Born to a Ukrainian family in Bessarabia, Timoshenko was drafted into the Imperial Russian Army and saw action in the First World War as a cavalryman.

His fortunes had faltered by mid-1942, in particular after the overwhelming Soviet defeat at the Second Battle of Kharkov, and he was relieved from the command of the newly formed Stalingrad Front.

Born in Orman in the Akkerman uezd, Bessarabia Governorate of the Russian Empire (present-day Furmanivka, Odesa Oblast, Ukraine),[1] to an ethnic Ukrainian family.

[2] His most important encounter occurred at Tsaritsyn, where he commanded a cavalry regiment and met and befriended Joseph Stalin, who was responsible for the city's defense.

Due to being a loyal friend of Lenin and Stalin, Timoshenko survived the Great Purge to become the Red Army's senior professional soldier.

British historian John Erickson has written: Although by no means a military intellectual, Timoshenko had at least passed through the higher command courses of the Red Army and was a fully trained 'commander-commissar'.

[8] Timoshenko was a competent but traditionalist military commander who nonetheless saw the urgent need to modernise the Red Army if, as expected, it was to fight a war against Nazi Germany.

[14] In November and December 1941, Timoshenko organized major counter offensives in the Rostov region, as well as carving a bridgehead into German defenses south of Kharkiv in January 1942.

The fact that he was the most senior Soviet army officer with a front-line command during most of the first year after the German invasion turned Timoshenko, briefly, into an international celebrity, lionised in the US and UK in particular as a supposed military genius.

According to an account written later in the war: Marshal Timoshenko flared up like a shooting star of unusual brightness against a sky that was more than commonly dark, and faded just as swiftly and unexpectedly.

From June 1941 to about July 1942, so famous was he that foreigners, notably the Welsh and Irish, attempted to inch under his halo by finding their blood in him.

The Welsh said that Timothy Jenkins was the Marshal's ancestor who had migrated to Russia to work as a mechanic and marry a Ukrainian girl.

[19] After the Red Army liberated Chișinău on 25 August during the Jassy–Kishinev offensive, Timoshenko sent a telegram to Stalin that praised the achievement of the 2nd and 3rd Ukrainian fronts under his coordination and requested the promotion of their respective commanders, Malinovsky and Tolbukhin, to the rank of Marshal of the Soviet Union.

Later, the author Primo Levi (Prisoner 174517) wrote in The Truce of how the extremely tall Timoshenko "unfolded himself from a tiny Fiat 500A Topolino" to announce that the liberated survivors would soon begin their final journey home.

During a discussion with Stalin in 1941, Zhukov praised Timoshenko's conducts at Smolensk sector, claimed that he had done everything he could and gained the trust of the soldiers.

[23] After the war, Zhukov repeated his praise during an interview with Konstantin Simonov, claimed that Timoshenko was a strong-willed, educated and experienced military man.

He was removed from the frontline duty not because of his capability, but mainly because people were upset with his defeat at Kharkov and Timoshenko himself did not attempt to curry favour with his superior.

When the stories were republished, his name was changed to Savitsky, after Budyonny had denounced Babel's work as "slander" by a "literary degenerate".

[27] Babel's story My First Goose opens with this description: Savitsky, the commander of the Sixth Division, rose when he saw me, and I was taken aback by the beauty of his gigantic body.

[28]In Babel's The Story of a Horse, originally "Timoshenko and Melnikov", "Savitsky" is described as having been removed from his command, and living with a Cossack woman, and is accused of having taken a white stallion that belonged a rival officer, who tries in vain to get it back.

In the Warner Bros. cartoon Russian Rhapsody, a caricature of Adolf Hitler referred to Timoshenko as "that Irish general, Tim O'Shenko".