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==