Activities and affiliations

Military command Soviet Union state institutions 1900–1973 ○ Natural causes

Two-time Soviet Air Force commander who led its transformation into the jet and nuclear age

At Kuban, Vershinin massed aviation on the decisive axis against prevailing doctrine — the ace Pokryshkin called his fighter conferences 'unheard of in the first two years of war.'

A military commander who served two terms as C-in-C of the Soviet Air Forces (1946–1949, 1957–1969), reshaping Soviet air power into a jet and nuclear-capable strategic arm. Born into a peasant family, he joined the Red Army in 1919, fought in the Civil War, and was transferred to aviation in 1930. In the Great Patriotic War he commanded the 4th Air Army, pioneering the massing of frontline aviation on the decisive axis during the Kuban air battles and winning the title Hero of the Soviet Union for the Belorussian offensive. After the war he led the Air Force's transition to jets and created its first nuclear bomber unit, was abruptly demoted in 1949, then restored by Khrushchev in 1957, completing the build-up of Soviet strategic aviation before retiring in 1969.

Military command Comintern 1900–1974 ○ Natural causes

“Li De”, the only Westerner on the Long March and the Comintern military adviser blamed at Zunyi

Sent to China as a Comintern agent under the name Li De, he was nearly the only foreigner on the Long March, and the Zunyi Conference of 1935 removed him and Bo Gu from command. East Germany revealed only in 1964 that Li De was Otto Braun.

A German Communist from Munich who escaped prison in 1928 and studied at the Frunze Military Academy in the Soviet Union. Sent to Shanghai as Comintern military adviser in 1932, he entered the Jiangxi Soviet in 1933 and with Bo Gu directed a positional defence that lost the fifth encirclement campaign. On the Long March the Zunyi Conference of 1935 condemned his and Bo Gu’s military leadership and elevated Mao. He returned to Moscow in 1939 and after the war lived in East Germany as a translator and lecturer, publishing his memoir A Comintern Agent in China in 1973.

Military command Soviet Union state institutions 1900–1976 ○ Natural causes

The VVS commander who rebuilt a shattered force into the air armada that swept the Luftwaffe from the sky

From December 1942 to February 1943 Novikov organized the aerial blockade of the encircled German force at Stalingrad, cutting its transport supply line.

Born a peasant's son in Kostroma province and trained as a village teacher, he joined the Red Army in 1919 and graduated from the Frunze Military Academy in 1930. He moved to the VVS in 1933, fought in the Winter War and in April 1942 became commander-in-chief of the VVS. He converted front air forces into air armies and formed homogeneous aviation corps, enabling massed air operations, coordinated the Stalingrad aerial blockade and the Kursk, Königsberg and Berlin operations, and in 1943 became the first Marshal of Aviation, in 1944 the first Chief Marshal. Arrested in the 1946 'aviators' affair' and broken by sleepless interrogation into a confession, he served at Tiksi, was released in 1952 and rehabilitated in 1953, then commanded Long Range Aviation. From 1956 he headed the Leningrad Higher Civil Aviation School, retiring after a stroke in 1966.

Military command Democratic People's Republic of Korea state institutions 1900–1976 ○ Illness

The Manchurian guerrilla who became the KPA's first commander and the DPRK's nominal head of state

In December 1955, Choe Yong-gon presided over the trial of Pak Hon-yong and sentenced him to death, rejecting pleas for clemency from Mao Zedong and Zhou Enlai.

After military training at Yunnan and Whampoa academies, he led anti-Japanese guerrilla war in Manchuria as chief of staff of the 2nd Route Army and commander of the 7th Army of the Northeast Anti-Japanese United Army, forming the Manchurian trio with Kim Il Sung and Kim Chaek. Returning in 1945, he played the decisive role in converting Cho Man-sik's Korean Democratic Party to a communist line; upon the DPRK's founding in 1948 he became its first Minister of National Defence and Chief Commander of the Korean People's Army, the KPA's senior field commander during the Korean War. From 1957 to 1972 he chaired the Supreme People's Assembly Standing Committee, the DPRK's nominal head of state, and served as the regime's diplomatic face abroad. He received a state funeral at his death in 1976 and was interred in the Patriotic Martyrs' Cemetery.

Military command Soviet Union state institutions 1900–1976 ○ Natural causes

Marshal of Armoured Troops who stopped Guderian and led the 1st Guards Tank Army

After being stopped at Mtsensk by Katukov's T-34s, Guderian wrote: 'They [the Russians] have already learned a thing or two.'

Mikhail Katukov was one of the Red Army's finest armor commanders, leading the 1st Guards Tank Army from its formation in 1943 through the capture of Berlin. At Mtsensk in October 1941, his 4th Tank Brigade stopped Guderian's panzer group and became the first Red Army unit awarded Guards status. At Kursk he absorbed the southern armored thrust through dug-in tanks and counterattacks, then spearheaded the Lvov-Sandomierz, Vistula-Oder, and Berlin offensives as the armored fist of the 1st Belorussian Front. After the war he commanded armored forces in Germany and served as Inspector General, becoming Marshal of Armoured Troops in 1959 and twice Hero of the Soviet Union.

Military command Soviet Union state institutions 1900–1977 ○ Natural causes

Hero of Khalkhin Gol who commanded the army that broke the siege of Leningrad

Zhukov recalled: "When Stalin summoned me to the apparatus and asked whether I had a good army commander in mind for Leningrad, I named General Fedyuninsky without hesitation … He is undoubtedly a talented military leader, an excellent organiser, a master of troop leadership."

Born to a peasant family in the Urals, he volunteered for the Red Army in 1919 and fought in the Civil War. At Khalkhin Gol in 1939 he commanded the 24th Motorized Regiment, breaking through Japanese rear positions, an action that earned him the Hero of the Soviet Union and brought him to Zhukov's attention. As deputy commander of the Leningrad Front in the desperate autumn of 1941 and later commander of the 2nd Shock Army, he executed the deception operation from the Oranienbaum bridgehead that decisively broke the siege of Leningrad in January 1944. After the war he commanded the Transcaucasian and Turkestan Military Districts, was promoted to Army General in 1955, and served as an inspector-adviser to the Ministry of Defence until his death.

Military command Soviet Union state institutions 1900–1977 ○ Natural causes

Longest-serving wartime fleet commander, from the Tallinn breakout to Königsberg

On the night of 28 August 1941, the Baltic Fleet fleeing Tallinn halted in a Gulf of Finland minefield. Ignoring the air-attack risk of stopping, Tributs ordered the fleet to rescue the men in the water. He stayed on the bridge all night.

The longest-serving commander of the Soviet Baltic Fleet (1939–1947) and the only fleet commander who led his force through every phase of the war: the Winter War, the Tallinn evacuation, the siege of Leningrad, and the 1944–45 Baltic offensives. On the eve of the German invasion he put the fleet on full alert, sparing it the shock that crippled the army; during the siege his ships' guns and naval aviation became integral to the city's defence. Though the 1941 Tallinn breakout cost heavy losses and drew lasting criticism, he was promoted to admiral in 1943 and kept his command into the postwar. After retiring he earned a doctorate for over 200 naval-history publications; the Pacific Fleet destroyer Admiral Tributs carries his name today.

Military command Soviet Union state institutions 1900–1980 ○ Natural causes

The GRU chief who held the intelligence yet missed the invasion, and fought his way back to marshal

On 20 March 1941, Golikov reported to Stalin: 'Rumours and documents speaking of the inevitability of war against the USSR this spring must be regarded as disinformation from British and perhaps even German intelligence.' Ninety-four days later, Barbarossa began.

A peasant-born political commissar in the Civil War, he spent 11 years in army political organs before switching to command after the Frunze Academy. Appointed GRU chief in July 1940, he assessed the spring 1941 intelligence on Germany's imminent invasion as Anglo-American disinformation, enabling the strategic surprise of Barbarossa. In the war he led the 10th Army at Moscow and the Bryansk and Voronezh Fronts; his January 1943 offensives crushed 25 enemy divisions, but the loss of Kharkov that March ended his frontline career. After heading the Main Personnel Directorate, he became chief of GlavPUR in 1958, enforcing party control over the armed forces under Khrushchev, and was made Marshal of the Soviet Union in 1961.

Military command Soviet Union state institutions 1900–1982 ○ Natural causes

“There is no land for us beyond the Volga”

12 September 1942. Told the previous commander had lost faith, Chuikov was asked: how do you understand your task? "I swear: I'll either die in Stalingrad or defend it."

Commander of the 62nd Army in the rubble of Stalingrad. He held the city by “hugging” the enemy, keeping his command post within grenade range, and learned only later that his army had been the plan’s bait. That army, renamed the 8th Guards, walked all the way to Berlin. As he willed, he is buried on Mamayev Kurgan at Stalingrad, beside his soldiers.

Military command Soviet Union state institutions 1900–1989 ○ Natural causes

From Civil War cavalryman to the commander whose army liberated Auschwitz, the last surviving wartime Front commander

On 4 July 1917 the sixteen-year-old Kurochkin guarded Lenin as he addressed a crowd from the balcony of the Kshesinskaya Palace, and he later recalled that the speech had an enormous influence on him.

Born in the village of Gornevo in Smolensk province, he worked from age thirteen as a confectioner's errand boy and in locomotive repair workshops, guarded Bolshevik meetings in a workers' druzhina in Petrograd in 1917, and joined the Red Guards that October. He entered the Red Army in August 1918, completed cavalry courses, fought in the Civil War and the Polish-Soviet War, and took part in suppressing the Tambov Rebellion in 1921. In July 1941, commanding the 20th Army, he went through the Lepel counterstrike and the Smolensk encirclement and organized the breakout of the encircled 16th and 20th armies, then commanded the Northwestern Front and the Demyansk encirclement. From 1944 he led the 60th Army, whose 322nd Rifle Division entered Auschwitz-Birkenau on 27 January 1945; he died in Moscow on 28 December 1989.

Military command Soviet Union state institutions 1900–2000 ○ Natural causes

The 'grandfather of Soviet special forces,' a sabotage engineer who designed the radio-controlled mine and the partisan rail war

At 3:30 a.m. on 14 November 1941, Starinov transmitted an encoded radio signal from Semiluki outside Voronezh. Three hundred kilometres away in Kharkov, the German headquarters, full of officers at a banquet, exploded with its R-10 mine, burying General Georg von Braun and his staff.

He joined the Red Army early, served in the Civil War, then as a railway sapper taught himself demolition; by the early 1930s he was training partisans and saboteurs in the Ukrainian Military District. In the Spanish Civil War he organized sabotage operations for the Republican 14th Guerrilla Corps, and during the Great Patriotic War he remotely detonated the German HQ in Kharkov with his R-10 radio-controlled mine, then as the Central Partisan Staff's chief of sabotage designed the technical basis for the Rail War and Operation Concert. After the war he taught sabotage tactics at KGB academies until 1987, and as the 'grandfather of Soviet special forces' his anti-train mine (PMS) and training system became a legacy of 20th-century irregular warfare from Vietnam to Latin America.

Military command Soviet Union state institutions 1901–1944 ✕ Killed in action

Strategic architect of Stalingrad and Kursk, the army general who fell at the front

At a July 1942 operations conference, with Voronezh in crisis, Vatutin rose. "Comrade Stalin! Appoint me commander of the Voronezh Front." Stalin raised his eyebrows in surprise. Vatutin later reflected: "That act of mine probably resembles a sergeant deciding to take command of a company when he sees there is no one more suitable around at that moment."

Soviet army general. He drafted the Stalingrad counteroffensive (Operation Uranus), commanded the Kursk southern-face defence, and liberated Kiev as commander of the 1st Ukrainian Front. Mortally wounded in a UPA ambush, February 1944; died that April.

Military command Soviet Union state institutions 1901–1946 ✕ Executed

Hero of the Battle of Moscow who defected to lead the Nazi-backed Russian Liberation Army

June 1942: with his 2nd Shock Army encircled, Vlasov was offered escape by plane. He refused, hid in German-occupied territory with his men, and was betrayed by a local farmer ten days later.

Andrey Vlasov was a Red Army lieutenant general hailed as a "defender of Moscow" for leading the 20th Army in the capital's defense, who after his capture in the 1942 Lyuban operation defected to Nazi Germany. As leader of the Russian Liberation Army (ROA) and the Committee for the Liberation of the Peoples of Russia (KONR), he advanced an anti-Stalinist program for a democratic Russia, codified in the 1944 Prague Manifesto with its pledges of national self-determination and basic freedoms. The Nazis used him chiefly as a propaganda weapon, but in the war's final days the ROA's 1st Division joined the Prague uprising against the Germans. Captured by Soviet forces after the war, he was hanged for treason following a secret trial; his legacy remains fiercely contested in Russian historiography and memory politics.

Military command Soviet Union state institutions 1901–1951 ○ Natural causes

An armoured commander tested by shifting fronts

In June 1939, he telegraphed Moscow that he had handed command of the corps to Zhukov.

Nikolai Feklenko was a Soviet armoured commander whose service ran from the Russian Civil War through the Second World War. He commanded the 57th Special Rifle Corps at the opening of the 1939 Khalkhin Gol fighting, but was recalled to Moscow after the May setbacks in June, when Georgy Zhukov replaced him. He later remained part of the war-making apparatus through commands in mechanised and tank formations and work organising and training armoured and mechanised troops.

Military command Soviet Union state institutions 1901–1977 ○ Natural causes

The commander Stalin made change his name, who led the 5th Guards Army from Stalingrad to Prague

Nov 1942: Rokossovsky told him Stalin didn't like his surname Zhidov — it echoed a slur for Jews. Zhadov changed one letter and Stalin wrote back: 'Very good.'

Born to a poor peasant family, he joined the Red Army in 1919 and fought Wrangel, Makhno, and the Basmachi with the 1st Cavalry Army during the Civil War. In the autumn of 1942 at Stalingrad, commanding the 66th Army on the northern flank, he blunted German breakthroughs, earning his formation the Guards designation as the 5th Guards Army. He led that army through the decisive campaigns of the German-Soviet War: the Prokhorovka tank battle at Kursk, the liberation of Ukraine, the Vistula-Oder operation, and the Berlin and Prague offensives, meeting the US First Army at the Elbe in April 1945 and cutting Germany in two. Awarded Hero of the Soviet Union in 1945, he served postwar as First Deputy Commander-in-Chief of the Ground Forces, head of the Frunze Military Academy, and commander of the Central Group of Forces, rising to Army General in 1955.

Military command Soviet Union state institutions 1901–1982 ○ Natural causes

The Marshal of Armour who commanded history's largest tank battle at Prokhorovka

In February 1943 he stood before Stalin and argued for stripping rifle divisions out of tank armies to create pure armoured formations. Stalin gave him the first reformed tank army and said: "You prove it yourself."

Born a village blacksmith's son, Rotmistrov rose to become the Soviet Union's first Marshal of Armoured Troops and later Chief Marshal. He commanded the 5th Guards Tank Army at Kotelnikovo, blocking the German relief of Stalingrad, and at Prokhorovka, the largest tank battle in history, where his counter-attack halted the southern pincer of the Kursk offensive. The heavy losses at Prokhorovka shadowed his career, yet the battle decisively stopped the German advance. In early 1943 he persuaded Stalin to strip rifle divisions from tank armies, creating homogeneous armoured formations as the front's main strike instrument; Stalin made him commander of the first such army. He led at Korsun-Cherkassy and Operation Bagration, liberating Minsk, and after the war shaped Soviet tank doctrine as head of the Armoured Forces Academy and Assistant Minister of Defence.

Military command Soviet Union state institutions 1901–1987 ○ Natural causes

'General Forward' who halted Guderian at the gates of Moscow and drove the 4th Guards Tank Army to Prague

He almost never sat in headquarters, spending days and nights at the front line. — Army General Sergei Shtemenko, who called him 'General Forward!'

Twice Hero of the Soviet Union and Army General, Lelyushenko's defining achievement was halting Guderian's panzer group on the southern approaches to Moscow at Mtsensk in October 1941, buying time that arguably saved the capital. He commanded the 30th Army in the Moscow counteroffensive, recapturing Klin, then led the 3rd Guards Army in forming the outer encirclement ring at Stalingrad. As commander of the 4th Tank Army (later 4th Guards Tank Army), he drove through Lvov-Sandomierz, the Vistula-Oder operation, the assault on Berlin, and the lightning dash to Prague in May 1945. Post-war he commanded the Transbaikal and Ural Military Districts, chaired DOSAAF, and earned a Candidate of Military Sciences degree for his work on armored warfare doctrine.

Military command United States state institutions 1901–1987 ○ Natural causes

A military strategist of the nuclear age

During the Cuban Missile Crisis, he presented the military options and then conveyed the president’s blockade decision to the armed forces.

Maxwell Taylor was a U.S. Army officer who moved from airborne command in World War II to a central military and diplomatic role in the Cold War. He criticized the Eisenhower administration’s nuclear-heavy “New Look” and argued for stronger conventional forces and flexible response. Trusted by John F. Kennedy, he served as presidential military representative and chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff; during the Cuban Missile Crisis he joined EXCOMM, presented military options, and conveyed the president’s blockade decision to the armed forces. He later supported expanding U.S. involvement in Vietnam, revealing both the reach and limits of Cold War military strategy.

Military command 1901–1990 ○ Natural causes

Marshal who commanded the Fourth Front Army through Zhang Guotao’s split and as defence minister directed the 1979 war with Vietnam

Hospitalized after a tuberculosis relapse in June 1990, he died on 21 September 1990 at eighty-nine, asking that there be no memorial or farewell and that his ashes be scattered over the Dabie, Daba and Taihang Mountains and the Hexi Corridor, where they were divided and scattered after cremation.

A Shanxi native in Whampoa’s first class, he became commander of the Fourth Front Army in the Eyuwan Soviet after the Guangzhou Uprising, followed Zhang Guotao’s southward decision on the Long March and in 1936 saw the Western Route Army destroyed in the Hexi Corridor. Deputy commander of the 129th Division in the war with Japan and of the North China Military Region in the civil war, he took Taiyuan in 1949. A marshal in 1955, he was sidelined after the “February Countercurrent” of 1967, returned in 1978 and as minister of defence directed the 1979 war with Vietnam.

Military command Beiyang government and warlords 1901–2001 ↓ Arrested 1936 · natural causes

The “Young Marshal” who detained Chiang Kai-shek at Xi’an and opened the way to the second united front

In December 1936 he detained Chiang Kai-shek at Xi'an, forcing the Second United Front against Japan, and paid for it with more than fifty years under house arrest.

Son of the Manchurian warlord Zhang Zuolin, he inherited the Northeast when the Japanese killed his father in 1928 and pledged allegiance to Nanjing that year. Driven from Manchuria in 1931, he was sent against the Communists, but in December 1936 he and Yang Hucheng seized Chiang Kai-shek at Xi’an to demand an end to civil war and resistance to Japan. Zhou Enlai brokered the release; Zhang flew back with Chiang and spent more than fifty years under house arrest. Freed in the 1990s, he died in Hawaii at 100.

Military command Soviet Union state institutions 1902–1941 ✕ Executed

A victorious air-force builder destroyed by the purges

At Khalkhin Gol, pilots remembered him as an outstanding organizer and an excellent commander.

Yakov Smushkevich was a Soviet air commander who carried the combat lessons of Spain and Khalkhin Gol into the reorganization of the Red Army Air Force before the Second World War. At Khalkhin Gol in 1939 he directed the air campaign that overcame Japan’s early advantage, then led the Air Force while pressing the problems exposed by the Winter War, including pilot training and the shortage of modern equipment. Arrested on fabricated conspiracy charges shortly before the war, he was executed without trial and rehabilitated posthumously.

Military command France state institutions 1902–1947 ✕ Killed in crash

Free French armoured commander

At Kufra in 1941, he had his men swear not to lay down their arms until the French flag flew over Strasbourg Cathedral.

Philippe Leclerc de Hauteclocque was a French general who joined de Gaulle's Free French after the 1940 defeat and forged colonial troops and exiles into a fighting force. He set an objective that ran from Kufra to Strasbourg and transferred the mobile warfare learned in Africa to the 2nd Armored Division. In August 1944 he challenged the Allied plan to bypass Paris, driving on the capital and making its liberation French-led alongside the Resistance. After the war he recognised in Indochina that military victory could not settle the conflict, but died in a 1947 air crash before he could develop that judgement.

Military command Soviet Union state institutions 1902–1950 ✕ Executed

Stalin's air adviser at Tehran and Yalta. The Red Army's only Armenian Marshal of Aviation, executed 1950

When the Baku evacuation ship was sunk, Armenak — unable to swim — was pulled from the water by Sergei Khudyakov. After Khudyakov was killed in a White raid, Armenak took his weapons and coat, led the unit to safety, and wore the dead man's name for the rest of his life.

Born into an Armenian family in Karabakh, he worked in the Baku oilfields, joined the Bolsheviks, and fought as a cavalry commander in the Civil War, adopting the name of his friend Sergei Khudyakov, who saved him from drowning before falling in battle. With honours from the Zhukovsky Air Academy, he rose to command the VVS of the Western Front during the defence of Moscow, then helped pioneer the air army reorganization that concentrated Soviet air power. As deputy commander of the VVS he coordinated aviation at Kursk and the Dnieper, was promoted Marshal of Aviation in 1944, and served as Stalin's aviation adviser at Tehran and Yalta. In the 1945 Manchurian offensive he commanded the 12th Air Army, overseeing the airborne capture of Emperor Pu Yi and the seizure of Manchukuo's gold reserves, only to be arrested that December on fabricated charges and executed in 1950.

Military command Soviet Union state institutions 1902–1960 ✕ Killed in explosion

Chief Marshal of Artillery who created the Strategic Rocket Forces and drove the R-7 that launched Sputnik: killed at his own pad

When the fire subsided, all that could be identified was a partially melted Gold Star medal, one shoulder board, and a wristwatch stopped at the moment of the explosion; his body had been reduced to ashes.

Born 9 November 1902 (Old Style 27 October) in Borisoglebsk, Tambov Governorate; died on 24 October 1960 at Baikonur. Sources differ on his social origins: a noble Nedelin family, a working-class family, or a merchant's clerk family; his father died in 1907. He joined the Red Army in 1920, entered the party in 1924, and commanded artillery in Spain, Finland and the Great Patriotic War. He was Commander-in-Chief of Artillery in 1950–1952 and 1953–1955, and Deputy Minister of War for armament in 1952–1953.