Filipp Golikov

Filipp Ivanovich Golikov, (Russian: Филипп Иванович Голиков; July 30, 1900 – July 29, 1980) was a Soviet military commander. He is best known for not passing on to Stalin intelligence about Nazi invasion plans in June 1941, either because he did not believe them or because Stalin made it very clear he did not want to hear them. He was promoted to the rank of Marshal of the Soviet Union in 1961.

Born at Borisova, in 1900, Golikov saw service as a political commissar during the Russian Civil War. He graduated from the Frunze military academy in 1933. He commanded the 6th Army during the Soviet invasion of Poland in 1939, and in 1940 he served in the war against Finland. He was in charge of the Soviet Main Intelligence Directorate (GRU) (1940–41), personally leading Soviet military missions in Great Britain and the United States.

During the war, he commanded the Bryansk Front (1942) and Voronezh Front (1942–43), before being appointed Assistant Minister of Defense (April 1943), in which post he was responsible for the repatriation of Soviet POWs. After the war, he held various offices in the Ministry of Defense.

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn mentions Golikov briefly in a footnote in part one of his Gulag Archipelago, implicating him in the mass incarceration in the gulag system of former Soviet POWs who returned home after World War II. He writes, "One of the biggest war criminals, Colonel General Golikov, former chief of the Red Army's intelligence administration, was put in charge of coaxing the repatriates home and swallowing them up."

Golikov was buried at Novodevichy Cemetery.