Kliment Voroshilov

• 1. Introduction

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  Kliment Voroshilov put on his military uniform one winter morning in 1969, fully decorated with his medals, called a car, and drove himself to the hospital. He had refused, the night before, to let his family call an ambulance. That quiet act of pride tells you something essential about the man who was once one of the five original Marshals of the Soviet Union and served as the nominal head of state of the world's largest country. What shaped a boy who grew up illiterate in a Ukrainian settlement and worked from the age of six into one of Stalin's closest allies? How did a soldier famous for personal bravery on the battlefield become the fourth-biggest signer of execution lists in the Soviet purges? And what happens to a man who outlives the system that made him?

• 2. A Childhood of Hard Work

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  Voroshilov was born on the 4th of February 1881 in the settlement of Verkhnyeye, in Bakhmut uyezd, Yekaterinoslav Governorate, which is now part of Lysychansk in Luhansk Oblast, Ukraine. His father had served as a soldier but spent his working years alternating between railway work and mining, with stretches of unemployment in between. In his published autobiography, Voroshilov described working from as early as age six or seven, enduring frequent beatings from wealthy peasants. That experience left him, by his own account, with a lasting hostility toward kulaks, the class of better-off rural farmers. He grew up unable to read or write until, at the age of twelve, he enrolled in a newly opened village school and received two years of education.

  By 1896, Voroshilov was working at a factory near his home village, and by 1899 he was leading a strike there. In 1903 he moved to a German-owned factory in Lugansk, later renamed Voroshilov during the Stalin era, and joined the Bolsheviks. During the 1905 revolution he again led strikes. Then in April 1906, he traveled to Stockholm for the Fourth Congress of the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party, using the pointed pseudonym Volodya Antimekov, meaning Anti-Menshevik. In Stockholm he shared a room with the delegate from Georgia, one Josif Dzhugashvili, who would later be known to the world as Stalin. That chance rooming arrangement in a Swedish city would set the course of both men's lives.

• 3. War, Revolution, and Trotsky's Contempt

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  Voroshilov was in Petrograd during the February Revolution of 1917, but he returned to Lugansk, where he chaired the town soviet and was elected to the Constituent Assembly. His military career began in early 1918, when he was given command of the Fifth Ukrainian Army, a loose collection of scattered units that were quickly driven out of Ukraine by German forces. After a long retreat, those units reached Tsaritsyn, where Stalin had arrived in the summer of 1918 as a representative of the central party leadership. There, Voroshilov took command of the Tenth Army, and he and Stalin jointly led the Red Army's defense of the city in 1918.

  At Tsaritsyn, Voroshilov clashed directly with Leon Trotsky, the People's Commissar for War. Trotsky considered him undisciplined and unfit to command, and in October 1918 threatened him with court-martial. Voroshilov was transferred to Ukraine, first as commander of the Kharkiv military district and later as People's Commissar for War in the Ukrainian soviet republic. He sided with what was called the Military Opposition, a faction that resisted building a centralized army and opposed using former Tsarist officers in the Red Army's ranks. These disputes seeded a rivalry with the professional military establishment that would complicate his career for decades.

• 4. The Price of Loyalty

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  During the first of the Moscow show trials in August 1936, Voroshilov was one of four Politburo members who signed the order denying appeals for clemency and directing that defendants be executed without delay. At the March 1937 plenum of the Central Committee, he was one of the main speakers, denouncing Nikolai Bukharin and Alexei Rykov as renegades, a speech that ended with their arrests. His documented role in the Great Purge extended further: Voroshilov personally signed 185 execution lists, placing him fourth among the Soviet leadership after Molotov, Stalin, and Kaganovich.

  His relationship to the purge was not simple, though. He initially believed the military would be spared, and when Marshal Tukhachevsky was arrested, Voroshilov was apparently caught off guard. He tried to protect officers he respected, sometimes successfully, including men like Lukin who went on to serve with distinction in the Second World War. But on the 30th of May 1937, he telephoned the commander of the Ukraine military district, Iona Yakir, and ordered him to travel by train to Moscow, knowing full well that Yakir would be arrested along the way. When the Military Revolutionary Council met on the 1st of June, Voroshilov vacated the chair to deliver a report in which he said, apologetically: "I could not believe we would reveal so many and such scoundrels in the ranks of the highest command of our glorious, our valiant Workers' and Peasants' Army."

  He also wrote personal letters to exiled Soviet officers and diplomats, including commissar Mikhail Ostrovsky, urging them to return voluntarily and falsely assuring them they would face no retribution from authorities.

• 5. Finland and Leningrad

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  Voroshilov commanded Soviet troops in the Winter War against Finland from November 1939 to January 1940. The results were catastrophic: the Red Army suffered roughly 320,000 casualties compared to about 70,000 Finnish casualties, a disparity that shocked outside observers and alarmed the Soviet high command. When the leadership gathered at Stalin's dacha at Kuntsevo, Stalin furiously blamed Voroshilov for the losses. Voroshilov shot back, blaming Stalin for having destroyed the army's best generals through his own purges, then smashed a platter of food on the table. Nikita Khrushchev later said it was the only time he ever witnessed such an outburst. Voroshilov was replaced as Defense Commissar by Semyon Timoshenko and reassigned to oversee cultural matters as Deputy Premier.

  After Germany invaded the Soviet Union in June 1941, Voroshilov was recalled and given command of the Northwestern Direction, coordinating several fronts from July to August 1941. In September he took command of the Leningrad Front. Under heavy German shelling near Ivanovskoye, he displayed genuine personal courage, rallying retreating troops and personally leading a counter-attack armed with nothing but a pistol. His colleagues, however, viewed the tactical approach with contempt; it was a style of fighting the strategists had long since abandoned. He failed to stop the German encirclement of Leningrad and was dismissed on the 8th of September 1941, replaced by Georgy Zhukov. Stalin kept him on as a public figurehead, recognizing that the Soviet public needed recognizable wartime symbols even when the generals behind those symbols had failed.

• 6. After Stalin

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  Stalin's death on the 5th of March 1953 opened a new chapter for Voroshilov. On the 15th of March 1953, he was approved as Chairman of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet, making him the nominal head of state of the Soviet Union, with Khrushchev as First Secretary and Georgy Malenkov as Premier. One of his concrete responsibilities in that role was presiding over appeal reviews for Soviet death row inmates. Researchers Jeffrey S. Hardy and Yana Skorobogatov analyzed his conduct in that role and found that he frequently pushed toward leniency, particularly for those who expressed repentance and those convicted of crimes of passion or alcohol-related offenses. He judged those convicted of political crimes or financial motives more harshly. During his tenure, many death sentences were commuted to prison terms. His successor, Leonid Brezhnev, took what the same researchers described as a noticeably harder line.

  Khrushchev noticed the contrast with Voroshilov's role in the 1930s purges and put the question to him directly: "So when were you acting according to your conscience, then or now?" Between 1945 and 1947, Voroshilov had also supervised the establishment of the socialist republic in postwar Hungary. Following the October 1945 Budapest municipal elections, in which the Hungarian Communist Party performed poorly, he attributed the result to the number of minorities in leadership positions and argued it was detrimental that party leaders were not of Hungarian origin. On the 7th of May 1960, the Supreme Soviet granted his request for retirement. In October 1961, at the 22nd party congress, he was excluded from election to the Central Committee. After Khrushchev himself fell from power, Brezhnev brought Voroshilov back into a ceremonial political role, and in 1966 he was again elected to the Central Committee.

• 7. The Man Behind the Marshal

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  Voroshilov married Ekaterina Voroshilova, born Golda Gorbman, a Ukrainian Jew from Mardarovka. She converted to Orthodox Christianity and changed her name in order for the marriage to be permitted. They first met while both were exiled in Arkhangelsk, where Ekaterina had been sent in 1906. In 1918, while both were at the Tsaritsyn Front, where Ekaterina was working with orphans, they adopted a four-year-old boy and named him Petya. They also adopted the children of Mikhail Frunze after his death in 1925. During Stalin's rule, the Voroshilovs lived in the Kremlin at the Horse Guards.

  Vyacheslav Molotov described Voroshilov in 1974 as a good orator who came from the working class and was personally devoted to Stalin, though Molotov added that the devotion was not unconditional. Stalin himself treated Voroshilov with a degree of suspicion, excluding him from private conversations, though Voroshilov sometimes showed up anyway. The Kliment Voroshilov series of tanks, known as KV tanks, was named in his honor and saw use throughout the Second World War. Two Ukrainian cities also carried his name, as did the General Staff Academy in Moscow. When he was awarded his second Hero of the Soviet Union medal in 1968, it was in conjunction with the 50th anniversary of the Armed Forces of the USSR, a final formal recognition from a state he had served since its founding.