Kirill Mazurov

Kirill Trofimovich Mazurov (Belarusian: Кіры́ла Трафі́мавіч Ма́зураў, romanized: Kiryła Trafimavič Mazuraw, Russian: Кири́лл Трофи́мович Ма́зуров; 25 March 1914 – 19 December 1989) was a Soviet partisan, politician, and one of the leaders of the Belarusian resistance during World War II who governed the Byelorussian Soviet Socialist Republic as First Secretary of the Communist Party of Byelorussia from 1956 until 1965, when he became a member of the Politburo of the CPSU.

Political career

Kirill Mazurov was born in 1914 in the Mogilev Governorate of the Russian Empire in a peasant family of Belarusian ethnicity.^[1] He was originally a construction technician, and graduated from the Gomel highway technical school in 1933. He joined the Communist Party of the Soviet Union in 1940 and the Red Army in 1941. During the Great Patriotic War, he participated in military actions as a political instructor, a battalion commander and an instructor of the army's political department.^{[citation needed]}

Mazurov left the army in 1942 to become secretary of the central committee of the Belarusian

In the 1980s, he gave an interview to Izvestia in which he said he was the envoy of Brezhnev who commanded the Warsaw Pact invasion force in Czechoslovakia in 1968 under the code name "General Trofymov". He said he regretted his action, added "today I would not accept to guide one similar operation" and asked the Czechs to forgive the Soviets. [1]

Decorations

He was

• (in Russian) Biography of Mazurov
• (in Russian) Mazurov biography
• (in Italian) Biography of Mazurov
• Kirill Mazurov at Find a Grave

References