Magomed Tankayev

Magomed Tankayevich Tankayev (Russian: Магомед Танкаевич Танкаев, 1919–1998) was a Soviet military leader of Avar origin who served as chief of the Northern Group of Forces in 1968-1973 and representative of the Warsaw Pact Supreme Command in East Germany in 1974-1978.

Magomed Tankayevich Tankayev was born in 1919 in Urada, a village in the mountainous Dagestani region of MRNC northern Caucasus and came from a peasant background. He was an ethnic Avar.

A talented school student, he went on to study the science of agronomy at the Dagestan Agro-Pedagogical Institute (now Dagestan State University) for several years in the 1930s and entered the Red Army in 1939.

Magomed Tankayev was trained at an infantry officers' course in Krasnodar before the war. He was commissioned as a junior officer on 16 June 1941 and joined the front lines soon after the German attack on the Soviet Union. He fought at the Battle of Smolensk, commanded a company of soldiers of the Kalinin Front, and served with the 302nd Rifle Division of the 51st Army at the Battle of Stalingrad.

Tankayev assumed command of the 823rd Rifle Regiment in February 1943 and led this regiment during the fighting in the Donbas and Left-Bank regions of Ukraine in 1943, the Korsun-Shevchenkovsky Offensive in Ukraine in early 1944, and the Lvov-Sandomierz Operation in western Ukraine and eastern Poland during the summer of 1944. Tankayev was subsequently named commander of the 460th Rifle Regiment within Major-General Fyodor Krasavin's 100th Rifle Divisionwhich fought as part of Colonel-General Pavel Kurochkin's 60th Army of the 1st Ukrainian Front for the remainder of the war.

In January 1945, Krasavin's 100th Rifle Division assisted the 322nd Rifle Division in crushing the German troops in the Oświęcim area in order to enter the Auschwitz concentration camp, whose horrors Tankayev witnessed at the time of the liberation. The regiment went on to fight at the Battle of Prague in the spring of 1945.

Magodem Tankayev was in Prague at the time of the victory over Nazi Germany in May 1945. His brother Gitinomagomed had been killed at the end of the Battle of Berlin in April 1945.

Tankayev graduated from the Frunze Military Academy in Moscow in 1948 and served in the Belorussian Military District afterward. He was promoted from colonel to major-general in 1958 and was elected to the Supreme Soviet of the Dagestan Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic in 1959. Tankayev graduated from the General Staff Academy in 1960 and led the elite 106th Guards Airborne Division in 1960-1961.