Georgy Zhukov

Georgy Konstantinovich Zhukov, who lived from 1896 to 1974, was a Soviet military commander who rose from a poor peasant family near Moscow to become Marshal of the Soviet Union and one of the most influential military figures of the twentieth century. During the Second World War he served as deputy commander in chief of the Soviet armed forces under Joseph Stalin and played a central role in some of the war's decisive engagements, including the defense of Leningrad and Moscow and the battles of Stalingrad and Kursk. As a coordinator for the Soviet high command, or Stavka, he helped plan major operations, and he personally commanded the First Belorussian Front during the Vistula-Oder offensive and the final Battle of Berlin in 1945, a role that led to his being chosen to accept the German instrument of surrender on the Soviet Union's behalf. After the war he served briefly as the first Soviet military governor of the occupation zone in Germany, and although his prominence and popularity provoked political rivalry, including Stalin's own jealousy, he returned to high office as Defense Minister under Nikita Khrushchev before being forced into retirement in 1957. He is remembered as one of the Soviet Union's, and history's, most significant military commanders of the Second World War.