Voroshilov was born in the settlement of Verkhnyeye, Bakhmut uyezd, Yekaterinoslav Governorate, Russian Empire (now part of Lysychansk city in Luhansk Oblast, Ukraine).

According to the Soviet Major General Petro Grigorenko, Voroshilov himself alluded to the heritage of his birth-country (Ukraine) and to the previous family name of Voroshylo.

[3] In his published autobiography, Voroshilov described a childhood of extreme hardship, working from the age of six or seven, and receiving frequent beatings from wealthy peasants, which left him with a lifelong aversion to 'kulaks'.

In April 1906, he travelled to Stockholm for the Fourth Congress of the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party (RSDLP), using the provocative pseudonym 'Volodya Antimekov' or Anti-Menshevik.

[4] Voroshilov was in Petrograd (St Petersburg) during the February Revolution, but returned to Luhansk, where he was chairman of the town soviet, and was elected to the Constituent Assembly.

After a long, hazardous retreat, his group reached Tsaritsyn, where Stalin was posted in summer 1918 as representative of the central party leadership, and where Voroshilov was given command of the Tenth Army.

They also sponsored the creation of the first Red Cavalry unit, commanded by Semyon Budyonny, which was composed chiefly of peasants from southern Russia.

[8][9] In Tsaritsyn, Voroshilov clashed with Leon Trotsky, the People's Commissar for War, who considered him undisciplined and unfit to command an army, and in October 1918 threatened him with court martial.

In November 1930, the chairman of the Russian government, Sergey Syrtsov alleged that a "tiny group", which excluded Voroshilov but included nominally much less senior figures such as Pavel Postyshev, was making decisions "behind the back of the Politburo".

During the first of the Moscow trials, in August 1936, Voroshilov was one of four Politburo members who signed the order that appeals for clemency were to be denied and that the defendants were to be executed without delay.

[15] He was also of the main speakers at the March 1937 plenum of the Central Committee, which ended with the arrests of Nikolai Bukharin and Alexei Rykov, whom Voroshilov denounced as "renegades".

[17] He openly declared that the saboteurs in the Red Army were few in number and tried to save the lives of officers like Lukin, who would serve with distinction during the Second World War, and Sokolov-Strakhov, and he was sometimes successful.

[18] When the Council met on 1 June 1937, Voroshilov vacated the chair to deliver a report in which he said, apologetically: "I could not believe we would reveal so many and such scoundrels in the ranks of the highest command of our glorious, our valiant Workers' and Peasants' Army.

[20] Voroshilov personally signed 185 documented execution lists, fourth among the Soviet leadership after Molotov, Stalin and Kaganovich.

[17] Marshal Budyonny tried to recruit him to his cause of protecting the status of cavalry in the Red Army but Voroshilov openly declared his intention to do the opposite.

[17] He praised the army's combined arms warfare capabilities as well as the high quality and ability to take initiative of the officers during the 1936 summer manoeuvers.

[22] When territorial units were abolished Voroshilov noted that among the reasons for disbanding them was inability to train conscripts in the use of modern technology.

[26] Voroshilov initially argued that thousands of Polish army officers captured in September 1939 should be released, but he later signed the order for their execution in the Katyn massacre of 1940.

After the German invasion of the Soviet Union in June 1941, Voroshilov became commander of the short-lived Northwestern Direction (July to August 1941), controlling several fronts.

Working alongside military commander Andrei Zhdanov as German advances threatened to cut off Leningrad, he displayed considerable personal bravery in defiance of heavy shelling at Ivanovskoye; at one point he rallied retreating troops and personally led a counter-attack against German tanks armed only with a pistol.

[28] However, the style of counterattack he launched had long since been abandoned by strategists and drew mostly contempt from his military colleagues;[23] he failed to prevent the Germans from surrounding Leningrad and he was dismissed from his post and replaced by Georgy Zhukov on 8 September 1941.

One of Voroshilov's responsibilities as chairman of the Presidium was to oversee the appeal review of Soviet death row inmates.

Throughout his tenure as Presidium chair, he behaved like someone who believed that one should follow established procedure and not act too quickly in matters of life and death.

[31] However, the contrast between Voroshilov's relatively magnanimous attitude toward pardon cases in the 1950s with his well-documented participation in the deadly purges of the 1930s (as described above) was noted even at the time by Khrushchev, who asked him, "So when were you acting according to your conscience, then or now?

[citation needed] In October 1961, his political defeat was complete at the 22nd party congress when he was excluded from election to the Central Committee.

[citation needed] Following Khrushchev's fall from power, Soviet leader Brezhnev brought Voroshilov out of retirement into a figurehead political post.

Two towns were also named after him: Voroshilovsk in Donbas (now Alchevsk) Voroshilovgrad in Ukraine (now changed back to the historical Luhansk) and Voroshilov in the Soviet Far East (now renamed Ussuriysk after the Ussuri river), as well as the General Staff Academy in Moscow.