Moskalenko, Kirill

Born Apr. 28 (May 11), 1902, in the village of Grishino, now Krasnoarmeisk Raion, Donetsk Oblast. Soviet military commander; marshal of the Soviet Union (1955); Hero of the Soviet Union (Oct. 23, 1943); Hero of the Czechoslovak Socialist Republic (Oct. 3, 1969). Member of the CPSU from 1926.

Moskalenko joined the Red Army in 1920 and fought in the Civil War of 1918–20 as a private. He graduated from the Joint Ukrainian Red Commanders School in 1922, from artillery refresher courses for the command staff of the Workers’ and Peasants’ Red Army in 1928, and from the department of the higher command staff of the F. E. Dzerzhinskii Artillery Academy in 1939. He was chief of artillery of a rifle division in the Soviet-Finnish War of 1939–40. Moskalenko was chief of an artillery corps and commander of an antitank brigade in 1940. In the Great Patriotic War (1941–45), Moskalenko was commander of rifle and cavalry corps, commander of an army mobile group of forces, and deputy commander of the Sixth Army (until February 1942). He was commander of the Thirty-eighth, First Tank, First Guards, and Fortieth armies (1942–43), and, from October 1943 until the end of the war, commander of the Thirty-eighth Army on the Southwestern, Stalingrad, Voronezh, and First and Fourth Ukrainian fronts.

After the war Moskalenko held responsible posts in the armed forces (1945–48) and then served as commander of the forces of the Moscow Antiaircraft Defense District (1948–53), commander of the forces of the Moscow Military District (1953–60), and commander in chief of the Strategic Rocket Forces and deputy minister of defense of the USSR (1960–62). In April 1962 he became chief inspector of the Ministry of Defense of the USSR and, subsequently, deputy minister of defense of the USSR. He was a member of the Central Committee of the CPSU from 1956 and deputy to the second through eighth convocations of the Supreme Soviet of the USSR. Moskalenko was awarded five Orders of Lenin, the Order of the October Revolution, five Orders of the Red Banner, two Orders of Suvorov First Class, two Orders of Kutuzov First Class, the Order of Bogdan Khmel’nitskii First Class, various medals, and several orders and medals of foreign states.