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Dr. Steven A. Kulik, Foot & Ankle Surgeon, ASO - Arthritis, Foot Ankle... arspecialty.com | Dr. Grigory Goldberg, MD - Advanced Orthopedics Sports Medicine... advancedorthosports.com | | Dr Steven DeLisle | Dr Lewis... fourseasonsdentalspa.com |
Grigory Ivanovich Kulik (Russian: Григо́рий Ива́нович Кули́к) (November 9, 1890 - August 24, 1950) was a Soviet military commander and was born into a peasant family near Poltava in Ukraine. 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, seeing action at Kharkov 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 loyal Stalinist and a military conservative, opposed to the radical 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 Defence, 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. He was awarded the title of "Hero of the Soviet Union" in recognition of "outstanding services to the country and personal courage," [1] On May 8, 1940, Kulik was named a Marshal of the Soviet Union, along with Semyon Timoshenko and Shaposhnikov. He had a reputation as an incompetent officer and a bully, but his closeness to Stalin put him beyond criticism. He could not protect his wife though, Kira Simonich, who two days before Kulik's promotion had been arrested on Stalin's orders. She was subsequently executed. (Montefiore Stalin 293-4) [edit] CareerLike many of the politically reliable Marshalls appointed by Stalin following the catastrophic pre-war purges of the military officer corps, Kulik was a career Bolshevik and vigorous Stalinist, completely uneducated in military tactics, whose command experience consisted of scattered battles against White Army guerrillas during the Russian Civil War. In the pre-war atmosphere of bitter in-fighting and constant risk of denunciation, Kulik became best known for using his position to oppose various attempts to reform the notoriously corrupt and inefficient Red Army. This included plans to use the more effective F-34 76.2mm gun on the T-34 and KV-1 tanks. The F-34, designed by P. Muraviev of Vasiliy Grabin's design bureau at Factory No. 92 in Gorky, had proven in testing to be both considerably more effective and cheaper than the Leningrad Kirov Factory's L-11 76.2mm gun, but Kulik's status as political patron for the Leningrad Factory resulted in the relevant armament diplomats being too frightened of reprisal to approve the production of the better gun. This short-sighted decision eventually necessitated a rushed retrofit of the KV-1 and T-34's gun in the midst of the German invasion when it became apparent that the L-11 could not reliably penetrate even the lightly armored Panzer III which was being faced in large numbers. The crisis was mitigated only by Grabin's disobedience; he had secretly ordered the fabrication of a reserve stock of F-34 guns, predicting correctly that they would shortly be needed. Kulik was reportedly furious for having been countermanded and attempted to denounce the F-34's designers to Stalin after the fact, but was silenced by a flood of letters from Soviet tank crewman to Stalin writing in support of the new gun. Worse, Kulik's bureaucratic foot-dragging resulted in a drastic shortage of 76.2mm shells; at the start of war, no more than 12% of the T34 and KV-1 tanks had a full ammo load, with few having any anti-tank rounds, most having no more than a few HE shells, and a shocking number having to rely solely on their coaxial machine guns, having no 76.2mm rounds at all. [2] Many T-34 and KV-1 tanks were sent into battle underarmed then had to be abandoned by their crews when they ran out of ammunition. Kulik similarly scorned the German issuance of the MP-40 submachine gun to their shock troops as a "bourgeois fascist affectation", stating that it encouraged inaccuracy and excessive ammo consumption among the rank and file. He forbade issuance of the PPD-40 to his units, stating it was only suitable as a "pure police weapon". It was not until 1941, after widespread demand for a weapon to match the MP-40 again overruled Kulik's restrictions, that a simple modification of the manufacturing process for the PPD-40 produced the PPSh-41, which proved to be amongst the most widely produced, inexpensive and effective small arms of the war, considered by many German infantrymen to be superior to the MP-40. Similarly, Kulik opposed Marshal Tukhachevsky's campaign to redevelop the Red Army's mechanised forces into independent units like the Wehrmacht's Panzerkorps; the creation of separate divisions allowed them to use their greater maneuverability for Blitzkrieg-style maneuver warfare, rapidly exploiting breakthroughs rather than simply supporting the infantry. A bitter rival with Timoshenko for Stalin's favor, Kulik successfully argued against the change, suggesting in a letter to Stalin that such attitudes showed an unhealthy ideological sympathy with the "degenerate fascist ideology" of favoring feint and deception over aggressive frontal attack. He also disparaged using minefields as a defensive measure, considering it at odds with a properly aggressive strategy and calling it "a weapon of the weak." This disastrous decision allowed for essentially free movement of German forces across Russian defensive lines during Operation Barbarossa, with static defensive strongpoints being easily bypassed by Panzer spearheads and surrounded by infantry, forcing the defenders to surrender. He also zealously supported Stalin's exhortations against retreat, allowing whole divisions to be encircled and annihilated or starved into surrendering en masse. Eventually, after Kulik's demotion, it was only the laying of multiple layers of anti-tank mines that allowed for both the successful defense of Leningrad during the German siege and the successful trap sprung on the much stronger German armored forces at the Battle of Kursk. When Germany invaded the Soviet Union in June 1941, Kulik took command of the 54th Army on the Leningrad front.[3] Here his incompetence caught up with him, and he presided over heavy Soviet defeats that resulted in the city of Leningrad being surrounded and necessitating that General Georgi Zhukov be rushed to the front in order to stabilize the defenses. In March 1942 he was court-martialed and demoted to the rank of Major-General. His status as one of Stalin's cronies saved him from the firing squad that was the fate of other defeated Soviet generals. In April 1943 he became commander of the 4th Guards Army. From 1944 to 1945 he was Deputy Head of the Directory of Mobilization, and Commander of the Volga Military District. [edit] DownfallAfter a respite during and immediately after the war, Stalin and his police chief Lavrenty Beria began a new round of military purges due to Stalin's jealousy and suspicion of the generals' public standing. Kulik was dismissed from his posts in 1946 after NKVD telephone eavesdroppers overheard him grumbling that politicians were stealing the credit from the generals. Arrested in 1947, he remained in prison until 1950, when he was condemned to death and executed for treason. He was rehabilitated by Nikita Khrushchev in 1956, and posthumously restored to the rank of Marshal of the Soviet Union. [edit] References
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