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Military Rank
This article is about the Soviet rank "Army general", equivalent to the Russian Federation's
General army (Russia)
. For the equivalent OF9-rank in anglophone countries, see
General
.
Army general
(
Russian
:
генерал армии
,
romanized
:
general armii
) was a rank of the
Soviet Union
which was first established in June 1940 as a high rank for
Red Army
generals, inferior only to the
marshal of the Soviet Union
. In the following 51 years the
Soviet Union
created 133 generals of the army, 32 of whom were later promoted to the rank of
marshal of the Soviet Union
. It is a direct counterpart of the Russian Federation's "
Army general
" rank.
Promotion
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The rank was usually given to senior officers of the Ministry of Defence and General Staff, and also to meritorious military district commanders. From the 1970s, it was also frequently given to the heads of the
KGB
and the Ministry of the Interior.
Soviet
army generals
include
Ivan Chernyakhovsky
(the youngest Soviet
World War II
front commander, killed in
East Prussia
),
Aleksei Antonov
(head of the General Staff in the closing stages of World War II, awarded the
Order of Victory
),
Issa Pliyev
(an
Ossetian
-born World War II commander who played a major role in the
Cuban Missile Crisis
) and
Yuri Andropov
(who held the rank as head of the KGB).
The Soviet rank of
army general
is equivalent to the UK and US ranks of
general
; Soviet and current Russian rank systems also have a marshal rank.
The corresponding naval rank is
fleet admiral
, which has been used in both the
Soviet
and
Russian navies
, although conferred much more rarely.
Army general
was used for the infantry and marines, but in the air force, artillery, armoured troops, engineer troops and signal troops the ranks of
marshal of the branch
and
chief marshal of the branch
were used.
Versions of rank insignia
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See also
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References
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