Background
Grigory Kulik was born on November 9, 1890 in Poltava, Kharkivs'ka Oblast', Ukraine.
Grigory Kulik was born on November 9, 1890 in Poltava, Kharkivs'ka Oblast', Ukraine.
Graduated from the Frunze Military Academy, 1932.
A soldier in the army of the Russian Empire in World War I, he joined the Bolshevik Party in 1917 and the Red Army in 1918. During the Russian Civil War he become a commander in the Soviet artillery at Tsaritsyn and other battles.
In 1937 Kulik became head of the Red Army's Main Artillery Directorate, and remained commander of the Soviet artillery forces until 1941. He was both a sycophantic Stalinist and a radical military conservative, strongly opposed to the reforms proposed by Mikhail Tukhachevsky during the 1930s. For this reason he survived Stalin's Great Purge of the Red Army in 1937-38, and in 1939 he became Deputy People's Commissar of Defense, also taking part in the Soviet occupation of Eastern Poland in September. He led the Soviet's artillery attack on Finland at the start of the Winter War, which quickly foundered under his poor leadership. He was awarded the title of "Hero of the Soviet Union" in recognition of "outstanding services to the country and personal courage".
On May 8, 1940, Kulik was named a Marshal of the Soviet Union, along with Semyon Timoshenko and Boris Shaposhnikov.
One of Kulik's few positive historical anecdotes was his successful (and uncharacteristic) advocacy for the lives of over 150,000 enlisted Polish POWs, captured during the September 1939 Invasion of Poland. Stalin, concerned with invasion from Nazi Germany, had ordered all of the captured Poles to be summarily executed as potential fifth-columnists, his decision was supported by Lev Mekhlis, Polish Front Commissar, and Lavrenti Beria, chief of the NKVD. Kulik, commander of the Polish Front, twice strongly argued with Stalin for their release, eventually extracting the concession that only the officers - 26,000 - would be executed, with the over 150,000 common enlisted men being let go.
Despite Mekhlis and Beria's protests, the enlisted men were dutifully released. The 26,000 officers were executed less than a month later by Stalin's order (many at the hands of NKVD executioner Vasili Blokhin) in the Katyn Massacre.Sebag-Montefiore, 333.
Religious leaders contribute to secular and religious wars by endorsing or supporting the violence.
The emphasis on peaceful coexistence doesn’t mean that the Soviet Union accepted a static world with clear lines. Socialism is inevitable and the "correlations of forces" were moving towards socialism.
Grigory Ivanovich was considered a notoriously abusive and ineffective commander and bureaucrat, wildly erratic and unpredictable in his actions and considered by even his colleagues to be a "murderous buffoon", albeit one who bore Stalin's official approval. He championed a bizarre personal command motto he dubbed "Jail or Medal", those under his command were either showered with (usually unearned) awards and decorations if he favored them, or simply arrested and sent to the Gulag on trumped-up charges if he did not. He would also shout his command motto at his subordinates during meetings as a form of motivation if he felt they were on the verge of displeasing him. While this was, in many ways, typical behavior for Stalinist bureaucrats, Kulik's heavy-handed influence on the critical arms factories and design bureaus he controlled resulted in great disruption to Soviet production when whole technical committees and factories were arrested en masse on his whim and replaced with personal cronies from his power base in Leningrad.
