him had been killed in 1920 during the civil war: The evidence was based on the testimony of Adolph Yushkevich, a colleague of my grandfather in the Civil War. But my grandfather knew very well that Yushkevich died in Perekop. He said that he would sign [a confession] if Adolph was brought for a confrontation. They looked for Yushkevich and found that he had died long before. Alexander Solzhenitsyn reports that Rokossovsky endured two mock shooting ceremonies where he was taken out at night by a firing squad, but then returned to prison. Living relatives say that Svetlana Pavlovna, wife of Marshal Kazakov, confirmed that he sustained injuries including broken and denailed fingers and cracked ribs on top of enduring mock shooting ceremonies. Rokossovsky never discussed his trial and imprisonment with his family, only telling his daughter Ariadne that he always kept a gun because he would not surrender alive if they came to arrest him again. In his famous "secret speech" of 1956, Nikita Khrushchev, when speaking on the subject of the purges, was probably referring implicitly to Rokossovsky when he stated, "suffice to say that those of them who managed to survive, despite severe tortures to which they were subjected in the prisons, have from the first war days shown themselves real patriots and heroically fought for the glory of the Fatherland". After his trial Rokossovsky was sent to the Kresty Prison in Leningrad, where he remained until he was released without explanation on 22 March 1940. His release coincided with a relaxation of the Great Purge ushered in by the execution of NKVD chief Nikolay Yezhov on 4 February 1940, who was replaced by Lavrentiy Beria. Semyon Timoshenko, who had been named People's Commissar for Defence of the Soviet Union after the debacle of the Winter War and was in urgent need of experienced officers to fill command posts for the rapidly expanding Soviet army, returned Rokossovsky to the command of the 5th Cavalry Corps at the rank of colonel. Subsequently, the 5th Cavalry Corps participated in the occupation of Bessarabia and he was soon promoted to the rank of a major general and given the command of the 9th Mechanized Corps, as part of M.I. Potapov's 5th Army under Mikhail Kirponos, commander of the Kiev Military District, which would later be renamed the Southwestern Front at the outbreak of hostilities with Germany. World War II 1941: