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Admiral of the Fleet the Soviet Union . February 13 jul. / 26. February 1910 greg. In Kamenetz-Podolsky , Russian Empire , now Kamianets-Podilskyi, Ukraine ; † 13. May 1988 in Moscow.
Sergei Georgievich Gorshkov was born in 1910 as the son of a teacher. In 1927 he entered the Soviet Navy and initially studied physics and mathematics in Leningrad , where he also graduated from the Frunze Naval College , before serving as an officer from 1931, first in the Black Sea Fleet and then in the Pacific Fleet .
When the Great Patriotic War broke out in 1941, he commanded the Azov flotilla as rear admiral . In the course of this activity he also got to know Leonid Brezhnev , who later became head of state and party of the Soviet Union , who reported in his memoirs that his unit had been rescued from the German encirclement by Gorshkov's ships. Gorshkov later commanded the Danube flotilla until he lost his command due to differences of opinion with the Commander-in-Chief of the 3rd Ukrainian Front , Marshal Fyodor Tolbuchin .
Under Nikita Khrushchev , Gorshkov rose to First Deputy Commander-in-Chief of the Soviet Navy in 1955, then in January 1956 he was appointed successor to the Commander-in-Chief of the Soviet Navy, Nikolai Gerassimowitsch Kuznetsov , and First Deputy Minister of Defense of the Soviet Union.
In the same year Gorshkov, who had joined the Communist Party in 1942 , was elected a candidate for the Central Committee of the CPSU , and in 1961 was finally elected a full member of the Central Committee. In 1967 he was promoted to Fleet Admiral of the Soviet Union, the maritime equivalent of Marshal of the Soviet Union .
As Commander in Chief, he was able to convince Khrushchev of the need to convert the Soviet Navy from a coastal defense to a “global” fleet that would be able to assert Soviet interests worldwide. By 1985, among other things, the defense budget of the Soviet Union had inflated to 40% of the total budget, which led Mikhail Gorbachev to fire Gorshkov and replace him with Admiral Vladimir Chernavin , who had served as chief of staff since 1982.
Gorshkov died on May 13, 1988 in Moscow.
Because of his commitment, Gorshkov was seen as the "father of the Soviet nuclear submarines" or the "father of the Soviet deep-sea fleet", whose meaning equals a " Mahan of the Soviet Union".
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