Rokossovsky was a Pole, he had not lived in Poland for 35 years and most Poles regarded him as a Russian and Soviet emissary in the country. As Rokossovsky himself bitterly put it: "In Russia, they say I'm a Pole, in Poland they call me Russian". Rokossovsky played a key role in the regime's suppression of an independent Poland through Stalinization and Sovietization in general, and in the Polish Army in particular. As the de facto supreme commander of the Polish Army, he introduced various methods for the suppression of anti-Soviet activity, real or imagined. Among the most notorious were the labour battalions of the army, to which all able-bodied men found socially or politically insecure or guilty of having their families abroad were drafted. It is estimated that roughly 200,000 men were forced to work in these labour camps in hazardous conditions, often in quarries, coal mines, and uranium mines, and 1,000 died in their first days of "labour", while tens of thousands became crippled. Other groups targeted by these repressive measures were former soldiers of the pre-war Polish Army as well as the wartime underground Home Army. In the June 1956 Poznań protests against local working conditions and living standards, as well as the Soviet influence over Poland, Rokossovsky approved an order to send in military units. As a result of this over 10,000 soldiers and 360 tanks crushed the protesters, and at least 74 civilians were killed. In the wake of the Poznan riots and the "rehabilitation" of the formerly imprisoned communist reformer Władysław Gomułka in 1956, Rokossovsky went to Moscow in a failed attempt to persuade Nikita Khrushchev to use force against the Polish state. However, Gomułka managed to negotiate with the Soviets, and on the new Polish First Secretary's insistence Rokossovsky was forced to leave Poland. He returned to the Soviet Union, which restored his Soviet ranks and honours; and in July 1957, following the removal from office of Defence Minister Zhukov, Nikita Khrushchev appointed him Deputy Minister of Defence and commander of the Transcaucasian Military District. In 1958 he became chief inspector of the Ministry of Defence, a post he held until his retirement in April 1962. Throughout his life, he was fond of hunting – he had a double-barreled IZh-49 12 gauge shotgun and a 20 gauge double-barreled TOZ shotgun made in 1905. Rokossovsky died on August 3, 1968, of prostate cancer in