Stanislav Poplavskii

Born Apr. 9 (22), 1902, in the village of Vendichany, now in Mogilev-Podol’-skii Raion, Vinnitsa Oblast; died Aug. 9, 1973, in Moscow. Soviet military commander, general of the army (1955), Hero of the Soviet Union (May 29, 1945). Member of the CPSU from 1928. Son of a Polish peasant.

Poplavskii joined the Red Army in 1923 and graduated from the Kharkov Military School in 1930 and from the M. V. Frunze Military Academy in 1938. In the Great Patriotic War (1941–45), Poplavskii served on the Western, Kalinin, and First and Third Byelorussian fronts as regimental commander and chief of staff of a rifle division (1941), commander of a rifle division (1942–43), and commander of a rifle corps (1943–44). In 1944 upon the request of the Polish government he was dispatched to the Polish Army, where he took command of the Second Army in September 1944 and the First Army in December 1944. Poplavskii fought in the battle of Moscow and in the Baltic, Vistula-Oder, Eastern Pomeranian, and Berlin operations.

After the war (1945–56), Poplavskii served as commander of the forces of a military district, commander in chief of the ground forces, and deputy minister of national defense of the Polish People’s Republic. In December 1956 he returned to the USSR, served as first deputy chief inspector of the Ministry of Defense of the USSR, and in April 1958 was appointed military inspector-adviser of the Group of Inspectors General of the Ministry of Defense of the USSR.

Poplavskii was awarded three Orders of Lenin, the Order of the October Revolution, four Orders of the Red Banner, the Order of Suvorov First and Second Class, the Order of Kutuzov Second Class, the Order of Bogdan Khmel’nitskii Second Class, the Order of the Red Star, and many foreign orders.