Semyon Budyonny

Born to a poor Don Cossack family in 1883, Budyonny was drafted into the Imperial Russian Army in 1903 and distinguished himself as a dragoon in the First World War, earning all four classes of the Cross of St. George. When civil war came he founded the Red Cavalry, became a folk hero in patriotic songs, and rode the Bolshevik victory into the upper ranks — one of the original five Marshals of the Soviet Union in 1935. His closeness to Stalin kept him alive through the Great Purge; he testified against Tukhachevsky's tank corps as "wrecking," insisting cavalry was superior, and in 1939 dismiss…