Marshal K.K. Rokossovsky: The Red Army's Gentleman Commander

By Boris Sokolov

The author Boris Sokolov offers this first objective and intriguing biography of Marshal Konstantin Konstantinovich Rokossovsky, who is widely considered one of the Red Army's top commanders in the Second World War. Yet even though he brilliantly served the harsh Stalinist system, Rokossovsky himself became a victim of it with his arrest, beatings and imprisonment between 1937 and 1940.

The author analyzes all of Rokossovsky's military operations, in both the Russian Civil War and the Second World War, paying particular attention to the problem of establishing the real casualties suffered by both armies in the main battles where Rokossovsky took part, as well as on the Eastern Front as a whole. Rokossovsky played a prominent role in the battles for Smolensk, Moscow, Stalingrad, Kursk, Belorussia, Poland, East Prussia and Pomerania. While praising Rokossovsky's masterful generalship, the author does not shy away from criticizing the nature of Soviet military art and strategy, in which the guiding principle was "at all costs" and little value was placed on holding down casualties. This discussion extends to the painful topic of the many atrocities against civilians perpetrated by Soviet soldiers, including Rokossovsky's own troops.

A highly private man, Rokossovsky disliked discussing his personal life. With the help of family records and interviews, including the original, uncensored draft of the Marshal's memoirs, the author reveals the numerous dualities in Rokossovsky's life. Despite his imprisonment and beatings he endured, Rokossovsky never wavered in his loyalty to Stalin, yet also never betrayed his colleagues. Though a Stalinist, he was also a gentleman widely admired for his courtesy and chivalry. A dedicated family man, women were drawn to him, and he took a 'campaign wife' during the war. Though born in 1894 in Poland, Rokossovsky maintained that he was really born in Russia in 1896. This Polish/Russian duality in Rokossovsky's identity hampered his career and became particularly acute during the Warsaw uprising in 1944 and his later service as Poland's Defense Minister. Thus, the author ably portrays a fascinating man and commander, who became a marshal of two countries, yet who was not fully embraced by either.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Helion and Company
• Release date: Mar 19, 2015
• ISBN: 9781912174508

Boris Sokolov

Dr. Boris Sokolov is a prolific author and a member of PEN International, which celebrates literature and promotes freedom of expression. In 2008, he was forced to resign from his post at the Russian State Social University after publishing an article about the Russian-Georgian War. His work has focused on WW2 and biographies of prominent military and political leaders.

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Introduction

Not so long ago, Konstantin Rokossovsky was still being called the Marshal of two nations – the Soviet Union and Poland. In the Soviet Union and throughout the world, he’s been recognized as one of the greatest commanders of the Second World War. Today in his Polish homeland, people relate to Marshal Rokossovsky, putting it gently, relatively coolly, and are more likely trying to forget him, just as we all strive to forget something unpleasant. His name reminds the Poles about the era of unlimited Soviet supremacy, when a country with a thousand-year history for all practical purposes was stripped of its sovereignty. In Russia, the Marshal’s figure as one of the primary architects of victory in the Great Patriotic War remained in the shadows of Stalin and of his top deputy in his post of Supreme Commander-in-Chief of the Red Army, Marshal G.K. Zhukov, who by reputation was christened the Marshal of Victory back in the time of perestroika. Here, unquestionably, Rokossovsky’s nationality played a role. Konstantin Konstantinovich repeatedly said with bitterness, that in Russia they considered him a Pole, while in Poland, they considered him Russian. In both countries, this duality caused him much unpleasantness. In the Soviet Union, his Polish origin was one of the causes for his arrest in 1937 and led to more than two years in prison. His nationality served also as the main reason why Rokossovsky wasn’t allowed to take Berlin in 1945 – this honor was given instead to his former subordinate Zhukov, a genuine Russian. Because of his nationality, after the war Rokossovsky was assigned to Poland, a country by that time which was largely foreign to him, where for many years he had to engage primarily not in military matters, but in political issues that were deeply unfamiliar to the Marshal.

In Soviet times, Rokossovsky’s biography was substantially mythologized, and differed little from the biography of the other Soviet military commanders. It touched only lightly upon the Marshal’s mistakes, as well as the tragic events of 1937, and emphasized at every opportunity Rokossovsky’s fealty to Communist ideals, as if trying to convince that it was just these ideals that nudged him to support the Bolsheviks. The war and Rokossovsky’s role in it were totally glossed over, in complete agreement with the official conception, according to which the strategic artistry of the Soviet commanders and the indestructible unity of the Party and the people, which secured the victory, are emphasized, while the suffering of the people and the Red Army’s defeats are kept distantly in the background. Of course, difficulties in the interrelationships with the Polish leadership during Rokossovsky’s time in his post as the Minister of National Defense of the Polish People’s Republic are minimized in every possible way. In addition, not nearly enough attention was paid to the Marshal’s psychology, his inner torments. According to the canons of those times, heroes of Soviet history were not allowed any self-reflection or any doubts in the correctness of the singularly correct course of the Party.

Rokossovsky managed to leave behind his memoirs, although he completed them at a time in his life when he was already gravely ill. That version of the book, which came out soon after the Marshal’s death, hardly diverged from the canons of that type of Soviet literature. It mentions nothing about the repressions of the 1930s, and any criticism of the Stavka of the Supreme High Command and of other Soviet military commanders is quite muffled. In contrast, thanks to the posthumous work of the editors, plainly fanciful episodes appeared in the book, especially connected with Konstantin Konstantinovich’s participation in the Russian Civil War. At the same time, the text written by the pen of Rokossovsky himself (the Marshal didn’t use the help of any co-writers), has no substantial distortions of the facts, unlike many other Soviet military memoirs, such as Zhukov’s own.

After the censors’ contempt lessened and then totally disappeared, a more complete version of Rokossovsky’s memoirs appeared, in which the censored material, which chiefly concerned criticism of the Stavka’s plans and the actions of other Soviet commanders, was restored. However, we won’t find any criticism of Stalin personally or of his repressive policies in this version of the memoirs either. We can only find mentions of the repressions in rough drafts of the memoirs, and they were all neatly stricken through by Konstantin Konstantinovich himself. Likely, this was done not only due to reasons of censorship. The point is that Rokossovsky never once publically criticized Stalin for the repressions, even at the height of Khrushchev’s thaw, when criticism of Stalin’s cult of personality was accepted at the highest Party-state level. One can assume that for his entire life, Rokossovsky was grateful to Stalin for freeing him from prison (after all, Rokossovsky’s release could not have occurred without the Leader’s approval), and for later elevating him to the rank of front commander, Marshal of the Soviet Union, and twice Hero of the Soviet Union.

Right up to the present day there has been no comprehensive criticism of Rokossovsky’s biography. Criticism, I will stress, not with respect to the Marshal, but to the propagandistic-patriotic myths that were built around him and the entire Great Patriotic War. What are the titles of recent other biographies of Rokossovsky – Pobeda ne liuboi tsenoi [Victory not at any price] or Genii manevra [Genius of maneuver] – really worth? As we will see in this study, Rokossovsky’s troops paid approximately the same high price for victory as did those of the other Soviet generals and marshals. Stalin’s Red Army was unable to fight any other way. This was a fact not of military art, but of sociology. The matter was just as much the quality of the human material, the officers and soldiers, whose education level and discipline left much to be desired, as it was the extreme totalitarian system of command, which significantly restricted commanders at all levels and inculcated a desire to act according to template. This happened because of the fear of punishment for any non-standard actions. Because of this same fear, commanders were compelled to submit false reports, which exaggerated the enemy losses many times over and the achievements of their own troops, with the simultaneous, significant understatement of their own losses. As we will see further on, Konstantin Konstantinovich also was compelled at times to submit false reports to the Stavka in the effort to divert Stalin’s wrath away from his subordinates.

It is impossible to consider Rokossovsky a genius of maneuver either, since he didn’t conduct any outstanding maneuvers of strategic significance like M.I. Kutuzov’s famous 1812 Tarutino maneuver. Rokossovsky’s value as a military commander lay in his ability to rally retreating units quickly, force them to defend stubbornly, and under suitable circumstances, to counterattack. When defending against an enemy offensive in previously prepared positions, Konstantin Konstatinovich managed better than other Soviet commanders to anticipate the direction of the main attack and to concentrate more infantry and artillery there. He preferred to use tanks in close collaboration with the infantry and not in excessively large aggregations, although this was not always successful. On the offensive, Rokossovsky skillfully implemented double encirclements of the enemy, but in reality, his forces were able to encircle large groupings of German forces only while conducting Operation Bagration in Belorussia.

Where Rokossovsky really stood out in comparison with other Soviet generals and marshals was his emphatically proper behavior with respect to his subordinates. In distinction from the others, Konstantin Konstantinovich never used invectives, beatings or direct threats of execution. I was unable to find a single order regarding the shooting of specific officers under his command, whereas an ample number of such orders over Zhukov’s signature or those of other Marshals of Victory have been preserved. He was, without a doubt, the most humane of all the Soviet military commanders. He also strove as far as possible to spare the lives of his soldiers, though such opportunities appeared quite rarely, and had practically no effect on the overall correlation of Soviet and German losses in the operations of the fronts and armies that he commanded.

In addition, Rokossovsky was doubtlessly the most likeable of the Soviet marshals. A gallant, handsome man almost 6 feet, 5 inches tall, always straight-laced, well-groomed and impeccably dressed, women always found him nearly irresistible. It was strictly forbidden to write on this matter in Soviet times, and when such publications became popular, Rokossovsky was strongly eclipsed by the figure of Zhukov, in whose personal life the public showed greater interest. In general, Rokossovsky spent a significant portion of his life’s path seemingly in Zhukov’s shadow, and likely to a certain degree this weighed upon Konstantin Konstantinovich.

However, existing biographies of the Marshal not only failed to elucidate questions of Rokossovsky’s military skill or his psychological sufferings. Very little is known about his participation in the First World War and the Russian Civil War, his service in the interwar period, or his postwar time in Poland. As concerns his personal life, it seems that Konstantin Konstantinovich was a rather closed fellow, who preferred not to share his personal feelings even among his circle of family and friends. Indeed, the times were such that openness could be hazardous. Thus we can assess the details of the Marshal’s life only through interviews with Rokossovsky’s descendants, which to a significant degree are based upon family tales, and through a few more or less open memoirs of people who knew the Marshal in some way or another. Most such memoirs appeared only in the time of perestroika and glasnost’, a couple of decades after Konstantin Konstantinovich’s death.

Rokossovsky’s life, as it has turned out, has to this point been very poorly documented. Thus far, practically no documents have been found related to his birth and his first 20 years of life, right up to the start of the First World War. Therefore we are forced to reconstruct even his date and place of birth only on the basis of the latest evidence. Not too many documents about his activities in the Great Patriotic War have been made public either; in this respect, Zhukov was much luckier. Even sparser is the published documentary material on his service in the interwar period and especially any material related to his arrest and trial. The latter was destroyed back at the beginning of the 1960s. A limited number of documents devoted to Rokossovsky’s service in Poland after the end of the Great Patriotic War have been published. As concerns the final years of the Marshal’s service in the Soviet Union, here one can point only to his speech at the October 1957 Plenum of the Communist Party’s Central Committee, which came during the hearing of Marshal Zhukov’s case. Thus, compiling an academic biography of the commander requires many years of search into Russian and Polish archives, and likely still remains a matter of the relatively distant future.

My task is far more modest. I want to linger on the key moments of Marshal Rokossovsky’s biography, on the most interesting moments of the operations conducted under his command with the use of little known and unpublished archival documents. I also sought to penetrate into Marshal’s inner world, to understand how he lived in the conditions of a totalitarian regime, and how far he shared its ideology and values. If the German generals and field marshals fully felt the iron grip of the Reich only following the failure of the anti-Hitler plot of 20 July 1944, in the Soviet Union, the higher commanders had direct experience with all the charms of totalitarianism back in 1937. Rokossovsky played no part in Stalin’s repressions, but he was a witness to them and a victim, and this had to have some effect on his personality.

I have strived to portray Konstantin Konstantinovich as both a commander and as a man, not closing my eyes to his mistakes and failures. The reader can judge how far I managed to succeed in this. I will not hide that while working over the book, I experienced increasing sympathy for my hero, who managed under the most trying conditions to preserve his decency, correctness and other human qualities.

I want to express my extreme gratitude to the Marshal’s grandson Konstantin Vil’evich and great-granddaughter Ariadna Konstantinovna Rokossovskaia. They gave me invaluable assistance, shared materials with me from the family archive, and offered a number of ideas touching upon the biography of their great ancestor; they also assumed the difficult task of looking over the manuscript prior to its publication. I also want to express my sincere gratitude to the Polish historian Tomasz Bogun for his assistance in locating facts of Rokossovsky’s biography, as well as to the Russian historians Konstantin Aleksandrovich Zalessky, who made a number of valuable comments about the manuscript, and Sergei Vladimirovich Volkov, who brought a number of valuable sources on the history of Warsaw at the end of the 19th Century and beginning of the 20th Century to my attention.

1

Rokossovsky’s Youth in Poland

Konstantin Konstantinovich’s ancestors, according to family tradition, stemmed from ancient nobility with the Glaubicz coat of arms: on a blue field, a gold (or silver) left-facing fish with five ostrich plumes on the crest – which was first mentioned in 1396. One of the Marshal’s ancestors in the 15th Century received ownership of the Rokosowo landed estate. In the Polish language, the word rokos means a swamp or bog. Likely, Konstantin Konstantinovich’s ancestors first received their family name in a swampy area. From this came the family name Rokosowskie that later became Rokossovsky. This name is entered in the Russian Empire’s General Book of Heraldry – a digest of the coats of arms of Russian nobility, which was constituted by order of Tsar Paul I on 20 January 1797 and includes more than 3,000 family and several dozen personal coats of arms. It can also be found in the second volume of the book Heraldry of the Polish Kingdom’s Nobility.

The Marshal’s grandfather Józef Rokossowski on 12 November 1811 was chosen and appointed as a podporuchik [roughly, a second lieutenant] of the 2nd Cavalry Regiment in the army of the Grand Duchy of Warsaw – the Polish state formation created by Napoleon I and under his personal suzerainty. Because Józef Rokossowski entered military service as an officer, he was also a count, but his son Ján Wisenty was not a nobleman, only an assistant forester. The point is that many Polish noblemen at the time of Poland’s merging with the Russian Empire did not have their own castles or in some cases even their own land, which by their position made them little different from peasants. At the same time, the Polish gentry had greatly multiplied in number. Already in the 16th Century it comprised 8 percent of the population of the Reczpospolita, while in Mazovia (Masovia) and Podlasie, that figure rose to 20 percent The Tsarist regime not without justifications assumed that the Polish landed nobility would preserve its liberal spirit and try to rid itself of Russian rule, an attitude which had particularly manifested itself in the 1830-1831 and 1863-1864 uprisings. Therefore the Tsarist officials sought by every means to decrease the number of noblemen, starting first in the territories of Lithuania, Belorussia and the Ukraine, which had previously been part of the Reczpospolita, and then later in the Kingdom of Poland as well, following its merger with the Russian Empire in 1815. According to a decree of 29 March 1812, a title of nobility was recognized only for those who had previously had their title confirmed. A commission, which conducted a revision in 1816, was given the duty to examine the rights of people, who claimed to be part of the landed nobility, based upon the presence of notes about them in the 1795 census records. Those who could prove their nobility were registered as free grain growers, sovereign peasants, or as bourgeoisie.

After the uprising of 1830-1831, the Committee of Western Guberniia, among other similar tasks, took up the resolution of the problem regarding noble estates. On 19 October 1831, the law On the review of Polish nobles in the Western Guberniia and on the regulation of such people was issued. All nobles, who were unable to provide documented proof of their titles, were enrolled in specially created orders of odnodvortsy (small landholders) in the villages and grazhdane (citizens) in the cities. The Polish nobles that didn’t have land, or having land, had no castle, were stripped of their noble title.

Meanwhile, treatment of the Eastern Orthodox nobility was much more liberal. They even accepted plainly falsified title documents, which were manufactured in large numbers in return for a modest fee in Ukrainian and Belorussian lands, as confirmation of nobility. In particular, a great number of such forged documents were presented in the second half of the 18th Century, when former Ukrainian Free Cossacks attempted to become enrolled in the nobility. For example, the writer Nikolai Gogol’s father Vasilii Ianofsky had a document on the bestowing of noble status to a Mogilev colonel, Ostap Gogol, in 1674 by the Polish King Ján Kazimir. In distinction from later scholars, it didn’t trouble the Office of Heraldry that Ján Kazimir had abdicated his throne back in 1668.

By a decree of 19 January 1866, the orders of odnodvortsy and grazhdane of the Western Guberniia were abolished, and all of the Polish nobles who were unable to prove their knighthood were registered as peasants or bourgeoisie. Konstantin Konstantinovich himself was considered a member of the bourgeoisie. It can be assumed that Rokossovsky’s ancestors had been stripped of their noble status back in the 1840s, since they lived on territory of the Kingdom of Poland. Most likely, they’d been unable to present papers that confirmed their noble title, so they were registered in the grazhdane, and later in the bourgeoisie.

According to family tradition, Ján Wicenty quarreled with his son Ksawery Józef, the future father of our hero, because at 10 years of age, Ksawery Józef ran away from home in order to take part in the January uprising of 1863 to secure the restoration of an independent Poland. The father with difficulty finally found his son in the Lublin area. Incidentally, Ján Wicenty himself was unable to avoid a term of imprisonment in the Warsaw Citadel for having sympathy for the rebels.

Ksawery’s mother and Konstantin Konstantinovich’s grandmother was Konstancja Cholewicka, who was related to the famous prima donna of the Warsaw Opera Helena Cholewicka. One can assume that the family of Ján Wicenty Rokossowski was sufficiently well-off financially. Ksawery, who was born in 1853, according to the recollections of his daughter Helena was a man of average height, slender, but physically strong. He got married at the end of the 1880s or the beginning of the 1890s, at around 40 years of age, to the schoolteacher Antonina (Atonida) Ovsiannikovaia, from the bourgeois township of Telekhany, in the Pinsk district of the Minsk Guberniia, who was most likely significantly younger than her husband. She was Russian and Eastern Orthodox. Possibly, that fact that Ksawery Józef married a Russian separated him from his Polish kinfolk.

Later in Soviet years, Konstantin Konstantinovich would write on forms and in his autobiographies that his father was a railroad machinist. For example, in the autobiography that he penned immediately after his release from prison, Rokossovsky wrote: I was born in 1896 into a worker’s family. My father was a machinist who worked for the Riga – Orel and then the Warsaw – Vienna railroads. He passed away in 1905. My mother was a worker employed by a factory that produced women’s stockings. She died in 1910 … I graduated from a four-year city school in the Warsaw suburb of Praga in 1909.

As we will see later, much in this passage isn’t exactly true. At the moment of Konstantin’s birth, Ksawery was working at a railroad as a government inspector, thus he was not a worker, but a service employee. Of course, prior to this job, he may have worked as a machinist. There is also no certainty that Konstantin’s mother actually worked in a stocking factory. Finally, the question as to where and when Konstantin was born also has various answers.

Rokossovsky in all his forms gives the date of his birth as 8 (20) December 1896. He gave various locations as his place of birth: right up until 1945, the Marshal always stated that he was born in Warsaw. However in one form he completed in 1945, as well as in an account of his life that he wrote on 27 December 1945, he indicated that Velikie Luki in the Pskov Guberniia was his place of birth. Then, when in the autumn of 1949 Stalin ordered Rokossovsky to become a Pole again and to head the Polish Army, his place of birth again became Warsaw. However, after returning to the Soviet Union seven years later, Rokossovsky again began to assert that he was born in Velikie Luki.

The Marshal’s grandson Konstantin Vil’evich Rokossovsky puts forward an interesting hypothesis as to why in his postwar autobiography, his grandfather replaced Warsaw as his place of birth with Velikie Luki. In 1945, Rokossovsky became a twice-Hero of the Soviet Union. However, according to the entitlements of this rank, a bust of the twice-Hero was supposed to be put up in his homeland. Yet how could a bust dedicated to a twice-Hero of the Soviet Red Army be erected in Warsaw? Of course, at the time the Polish government was fully dependent upon Moscow, but it would have been very awkward for it to have a statue raised in its capital to honor a Hero of a different country, which would thereby demonstrate its total subservience to the USSR. Therefore, in his autobiography Rokossovsky, obviously at the insistence of prompting from above, gave his birthplace as the fully Russian Velikie Luki. Possibly, this place was chosen because in the Pskov area surrounding Velikie Luki, there were once barons with the family name of Rokossovsky who were not without justifications seen as distant ancestors of the Soviet Marshal. It is fully possible that Rokossovsky’s place of birth was changed at Stalin’s direct order.

What is most interesting is that Rokossovsky, a bit later, at some moment sought to convince himself that he actually had been born in Velikie Luki, so after the war, now as Poland’s Minister of National Defense, he sent an inquiry there, seeking to clarify his own genealogy. Of course, it is possible that Konstantin Konstantinovich never doubted his real birthplace, but sent the inquiry only in order with a negative response to convince his Polish comrades that he actually had been born in Warsaw. After all, when Rokossovsky had been sent to serve in Poland, he again began to indicate Warsaw as his place of birth. But when the Poles rather unceremoniously sent Konstantin Konstantinovich back to the USSR, he again chose the Russian city of Velikie Luki as his birthplace.

It is worth noting one more peculiarity. Both Konstantin’s older sister Maria and younger sister Helena were born in Warsaw, or at least within the territory of the Kingdom of Poland. Why suddenly did a family of a railroad employee, who worked on the Riga – Orel railroad, set up residence in Warsaw? After all, that particular railroad was rather distant from Polish land. However, if we assume that when the children were being born, the family head was now working for the Warsaw – Vienna railroad, then what brought him to the Pskov area becomes utterly incomprehensible, especially with a pregnant wife. After all, there is not a single fool who would drive from Warsaw to Vienna by way of Velikie Luki, while the families of railroad employees normally settled in stations along the railroad for which they worked. Moreover, a railroad didn’t pass through Velikie Luki until 1898, already two years after the date taken for Rokossovsky’s birth. However, it isn’t known whether Konstantin Konstantinovich knew about this fact.

In reality, the birthplace of the future marshal was the Warsaw area on the territory of the Kingdom of Poland. We do know with confidence that at his birth, Konstantin was baptized in the Russian Orthodox faith. This follows from documents of his subsequent service in the 5th Kargopol Dragoon Regiment, including recommendations to award him the St. George’s Cross. This circumstance shouldn’t surprise anyone. According to acting law, right up until 1905, in the case of a marriage of a Catholic, employed by the government, to someone of the Russian Orthodox religion, their children had to be baptized as Russian Orthodox, or otherwise their father would have lost his job. Konstantin Konstantinovich’s father was either a machinist or a government inspector, but in either case, he was working for the government. Although the Warsaw – Vienna railroad, like almost all the railroads of the Russian Empire, was in part financed by private capital, the railroad workers were considered government employees and wore official uniforms bearing the Russian Imperial emblem – the two-headed eagle.

Here’s what the publisher Granat’s encyclopedic dictionary has to say about Warsaw of that era, when Konstantin Rokossovsky was living there:

The population of Warsaw was growing rapidly and in this respect it held third place among all Russian cities in size, after St. Petersburg and Moscow. In 1913, it had a total population of around 785,000, of which 36,000 were Orthodox Slavs, 400,000 – Catholics, 20,000 – Protestants, 254,000 – Jews; Armenian-Georgians, Muslims and others made up the rest of the population. Warsaw had a university, technological and veterinarian institutes, 7 all-boys’ secondary schools, 2 preparatory schools, several non-classical, commercial and technical schools, a cadet’s corps, a normal school, a finishing school for young ladies of the aristocracy, 4 all-girls’ secondary schools, and more than 180 city schools. The cost of living, and particularly the rents, rivaled that of St. Petersburg. There were more than 20 Orthodox churches (with chapels) in the city.

In one of them, most likely, the future Marshal was baptized. Rokossovsky’s family at the moment of his birth was living on the right bank of the Vistula, in Praga, on Stalowa Street.

As we see, there weren’t that many of the Russian Orthodox faith in Warsaw – about 5 percent of the population. However, among this subsection of the population, it wasn’t Poles that dominated, but Russians – families of clerks and officers. The majority of the Poles regarded their compatriots of the Orthodox faith suspiciously, seeing them as agents of Russia – the country that had deprived Poland of independence and which at the end of the 19th century and the start of the 20th century had been conducting a policy of Russification. Even instruction in the Polish secondary schools was for a long time exclusively in the Russian language. Only after the 1905 Revolution was teaching in the Polish language partially restored; at the same time, private all-boys’ secondary schools were allowed.

It must be said that in the Marshal’s 1940 autobiography there are obvious inaccuracies. His father Ksawery Józef died not in 1905, but on 17 October 1902, and on 20 October he was buried in the Bródno Cemetery in the eastern part of Warsaw. His tombstone, which even today stands above his grave, was emplaced by the Marshal in the beginning of the 1950s. According to the recollections of Helena Rokossovsky, her father never fully recovered from a railroad accident that had taken place several years prior to his death. She recalled a photograph that depicted her father beside an overturned train.

There is another inaccuracy regarding the four-year city school that Rokossovsky purportedly finished. In reality, Konstantin either never graduated from the school, or he finished it but failed the graduation exams.

Why am I certain of this? On the candidate’s card for those taking command posts in the Red Army, which he filled out on 22 April 1920, Rokossovsky signed it as Konstantin Konstantinovich, thereby shunning the patronymic of Ksaver’evich, which sounded strange to the Russian ear (and the Poles do not use the patronymic at all). He gave his date and place of birth as 8 December 1896, Warsaw. Here the date was indicated according to the old style Julian calendar, which was used in the Russian Empire. According to the new style, his birthday was 20 December, but subsequently Rokossovsky always celebrated his birthday on 21 December, that is, 8 December according to the Julian calendar. On that same candidate’s card, he indicated that he had finished five years of secondary schooling. The name of the school is indecipherable. It can be read as Fronaszowsko or as Brzezinski. If the latter reading is correct, then most likely Rokossovsky had in mind the 1st All-males’ Secondary School, the director of which in 1911 was the state councilor in deed Aleksandr Alekseevich Brzezinski. Its address was 72 Nowy Świat.

In response to the question, "When did you enter military service and how: by conscription, as a simple volunteer [okhotnik], as a special volunteer [vol’noopredeliaiushchimsia] (who had to have had a minimum of four years of academic schooling), or as a specialist school graduate? Rokossovsky replied, On 2 August 1941 I joined the 5th Kargopol Dragoon Regiment as a special volunteer." Here the Marshal was embellishing his record a bit, because as documents show, he joined the regiment as a simple volunteer, because he lacked the necessary years of schooling.

It would seem that questionnaire confirms not only the date and place of birth of the future marshal, but also his sufficiently high level of education at the moment of joining the army. From his answer, he is indicating that he completed not four, but five years of grammar school, and thus entered the Czarist army in 1914 as a special volunteer. According to the Brokgauz and Efron Encyclopedia, "those who desired to join up as a vol’noopredeliaiushchimsia had to meet certain conditions: 1) they had to be at least 17 years old, and in case of minor status, have the permission of his parents or guardians; 2) they had to have the health and physique to meet the conditions required for acceptance into military service; and 3) they had to have due evidence of educational attainment." But in 1912 the rules were changed. Now a special volunteer had to have had a minimum of six years of academic schooling.

On that same candidate’s card Rokossovsky reported that his previous military rank in the old [Imperial] Army was that of a junior non-commissioned officer as a special volunteer, from 5 August 1914 to October 1917. Here again he was dissembling: he served as a simple volunteer, because he didn’t have the necessary educational attainments to meet the standard of a special volunteer, and he was made a junior non-commissioned officer only on 29 March 1917. Konstantin Ksaver’evich Rokossovsky [note that Rokossovsky used this patronymic until April 1920, when he changed it to Konstantinovich] is not listed a single time on the personnel rosters of the 5th Kargopol Dragoon Regiment between the years of 1914 and 1917 as anything other than an okhotnik, a simple volunteer.

This fact can only mean one thing: at the moment of joining the 5th Dragoon Kargopol Regiment, Rokossovsky hadn’t completed a minimum of six years of academic schooling, which would have given him the right to join as a special volunteer and to avoid at the very least the unpleasant army obligations of fatigue duties that were imposed on simple volunteers.

From the perspective of the version that Rokossovsky was born in December 1896, the assertion that he entered the military as a special volunteer seemed fully logical: special volunteers were taken into the army beginning from age 17, so Rokossovsky in August 1914 had to have been 17 years old. However, here’s the problem: in an order of the 5th Kargopol Dragoon Regiment dated 5 August 1914, Rokossovsky’s year of birth is given as 1894. The order states, … Peasant Vatslav Iulianov Strankevich, who was on the roster of a Government 1st Category milita unit in 1911, and commoner of the Komarowo District of Ostrowo County Konstantin Ksaver’evich Rokossovsky, born in 1894, have both enlisted in the regiment entrusted to me as simple volunteers with the rank of private, and will be carried on the regiment’s roster … from this date with assignment to the 6th Squadron.

The author of the first Soviet biography of Rokossovsky (which came out in 1972 and wasn’t bad for those times) Vladislav Kardashov, who found and published this order, tried to explain the evident contradiction in the following way:

Plainly, the desire of Konstantin Rokossovsky to join this regiment was so great that for this purpose he had to add, at the advice of his senior comrade Vatslav Strankevich, two full years to his age – in reality in August 1914 the young volunteer was not yet even 18 years old, while only those men who had reached 21 years of age were called up for service in the Russian Army.

Here it should be added that a man who joined the army before draft age, but lacked the requisite education to be a special volunteer, was called a simple volunteer. Thus, simple volunteers were taken into the army from 20 years of age. They had the privilege of choosing their branch of service.

It should be noted that in this order, Rokossovsky was called a commoner of Komarowo District. In fact he never resided in this district, and it wasn’t even necessary to make this claim. According to the legal system that existed at that time, Rokossovsky’s ancestors were given the status of Komarowo commoners after they were deprived of their status as members of the nobility. In particular, for a certain time Rokossovsky’s grandfather, Ján Wicenty Rokossowski, lived in the hamlet of Stoki in Ostrowo County, and several of his children were born there. It is unlikely that Konstantin Rokossovsky knew accurately from memory the precise district to which his father and he himself had been assigned. Most likely, this information was gleaned from Rokossovsky’s passport. They couldn’t take someone into the regiment who had no documents at all – he might prove to be a deserter, a criminal fugitive, an enemy spy, or simply someone who had already been drafted and thus didn’t have the right to join the regiment as a simple volunteer. That Vatslav Strankevich’s year of birth isn’t given in the order is understandable: the regiment commander was primarily interested in the newly-signed simple volunteers’ reception into military duty. Strankevich doubtlessly had presented written evidence that in 1911 he had been on the roster of 1st Category militia soldiers. This category of draftees was not subject to initial call-up after the declaration of universal mobilization and was not at all subject to conscription in the regular army, but was only to replace those reserve troops in the rear that had been sent to the front. Thus, Strankevich could enter service as a simple volunteer. Rokossovsky meanwhile, who was born in 1894, was only subject to be called up in 1915, so accordingly he had every right to enter the army as a simple volunteer.

However, let’s for a moment in the wake of Kardashov believe that Rokossovsky really did add two years to his age in order to join the war, and that the commander of the 5th Dragoons Regiment Colonel Artur Shmidt and his adjutant Lieutenant Sergei Lomikovsky were so naïve that they didn’t they didn’t request any documents from the new recruit. But all the same, Konstantin Rokossovsky could not in any way have been born in 1896 – and this argument is iron-clad, or more accurately, set in granite.

The point is that Konstantin’s younger sister Helena Rokossovsky, as the tombstone standing above her grave in the Bródno Cemetery in Warsaw testifies, was born on 16 August 1896 and passed away on 22 July 1982. On one of the Marshal’s visits to Warsaw, his great-granddaughter Ariadna took a color photograph of Helena’s grave. Years later in Ariadna’s apartment, we together with her father, Marshal Konstantin Rokossovsky’s grandson, were examining the inscription on the tombstone through a large magnifying glass. Without the assistance of the magnifying glass, the date of birth on the tombstone appears to be 18 VIII 1898, but on closer examination, it reveals itself rather convincingly as 1896. In order to make sure, I wrote my friend in Warsaw, historian Tomasz Bogun, and asked him to drop by the Bródno Cemetery, find Helena’s gravesite, and clarify the date of birth given on her tombstone. Tomasz wrote me back on 15 January 2009 that the date of birth of the Marshal’s younger sister was 16 August 1896 (meaning that even with the magnifying glass, we had misinterpreted her birthday as 18 August), and that this information had been entered in the cemetery’s computer database.

Thus, there was no longer any doubt. Helena Rokossovsky was really born in August 1896. But at the same time this totally proves that the future Marshal could not have in any way have been born in December 1896. So far no one has repealed the laws of nature. One can jokingly assume that Helena and Konstantin were twins, and Konstantin simply clung to his mother’s womb for four-plus months, but this would be only a joke. One can even seriously suppose that the brother and sister were in fact twins, and that the future Marshal was actually born on the same date as his sister Helena, that is to say, 16 August 1896, but most likely this supposition is simply false. After all, none of the future Marshal’s family recalls this rather uncommon fact of the birth of twins, including Helena herself. There isn’t any suggestion of this either in her memoirs or in family lore.

So when was Konstantin Rokossovsky actually born? If we assume that he was actually younger than his sister Helena, then the earliest possible date of his birth would be the end of 1897. However, then it is totally incomprehensible why Konstantin Konstantinovich at the beginning of his service in the Red Army made himself older than he actually was. After all, by that time he was already set on a military career, and from that point of view it would be more advantageous to be younger, not older, than you actually are: that pushes back the date when you must go into the reserve and your eventual retirement, and you become a more promising cadre in the eyes of the command. In the years of revolution and the Civil War, very many people, taking advantage of the chaos that arose, altered their date of birth. However, they did this as a rule to make themselves younger, since this improved their career and marital prospects. At the same time, they often reduced their level of education, so they wouldn’t be suspected of being a member of the propertied classes, which had much greater chances to give their children an education. In this case, the shift of one’s birth year to a later year allowed one to conceal years spent in the upper years of secondary school. For example, the NKVD People’s Commissar Nikolai Ivanovich Ezhov, judging from everything, reduced his own age by two or three years for just this reason.

Rokossovsky, however, rather unusually went the other direction, by increasing his education level, not lowering it, and by doing so making himself a special volunteer. This might cause alert commanders to doubt in his proletarian origins, but on the other hand it opened fine career prospects. After all, by March 1919 Rokossovsky was already a member of the RKP(b) [Russian Communist Party (Bolshevik)], and among those Red Army commanders that were joining the Communist Party at this time, only few could boast of having even five years of secondary schooling. With such an education, one could hope to be approved in the post of regiment commander, which did in fact happen in Rokossovsky’s case.

Here it should be added that throughout her life, Helena believed herself to be Konstantin’s younger, not older sister. It is difficult to imagine that she might be wrong here. Thus the supposition that the Marshal was born before his sister is the only reasonable one. Then he could not have been born later than mid-1895. However, December 1894 lies rather close to this time – it is doubtful that Rokossovsky had any thought to alter his birth month. The year 1894, as we recall, also figured in the order about enlisting Konstantin Rokossovsky into the 5th Kargopol Dragoon Regiment. The fact that Konstantin’s older sister Maria was born in 1892 correlates well with this. Therefore it can be believed that Konstantin Ksaver’evich Rokossovsky was born in Warsaw on 8 (20) December 1894 – two years prior to the date given in all the dictionaries and encyclopedias. Incidentally, even this date is rather conditional: in Russia back then, as well as in Poland even today, birthdays were celebrated most often not on the actual day of birth, but on the Saint-day that usually fell on that same month, but rarely on the same day. Thus, Rokossovsky may not have been able to recall the precise date of his birth at all.

It would only be possible to learn Konstantin Rokossovsky’s date of birth with absolute certainty if an entry about his birth could be found in a church’s parish register. Accordingly, one would have to try to find it in the archives of the parish register books of the Russian Orthodox church in Warsaw where Rokossovsky was baptized. In 1894, there were five such churches in Warsaw, and Rokossovsky was baptized in one of them – most likely, in the St. Troicki Church at No. 5 Podwalna Street. However, it is hardly worth hoping that something could be found in the archives – two world wars had a most ruinous effect on the condition of Polish archives. Some of them were evacuated to Russia in 1915. Many of them were destroyed in the fighting for Warsaw in September 1939 and in the 1944 uprising. It cannot be excluded that the entry about Konstantin Rokossovsky’s birth long ago turned into ashes.

It is interesting that Marshal Georgii Konstantinovich Zhukov, Rokossovsky’s friend and peer who was born on 19 November (1 December) 1896, was certain that he was younger than Rokossovsky, if only at most by three weeks. In fact, Rokossovsky was almost two full years older than him.

We’ll now say a few words about Konstantin’s older sister Maria. Little is known about her fate after their father’s death. When Rokossovsky soon after joining the 5th Dragoons Regiment informed his family of the news, they told him that Maria was now married. She died in evacuation to Russia in 1915 or 1916, about which Konstantin informed his sister Helena when he met her in liberated Warsaw in 1945. Since she was evacuated, one can assume that her husband was a Russian civil servant or officer. I will remind you that she, like Ksawery’s other children, was Russian Orthodox. It isn’t known if Maria had any children. Perhaps she died when giving birth, which was not a rare occurrence back then. However, how are we to know if perhaps Maria Rokossovsky’s descendants are now living in Russia, or somewhere in France or America if her husband was lucky enough to emigrate. Incidentally, it would be a difficult task to track down these distant relatives of the famous Marshal. After all, we still don’t even know the family name of Maria’s husband. In Soviet times, Rokossovsky on questionnaires never indicated that he had close relatives in Poland (this would have been a rather dangerous point, fraught with unpleasantness), and prior to 1945 he knew nothing about the fate of his sister.

We know mostly about Konstantin Rokossovsky’s life right up until 1914 through the memoirs of his sister Helena. She writes that after their father’s death, his relatives took Maria and Konstantin away from their mother, supposedly to raise them in a Polish spirit. It is characteristic that in Soviet times, Rokossovsky would answer Pole in response to the question about his nationality in questionnaires, but he would fill in the blank for Native language with Russian. He learned this language from his mother. Having lost her husband, Antonina was forced to go to work in a textile factory on Szeroka Street. Another version holds that she never worked in a factory, but after her husband’s death she immediately departed with her youngest daughter to her homeland, to Telekhany, where she in fact lived until her death.

Helena’s aunt Ioanna Vladislava, who lived in Petersburg, took Helena in after her mother’s death. There she married some bureaucrat, but they had no children. Konstantin, however, immediately after his father’s death was taken in by his father’s younger brother Aleksandr Ksawery, the owner of a prestigious dental clinic at 151 Marszałkowska Street. He was a fine dentist who had an extensive practice among the well-to-do families of Warsaw. Ksawery was even able to purchase the Pulapin Estate, where Konstantin spent his summers and he learned well how to ride horses. Because of his passion for horseback riding, his friends nicknamed Rokossovsky The Bedouin. They gave him postcards with photographs of his favorite jockeys, addressing them To our Bedouin.

Uncle Aleksandr arranged for his orphaned nephew to be accepted into the prestigious private school of Anton Laguna at 25 Świętokrzyska Street in Warsaw. His grandmother Konstancja, who was living with her youngest daughter Stefania Dawidowska at the address 117 Marszałkowska Street, looked after Konstantin. At the end of 1906, Aleksandr Ksawery Rokossowski unexpectedly passed away at the age of only 48. After this, Aleksandr’s younger brother Michał took on the role of caring for his nephew Konstantin. He arranged for Konstantin to enroll in the Kupeczestwy Upper Secondary School on the corner of Waliców and Twarda Streets, the pupils of which wore green-banded dress caps. It is not excluded that this was in fact the upper secondary school that Rokossovsky named on his officer’s candidate card in 1920.

In his memoirs, Rokossovsky wrote that "from his childhood years he had been interested in military history books that portrayed the development of the art of war beginning with the campaigns of Alexander the Great and the Roman generals. According to Helena’s memoirs, Konstantin was particularly captivated with the military historical novels by Valerii Pshiborovsky, Shvedy v Varshave [The Swedes in Warsaw] and Bitva pod Rashin [Battle of Rashin]. This literature ultimately led Rokossovsky into the Russian cavalry and determined his life’s path.

On 24 August 1909, the 47-year-old Michał Rokossovsky also passed away. He is buried next to Aleksandr in the family tomb in the prestigious Warsaw Powonski Cemetery. Konstantin was forced to drop out of the upper secondary school. As we recall, he didn’t even receive an education equivalent to a four-year city school. Why this happened still isn’t clear. It is possible that the surviving relatives didn’t consider it possible to pay for their nephew’s education, although there were well-heeled people among them such as, for example, Stefan Wysocki. I will have more to say about this man in a bit. However, it is also possible that Konstantin himself didn’t want to continue his schooling, preferring instead of a classical education to acquire a fine profession in his uncle’s workshop, one that would always provide him a good living.

Konstantin moved to live with his father’s sister Sofia Wysocki, who was living at 11 Konopacka Street. His Aunt Stefania with her husband Mieczysław Dawidowski moved into a neighboring 4-story stone building on Karbowska Street. Obviously, Konstantin never had a notion to rejoin his mother, although she was still living. Antonina Rokossovskaia passed away only at the beginning of 1911, from tuberculosis according to some evidence. Probably, at the time she was already seriously ill. It is also possible that some shadow had fallen over the relationship between Konstantin and his mother. The following fact is characteristic: After Rokossovsky returned to Poland in 1945, he raised a monument above his father’s grave, but he never in fact located his mother’s grave. So to this day we don’t really know where Antonina Rokossovskaia is buried. According to one version, her grave is in one of Warsaw’s cemeteries. According to another, more likely version, her remains lie in her native village of Telekhany. After the Second World War, when Rokossovsky was in Poland, he received a letter from local residents who were representing the relatives of Antonina Ovsiannikovaia (Rokossovskaia). They asserted that the Marshal’s mother had been buried in Telekhany, but for some reason in a Catholic cemetery, and they indicated a specific grave. They also inquired whether the Marshal knew about the fate of his mother after his father’s death. Konstantin Konstantinovich responded that he was too young at the moment of his father’s passing, and thus he couldn’t recall what had happened with his mother. According to the recollections of his grandson Konstantin Vil’evich, the Marshal in fact never visited the cemetery in Telekhany. Obviously, he doubted whether his mother had actually been buried there.

At the same time, it can’t be excluded that after her husband’s death, Antonina Rokossovskaia got married a second time to a Pole or a Belorussian Catholic, and thus her grave is in fact in a Catholic cemetery. If this hypothesis is confirmed, it could explain why her children wound up with Aleksandr Ksawery’s family.

Konstantin went to work. At first it seems he was an assistant pastry chef and then an assistant dentist, but he got into an argument with the boss and went to work in a hosiery factory on Szeroka Street. However, it is possible that in reality Konstantin worked at none of these jobs, but went immediately to work as an apprentice stonemason in the workshop owned by the husband of his Aunt Sofia, Stefan Wysocki at No. 2 Strzelecka Street. In his 1940 autobiography, Rokossovsky gave this event as happening in 1911. However, in this autobiography, as in all the others, he made himself two years younger than he was in fact, and in a corresponding fashion shifted several other important dates, such as the death of his father, which he placed in 1905. It is fully likely that in just the same fashion, Konstantin Konstantinovich also shifted the time when he began working in his uncle’s workshop. It is fully logical that having moved in with Wysocki’s family at the end of 1909 after the death of Michał Rokossovsky, Konstantin immediately went to work in the stonemason’s workshop. In December 1909 he should have been 15 years of age, but he was physically developed beyond his years. As for the hosiery factory, Konstantin Konstantinovich could have asserted this exclusively in order to strengthen his proletarian origins.

If my speculation is correct, then Konstantin went to work in the stonemason’s workshop in 1909, so at the moment of joining the army, he had already been working as a stonemason for approximately five years. It is not surprising that his colleagues spoke about him as a skilled and experienced mason. The workshop made tombstones (it was in fact right here that the Rokossovsky’s granite tomb in the Powonzki Cemetery was made), stone walls, building facades and buildings. In particular, it was the Wysocki workshop that received an order to prepare the stone cladding of the 500-meter Nikolai II Bridge (today known as the Poniatowski Bridge). However, soon the workshop had to relocate to the village of Grójec, which lies 35 kilometers southwest of Warsaw, where it was easier to obtain the raw material. At the same time, Konstantin’s grandmother Konstancja and sister Maria moved to Grójec. For a certain amount of time, his youngest sister Helena also resided there at 12 Waretska Street. Approximately a year later, the Rokossovskys moved to 12 Mogielnica Street (this home no longer exists).

Like other masters, Konstantin engraved his initials into the tombstones that he made. Likely even today there are tombstones in the cemeteries of Warsaw, Grójec, Mragielnica and Gościn that were crafted by him. Stefan Wysocki’s son Roman and Konstantin’s sister Elena testified that the Wysocki family took very good care of the Rokossovsky orphans and strove to make them feel very much at home. According to the recollections of Grójecs’s elderly residents, Konstantin loved to sing and dance and he played the harmonica rather well. One can assume that the 6’4" handsome stonemason was not without female admirers.

There exists a legend, which first appeared in a biography of Marshal Rokossovsky written by V.I. Kardashov, which purports that Rokossovsky was arrested for participating in the 1912 First of May demonstration in Warsaw, when he attempted to conceal a red banner that had been torn down by the gendarmes. Konstantin, according to this story spent two months in the Pawiak prison, though another version given by Rokossovsky’s Polish biographers Tadeusz Konecki and Ireneusz Ruszkiewicz holds that he spent only six weeks there. Subsequently he was freed because he was under 16 years of age, but he was dismissed from the hosiery factory. Konecki and Ruszkiewicz maintain that Konstantin was bailed out of jail by his uncle Mieczysław Dawidowski.

This story is highly dubious, although the Marshal himself supported it. In his 1940 biography Rokossovsky wrote that for participating in the First of May demonstration in 1912, I was given a month-long stay in prison. However, in the same autobiography Konstantin Konstantinovich wrote, I went to work to support myself in 1909. I was employed as a worker in a hosiery factory in Warsaw’s suburb of Praga until 1911, and from 1911 to August 1914 I worked as a stonemason in Wysocki’s workshop in the town of Grójec in the province of Warsaw. If this statement is correct, then Rokossovsky’s purported participation in the First of May demonstration is quite doubtful. It turns out that Rokossovsky wasn’t even in Warsaw in 1912, and the hosiery factory couldn’t even have released him to take part in the demonstration, because he had already left that place of work a year earlier. In Grójec, a small town with a population of only a little more than 5,000 people, there were no First of May demonstrations right up until 1917. It is quite difficult to picture Rokossovsky heading into Warsaw in order to take part in a protest. For workers of a large stocking factory, in which it was quite possible that trade unions and revolutionary party cells were operating, participation in a demonstration as part of the struggle for their rights would be natural. But the situation in a stonemason’s workshop was completely different. In practice stonemasons weren’t workers, but craftsmen. Doubtlessly, their work was demanding, but they were very well-paid for it, much more than the salary of an average worker at a hosiery factory. Indeed, there was no need whatsoever for them to struggle against their boss – if they fell out with him, they would lose a very favorable place of work. After all, it would be much more difficult to find customers by going it alone as a stonemason, and a craftsman who did so would have seen a sharp decrease in earnings. Moreover, economic crises hardly affected a stonemason workshop – all the same people continued to pass away and surviving family members always wanted a tombstone for the deceased. For Konstantin, it was also possible to say that the workshop was a family enterprise. It was owned by his aunt’s husband, against whom he could hardly have had any intention to stand against. Incidentally, it is also the case that prior to the First World War, Georgii Konstantinovich Zhukov, whose rival in popularity was always Rokossovsky, worked in just the same sort of family enterprise that was owned by his uncle, a furrier.

Most likely, Rokossovsky never participated in any sort of protest, and just as with his work in a factory, he wrote about his arrest and imprisonment only to improve his biographical information in the eyes of the Bolsheviks. Later, in his final service record, which has been preserved in Rokossovsky’s personal archive, the evidence about the beginning of his labor history was corrected where it concerned his participation in the First of May demonstration, arrest, and dismissal from the factory: 1910 – May 1912: worker in a hosiery factory in the Warsaw suburb of Praga. June 1912 – August 1914: stonemason in Stefan Wysocki’s workshop, town of Grójec, Warsaw Province.

However, there is no reason to assume that in his 1940 autobiography Rokossovsky especially shifted the time when he began work in his uncle’s workshop in 1912 to an earlier time. Most likely, on the contrary he moved this date to a later time together with the two years by which he decreased his age.

Only archival materials can decisively confirm or refute the story about Rokossovsky’s arrest in 1912. Part of the archive of the headquarters of the Warsaw Province’s gendarme have been preserved and are kept in the Russian Federation’s State Archive in Moscow. Those who wish to do so might find there the records of inquiry regarding the First of May demonstrations and whether or not Rokossovsky’s name appears on the list of those arrested. If they can find it, we have a chance to locate a good early photograph of the future marshal – all of the arrested were compulsorily photographed. While there are very few such photographs, just as with the details of Rokossovsky’s youth in Poland, this is not at all out of the ordinary and says nothing about the future glittering career of the commander.

2

In the Trenches of the First World War

We’ll start by noting that a lot of Rokossovskys served in the Russian Army in the First World War and prior to it. Officers, generals and noblemen were among them. It is difficult to say if any of them were even at least distantly related to our hero.

Here is just one dramatic story. In the archives, there is a Report on granting a pension to the widow Anna Pavlovna Rokossovskaia, whose husband Staff Captain Baron Aleksei Alekseevich Rokossovsky of the 1st Grenadier Artillery Brigade drowned while bathing on 26 May 1915, which was compiled by the district military commander in Helsingfors on 17 July 1915. The widow was living in Helsingfors [Helsinki] in Building No. 15 on Berman Street. In the application submitted by the widow Anna Pavlovna (28 years of age, no children) to the district commander on 30 June 1915, there is the statement:

My husband in the current war drowned while bathing because of heart failure; therefore submitting all the documents named below and responses to the questionnaire requesting additional information, I request the recommendation of Your Honor regarding the granting of a pension that is owed to me …

When determining the size of the pension, I ask that you keep the following circumstances in mind: 1) My husband, serving in the Chancellery of Finland’s Governor-General, voluntarily, not by call-up, and joined the acting army in order to give up his life to the Fatherland; 2) For his combat distinctions, he was promoted to staff captain and awarded the Order of St. Anne with Swords and Knot; 3) In the month of November 1914 my husband during a battle was wounded in the arm and leg, as well as concussed, which resulted in serious consequences to his health; 4) Still far from having recovered, already in January 1915 he returned to active duty; 5) My husband’s death from heart failure was undoubtedly the result of his wounds and concussion, since before going to war he was strong and healthy.

According to his service record dated 15 August 1915, A.A. Rokossovsky was born on 1 March 1886. He was the offspring of

Reviews for Marshal K.K. Rokossovsky

[kunikov_1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Boris Sokolov’s biography of Marshal of the Soviet Union K. K. Rokossovsky is a noble effort to document the life and history of one of the most accomplished Soviet commanders to come out of the Second World War. The subtitle, “The Red Army’s Gentleman Commander,” serves multiple purposes as it immediately highlights that other Red Army commanders were “ungentlemanly” and it allows Sokolov to pontificate somewhat on a subject he covers in numerous publications – the true losses the Red Army suffered were much higher than those presented in published works. In general Sokolov’s biography walks a less than fine line between academic study and a polemical work. He takes a few too many literary licenses when he goes off on tangents here and there that have no place in a historical work but in a general sense this biography is still full of valuable information. Sokolov discusses Rokossovsky’s history and youth in the first few chapters and covers his exploits in the Revolutionary/Civil War period. The most interesting parts of the book are those that cover Rokossovsky’s actions during the Second World War, or the Great Patriotic War. In part this is not the fault of Sokolov as there is little enough information available on Rokossovsky from his youth (Rokossovsky wanted to write about the Civil War but never had a chance). The majority of Rokossovsky’s major campaigns are covered by the author: his actions in 1941 and clashes with Zhukov, the Moscow Counteroffensive and his thoughts about what was done correctly and incorrectly, the operations around Stalingrad and Rokossovsky’s role in the destruction of the German Sixth Army, operation Kursk, operation Bagration, the Home Army’s Warsaw Uprising, and the final battles for Germany. Before continuing I will say that one of the weaknesses of this volume is that while there are many quotes (more so than western readers might be used to) and the author utilizes a range of archival documentation and published archival collections there is a distinct lack of endnotes/footnotes (something the original volume undoubtedly suffers from as well). Sokolov is in no way making this information up, as I have some of the collections he uses and can verify the information he presents in a few cases, but the problem remains in that this volume becomes problematic as a source. Furthermore, some of the source material is dated, unfortunately alternatives were/are hard to find.Coming back to the text itself, the more interesting chapters were those on the Warsaw Uprising and the final battles/actions of the Red Army in Germany. Here is where Sokolov presents a wide variety of interesting and pertinent material but at the same time goes off on tangents and at times simply makes up statistics. The Warsaw Uprising is presented well enough with a lot of information provided from a number of eye witnesses (both Polish and Soviet) but primary source material is a bit sparse for the conclusions he makes. We know that Soviet forces suffered losses trying to reach Warsaw, with the 2nd Tank Army losing close to 1,000 tanks and having to be taken off the line. Similar attempts to by the 1st Polish Army resulted in losses for a variety of reasons but Sokolov insists on pointing toward Stalin as the cause. Even though orders were given to take Warsaw that’s not good enough, for Sokolov armies needed to be moved over to Rokossovsky’s front, supplies diverted, other operations cancelled and postponed, all to help the Poles in Warsaw. From an ethical standpoint, yes, everything should have been done to aid the Warsaw Uprising. Unfortunately reality dictated otherwise, the Poles were in an unenviable position and acted in their own best interests then relied on Stalin’s apparent good graces and that of the Red Army to support them in taking the capital of Poland to use as a bargaining chip against Stalin. They were asking for quite a bit from a man and armed forces they held in high contempt.Finally, the chapter on the Red Army’s actions in Germany at the end of the war there are two arguments Sokolov expands on. First is the issue of losses in the battle of Berlin. He argues against the provided figure of 81,116 irrecoverable losses because in that figure are included losses for the two Polish armies that participated in the battle for the city. Irrecoverable losses for both armies were 2,825. Sokolov cites an “official” report from the Polish Defense Ministry that lists killed and missing in action as 11,000, almost four times as large a figure. What he does then is argue that since this figure is a quarter of the number presented by the Russians then all other losses during the Berlin operation should be multiplied by four. He utilizes the same argument in other places and I’m simply unconvinced. I appreciate coming across new information and presenting it (I appreciate it more if it includes a citation) but an extrapolation based on limited evidence is unacceptable for a historian or an academic publication. A similar argument is utilized when discussing the Red Army’s progress through Germany and Eastern Europe in terms of atrocities and rapes. There’s no doubt that Red Army soldiers, as well as soldiers from national contingents serving within the Red Army (Poles among them), committed atrocities against the Germans, including wholesale plunder, murder, and rape. Similar actions were committed when the Germans invaded the Soviet Union, the allies invaded Western Europe, or the Japanese invaded China. But to paint an entire armed forces with such a broad brush is unacceptable, at least in my opinion. In terms of degrees it might very well be that the Red Army’s occupation proved that much more detrimental than that of the allies, unfortunately qualifying some of the actions of Red Army soldiers will prove impossible. What Sokolov does well enough is present a variety of eye witness accounts to some of the actions that happened on the ground, but he offers little to nothing as explanation for why these criminal actions happened. Recently Filip Slaveski, in his “The Soviet Occupation of Germany,” offered an enlightening look at the Soviet occupation of Germany including the crimes committed. Sokolov aimed for emotions, Slaveski offers that and an attempt to explain what happened along with why. As much as I appreciate Sokolov’s efforts, there are quite a few weaknesses here that make this far from a definitive study of either Rokossovsky’s life or his actions within the confines of the Second World War. In part this is a result of many archives still being closed off to research within the Russian Federation but I would also argue that Russian academic standards are still somewhat lacking when compared to their Western equivalents. Furthermore, while there are some excellent historians within Russia they are still working within a state that continues to view its present as a reflection of past accomplishments and shies away from attempts to take a closer look at its history for fear that a crack in the foundation will unravel a collection of myths better kept under a Potemkin village façade.