Ieronim Uborevich

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Ieronim Petrovich Uborevich (Russian: Уборевич, Иероним Петрович, Lithuanian: Jeronimas Uborevičius) (January 14, 1896 near Užpaliai, - June 12, 1937 Moscow) was a Soviet military commander of the Red Army during the Russian Civil War, and eventually attained the rank of Army Commander, 1st Rank, equivalent to General of the Army after tsarist ranks were reintroduced in 1940.

Uborevich began his military career during World War I, graduating from artillery school in 1916 and serving as a junior officer in the imperial Russian army. After the Russian Revolution, he served in a variety of command posts in the Red Army, commanding the 9th, 13th, and 14th Armies as well as in 1922 becoming War Minister of the short-lived Far Eastern Republic, a buffer state between Soviet Russia and Japan. In 1925 he became commander of the North Caucasus Military District, and then in 1928 the Moscow Military District. He served as the Red Army's Director of Armaments from 1928-1931. From 1931-1937, he was commander of the Belorussian Military District, one of the two (along with the Ukrainian Military District) key commands that would bear the brunt of any Soviet war along its western border.

He was a prominent victim of Joseph Stalin's purges of the Red Army. In 1937, at the orders of Stalin, Uborevich was tried and executed by the NKVD in a event known as the Case of Trotskyist Anti-Soviet Military Organization.

References: Voennyi entsiklopedicheskii slovar' (Moscow, 1984) Grazhdanskaia voina i voennaia interventsiia v SSSR: Entsiklopediia (Moscow, 1983)