Stalin's General (21 page)

Zhukov's reward for the victory at Yel'nya was another important assignment. Throughout the battle Stalin had been urging him to come to Moscow for consultations but Zhukov demurred on grounds that he needed to stay close to his troops. By the time Zhukov met Stalin on September 11 the Soviet dictator had a pressing need for his services in a completely different zone of the battlefield. Leningrad, surrounded and besieged, was in imminent danger of falling to the Germans. Stalin needed someone with the will and the skill to stiffen and inspire the defense of the Soviet Union's second city and Zhukov fit the job description.

STALIN'S RELATIONSHIP WITH ZHUKOV HAD THE SAME FOUNDATION AS THE
Soviet dictator's relations with all his senior military: their loyalty and competence and his trust in them. Throughout his military career Zhukov had been loyal and respectful of his superiors even if not to all his subordinates and peers. His respect for Stalin's authority was reinforced by the panegyrics of the dictator's personality cult—to which Zhukov, like everyone else, subscribed, albeit moderately in his case. But more important was the force of Stalin's personality. Stalin dominated everyone who came into close contact with him, and Zhukov was no exception.

Besides their professional relationship Stalin and Zhukov had a lot else in common. Both were from a peasant background. Both their fathers had been cobblers and prone to inflict corporal punishment on their sons. The two men's mothers had striven to ensure their sons received a good education. Both men were sentimental about their own children (in Stalin's case, more so in relation to his daughter than his two sons). The Russian Civil War had been a brutal, formative experience for Zhukov and Stalin, albeit with the former as a lowly soldier and the latter as a high-ranking political commissar. Although Stalin had some intellectual pretensions he, like Zhukov, saw himself primarily as a
praktik
—a practical man of action. Both were single-minded in pursuit of their goals and as ruthless as necessary to achieve them. Politically, Stalin and Zhukov shared not only their communist
ideology but also a profound patriotic commitment to the defense of the Soviet Union as the protector of all the nationalities and ethnic groups—more than 100 of them—that constituted the multinational state that was the USSR. It was this “Soviet” patriotism that united the Georgian Stalin and the Russian Zhukov. In the case of Hitler and the Nazis they faced not merely a foreign invader but one who sought to exterminate millions of Soviet citizens (especially the Jews) and to enslave the rest.

Zhukov's relationship with Stalin began to evolve when he became chief of the General Staff in January 1941 but was forged fully only in the crucible of war. The war showed Stalin that Zhukov could be relied upon in even the direst circumstances; that he would not panic under pressure; and that he had the talent and determination to rise to the challenge of dealing with a supreme emergency.

What Zhukov thought about Stalin is evident from a chapter in his memoirs devoted to the functioning of the Stavka (HQ) of the Supreme Command. Zhukov's primary aim in writing the chapter—added to his memoirs when he revised them in the early 1970s—was to defend the reputation of the wartime leadership of the Soviet Supreme Command, not least his own role as deputy supreme commander. But he also wanted to refute the critique of Stalin's war leadership inaugurated by Khrushchev in what became known as his Secret Speech to the 20th Party Congress in 1956. Zhukov succeeded brilliantly—his remarkable pen portrait of Stalin as supreme commander became one of the key texts in the rehabilitation of the dictator's reputation as a successful warlord.

In the course of the war Zhukov met Stalin in his Kremlin office more than 120 times, a very large number of meetings considering that he spent most of his time at the Front.
¹
Many additional meetings took place at one or other of Stalin's country dachas near Moscow. When he didn't see Stalin in person Zhukov talked to him on the phone or via telegraph, sometimes daily. Not surprisingly, Zhukov came to know Stalin quite well during the war. “I had never associated with him as closely before, and initially felt a little awkward in his presence.… In the early period of our association Stalin did not have much to say to me. I felt that he was sizing me up most attentively and had no fixed opinion of me.… But as experience accumulated I became
more confident, more bold in expressing my ideas. I noticed, too, that Stalin began to give them more heed.”

Many of Zhukov's encounters with Stalin took place at night. The dictator was a late riser and he generally worked through to the early hours of the morning. His punishing work routine of fifteen-to-sixteen-hour days was as tough on his subordinates as it was on himself. The Soviet leader required briefing by the General Staff two or three times a day and he never took important operational decisions without consulting the relevant members of his Supreme Command, especially the chief of the General Staff, and from August 1942 his new deputy supreme commander, Zhukov. During briefings Stalin would pace up and down the room smoking a pipe or Russian cigarettes, stopping now and again to scrutinize the situation maps. Zhukov recalled: “as a rule he was businesslike and calm; everybody was permitted to state his opinion.… He had the knack of listening to people attentively, but only if they spoke to the point.… Taciturn himself, he did not like talkative people.… I realized during the war that Stalin was not the kind of man who objected to sharp questions or to anyone arguing with him. If someone says the reverse, he is a liar.” Zhukov rated Stalin's military talent and judgment highly:

Zhukov most liked Stalin's general informality and lack of pretension. The dictator rarely laughed out loud but he had a sense of humor and liked a good joke. On the other hand Stalin could be willful, impetuous, secretive, and highly irritable at times: “And when he was
angry he stopped being objective, changed abruptly before one's eyes, grew paler still, and his gaze became heavy and hard. Not many were the brave men who stood up to Stalin's anger and parried his attacks.” Nonetheless, Zhukov was besotted rather than fearful and, like so many others, under Stalin's spell:

In post-Soviet versions of his memoirs and in other material that has come to light, Zhukov was a little more critical of Stalin than in his officially published memoirs but Zhukov's positive view of Stalin as a great warlord remained.
³

What Stalin thought about Zhukov is more difficult to know since the dictator gave little away about his private thoughts. Certainly he had a fondness for many of his generals. He admired their professionalism and was willing to learn from them, even though he had pretensions to great generalship himself. The best guess is that Stalin respected Zhukov more than most of his inner circle, many of whom were prone to fawning. Equally, Stalin was suspicious of anyone like Zhukov who displayed too much independence of mind, even when their loyalty was beyond question. Stalin's attitude to Zhukov is perhaps best summed up by his treatment of him when the two men fell out after the war: banishment for lack of deference followed by rapid rehabilitation once Zhukov had proved his loyalty again.

Zhukov's first assignment from Stalin after his victory at Yel'nya was to go to the defense of Leningrad. When the Germans first invaded the USSR their main goal was not to reach Moscow but to capture Leningrad. Only after Army Group North had seized Leningrad were German forces to be concentrated against Moscow. Initially, all went
according to plan. Soviet defenses on the Lithuanian border were easily penetrated and within three weeks the Germans had advanced 300 miles along a wide front and occupied much of the Baltic region. But the pace of the German advance slowed as the Red Army's resistance stiffened. Not until early September 1941 did the Germans reach the outskirts of Leningrad. At this point Hitler made Moscow his main target instead and decided that rather than take Leningrad by storm, the city should be besieged, its defenses worn down, and its population starved into submission. The Germans were confident the city would fall sooner rather than later. On September 22, 1941, Hitler issued the following directive on Leningrad: “the Führer has decided to erase the city of Petersburg from the face of the earth. I have no interest in the further existence of this large population point after the defeat of Soviet Russia.… We propose to closely blockade the city and erase it from the earth by means of artillery fire of all caliber and continuous bombardment from the air.” (See
Map 9
: The German Advance to Leningrad, June–September 1941
.)

For the Soviets the threat posed to Leningrad was even more dangerous than their contemporaneous collapse in Ukraine. If Leningrad fell the way would be open for the Germans to make a flanking attack on Moscow from the north. Losing the Soviet Union's second city would also deprive the country of a pivotal center of defense production and the negative psychological impact of the cradle of the Bolshevik Revolution falling to the Nazis would have been immense.

Stavka was not pleased with the performance of its Northwestern Front. On July 10 Zhukov—at that time still chief of the General Staff—admonished the Front command for failing “to punish commanders who have not fulfilled your orders and who have without authorization withdrawn from defensive positions. Such a liberal attitude by you towards cowards cannot be defended … go immediately to forward units and deal with the cowards and criminals on the spot.”
⁴
That same day Stavka created a multi-Front Northwestern Direction to replace the Northwestern Front. Included in the new Direction was the Northern Front, which faced the Finns north of Leningrad, Finland having joined in the German attack in June 1941 in order to restore territorial losses sustained during the Winter War of 1939–1940.
⁵
Placed in command of the new Direction was Kliment Voroshilov,
the former defense commissar. His orders from Stavka were to counterattack in the Sol'tsy, Staraya Russa, and Dno areas near Lake Il'men southeast of Novgorod. Voroshilov's attacks in mid-July and again in early August held up the German advance but did not halt it and Stavka became increasingly dissatisfied with his command, too. On August 29 the Northwestern Direction was merged with the Leningrad Front, commanded by General M. M. Popov. Voroshilov was named commander of a new Leningrad Front, with Popov as his chief of staff. But Stalin was still not happy, and the strain of constant defeats and retreats since June 22 was beginning to tell on him. That same day he sent a telegram to his foreign commissar, Vyacheslav Molotov, who was in Leningrad at the head of a high-powered political commission sent to examine the city's defenses: