Ivan Stepanovich Konev

Konev's military fate was inseparable from Georgy Zhukov. When the Western Front was annihilated in the Vyazma pocket in October 1941 and a State Defence Committee commission led by Molotov and Voroshilov arrived to punish Konev, it was Zhukov who saved him from court-martial and likely execution. Zhukov proposed to Stalin that Konev be kept as his deputy, and days later recommended him as commander of the Kalinin Front.

Yet the rescue did not lead to an equal friendship. As the war neared its end, the two commanders competed fiercely for the prize of Berlin. Stalin drew a boundary between their Fronts and effectively encouraged a race. In April 1945, Konev's 1st Ukrainian Front and Zhukov's 1st Belorussian Front dueled over who would capture the German capital first. Konev's troops entered the city first, but Stalin awarded the symbolic honor (hoisting the Soviet flag over the Reichstag) to Zhukov. Konev was diverted southwest, linking up with the Americans at Torgau and pushing on to Prague.

The tension persisted after the war. In 1946 Konev succeeded Zhukov as C-in-C of Soviet Ground Forces. The decisive break came in 1957. When Khrushchev moved to oust Zhukov from the Central Committee, Konev sided with the marshal's opponents. In an article published in Pravda on 3 November 1957, Konev denounced Zhukov as a man who 'failed to justify the Party's trust' and proved 'a politically incompetent figure inclined toward adventurism in understanding the most important tasks of Soviet foreign policy.' The betrayal of the man who had saved his life remains one of the most controversial episodes of Konev's career.

In May 1955 Konev became first deputy minister of defence of the USSR and Commander-in-Chief of the Ground Forces, and on 14 May 1955, when the Warsaw Pact was formally established, he also became the first Commander-in-Chief of its Joint Armed Forces. The appointment rested on his proximity to Khrushchev, reinforced after he chaired the 1953 Beria trial. He held the post until April 1960, when Andrei Grechko succeeded him; through 1960 he also remained first deputy minister of defence.

As Commander-in-Chief, Konev directed the suppression of the 1956 Hungarian Revolution. From 1 November he ran the operation from a temporary headquarters in the Hungarian city of Szolnok. Before the final assault on Budapest, planned as Operation 'Vikhr' ('Whirlwind'), order No. 1 in the name of the Commander-in-Chief of the Joint Armed Forces was communicated to all Soviet personnel in Hungary, setting the assault for 4 November at 05:50; on 4 November the same order was read on the radio as a decoy announcement in the name of Pal Maleter. The operation began in the night of 3-4 November: 16 Soviet divisions crossed the Hungarian border, including two airborne divisions and a railway brigade, with more than 60,000 personnel and over 3,000 tanks, mainly modern T-54s. The plan tasked Lt-Gen P. N. Lashchenko's Special Corps with seizing the Danube bridges, Gellert Hill and the Buda fortress, the parliament building, the ministry of defence and police headquarters, the Nyugati and Keleti stations, Moscow Square, the Corvin cinema resistance headquarters and Kossuth radio. The Soviet command cancelled the planned air bombardment of Budapest, fearing mass civilian casualties, and Konev expected fighting to end by 6 November, but Hungarian resistance was so fierce that active combat continued until 12 November. Operation 'Vikhr' itself was drawn up under the direction of Defence Minister Zhukov, who also exercised overall command of the November re-entry.

English Wikipedia states that Konev 'led the violent suppression of the Hungarian Revolution and Prague Spring', conflating 1956 with 1968: he lost the Warsaw Pact command in 1960 to Grechko and was not the Pact commander in 1968. The Prague Spring line is unsupported and is not adopted here.