Georgy Konstantinovich Zhukov

Soviet commander, Marshal of the Soviet Union (1943), four times Hero of the Soviet Union and twice a recipient of the Order of Victory. Born on 1 December 1896 in the village of Strelkovka, Kaluga province, into a peasant family. He served in the cavalry as a non-commissioned officer in the First World War and was awarded two Crosses of St George; he joined the Red Army in 1918. In 1939 he commanded the 1st Army Group at Khalkhin Gol, where Soviet and Mongolian forces encircled and destroyed the Japanese grouping; the operation brought him his first Hero of the Soviet Union title. He was Chief of the General Staff from January to July 1941. Sent to Leningrad in September 1941, he took over the Western Front in October and directed the defence of Moscow and the counteroffensive. From August 1942 he was Deputy Supreme Commander-in-Chief, coordinating fronts at Stalingrad, at Kursk and in the liberation of right-bank Ukraine. In 1944 he commanded the 1st Ukrainian Front and, from November 1944, the 1st Belorussian Front through the Vistula-Oder and Berlin operations. On 8 May 1945 at Karlshorst he accepted the German surrender on behalf of the Soviet High Command, and on 24 June 1945 he took the Victory Parade on Red Square. After the war he commanded the Odessa and Urals military districts and served as Minister of Defence from 1955 to 1957. He died in Moscow on 18 June 1974 and is interred in the Kremlin Wall.