The most gifted front commander who never became a marshal
On 29 August 1941, Stalin cabled Molotov: 'Does it not seem to you that someone is deliberately opening the road to the Germans on this sector? What sort of man is Popov?' The vozhd's suspicion caught up three years later, in a demotion.
Born on the Don, he volunteered for the Red Army in 1920. He commanded the Northern and Leningrad Fronts in 1941, helping halt the German advance, and at Stalingrad served as deputy commander planning the encirclement. In 1943 his Bryansk Front liberated Oryol and Bryansk, winning him Army General rank, only for a stalled Baltic campaign and a clash with commissar Bulganin to bring demotion to colonel general. Post-war he served as Chief of Staff of the Ground Forces (1956–62) and received the Hero of the Soviet Union (1965). Admired by Vasilevsky and Golovanov as a supreme talent, he remains the emblematic front commander who never wore a marshal's star.
Activities and affiliations
Career Timeline
- 1939–41CO 1st Independent Red Banner Army (Far East)
- 1941.1–6CO Leningrad Military District
- 1941.6–9CO Northern Front, then Leningrad Front
- 1941.12–42.6CO 61st Army (Moscow counteroffensive)
- 1942.10–12Deputy CO Stalingrad Front; CO 5th Shock Army
- 1943.6–10CO Bryansk Front: liberated Oryol & Bryansk; promoted Army General
- 1943.10–44.4CO 2nd Baltic Front: demoted to Col. Gen. after stalled operations
- 1944–45Chief of Staff, Leningrad Front
- 1955–62Chief of Combat Training, then Chief of Staff & 1st Deputy C-in-C Ground Forces
Related historical events
The Bryansk triumph and the Baltic demotion
Popov's finest hour as a commander came in the summer of 1943 on the Bryansk Front. During Operation Kutuzov, the Oryol offensive, his troops liberated Oryol on 5 August, and the first artillery salute of the entire war was fired in Moscow for the liberation of Oryol and Belgorod that evening. In the Bryansk offensive that followed, Popov proposed and carried through a plan outside the textbook: he broke through on the sector of the neighbouring Western Front, then threw a mobile group sideways to cut the enemy's defence line. The result was an advance of up to 200 kilometres that liberated Bryansk and Bezhitsa, forced the Sozh and Desna rivers, and broke into Belorussia. His irrecoverable losses of some 13,000 men were among the smallest of any comparable Soviet operation. For this he was promoted to Army General on 26 August 1943.
Four months later the arc turned. As commander of the 2nd Baltic Front he conducted fourteen army and front operations without breaking the German 'Panther' line, and in the March 1944 fighting he was faulted for not detecting the enemy's withdrawal in time and for sluggish pursuit. On 20 April 1944 State Defence Committee decree No. 5689ss demoted him to colonel general, declaring that the front command 'had grown conceited, was not self-critical, and could not brook criticism.' His biographer Smyslov argued the real cause was not operational failure but his conflicts with First Deputy Chief of the General Staff Antonov and with the military council member Bulganin. Immediately after his dismissal Popov became Chief of Staff of the Leningrad Front, where he planned the Karelian Isthmus operation and predicted it would be 'a beautiful operation.' He went into history as the war's senior commander who alone was stripped of the rank of Army General in 1944, only to win it back in 1953.