Kozak, Semen

Kozak, Semen Antonovich 

Born May 10 (23), 1902, in the village of Iskorost’, now the city of Korosten’, Zhitomir Oblast; died Dec. 24,1953, in Iuzhno-Sakhalinsk. Soviet military commander, lieutenant general (1945), twice Hero of the Soviet Union (Oct. 26, 1943, and Apr. 28, 1945). Member of the CPSU from 1923. Son of a Ukrainian worker.

Kozak entered the Red Army in 1924. He graduated from an artillery school (1928) and from the Frunze Military Academy (1938), where he was an instructor until 1941. Kozak worked in the central apparatus of the People’s Commissariat of Defense at the beginning of the Great Patriotic War (1941–45). In 1942 he was appointed deputy chief of staff of the Sixty-fourth (Seventh Guards) Army and later commander of the 73rd Guards Rifle Division and of the XXI Guards Rifle Corps. Kozak participated in battles at Stalingrad, at Kursk, in the Ukraine, and for the liberation of Rumania, Bulgaria, and Hungary, as well as in the Vienna Operation of 1945. After the war he was assistant commander of the troops of the Far Eastern Military District. He was a deputy to the third convocation of the Supreme Soviet of the USSR. Kozak was awarded two Orders of Lenin, four Orders of the Red Banner, the Order of Suvorov, the Order of Kutuzov, the Order of Bogdan Khmel’nitskii Second Class, and various medals. He is buried in Moscow.