He was a veteran of
World War I and the
Russian Civil War. He was stationed at the
Northwestern Front as commander of the 8th Army (March–June 1941). He became head of the
Northwestern Front (July–August 1941) and then of the 43rd Army (September–October 1941). On 16 October 1941, Sobennikov was arrested and sentenced in February 1942 to five years of hard labour in the camps. On this occasion, he was stripped of the Order of the Red Star and the Red Army 20th Anniversary Commemorative Medal. He was eventually pardoned, but demoted. From November 1942 until the end of the war, he was deputy commander of the
3rd Army. He took part in the
Battle of Kursk and the
Second Battle of Smolensk near
Briansk, in the Gomel-Retchytsa and Rahatchow-Jlobine operations. In 1944, he took part in
Operation Bagration in the 1st Belarusian front and towards the end of the war, in the offensives in East Prussia, eastern Germany, as well as the
Battle of Berlin. He is buried in the
Novodevichy Cemetery. He was a recipient of the
Order of Lenin, the
Order of the Red Banner, the
Order of Bogdan Khmelnitsky (Soviet Union), the
Order of Suvorov, and the
Order of Kutuzov. ==References==