Born to a Ukrainian peasant family near Rostov-on-Don, Grechko served in the Red Army cavalry during the Russian Civil War.

Grechko was a fresh graduate of the Voroshilov Military Academy when Axis forces invaded the Soviet Union.

In 1967, Grechko was appointed Minister of Defence, and oversaw the subsequent Warsaw Pact invasion of Czechoslovakia and violent border clashes with China.

An ideological hardliner, he was a defender of the first strike nuclear strategy, and only reluctantly supported Leonid Brezhnev's détente with the United States and the Strategic Arms Limitation Talks (SALT).

He studied at the Crimean Cavalry courses Named After the All-Russian Central Executive Committee, in which he graduated in August 1923.

[2] In the early days of the German invasion of the Soviet Union, Grechko served in the Operational Directorate of the General Staff of the Red Army.

[3] From 5 January 1943, Grechko was commander of the 56th Army in the Transcaucasian Front, during which he took part in the North Caucasian Strategic Offensive Operation.

After fierce battles in January, his unit broke through the heavily fortified enemy defenses and reached the approaches to Krasnodar.

[6] On 11 March 1955, Grechko and five other high-ranking colleagues, all of whom gained recognition during the Great Patriotic War as either army or front commanders - Moskalenko, Chuikov, Bagramyan, Biryuzov and Yeremenko - were promoted to the rank of Marshal of the Soviet Union.

[8] On 12 April 1967, Grechko was made the Minister of Defense, taking over shortly after Marshal Rodion Malinovsky died.

During the 1970s, Grechko served as the chairman of the editorial commission that produced the official Soviet history of the Second World War.

[9] In January 1968, following the outbreak of the Prague Spring in Czechoslovakia, Grechko was the major planner and supporter of the Warsaw Pact invasion of the country, which stopped Alexander Dubček's Prague Spring liberalisation reforms and strengthened the authoritarian wing of the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia (KSČ).

In March 1969, Chinese and Soviet troops fought in violent border clashes near Damansky Island and Tielieketi.

Due to the resistance of the party factions headed by Mikhail Suslov and Soviet Premier Alexei Kosygin, who went to Beijing to meet with the Chinese leaders to reduce tensions between the two countries, a nuclear war was avoided.

In the final days of the Yom Kippur War in 1973, Grechko authorized the Soviet advisers operating the Scud missile brigade stationed in Egypt to fulfill Egyptian request to launch a barrage of missiles at Israeli Defense Forces targets at the Israeli bridgehead on the western bank of the Suez Canal on October 22, just moments before the ceasefire.

His views had caused opposition within the military and the political leadership, who wanted the Soviet Union to have a second strike capacity in order to prevent a war with the United States from going nuclear immediately as he preferred.

[16] In 1976, shortly before his death, he initiated the deployment of the RSD-10 medium-range ballistic missiles, which led to the NATO Double-Track Decision in the early 1980s.