Grigory Ivanovich Kulik

Grigory Ivanovich Kulik

Grigory Kulik ( Russian Григорий Иванович Кулик * October 28 ^{. Jul} / 9. November  1890 ^greg. In the village Dudnikowo in Poltava Governorate ; † 24. August 1950 , executed) was a Marshal of the Soviet Union and Deputy People's Commissar of Defense.

Life

Kulik came from a farming family near Poltava in Ukraine . During the First World War he served in the tsarist army . In 1917 he joined the Bolsheviks and entered 1918 in the Red Army one in which he is during the Civil War to the commander of the artillery brought.

In 1926 Kulik became chief of the main artillery directorate of the Red Army and remained in command of the Soviet artillery until 1941. The loyal Stalinist was a staunch opponent of the radical reforms proposed by Mikhail Tukhachevsky in the 1930s. This circumstance meant that he survived Stalin's purge of the Red Army in 1937/38 and rose to become Deputy People's Commissar for Defense in 1939. Even so, he led the Soviet artillery in the occupation of Poland in September 1939 and at the beginning of the Winter War against Finland in November 1939. In May 1940, Kulik was appointed Marshal of the Soviet Union, although he was widely regarded as incompetent.

Kulik opposed the reformers under Semyon Tymoshenko , who campaigned for the mechanization and motorization of the Red Army, and turned against the use of minefields as a defensive measure, as he considered mines "a weapon of the weak". His resistance to reforms had serious consequences for the readiness and fighting power of the Red Army in the German-Soviet war . Kulik also underestimated the role of automatic weapons - especially submachine guns , which he described as "pure police weapons". Instead, he advocated the horse and rifle as the basis of Red Army's equipment. Even in matters of artillery his harmful influence made itself felt, in that he demanded "nice" cannons and hindered the development of new artillery.

During the German invasion of the Soviet Union on June 22, 1941 , Kulik took command of the 54th Army on the Leningrad Front . His ineptitude contributed to the severe Soviet defeats that made it possible for Leningrad to be enclosed by the Wehrmacht until 1944 . In March 1942 he was tried by a court-martial and demoted to major general, expelled from the Central Committee of the Communist Party and removed from his post as Deputy People's Commissar for Defense, and his awards (including the Golden Star of the Hero of the Soviet Union ) were stripped of his. His close ties to Stalin may have saved Kulik from a possible shooting , as had been expected by many other Soviet generals. In April 1943 he was given command of the 4th Guard Army . From 1944 to 1945 he was deputy head of the mobilization department and then commander of the Volga military district.

During the new “ purges ” after the end of the war, Kulik was removed from his post and finally arrested. Until his conviction in 1950, he remained in custody, was on August 23, 1950 sentenced to death , and on August 24, along with Colonel General W. N. Gordov executed . In the thaw period under Nikita Khrushchev in 1956, he was posthumously rehabilitated and reinstated as Marshal of the Soviet Union.

Web links

• CV on hrono.ru

Individual evidence

1. ↑ http://de.rian.ru/opinion/20120306/262873257.html