Following the German invasion of the Soviet Union in 1941, Konev took part in a series of major campaigns, including the battles of Moscow and Rzhev.

In 1956, he was appointed commander of the Warsaw Pact armed forces, and led the violent suppression of the Hungarian Revolution and Prague Spring.

Konev was born 28 December 1897 in the village of Lodeyno in the Nikolsky Uyezd of Vologda Governorate to a peasant family of Russian ethnicity.

Posted to the 2nd Separate Heavy Artillery Battalion (then part of the Southwestern Front) as a junior sergeant in 1917, he fought in the Kerensky Offensive in Galicia in July 1917.

[2] When the October Revolution broke out in November 1917, he was demobilized and returned home; in 1918, he joined the Russian Communist Party (Bolsheviks) and the Red Army, serving as an artilleryman.

He commanded the Kalinin Front from October 1941[4] to August 1942, playing a key role in the fighting around Moscow and the Soviet counter-offensive during the winter of 1941–42.

[2] He participated in the Battle of Kursk, commanding the southern part of the Soviet counter-offensive, the Steppe Front, where he actively and energetically promoted maskirovka (the use of military camouflage and deception).

In it, the 1st and 2nd Ukrainian Fronts, commanded, respectively, by Nikolai Vatutin and by Konev, trapped German forces of Army Group South in a pocket or "cauldron" west of the Dnieper river.

According to Milovan Djilas, Konev openly boasted of his killing of thousands of German prisoners of war: "The cavalry finally finished them off.

In September 1944 his forces, now designated the Fourth Ukrainian Front, advanced into Slovakia and fought alongside the Slovak partisans in their rebellion against German occupation.

In January 1945, Konev, together with Georgy Zhukov, commanded the Soviet armies which launched the massive winter offensive in western Poland, driving the German forces from the Vistula to the Oder River.

Soviet historians, and generally Russian sources, claimed that Konev preserved Kraków from Nazi-planned destruction by ordering a lightning attack on the city.

In April Konev's troops, together with the 1st Belorussian Front under his competitor, Marshal Zhukov, forced the line of the Oder and advanced towards Berlin.

Konev's forces entered the city first, but Stalin gave Zhukov the honor of capturing Berlin and hoisting the Soviet flag over the Reichstag.

Following the Prague Spring, Konev headed a delegation that visited Czechoslovakia in May 1968 to celebrate the anniversary of the Soviet victory during World War II.

It has been claimed that Konev visited military units in Czechoslovakia in order to obtain first-hand information to better assess the situation in the country, but there is no documentary evidence to support this.

He married twice, and his daughter Nataliya is Dean of the Department of Linguistics and Literature at the Military University of the Ministry of Defense of the Russian Federation.

The places include Svidník, Patriot Park (Moscow region), Kirov, Belgorod, Nizhny Novgorod, Omsk, and Vologda.