Konstantin Rokossovsky was one of the highest-ranking military officers in the
Soviet Union and Poland during World War II and beyond. Born in Warsaw in what was then
the Russian Empire, Rokossovsky dedicated much of his life to defending his homeland.
But things did not always go smoothly for Rokossovsky in his military career. As a
victim of Stalin’s Great Purge, he suffered a great deal. But despite the hardship he
faced at the hands of the government, he remained loyal to the Red Army.
In this video, we’re going to take a look at Rokossovsky’s life and try to
understand why he stayed loyal to the government that tortured him.
Rokossovsky enlisted in the Russian Army in 1914 at the outbreak of World War I. He was
placed in the Kargopolsky 5th Dragoon Regiment, where he started as a non-commissioned officer.
Throughout the war, he proved himself to be a skilled soldier and brave leader,
which landed him a spot in the cavalry. He was also injured twice,
which led to him receiving the Cross of Saint George, a military decoration
awarded by Imperial Russia to soldiers in the lower ranks who showed great courage.
In 1917, Rokossovsky joined the Bolshevik Party, and then the Red Army shortly after. When the
Russian Civil War started, he was given command of a cavalry brigade. He and his men fought their
enemy, the White Russians, in the Ural Mountains. It was during this campaign that Rokossovsky
received the Order of the Red Banner, the highest military decoration any Soviet could receive
at the time. He earned it after he killed the opposing officer who had injured him previously.
In 1921, Rokossovsky and his cavalry played a major role in helping Mongolian forces capture
their own capital city of Ulaanbaatar after it had fallen to Roman von Ungern-Sternberg,
a White Russian general who thought he was the reincarnation of Ghengis Khan.
Rokossovsky spent 1924 and 1925 in the Leningrad Higher Cavalry School, where he first met Georgy
Zhukov, a man with whom he would later have a fierce rivalry during the Second World War.
After finishing school, he returned to Mongolia,
where he trained Mongolian soldiers and participated in a few other armed conflicts.
He continued to work his way up the ranks until he reached senior
command. But that position didn’t last forever.
Rokossovsky fell victim to Stalin’s Great Purge in 1938. This event was the culmination of Stalin’s
paranoia and desire for power. It was his campaign to eliminate anyone he deemed even a little bit
of a threat. The majority of the victims of this purge were in politics and the military, but it
eventually trickled down to include everyday professionals, academics, and even peasants.
It is difficult to know for sure how many people were executed in the Great Purge,
but most experts agree on a figure of around 750,000,
while an additional one million people were sent to forced labor camps, maybe more.
Stalin’s government accused Rokossovsky of being a spy. The reason behind this is unclear,
but historians believe that Rokossovsky’s use of
Mikhail Tukhachevsky’s military methods may have had something to do with it.
Mikhail Tukhachevsky was a military officer and theoretician who worked to modernize the
Soviet Union’s military throughout the 1920s and 30s. He developed the theory of deep operation,
which is the tactic of striking deep behind enemy lines to take them by surprise and
destroy much of their formations and supply lines. The established Soviet military of
the time resisted these new ideas, but by the mid-1930s, much of the Red Army had adopted
Tukhachevsky’s tactics. But merely because these ideas were new, Stalin saw them as a threat. He
arrested Tukhachevsky for treason, tortured him, “tried” him, and ultimately executed the poor man.
Once in custody, Rokossovsky was accused of having links to Japanese and Polish intelligence.
Allegedly, Rokossovsky met with Colonel Komatsubara, head of a Japanese military
mission in Harbin, China, in 1932. Instead of denying the meeting ever took place, Rokossovsky
tried to justify it by saying it was necessary because they were deciding what they would do
with some captured Chinese. This was as good as an admission of guilt to the men who arrested him.
Rokossovsky’s own negligence as a commander further supported the accusation.
Things like not training his men, not keeping his camp neat and tidy, and sending his men out into
the cold, despite knowing it would increase the number of dead horses and sick soldiers.
These acts were interpreted as deliberate acts of sabotage against the Soviet Union.
Rokossovsky endured non-stop torture during his time in prison.
His fingers were broken, the nails were removed, his ribs were cracked, and on two different
occasions, he was brought outside for a fake shooting ceremony, just to eff with his head.
Despite all this, Rokossovsky didn’t blame Stalin for his suffering. He only blamed the police,
even though they were acting on Stalin’s orders. Rokossovsky continued to proclaim his innocence
and refused to sign the false confession statement the police had written for him.
One of Rokossovsky’s cell mates later wrote about this in a memoir, saying “Those who refused to
sign a false statement were beaten up, as long as the false statement was not signed. There
were steadfast people who stubbornly did not sign. But there were relatively few. K. K. Rokossovsky,
as he sat with me in the same cell, did not sign a false statement. But
he was a brave and strong man, tall and broad-shouldered. He, too, was beaten.”
Rokossovsky’s refusal to sign the confession was part of the reason he was not found guilty of
treason at his trial. He said he would sign it if the court was able to bring in Adolph Yushkevich,
who had been one of his colleagues in the civil war. Yushkevich had given a testimony denouncing
Rokossovsky years before, which was being used as evidence against him in the trial. However,
Yushkevich had been killed back in 1920 and, thus, couldn’t come to court. When the court learned
that Yushkevich had long been dead, it couldn’t justify sending Rokossovsky to the gallows.
Rokossovsky was then sent to a prison in Leningrad,
where he remained until March 1940, when he was released suddenly and without explanation .
Rokossovsky rejoined the Red Army after his release. His former commander, Semyon Timoshenko,
was in desperate need of experienced military officers in the rapidly growing Soviet military.
Rokossovsky was commissioned as a colonel in command of the
5th Cavalry Corps and was soon after promoted to major general.
Rokossovsky served throughout World War II,
and we’re not exaggerating when we say that he absolutely smashed it during the war.
We don’t have time to go over all of Rokossovsky’s achievements, but here are some of the highlights.
In September 1941, Rokossovsky was personally appointed by Stalin to command the 16th Army.
He was sent to defend Moscow as the Germans approached. During the Battle of Moscow,
Rokossovsky was under the direct command of his rival Zhukov. The two worked together during the
battle as well as they could, but their opposing styles of military leadership caused tension.
That all came to a head when, in November 1941,
after Rokossovsky and his men had staved off the German advance, they were backed into a
corner by the 4th Panzer Group in the Germans' Hail-Mary attempt to encircle the capital.
Rokossovsky asked Zhukov if he and his men could retreat and find a more advantageous position,
but Zhukov refused, ordering Rokossovsky to hold. Displeased, Rokossovsky went over Zhukov’s head
and asked the next highest-ranking officer for permission to retreat, which was granted.
This infuriated Zhukov, who threw out the order to retreat and forced Rokossovsky and
his men to hold their position. This move led to the Panzer Group breaking through the Soviet
lines and winning a strategic position north of Moscow. If Zhukov had allowed Rokossovsky
and his men to retreat, the Germans would not have advanced as much as they did.
While being right over your rival is an achievement on its own, that was nothing
compared to Rokossovsky’s greatest success of the war, which occurred in January 1943.
Stalin had sent Rokossovsky to Stalingrad in October to stamp out the surviving German
forces littering the city. He was granted around 218,000 soldiers, 6,500 guns, 2,500 tanks, and 300
aircraft to complete his mission. On January 10th, after much planning, he launched what became known
as Operation Ring. Though Rokossovsky and his men were better armed, the Germans fought ferociously,
and in the first three days, Rokossovsky lost 26,000 men and half of his tanks.
When Rokossovsky relaunched the offensive after regrouping, he struck harder and captured the
Germans’ last remaining airfields before driving them into the heart of the city.
At that point, the commander of the Germans, General Paulus, asked Hitler
if he could surrender, but the Fuhrer said no. Rokossovsky split the Germans into two pockets
and slowly wore them down over a few days. Soon, they had no choice but to surrender.
In total, Rokossovsky either destroyed or captured 22 German divisions and
ended the crescendo of the German advance into the USSR. For this,
Rokossovsky was promoted to the rank of colonel general.
Following his success in Stalingrad, Rokossovsky wrote this in his diary:
“I'm appointed commander of the Central Front. It means
that Stalin has entrusted me to play the key part in the summer Kursk campaign.”
The Kursk campaign was a massive attack on the Germans positioned near Kursk. But the
Germans were also planning an offensive, and when the Soviets caught wind of it,
they hunkered down and went on the defensive instead. The German offensive began in June 1943,
and Rokossovsky narrowly escaped death after his HQ was bombed in a night raid.
After that, Rokossovsky’s HQ was moved underground. From there,
Rokossovsky served as a commander of one of the largest tank battles of the Second World War.
Known as Operation Citadel to the Germans, it involved more than 8,000 tanks and 2.6 million men
in total. As the Germans rolled in, Rokossovsky organized the Soviet defense, which held strong.
He eventually ordered his troops to counterattack, however, which resulted in heavy losses.
Realizing his mistake, he again switched up his strategy, going back on the defensive and leaving
the Germans to enjoy the Soviet minefields. By the end of the battle, around 2,000 tanks had
been destroyed, and more than 200,000 men had been killed. The Germans, unable to penetrate
the Soviet defense, were ordered to retreat, spelling out yet another victory for Rokossovsky.
At the end of the war, Rokossovsky held the highest military rank possible:
Marshal of the Soviet Union. He was one of the most prominent Soviet commanders
of the war and participated in the victory parade in Moscow.
Rokossovsky remained loyal to the Soviet Union for the rest of his life, appointed, by Stalin, as
the commander of the Soviet forces in Poland and then Poland’s first Minister of National Defense.
During his time in politics, he worked to Stalinize Poland and actively fought the
Polish independence movement. He introduced the practice of sending able-bodied men to
labor camps if they were deemed “anti-Soviet.” In 1956, he also approved an order to use the
military to break up protests, protests which stood against working conditions
under the Soviet Union and Soviet rule in general. Rokossovsky sent 10,000 men
and 360 tanks to stamp out these protests, and 74 civilians were killed as a result.
Rokossovsky stayed incredibly loyal to the Soviet Union until he succumbed to prostate cancer in
1968. What blows our minds was his loyalty to a regime that had tortured him and wanted him dead.
But why do you think Rokossovsky remained loyal to Stalin and the USSR? Would you have remained
loyal to your country and leader under the same circumstances? Do you know of anyone else from
World War II that was as loyal to their country? Please share your thoughts in the comments below.