Konstantin Rokossovsky was born on December 21, 1896, in Warsaw, Poland, then part of the Russian Empire. His father was a Polish railway worker and his mother was a teacher from Belarus. He was bilingual in Polish and Russian, speaking the latter with a Polish accent. In 1904 his father died in a rail accident and his mother died in 1910. Briefly working as an apprentice stone-cutter, he was arrested in 1912 after participating in a demonstration of Warsaw workers. These humble beginnings would subsequently be exploited by the Soviet propaganda machine to promote Rokossovsky as not just a war hero but a working-class hero as well.

With the outbreak of World War I in 1914, Rokossovsky joined a prestigious dragoon regiment and served in the cavalry throughout the war. He was wounded twice and won the Cross of St. George. In 1917, the October Revolution brought an end to Russian involvement in the war but ignited a civil war between the Bolshevik Reds and tsarist Whites. Throwing in with the Red cavalry, Rokossovsky commanded a squadron in Central Siberia while fighting against the White forces under Aleksandr Kolchak. In 1921 he commanded a regiment in Mongolia against the infamous general and occultist Roman von Ungern-Sternberg, who believed he was the reincarnation of Genghis Khan. In recognition of his bravery Rokossovsky earned the Order of the Red Banner twice, decorated in May 1920 and December 1921, respectively.

After the Civil War and throughout the 1920s, Rokossovsky initially benefitted from his record as a hero, climbing the ranks, commanding cavalry brigades in the Far East and Central Asia. He had made important friendships with other promising young cavalry officers who would also show their mettle in the German-Soviet war, including Andrey Yeryomenko, Ivan Bagramyan, and Prokofy Romanenko. He married the daughter of a minor official from a small town on the Soviet-Mongolian border. In 1929, he served in the Sino-Soviet conflict over the Chinese Eastern Railway that connected the Republic of China with the Soviet Union, a major test for the nascent Red Army. As a leader of the cavalry troops attached to the Soviet intervention force sent to reassert Moscow’s control over the railway, Rokossovsky further advanced his status. However, his association with the overall commander of the Soviet force in East Asia, Vasily Blyukher, would sow the seeds for Rokossovsky’s arrest and torture in the purges to come.

By the time the purge of the Soviet armed forces began in earnest in 1937, Rokossovsky was based in Leningrad, leading a cavalry corps. His past link to Blyukher led to his detainment in August that year, and like many officers arrested by the NKVD, he was accused of being a spy and saboteur in the employ of the Japanese government. He refused to confess; when told his old Civil War commander had confessed against him, he replied that the commander had died seventeen years ago. He survived extensive torture, including having his fingernails removed, and endured several mock executions, but maintained his innocence all the while. He would not be released until 1940, after the disastrous Soviet performance in the attack on Finland the previous year. With Soviet military weakness revealed and war with Germany more probable, the Red Army needed talented, experienced officers after the purges had led to the death or imprisonment many senior officers of the army, air force, and navy.

Rokossovsky was restored as a cavalry corps commander after his release and served on the Soviet Union’s western borders. In the summer of 1940 he participated in the Soviet annexation of Bessarabia and Northern Bukovina before returning to the area around Kiev in Ukraine.

When Nazi Germany invaded the Soviet Union in June 1941, Rokossovsky was leading the 9th Mechanized Corps and commanded that unit in the Battle of Brody, one of the fiercest tank battles of the entire German-Soviet conflict. Soviet medium and heavy tanks actually showed themselves superior to German armor, but German air superiority and superior armored tactics led to a major Soviet defeat with severe casualties. The concentration of Red Army troops in Ukraine prior to the invasion slowed the German advance, but further north, rapid German successes meant Moscow was in danger. In July, Rokossovsky moved to command forces in the Battle of Smolensk, where again German forces were slowed down but not defeated.

Rokossovsky was put in command of the 16th Army in the fall of 1941, a rag-tag mix of battle-scarred units, volunteer militia, and the first reserve troops raised in Siberia and Central Asia. The army would take the worst of Operation Typhoon, the German effort to take Moscow before the end of the year. Until December, the 16th Army fell back closer and closer to Moscow, despite insistence from above to not retreat; Rokossovsky would clash with Zhukov over the matter. With the onset of winter, however, advantage swung to the Soviet side. Despite their heavily depleted nature, the 16th Army fought on through the December Soviet counteroffensive.

In March 1942 Rokossovsky was wounded by shrapnel and had to recover. That summer, the Wehrmacht launched its offensive to take the Caucasus and southern Russia to capture oilfields and knock the Soviet Union out of the war. After briefly commanding the relatively quiet Bryansk Front before Moscow, Rokossovsky was sent to Stalingrad to handle the crisis there. In September he was placed in command of the Don Front, which–along with the Stalingrad Front under his old comrade, Yeryomenko–was to entrap the bulk of the German 6th Army under Friedrich Paulus along with the 3rd and 4th Romanian armies. This effort, Operation Uranus, was a Soviet victory, leading to an encirclement that was not only a decisive German defeat but, at least according to some, the critical turning point of the German-Soviet war.

In February 1943 Rokossovsky’s Don Front became the Central Front, commanding the 21st, 65th, and 70th Armies. That March, it became clear that the Germans were massing for Operation Citadel, a final effort by the Germans to regain initiative, in and around Kursk. The Battle of Kursk would last through summer into the fall, and Rokossovsky relied on a defense-in-depth strategy that repelled the German assaults. By August it had become clear that the strategic initiative had passed over to the Red Army, and a massive counteroffensive from Orel to the Sea of Azov began. In October, the Central Front was reinvented again, this time as the Belorussian Front. Rokossovsky would oversee the planned Soviet advance after the triumphs of 1943 by moving on Minsk and then toward Warsaw. Once Poland was liberated, the next stop was Berlin.

In June 1944 Operation Bagration, the Soviet effort to liberate Soviet Belarus, began. The German line collapsed and Army Group Center under Field Marshal Walter Model was destroyed. Rokossovsky’s forces entered Minsk on July 4 and by July 25 had crossed the River Bug, entering Lublin. From eastern Poland, the Red Army was within striking distance of Germany. A Polish National Committee was established in anticipation of a post-war communist government in Warsaw. For his part in the Soviet victory, Rokossovsky would be promoted to the rank of Marshal of the Soviet Union as well as Hero of the Soviet Union in July 1944.

In August, the Polish Home Army started the Warsaw Uprising against the German occupation under orders from the Polish government-in-exile. For Stalin, who had set up his own government-in-waiting, the idea of aiding the rebels to restore the pre-war anti-communist government did not appeal to him, and so he permitted the uprising to be crushed by the German forces. Rokossovsky would later claim that, after the Belorussian campaign, his forces were in no condition to take Warsaw and relieve the Polish Home Army. Given the condition of the German forces post-1943, it is debatable among historians whether the refusal of the Soviets to aid the Poles was for political or practical reasons.

In November 1944 Stalin transferred Rokossovsky to the Second Belorussian Front with the mission to take East Prussia. Upset at being denied the chance to take Berlin, he nevertheless oversaw the Soviet advance through that territory and witnessed firsthand the savage revenge and atrocities exacted on the German population by his soldiers. Rape, murder, and looting remained the order of the day and Rokossovsky only made perfunctory attempts to stop them. By March 30, he captured Danzig, the city over which Germany had gone to war with Poland for in September 1939.

In April, the Battle for Berlin began, with the Soviet forces comprised of Georgy Zhukov’s First Belorussian Front, Rokossovsky’s Second Belorussian Front, and Ivan Konev’s First Ukrainian Front against the largely shattered Army Group Vistula under General Gotthard Heinrici. The honor of entering Berlin would go to Zhukov, who shelled the capital’s center on Hitler’s birthday, April 20. Meanwhile, Rokossovsky was advancing on the Elbe and the Baltic Sea to the north. On May 4 he met British Field Marshal Bernard Montgomery in Pomerania, ending his wartime career.

After the war, Rokossovky led Soviet forces in Poland until the 1949 establishment of a communist Polish government firmly in Moscow’s sphere of influence. Rokossovsky was made a Marshal of Poland and appointed the Polish Minister of National of Defense. This move was motivated by events in Yugoslavia, where the Tito regime had broken from Stalin, along with the need to rebuild the Polish armed forces in accordance with Soviet needs. Despite his origins, Rokossovsky was viewed as a symbol of Soviet repression and the persecution of the Polish Catholic Church. In 1956, Rokossovsky oversaw the government’s response to protests in Poznan over working conditions. The protesting civilians were fired upon, with eight killed and several wounded. As part of an attempt to improve relations with the Polish population, Rokossovsky returned to the Soviet Union, holding various posts. He retired in April 1962 and died in August 1968. He was cremated and his ashes placed in the Kremlin Necropolis.

Rokossovky is perhaps the least known of the three major Soviet war heroes to emerge from the German-Soviet war, along with Zhukov and Konev. In some ways, he was a man without a country, considered Polish by Russian nationalists and a Russian stooge by Polish nationalists. If anything, he was more loyal to Stalin and the Soviet state than any nationality–more ironic considering the brutality shown to him by the Stalin regime from 1937 to 1940. It is difficult to comprehend why someone so ill-treated by the state would go on to become one of its most famous defenders. Perhaps Rokossovsky was a more capable, modern version of Budyonny, his fellow dashing cavalry officer, but open-minded enough to embrace mechanization and a new form of war. He was already decorated before the German-Soviet war and his repeated valiant performances outside Moscow and then at Stalingrad and in Belarus cemented his position as one of the “best of the best” commanders produced by the Red Army during the conflict.

Sources

Fritz, Stephen. 2015. Ostkrieg: Hitler’s War of Extermination in the East. Lexington, KY: University of Kentucky Press.

Glantz, David and Jonathan House. 1995. When Titans Clashed: How the Red Army Stopped Hitler. Lawrence, KS: University of Kansas Press.

Megargee, Geoffrey. 2007. War of Annihilation: Combat and Genocide on the Eastern Front, 1941. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield.

Woff, Richard. 1993. “Konstantin Rokossovsky.” In Stalin’s Generals, ed. Harold Shukman. New York: Grove Press.