Kuznetsov, Fedor

Born Feb. 6 (19), 1904, in the village of Pritykino, in present-day Chaplygin Raion, Lipetsk Oblast. Soviet military commander, colonel general (1944). Became a member of the CPSU in 1926. The son of a peasant.

Kuznetsov was a worker and later a deputy director of a plant in Moscow between 1920 and 1931; he graduated in 1931 from a workers’ school (rabfak ) without leaving his job. He began to conduct party work in 1931 and was elected first secretary of the Proletarskii Raion Committee of the ACP (Bolshevik) in Moscow in 1937. In the Soviet Army from 1938, Kuznetsov was department chief and deputy chief of the Political Administration of the Workers’ and Peasants’ Red Army. After the outbreak of the Great Patriotic War (1941–45), Kuznetsov was deputy chief of the Main Political Administration and in 1942–43 was a member of the Military Council of the Sixtieth Army and then of the Voronezh Front. From 1943 he was head of the Main Administration and deputy head of the General Staff.

After the Great Patriotic War, Kuznetsov held high posts in the General Staff (1945–49) and served as head of the Main Political Administration (1949–53), head of the Main Personnel Administration of the Ministry of Defense (1953–57), and head of the V. I. Lenin Military Political Academy (1957–59). He was a member of the Military Council and head of the Political Administration of the Northern Army Group (1959–69). He retired in July 1969.

A member of the Auditing Commission of the Central Committee of the ACP(B) from 1939 to 1952, Kuznetsov was a candidate member of the Central Committee of the CPSU from 1952 to 1956 and a member of the Central Auditing Commission of the CPSU from 1956 to 1961. He has been awarded two Orders of Lenin, the Order of the Red Banner, the Order of Suvorov First Class, the Order of Kutuzov First Class, the Order of the Patriotic War First Class, four Orders of the Red Star, medals, and five foreign orders.