of the Red Army. The Great Purge of 1937–1938 struck a large part of the senior officer corps: three of the five marshals were shot or died in custody. Rokossovsky was tortured in the Kresty prison in Leningrad, lost teeth and suffered broken ribs, but refused to sign a confession. After the badly conducted Winter War against Finland thousands of dismissed and imprisoned officers returned to service, he among them.

The war on the Eastern Front was a war of annihilation in which the Soviet Union lost about 27 million civilians and soldiers. Commanders worked under the direct supervision of Stalin and the political police; a defeat could cost them their lives. After 1945 the Soviet Union imposed Communist governments on the countries of Central Europe, and Rokossovsky, born in Poland but a Soviet officer, became an instrument of that control.

The surrender at Stalingrad and the failed German attack at Kursk, in both of which Rokossovsky commanded a front, took the initiative in the east from Germany for good. In the summer of 1944 Bagration destroyed the German Army Group Centre and carried the Red Army from Belarus to the Vistula in five weeks, one of the heaviest German defeats of the entire war.

There the advance halted while the Polish Home Army rose in Warsaw from 1 August 1944. Rokossovsky later stated that his troops were exhausted and that a German counter-attack at Radzymin had thrown them back; many Polish and Western historians also point to Stalin's unwillingness to help a non-Communist rising. The city was destroyed after 63 days; an estimated 150,000 to 200,000 civilians died.

In November 1944 he had to hand over command of the front that would advance on Berlin to Zhukov, which he felt as a slight. After the war he commanded the Soviet troops in Poland and in 1949 became Polish Minister of Defence and a member of the Politburo. Under him the army was expanded on the Soviet model and purged of pre-war officers; dozens of people were killed when the rising in Poznań was put down in June 1956.

When Władysław Gomułka came to power in October 1956 Rokossovsky lost his seat in the Politburo and returned to Moscow, where he became a deputy minister of defence. He died on 3 August 1968. His memoirs, 'A Soldier's Duty', appeared in censored form; the deleted passages, on 1941 among other things, were published only in the 1990s. In Russia he is honoured as a war hero; in Poland opinion remains divided.