Vasily Danilovich Sokolovsky

Sokolovsky was appointed commander of the Western Front in February 1943 and took part in the Rzhev-Vyazma, Orel and Smolensk operations. In the Kutuzov operation of 12 July to 18 August 1943 his forces retook Orel and collapsed the Orel salient, so success and failure coexisted in this tenure. The offensives toward Orsha and Vitebsk, which ran from October 1943 into the following winter, failed at heavy cost, and in April 1944 he was dismissed from the command.

The supervisory inquiry focused on the absence of self-criticism at headquarters. A report of the State Defence Committee (GKO) commission of 11 April 1944 stated that the Western Front command, far from studying and correcting its defects, had fallen into complacency and flattery and had not exposed them, and that because the review of operations and the publication of resulting orders had never become routine, serious defects recurred in every operation. The same report recorded that the front's artillery failed in every operation to suppress the enemy fire system and thus could not guarantee the infantry's advance, and that the command knew of the resulting mass casualties and enormous ammunition expenditure without taking measures to address them.

Dismissal did not end his career. In April 1944 the Western Front was split into the 2nd and 3rd Belorussian Fronts, and he was transferred to be chief of staff of the 1st Ukrainian Front, where he contributed to the preparation of the Lvov-Sandomierz, Vistula-Oder and Berlin offensives. On 29 May 1945 he was made a Hero of the Soviet Union for his direction of operations in the Berlin offensive, and after the war his career continued at the highest level, through promotion to Marshal of the Soviet Union, the supreme headship of the Soviet Military Administration in Germany, and the post of Chief of the General Staff.

Assessments diverge. Vasilevsky recalled that Sokolovsky performed both chief-of-staff and command duties successfully but stood out most in staff work, while Pokrovsky's testimony described him as a highly contradictory figure: a capable commander with a very good mind who thought in political and strategic terms, but who did not succeed in the role of front commander and was removed by a special GKO commission sent from Moscow after a series of costly and unsuccessful operations. Conflicting source evaluations of this period must also be set side by side. The German weekly Die Welt (Johannes Althaus) was sharply critical, asserting that the Red Army lost 500,000 men in the eleven so-called 'Autobahn battles' around the Moscow-Minsk highway and holding Sokolovsky responsible for the losses and defeats. Russian Wikipedia rejects that figure as an exaggeration unrelated to reality, gives the losses of those eleven operations as 62,326 dead and missing and 219,419 wounded, and notes that Althaus omitted the fact that Sokolovsky was dismissed from his command precisely because of these operations. No figure is adopted here as the dictionary's settled account; both are presented as claims of their respective sources. Sokolovsky himself later wrote works on the fighting of this period, including an article on the battle of Moscow in the 1961 Military-Historical Journal.

Published in 1962 under Sokolovsky's editorship, Military Strategy (Военная стратегия) was the first systematic public exposition of how the Soviet Union conceptualized war in the nuclear age. Proceeding from the recognition that the nuclear-missile revolution had transformed the very nature of war after Stalin's death, the book argued that future conflict would unfold as "deep nuclear-missile strikes combined with operations of all branches of the armed forces," with strategic nuclear attack playing a decisive role from the outset. At the same time it insisted that massed ground offensives remained essential even in nuclear war, and it upheld the ideological proposition that the superiority of the socialist system guaranteed victory. The RAND Corporation rushed out an English translation, and Western analysts treated the volume as "the most important single document" revealing the internal logic of the Soviet military elite. The book became the point of departure for Brezhnev-era Soviet military doctrine, went through three editions, and served as the baseline framework for Soviet strategic thought well into the détente years of the 1970s.