How Marshal Konev fought in the World War I & the Russian Civil War

Ivan Konev is known as one of the most important Soviet military leaders of World War II. It was he who liberated Ukraine, took Berlin, together with Georgy Zhukov, and finished off the German troops in Czechoslovakia.

In 1916, at the age of 19, the future Marshal was drafted into the Russian Imperial Army. He was trained in the artillery training team and, in 1917, as a non-commissioned officer, he ended up on the Southwestern Front.

Konev fought in the Tarnopol (now Ternopil) area. After the start of the Civil War in November 1917, his artillery brigade was disarmed by troops of the Ukrainian People's Republic and he and his fellow soldiers were sent to Russia.

In his homeland, he joined the Red Army, participated in the suppression of the Left Socialist Revolutionary rebellion in Moscow in July 1918 and fought against the Whites in the east of the country. At one time, he served as a commissar of the ‘Grozny’ armored train and, later, the 2nd Verkhneudinsk rifle division.

In March 1921, the sailors of the Baltic Fleet rebelled against the Bolsheviks in the fortress city of Kronstadt. The military leader took part in suppressing the rebellion.

They went to the assault right on the frozen ice of the Gulf of Finland under artillery fire from forts and ships. "It was sheer hell… Each shell, falling on the ice, formed a huge crater. In the semi-darkness… our soldiers, every now and then fell, into these craters and immediately sank to the bottom," Konev recalled.

At the final stage of the Civil War, the military leader fought to establish Soviet power in the Russian Far East.