Marshal of the Soviet Union Grigory Kulik

Grigory Ivanovich Kulik (Russian: Григорий Иванович Кулик) (November 9 1890 - August 24 1950), Soviet military commander, was born into a peasant family near Poltava in Ukraine. A soldier in the army of the Russian Empire in World War I, he joined the Bolshevik Party in 1917 and the Red Army in 1918. During the Russian Civil War he become a commander of the Soviet artillery, seeing action at Kharkov and other battles.

In 1926 Kulik became head of the Red Army's Main Artillery Directorate, and remained commander of the Soviet artillery forces until 1941. He was both a loyal Stalinist and a military conservative, opposed to the radical reforms proposed by Mikhail Tukhachevsky during the 1930s. For this reason he survived Stalin's Great Purge of the Red Army in 1937-38, and in 1939 he became Deputy People's Commissar of Defence, also taking part in the Soviet occupation of eastern Poland in September.

In May 1940 Kulik became a Marshal of the Soviet Union. He had a reputation as a incompetent officer and a bully, but his closeness to Stalin put him beyond criticism. He used his position to oppose Semyon Timoshenko's campaign to develop the Red Army's mechanised forces and to use minefields as a defensive measure, regarding mines as "a weapon of the weak." This resistance to reform had severe consequences for the Soviet Union.

When Germany invaded the Soviet Union in June 1941, Kulik took command of the 54th Army on the Leningrad front. Here his incompetence caught up with him, and he presided over heavy Soviet defeats that resulted in the city of Leningrad being surrounded. In March 1942 he was court-martialled and demoted to the rank of Major-General. His status as one of Stalin's cronies saved him from the firing squad that was the fate of other defeated Soviet generals. In April 1943 he became commander of the 4th Guards Army. From 1944 to 1945 he was Deputy Head of the Directory of Mobilization, and Commander of the Volga Military District.

After a respite during and immediately after the war, Stalin and his police chief Lavrenty Beria began a new round of purges. Kulik was dismissed from his posts in 1946, arrested in 1947 and remained in prison until 1950, when he was condemned to death and executed for treason. The real reasons for his fall remain obscure. He was rehabilitated by Nikita Khrushchev in 1956, and posthumously restored to the rank of Marshal of the Soviet Union.