page_title: Konstantin Rokossovsky
section_title: Great Purge, trial, torture and rehabilitation
hierarchical_section_title: Konstantin Rokossovsky / Biography / Great Purge, trial, torture and rehabilitation
caption_attribution_description: Русский: Комдив Константин Константинович Рокоссовский
context_page_description: Konstantin Konstantinovich Rokossovsky was a Soviet and Polish officer 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. He was among the most prominent Red Army commanders of World War II.
  Born in Congress Poland under Russian rule, Rokossovsky served in the Imperial Russian Army during World War I. After the war he joined the Red Army and fought with great distinction during the Russian Civil War. Rokossovsky held senior commands until 1937 when he fell victim to Joseph Stalin's Great Purge, during which he was branded a traitor, imprisoned and tortured.
  After Soviet failures in the Winter War, Rokossovsky was reinstated due to an urgent need of experienced officers. Following Germany's invasion of the Soviet Union, Rokossovsky played key roles in the defense of Moscow and the counter-offensives at Stalingrad and Kursk. He was instrumental in planning and executing part of Operation Bagration—one of the most decisive Red Army successes of the war—for which he was made Marshal of the Soviet Union.
context_section_description: Rokossovsky held senior commands until August 1937 when he became caught up in Joseph Stalin's Great Purge and was 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.
  Some officers were merely swept up on suspicion due to past associations; in Rokossovky's case his association with the Special Red Banner Far Eastern Army and the intrigues surrounding Marshal Vasily Blyukher, who was arrested shortly after Rokossovsky and who died in prison without confessing, may have been enough to trigger his arrest. Rokossovsky, however, survived.
  He was variously accused of having links to Polish and Japanese intelligence 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.
  The charges against Rokossovsky stemmed from the case of the "Anti-Soviet Trotskyist Military Organization of the 11th Mechanized Corps" where Rokossovsky was implicated after the arrest of Corps Commander K.A. Tchaikovsky who, like Rokossovsky, served in the far east in the early 1930s. The Intelligence Chief of the Transbaikal Military District accused Rokossovsky of meeting with Colonel Komatsubara the head of the Japanese military mission in Harbin in 1932, when he was commander of the 15th Cavalry Division in Trans-Baikal; a fact that Rokossovsky did not dispute but justified as a meeting to resolve issues regarding Chinese prisoners. This accusation was supported with material charges, which included various acts of negligence of command that were interpreted as deliberate acts of sabotage, such as allowing the quarters of his division to become slovenly, failing to conduct training, and leading his division out into bad weather causing losses of horses and encouraging sickness among his troops.
  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".
  V. V. Rachesky, a cell mate of Rokossovsky, wrote in his memoirs that Rokossovsky blamed the persecution of innocent people on the NKVD and was "naive", refusing to acknowledge Stalin's role in creating the treacherous environment. 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.
  His grandson Colonel Konstantin Rokossovsky Vilevich says that his grandfather escaped the fate of so many other officers because he refused to sign a false statement and by proving to the court that the officer who his NKVD accusers claimed had denounced him had been killed in 1920 during the civil war;
  The evidence was based on the testimony of Adolph Yushkevich, a colleague of my grandfather in the Civil War. But my grandfather knew very well that Yushkevich died in Perekop. He said that he would sign [a confession] if Adolph was brought for a confrontation. They looked for Yushkevich and found that he had died long before. 
  Alexander Solzhenitsyn reports that Rokossovsky endured two mock shooting ceremonies where he was taken out at night by a firing squad, but then returned to prison. 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 sh
caption: Rokossovsky as Komdiv (division commander)
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