Commander of the 27th Rifle Division at Radzymin, defendant in the Tukhachevsky case
Born to a Lithuanian peasant family near Vilnius, he rose to battalion commander in the First World War and joined the Bolsheviks in February 1917. He entered the Red Army in 1918, fought Kolchak and from late 1919 commanded the 27th Omsk Rifle Division. In the Polish-Soviet War of 1920 he took Radzymin, east of Warsaw, on 13 August and on the 16th personally led the last assault on the town, backed by armoured cars, before being beaten back. In the retreat he gathered broken units to lead Red Army remnants out of the pocket near Białystok. After Kronstadt, service as an adviser in China and attaché in Japan, Germany and Britain, he was arrested in 1936 and shot with Tukhachevsky and others in 1937; rehabilitated in 1957.
Also known as: Vytautas Putna
Activities and affiliations
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1917–1936
Soviet Communist Party and Bolsheviks
Military command -
1918–1936
Soviet Union state institutionsMilitary and defenceMain
Military command
Career Timeline
- 1915–1917Served on the German front; battalion commander, 40th Turkestan Rifle Regiment
- 1918.11–1919.05Military commissar, 26th Rifle Division
- 1919.12.17–1922.09.08Commander, 27th Omsk Rifle Division — the 1920 assault on Radzymin
- 1921.03Took part in suppressing the Kronstadt rising
- 1924–1925Head of the Kalgan group of military advisers in China
- 1927.08–1931.03Military attaché in Japan, Finland and Germany
- 1932.01–1934.07Commander, Primorye Group, Special Far Eastern Army
- 1934.07–1936Military attaché in Britain; komkor from 1935
- 1936.08.20Arrested — shot on 12 June 1937