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Marshal of the Soviet Union

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The rank of Marshal of the Soviet Union was the second-highest military tank of the Soviet Union. (The highest rank, Generalissimo of the Soviet Union, was not a genuine military rank, being created for Joseph Stalin alone). The rank of Marshal of the Soviet Union was created in 1935 and abolished in 1991. Forty-one people held the rank of Marshal of the Soviet Union. It was succeeded by the rank of Marshal of the Russian Federation, which has been held by only one person.

History of the rank

The military rank of Marshal of the Soviet Union was established by a decree of the Soviet Cabinet, the Council of People's Comissars (Sovnarkom), on September 22, 1935. On November 20 the rank was confered on five people: People's Comissar of Defence and veteran Bolshevik Kliment Voroshilov, Chief of the General Staff of the Red Army Aleksandr Yegorov, and three senior commanders, Vasili Blyukher, Semyen Budyenny and Mikhail Tukhachevski.

Of these, Blyukher, Tukhachevski and Yegorov were executed during Stalin's Great Purge of 1937-38. On May 7, 1940, three new Marshals were appointed: the new People's Comissar of Defence, Semyen Timoshenko, Boris Shaposhnikov, and Grigori Kulik.

During World War II Timoshenko, Budyenny and Kulik were dismissed or demoted for incompetence, and the rank of Marshal of the Soviet Union was given to a number of military commanders who earned it on merit. These included Georgi Zhukov, Ivan Koniev and Konstantin Rokossovski. In 1943 Stalin himself was made a Marshal of the Soviet Union, and in 1945 he was joined by his police chief Lavrenti Beria. These "political" Marshals were joined in 1947 by Nikolai Bulganin.

Two Marshals were executed in postwar purges: Kulik in 1950 and Beria in 1953, following Stalin's death. Thereafter the rank was awarded only to professional soldiers, with the exception of Leonid Brezhnev, who made himself a Marshal in 1976. The last Marshal of the Soviet Union was Dmitri Yazov, appointed in 1990, who was imprisoned after the failed coup against Mikhail Gorbachev in 1991. All the postwar Marshals had been officers in World War II, except Brezhnev who had been a military comissar.

List of Marshals of the Soviet Union

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