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War II. Born to a peasant family, Konev was con-
scripted into the Russian imperial army and served
as a noncommissioned officer during World War I.
In 1918 he joined the Red Army and the
COMMU
-
NIST PARTY
(CPSU). During the civil war he served
mostly as a political commissar, although he was
part of the troops that put down the uprising at
the Kronstadt naval base in March 1921. He then
transferred to the regular officer corps in 1924,
graduated from the Frunze Military Academy in
1926, and was given progressively higher com-
mands until appointed commander of the North
Caucasus Military District in January 1941. When
Nazi Germany invaded the USSR in June 1941,
Konev was appointed commander of the Nine-
teenth Army and Western Army Group that
fought in the Battle of Moscow in 1941. As com-
mander of the Second Ukrainian and then First
Ukrainian fronts he took part in the battles that
liberated Kharkov (1943) and Kirovograd (1944),
before moving into Romania in April 1944. In
January 1945, Konev's armies invaded Germany
from the south, while Georgii
ZHUKOV
entered
from the center and Konstantin Rokossovsky
from the north. For his wartime service he was
promoted to marshal of the Soviet Union. As a
senior Soviet officer, Konev was appointed to a
number of important assignments after the war:
Soviet representative on the Allied Control Com-
mission in Vienna, chief of the Soviet ground forces
(1945-55), deputy minister of war (1946-50), first
deputy minister of defense (1955-60), comman-
der in chief of the
WARSAW PACT
forces, and com-
mander in chief of Soviet occupation forces in
East Germany, 1961-62. He presided over the
special court that sentenced secret police chief
Lavrenty
BERIA
to death in December 1953. He
was a member of the Central Committee of the
CPSU, 1952-73. He was twice named a Hero of
the Soviet Union.
teenager and young Communist Kopelev took an
active part in the collectivization of agriculture
campaign. He then graduated from the presti-
gious Moscow Foreign Languages Institute and
became a Soviet specialist in German-language
propaganda. His protests against the barbaric
behavior of Soviet army troops in conquered
Germany led to his arrest in 1945. He was sen-
tenced to 10 years, which he spent in a
sharaga
(scientific research institutes that employed
imprisoned scientists from the
GULAG
). There he
met Aleksandr
SOLZHENITSYN
, who later modeled
Rubin, one of his characters from his novel
The
First Circle,
on Kopelev. Released in 1954, Kope-
lev later played a not unimportant role in the
behind-the-scenes activity that led to the publi-
cation of Solzhenitsyn's seminal
One Day in the
Life of Ivan Denisovich
(1962). Using his former
COMMUNIST PARTY
connections, Kopelev person-
ally delivered the sensitive manuscript to Alek-
sandr
TVARDOVSKY
, editor of the journal
Novyi
Mir,
in which the topic was first published. A
prolific writer, Kopelev published his own work
and translations of German writers until 1966,
when he became active in the human rights
movement and was expelled from the Commu-
nist Party. In 1977, he was expelled from the
Union of Writers, fired from all his jobs, and was
not allowed to publish anymore. He and his
wife, Raisa Orlova, emigrated to West Germany
in November 1980 and were stripped of their
Soviet citizenship the following year.
Korbut, Olga Valentinovna
(1955-
)
athlete
The unexpected star of the gymnastics competi-
tion at the 1972 Munich Olympic games, Korbut
was born in Grodno, Lithuania. She trained with
the Grodno Armed Forces team and first gained
fame in the Soviet sports world when she
became USSR champion in 1970, an achieve-
ment that she repeated in 1974, 1975, and 1976.
At the 1972 Olympics she confounded Western
stereotypes about Soviet athletes with her mix-
ture of personality and showmanship, and led
the Soviet team, while winning individual gold
Kopelev, Lev Zinovievich
(1912-
)
writer and dissident
A dedicated Communist in his youth, Kopelev
became a prominent and influential dissident in
the post-World War II period. Born in Kiev, as a
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