Grigory Kulik

Who was Grigory Kulik?

Grigory Ivanovich Kulik was a Soviet military commander and Marshal of the Soviet Union.

Kulik was born into a peasant family near Poltava in Ukraine. A soldier in the army of the Russian Empire in World War I, he joined the Bolshevik Party in 1917 and the Red Army in 1918. During the Russian Civil War he become a commander in the Soviet artillery at Tsaritsyn and other battles.

In 1937 Kulik became head of the Red Army's Main Artillery Directorate, and remained commander of the Soviet artillery forces until 1941. He was both a sycophantic Stalinist and a radical military conservative, strongly opposed to the reforms proposed by Mikhail Tukhachevsky during the 1930s. For this reason he survived Stalin's Great Purge of the Red Army in 1937-38, and in 1939 he became Deputy People's Commissar of Defense, also taking part in the Soviet occupation of Eastern Poland in September. He led the Soviet's artillery attack on Finland at the start of the Winter War, which quickly foundered under his poor leadership. He was awarded the title of "Hero of the Soviet Union" in recognition of "outstanding services to the country and personal courage."