Ivan Stepanovich Konev (Russian: Иван Степанович Конев, IPA: [ɪˈvan sʲtʲɪˈpanəvʲɪtɕ ˈkonʲɪf]; 28 December 1897 – 21 May 1973) was a Soviet general and Marshal of the Soviet Union who led Red Army forces on the Eastern Front during World War II, responsible for taking much of Axis-occupied Eastern Europe.
Born to a peasant family, Konev was conscripted into the Imperial Russian Army in 1916 and fought in World War I. In 1919, he joined the Bolsheviks and served in the Red Army during the Russian Civil War. After graduating from Frunze Military Academy in 1926, Konev gradually rose through the ranks of the Soviet military. By 1939, he had become a candidate to the Central Committee of the Communist Party.
Following the German invasion of the Soviet Union in 1941, Konev took part in a series of major campaigns, including the battles of Moscow and Rzhev. Konev further commanded forces in major Soviet offensives at Kursk, in the Dnieper–Carpathian and Vistula–Oder offensives. In February 1944, he was made a Marshal of the Soviet Union. On the eve of German defeat, Konev's 1st Ukrainian Front was pitted against the armies of Georgy Zhukov in the Race to Berlin. Konev was the first Allied commander to enter Prague, the capital of Czechoslovakia, after the Prague uprising.
He replaced Zhukov as commander of Soviet ground forces in 1946. In 1956, he was appointed commander of the Warsaw Pact armed forces, and led the violent suppression of the Hungarian Revolution and Prague Spring. In 1961, as commander of Soviet forces in East Germany, he ordered the closing of West Berlin to East Berlin during the building of the Berlin Wall. Konev remained a popular military figure in the Soviet Union until his death in 1973.
Konev was born 28 December 1897 in the village of Lodeyno in the Nikolsky Uyezd of Vologda Governorate to a peasant family of Russian ethnicity. Konev graduated from a parish school in the village of Yakovlevskaya Gora in 1906, and later the Nikolo-Pushemsky Zemstvo School in the neighboring village of Schetkino in 1912. At the age of 15, he found work as a forester and lumberjack at Podosinovets and Arkhangelsk.
In the beginning of 1915, he was conscripted into the Imperial Russian Army. Konev was sent to the 2nd Heavy Artillery Brigade at Moscow and then graduated from artillery training courses. Posted to the 2nd Separate Heavy Artillery Battalion (then part of the Southwestern Front) as a junior sergeant in 1917, he fought in the Kerensky Offensive in Galicia in July 1917.
When the October Revolution broke out in November 1917, he was demobilized and returned home; in 1918, he joined the Russian Communist Party (Bolsheviks) and the Red Army, serving as an artilleryman. During the Russian Civil War of 1917-1923, he served with the Red Army in the Russian Far Eastern Republic. His commander at one time was Kliment Voroshilov, a close colleague of Joseph Stalin, who later became People's Commissar for Defense (in office: 1925-1940). (This connection was the key to Konev's subsequent career and to his protection during the Great Purge of the late 1930s.) In his memoirs, he wrote: "Together with a group of demobilized soldiers, I organized the overthrow of the land administration, the confiscation of agricultural land and the imprisonment of traders." He participated in the violent suppression of the 1921 Kronstadt rebellion.
In 1926 Konev completed advanced officer training courses at the Frunze Military Academy, and between then and 1941 he held a series of progressively more senior commands, becoming head first of the Transbaikal then of the North Caucasus Military Districts in 1940 and 1941, respectively. In 1934 he became commander and political commissar of the 37th Rifle Division. In July 1938, he was appointed commander of the 2nd Red Banner Army. In 1937 he became a Deputy of the Supreme Soviet and in 1939 a candidate member of the Party Central Committee.
When Nazi Germany invaded the Soviet Union in June 1941, Konev was assigned command of the 19th Army in the Vitebsk region, and waged a series of defensive battles during the Red Army's retreat, first to Smolensk and then to the approaches to Moscow.
He commanded the Kalinin Front from October 1941 to August 1942, playing a key role in the fighting around Moscow and the Soviet counter-offensive during the winter of 1941–42. For his role in the successful defense of the Soviet capital, Stalin promoted Konev to Colonel-General. In the summer of 1942 Konev led the Kalinin Front and later the Western Front in the battle on the Rzhev salient.
Konev held "Front" (army group) commands for the rest of the war. He commanded the Soviet Western Front until February 1943, the North-Western Front February–July 1943, and the 2nd Ukrainian Front from July 1943 (later further the 1st Ukrainian Front) until May 1945.
He participated in the Battle of Kursk, commanding the southern part of the Soviet counter-offensive, the Steppe Front, where he actively and energetically promoted maskirovka (the use of military camouflage and deception). Among the maskirovka measures he adopted to achieve tactical surprise were the camouflaging of defense lines and depots; dummy units and supply points; a dummy air-defense network; and the use of reconnaissance units to verify the quality of his army's camouflage and deception works. In David Glantz's view, Konev's forces "generated a major portion of the element of surprise".
As a result, the Germans seriously underestimated the strength of the Soviet defenses. The commander of the 19th Panzer division of the Wehrmacht, General G. Schmidt, wrote that "We did not assume that there was even one fourth [of the Russian strength] of what we had to encounter".
After the Soviet victory (August 1943) at Kursk, Konev's armies retook Belgorod, Odessa, Kharkov and Kiev. The subsequent Korsun–Shevchenkovsky Offensive led to the Battle of the Korsun–Cherkassy Pocket which took place from 24 January to 16 February 1944. The offensive was part of the Dnieper–Carpathian Offensive. In it, the 1st and 2nd Ukrainian Fronts, commanded, respectively, by Nikolai Vatutin and by Konev, trapped German forces of Army Group South in a pocket or "cauldron" west of the Dnieper river. During weeks of fighting, the two Red Army Fronts tried to eradicate the pocket; the subsequent Korsun battle eliminated the cauldron. According to Milovan Djilas, Konev openly boasted of his killing of thousands of German prisoners of war: "The cavalry finally finished them off. 'We let the Cossacks cut up as long as they wished. They even hacked off the hands of those who raised them to surrender' the Marshal recounted with a smile."
For Konev's achievements in Ukraine, the Presidium promoted him to Marshal of the Soviet Union in February 1944. Konev was one of Stalin's favorite generals and one of the few senior commanders whom even Stalin admired for his ruthlessness.
During 1944 Konev's armies advanced from Ukraine and Belarus into Poland and later into Czechoslovakia. In May 1944 he participated in an unsuccessful invasion of the Balkans, (the first Jassy–Kishinev Offensive) together with Generals Rodion Malinovsky and Fyodor Tolbukhin.
By July, he had advanced to the Vistula River in central Poland, and was awarded the title of Hero of the Soviet Union. In September 1944 his forces, now designated the Fourth Ukrainian Front, advanced into Slovakia and fought alongside the Slovak partisans in their rebellion against German occupation.
In January 1945, Konev, together with Georgy Zhukov, commanded the Soviet armies which launched the massive winter offensive in western Poland, driving the German forces from the Vistula to the Oder River. In southern Poland his armies seized Kraków (18 January 1945). Soviet historians, and generally Russian sources, claimed that Konev preserved Kraków from Nazi-planned destruction by ordering a lightning attack on the city. Konev's January 1945 offensive also prevented planned destruction of the Silesian industry by the retreating Germans.