An outstanding Soviet commander in World War II, General Ivan Stefanovich Konev (1897-1973) was a leader in the offensive against the Germans and twice named "Hero of the Soviet Union" (1944,1945).

Ivan Konev was born on Dec. 28, 1897, to a peasant family in Lodeino, Russia. He was drafted in the army of the czar in 1916, but after the Russian Revolution, he joined the Red Army in August 1918. He also joined the Communist party, becoming military commissar of successively larger units. By the end of the civil war, he was a corps commissar. After graduating from the Soviet military academy in 1926 and completing special training at the Frunze academy in 1934, he emerged from relative obscurity with the 1937-1938 purge of the military. Actually Konev, a civil war veteran, was in danger of being purged himself. Instead, he not only survived but promoted his rise in the Bolshevik party, becoming a candidate...