Ieronim Uborevich
Ieronim Petrovich Uborevich was a Soviet military commander of the Red Army during the Russian Civil War, reaching the rank of komandarm in 1935. He was executed during the Great Purge in June 1937 and was posthumously rehabilitated in 1957.Biography
Uborevich was born into a peasant family in the village of in the Kovno Governorate of the Russian Empire. After graduating from the Dvinsk realschule, he attended the Saint Petersburg Polytechnical Institute before transferring in 1915 to the, from which he graduated in 1916, receiving command of a battery and later a company.
He joined the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party in 1917 and, after the October Revolution, began recruiting Red Guards in Bessarabia. During Operation Faustschlag in March 1918 he was injured and taken captive by the Central Powers. He escaped in August, joined the Red Army, and served as an artillery instructor and commander of the Dvinsk Brigade on the Northern Front. In December 1918 he received command of the 18th Rifle Division of the 6th Army.
During the Russian Civil War, he held several significant commands, including: commander of the 14th Army of the Southern Front and the Southwestern Front ; commander of the 9th Kuban Army of the Southern Front ; commander of the 13th Army of the Southern Front ; and commander of the 5th Army of the Eastern Front.
Besides combat against the Whites and the Poles, he was also involved in the defeat of Nestor Makhno and Stanisław Bułak-Bałachowicz and acted as assistant to Mikhail Tukhachevsky during the Tambov Rebellion in 1921–1922. From August to November 1922 he served as minister of war of the Far Eastern Republic and commander-in-chief of its People's Revolutionary Army. In the latter position, he oversaw the storming of Spassk-Dalny and the seizure of Vladivostok in October, and finally, the ouster from Primorsky Krai of the last major White forces in Russian territory, the Zemskaya Rat of Mikhail Diterikhs. From August to November he served in the Far Eastern Bureau of the Comintern.
Uborevich was a member of All-Russian Central Executive Committee from 1922 and was then, consecutively, commander of a series of military districts: Ural ; North Caucasus ; Moscow ; Belorussia ; and Central Asia. He also attended the military academy of the German General Staff twice. He had a close relationship with his counterparts in the Reichswehr, acquiring important information on German weapon developments. He was also a member of the Soviet Revolutionary Military Council and chief of armaments for the Red Army. He acted a candidate member of the Central Committee of the All-Union Communist Party from 1931 to 1937 and from 1934 was a member of the military council of the People's Commissariat of Defense of the Soviet Union.
Uborevich was arrested on May 29, 1937, and along with Tukhachevsky, August Kork, and others, was arraigned in the Case of the Trotskyist Anti-Soviet Military Organization on June 11, 1937. Judged guilty of espionage and sabotage by a clandestine military tribunal, he was sentenced to death and executed on the same day. During the Khrushchev Thaw he was posthumously rehabilitated by the Military Collegium of the Supreme Court of the Soviet Union on January 31, 1957.
