Post by Bonobo on Jul 13, 2018 18:36:12 GMT 1
This time I don`t mean spies or agents. 
I mean people who were born Polish or had strong Polish roots but chose Russian nationality/citizenship for different reasons.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Konstantin_Rokossovsky
Konstantin Konstantinovich (Xaverevich) Rokossovsky (December 21, 1896 – August 3, 1968) was a Soviet officer of Polish origin who became Marshal of the Soviet Union, Marshal of Poland and served as Poland's Defence Minister from 1949 until his removal in 1956 during the Polish October.[1] He was among the most prominent Red Army commanders of World War II, especially renowned for his planning and executing of Operation Bagration, one of the most decisive Red Army successes of the Second World War.
Biography
Rokossovsky was born in Warsaw, then part of Congress Poland under Russian rule. His family had moved to Warsaw following the appointment of his father as the inspector of the Warsaw Railways. The Rokossovsky family were members of the Polish nobility (of the Oksza coat of arms), and over generations had produced many cavalry officers. However, Konstantin's father, Ksawery Wojciech Rokossowski, was a railway official in the Russian empire and his Belarusian mother Antonina Ovsyannikova was a teacher (born in Telekhany near Pinsk).[2][3][4] Orphaned at 14, Rokossovsky earned a living by working in a stocking factory.[2] In 1911, he became an apprentice stonemason.[5] Much later in his life, the government of People's Republic of Poland used this fact for propaganda, claiming that Rokossovsky had helped to build Warsaw's Poniatowski Bridge. Rokossovsky's patronymic Ksaverovich was Russified on his enlistment into the Russian Army at the start of the First World War to Konstantinovich, which would be easier to pronounce in the 5th Kargopol Dragoon Regiment where he volunteered to serve.[2]
[....]
Great Purge, trial, torture and rehabilitation
Rokossovsky held senior commands until August 1937 when he became caught up in Joseph Stalin's Great Purge and accused of being a spy. His association with the cutting edge methods of Marshal Tukhachevsky may have been the cause of his conflict with more traditional officers such as Semyon Budenny, who still favoured cavalry tactics over Tukhachevsky's mass armour theories, but few historians believe that the purge of the Red Army was solely a dispute over policy, and most attribute the purges to political and military rivalries as well.
He was variously accused of having links to Polish and Japanese intelligence[2] and acts of sabotage under Article 58, section 14; "conscious non-execution or deliberately careless execution of defined duties", a section added to the penal code in June 1937.
Upon his arrest by the NKVD, his wife and daughter were sent into internal exile, where his wife Julia was forced to support their daughter by finding odd jobs, which she would lose when it was discovered that her husband had been arrested as a "traitor".[10]
He described Rokossovsky's refusal to sign a false confession:
Those who refused to sign a false statement were beaten up, as long as the false statement was not signed. There were steadfast people who stubbornly did not sign. But there were relatively few. K. K. Rokossovsky, as he sat with me in the same cell did not sign a false statement. But he was a brave and strong man, tall and broad-shouldered. He too was beaten.[15]
Alexander Solzhenitsyn reports that Rokossovksy endured two mock shooting ceremonies where he was taken out at night by a firing squad, but then returned to prison.[18] Living relatives say that Svetlana Pavlovna, wife of Marshal Kazakov, confirmed that he sustained injuries including broken and denailed fingers and cracked ribs on top of enduring mock shooting ceremonies. Rokossovsky never discussed his trial and imprisonment with his family, only telling his daughter Ariadne that he always wore a revolver because he would not surrender alive if they came to arrest him again.[10]
[...]
1944: Operation Bagration & Warsaw Uprising
A famous incident is consistently reported from various sources in slightly different versions that during the planning in 1944 of Operation Bagration, Rokossovsky disagreed with Stalin, who demanded in accordance with Soviet war practice a single break-through of the German frontline. Rokossovsky held firm in his argument for two points of break-through. Stalin ordered Rokossovsky to "go and think it over" three times, but every time he returned and gave the same answer "two break-throughs, comrade Stalin, two break-throughs". After the third time Stalin remained silent, but walked over to Rokossovsky and put a hand on his shoulder. A tense moment followed as the whole room waited for Stalin to rip the epaulette from Rokossovsky's shoulder; instead, Stalin said "Your confidence speaks for your sound judgement", and ordered the attack to go forward according to Rokossovsky's plan.[10][63] The battle was successful and Rokossovsky's reputation was assured. After crushing German Army Group Centre in Belarus, Rokossovsky's armies reached the east bank of the Vistula opposite Warsaw by mid-1944. For these victories he gained the rank of Marshal of the Soviet Union. Stalin once said: "I have no Suvorov, but Rokossovsky is my Bagration".[citation needed]
Postwar
As one of the most prominent Soviet military commanders of the Second World War, Rokossovsky was present at the Victory Parade in Red Square in Moscow in 1945, riding on a black stallion next to Marshal Georgy Zhukov.
After the end of the war Rokossovsky remained in command of Soviet forces in Poland (Northern Group of Forces). Fully four years later, in October 1949 with the establishment of the government under Bolesław Bierut in Poland, Rokossovsky, on Stalin's orders, became the Polish Minister of National Defense, with the additional title of Marshal of Poland. Together with Rokossovsky, several thousand Soviet officers were placed in charge of almost all Polish military units, either as commanding officers or as advisors.[64]
In 1952 he became Deputy Chairman of the Council of Ministers of the People's Republic of Poland. Although Rokossovsky was Polish by ancestry, he had not lived in Poland for 35 years and most Poles regarded him as a Russian and Soviet emissary in the country.[65] As Rokossovsky himself bitterly put it: "In Russia, they say I'm a Pole, in Poland they call me Russian".[65]
Rokossovsky on 1976 Soviet stamp
Rokossovsky played a key role in the regime's suppression of an independent Poland through stalinization and sovietization in general, and in the Polish Army in particular.[66] As the de facto supreme commander of the Polish Army, he introduced various methods for the suppression of anti-Soviet activity, real or imagined. Among the most notorious were the labour battalions of the army, to which all able-bodied men found socially or politically insecure or guilty of having their families abroad[67] were drafted. It is estimated that roughly 200,000 men were forced to work in these labour camps in hazardous conditions, often in quarries, coal mines, and uranium mines, and 1,000 died in their first days of "labour", while tens of thousands became crippled.[67] Other groups targeted by these repressive measures were former soldiers of the pre-war Polish Army as well as the wartime underground Home Army.
In the June 1956 Poznań protests against local working conditions and living standards, as well as the Soviet occupation of Poland, Rokossovsky approved an order to send in military units.[66] As a result of this over 10,000 soldiers and 360 tanks crushed the protesters,[68] and at least 74 civilians were killed.[69]
In the wake of the Poznan riots and the "rehabilitation" of the formerly imprisoned communist reformer Władysław Gomułka in 1956, Rokossovsky went to Moscow in a failed attempt to convince Nikita Khrushchev to use force against the Polish state.[70][not in citation given] However, Gomułka managed to negotiate with the Soviets, and on the new Polish First Secretary's insistence Rokossovsky was forced to leave Poland. He returned to the Soviet Union, which restored his Soviet ranks and honours; and in July 1957, following the removal from office of Defence Minister Zhukov, Nikita Khrushchev appointed him Deputy Minister of Defence and Commander of the Transcaucasian Military District. In 1958 he became chief inspector of the Ministry of Defence, a post he held until his retirement in April 1962.[5]
He died in August 1968, aged 71. His ashes were buried in the Kremlin Wall Necropolis on Red Square.
I mean people who were born Polish or had strong Polish roots but chose Russian nationality/citizenship for different reasons. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Konstantin_Rokossovsky
Konstantin Konstantinovich (Xaverevich) Rokossovsky (December 21, 1896 – August 3, 1968) was a Soviet officer of Polish origin who became Marshal of the Soviet Union, Marshal of Poland and served as Poland's Defence Minister from 1949 until his removal in 1956 during the Polish October.[1] He was among the most prominent Red Army commanders of World War II, especially renowned for his planning and executing of Operation Bagration, one of the most decisive Red Army successes of the Second World War.
Biography
Rokossovsky was born in Warsaw, then part of Congress Poland under Russian rule. His family had moved to Warsaw following the appointment of his father as the inspector of the Warsaw Railways. The Rokossovsky family were members of the Polish nobility (of the Oksza coat of arms), and over generations had produced many cavalry officers. However, Konstantin's father, Ksawery Wojciech Rokossowski, was a railway official in the Russian empire and his Belarusian mother Antonina Ovsyannikova was a teacher (born in Telekhany near Pinsk).[2][3][4] Orphaned at 14, Rokossovsky earned a living by working in a stocking factory.[2] In 1911, he became an apprentice stonemason.[5] Much later in his life, the government of People's Republic of Poland used this fact for propaganda, claiming that Rokossovsky had helped to build Warsaw's Poniatowski Bridge. Rokossovsky's patronymic Ksaverovich was Russified on his enlistment into the Russian Army at the start of the First World War to Konstantinovich, which would be easier to pronounce in the 5th Kargopol Dragoon Regiment where he volunteered to serve.[2]
[....]
Great Purge, trial, torture and rehabilitation
Rokossovsky held senior commands until August 1937 when he became caught up in Joseph Stalin's Great Purge and accused of being a spy. His association with the cutting edge methods of Marshal Tukhachevsky may have been the cause of his conflict with more traditional officers such as Semyon Budenny, who still favoured cavalry tactics over Tukhachevsky's mass armour theories, but few historians believe that the purge of the Red Army was solely a dispute over policy, and most attribute the purges to political and military rivalries as well.
He was variously accused of having links to Polish and Japanese intelligence[2] and acts of sabotage under Article 58, section 14; "conscious non-execution or deliberately careless execution of defined duties", a section added to the penal code in June 1937.
Upon his arrest by the NKVD, his wife and daughter were sent into internal exile, where his wife Julia was forced to support their daughter by finding odd jobs, which she would lose when it was discovered that her husband had been arrested as a "traitor".[10]
He described Rokossovsky's refusal to sign a false confession:
Those who refused to sign a false statement were beaten up, as long as the false statement was not signed. There were steadfast people who stubbornly did not sign. But there were relatively few. K. K. Rokossovsky, as he sat with me in the same cell did not sign a false statement. But he was a brave and strong man, tall and broad-shouldered. He too was beaten.[15]
Alexander Solzhenitsyn reports that Rokossovksy endured two mock shooting ceremonies where he was taken out at night by a firing squad, but then returned to prison.[18] Living relatives say that Svetlana Pavlovna, wife of Marshal Kazakov, confirmed that he sustained injuries including broken and denailed fingers and cracked ribs on top of enduring mock shooting ceremonies. Rokossovsky never discussed his trial and imprisonment with his family, only telling his daughter Ariadne that he always wore a revolver because he would not surrender alive if they came to arrest him again.[10]
[...]
1944: Operation Bagration & Warsaw Uprising
A famous incident is consistently reported from various sources in slightly different versions that during the planning in 1944 of Operation Bagration, Rokossovsky disagreed with Stalin, who demanded in accordance with Soviet war practice a single break-through of the German frontline. Rokossovsky held firm in his argument for two points of break-through. Stalin ordered Rokossovsky to "go and think it over" three times, but every time he returned and gave the same answer "two break-throughs, comrade Stalin, two break-throughs". After the third time Stalin remained silent, but walked over to Rokossovsky and put a hand on his shoulder. A tense moment followed as the whole room waited for Stalin to rip the epaulette from Rokossovsky's shoulder; instead, Stalin said "Your confidence speaks for your sound judgement", and ordered the attack to go forward according to Rokossovsky's plan.[10][63] The battle was successful and Rokossovsky's reputation was assured. After crushing German Army Group Centre in Belarus, Rokossovsky's armies reached the east bank of the Vistula opposite Warsaw by mid-1944. For these victories he gained the rank of Marshal of the Soviet Union. Stalin once said: "I have no Suvorov, but Rokossovsky is my Bagration".[citation needed]
Postwar
As one of the most prominent Soviet military commanders of the Second World War, Rokossovsky was present at the Victory Parade in Red Square in Moscow in 1945, riding on a black stallion next to Marshal Georgy Zhukov.
After the end of the war Rokossovsky remained in command of Soviet forces in Poland (Northern Group of Forces). Fully four years later, in October 1949 with the establishment of the government under Bolesław Bierut in Poland, Rokossovsky, on Stalin's orders, became the Polish Minister of National Defense, with the additional title of Marshal of Poland. Together with Rokossovsky, several thousand Soviet officers were placed in charge of almost all Polish military units, either as commanding officers or as advisors.[64]
In 1952 he became Deputy Chairman of the Council of Ministers of the People's Republic of Poland. Although Rokossovsky was Polish by ancestry, he had not lived in Poland for 35 years and most Poles regarded him as a Russian and Soviet emissary in the country.[65] As Rokossovsky himself bitterly put it: "In Russia, they say I'm a Pole, in Poland they call me Russian".[65]
Rokossovsky on 1976 Soviet stamp
Rokossovsky played a key role in the regime's suppression of an independent Poland through stalinization and sovietization in general, and in the Polish Army in particular.[66] As the de facto supreme commander of the Polish Army, he introduced various methods for the suppression of anti-Soviet activity, real or imagined. Among the most notorious were the labour battalions of the army, to which all able-bodied men found socially or politically insecure or guilty of having their families abroad[67] were drafted. It is estimated that roughly 200,000 men were forced to work in these labour camps in hazardous conditions, often in quarries, coal mines, and uranium mines, and 1,000 died in their first days of "labour", while tens of thousands became crippled.[67] Other groups targeted by these repressive measures were former soldiers of the pre-war Polish Army as well as the wartime underground Home Army.
In the June 1956 Poznań protests against local working conditions and living standards, as well as the Soviet occupation of Poland, Rokossovsky approved an order to send in military units.[66] As a result of this over 10,000 soldiers and 360 tanks crushed the protesters,[68] and at least 74 civilians were killed.[69]
In the wake of the Poznan riots and the "rehabilitation" of the formerly imprisoned communist reformer Władysław Gomułka in 1956, Rokossovsky went to Moscow in a failed attempt to convince Nikita Khrushchev to use force against the Polish state.[70][not in citation given] However, Gomułka managed to negotiate with the Soviets, and on the new Polish First Secretary's insistence Rokossovsky was forced to leave Poland. He returned to the Soviet Union, which restored his Soviet ranks and honours; and in July 1957, following the removal from office of Defence Minister Zhukov, Nikita Khrushchev appointed him Deputy Minister of Defence and Commander of the Transcaucasian Military District. In 1958 he became chief inspector of the Ministry of Defence, a post he held until his retirement in April 1962.[5]
He died in August 1968, aged 71. His ashes were buried in the Kremlin Wall Necropolis on Red Square.