Semyon Timoshenko

Born to a Ukrainian family in Bessarabia in 1895, Timoshenko rode with the Tsar's cavalry in the First World War, then switched sides when the revolution came. He fought through the Civil War and the Polish-Soviet War with enough distinction to catch Lenin's and Stalin's eye, climbed the ranks through the 1930s, and emerged alive from the Great Purge. After leading troops into Poland in 1939, he inherited the floundering Finnish campaign in early 1940 and turned it around; by May he was Marshal of the Soviet Union and Commissar for Defence, scrambling to modernise the Red Army before Hitler struck. When the invasion came in June 1941, Stalin made him chairman of the Stavka for a month before taking the post himself, and Timoshenko went back to the field. His counter-offensive at Rostov that winter brought international headlines, but the catastrophic loss at Kharkov in mid-1942 cost him the Stalingrad Front. He spent the rest of the war coordinating multiple fronts as a Stavka representative, then commanded military districts until he retired in 1960. He died in 1970 at seventy-five.