Magomed Tankayev

Magomed Tankayevich Tankayev (, 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.

Biography 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.

World War II service 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. He was elected to the Supreme Soviet of the USSR ahead of its seventh convocation in 1966, selected as to succeed Colonel-General Ivan Shkadov as commander of the Northern Group of Forces in December 1968, and elevated to colonel-general in 1969. He continued to serve with the Northern Group of Forces until 1973.

Colonel-General Tankayev returned to Moscow to head the Main Directorate of Military Colleges of the USSR Ministry of Defense in 1973-1974 and served in East Germany as chief representative of the Warsaw Pact Supreme Command to the National People's Army in 1974-1978.

Tankayev headed the Military Institute of the Ministry of Defense of the USSR from 1978 to 1988.

He died at the age of seventy-eight after ten years in retirement in 1998.

Awards Soviet Order of Lenin Order of the October Revolution