Stalin's General (29 page)

It was a brilliantly prescient analysis of the next great battle of the Soviet-German war. At Moscow in 1941 the German war machine had ground to a halt in the face of dogged defense and a determined counteroffensive. At Stalingrad in 1942 the Soviets turned the tide of the war in their favor by a brilliant encirclement maneuver. Both these battles began with German offensives and ended with Red Army counteroffensives that dramatically turned the tables. The same was to happen at Kursk. Zhukov played a critical role in the Moscow and Stalingrad battles and was destined to star again at Kursk. One key to his success was his growing prowess as a high-level military commander. But equally important was Stalin's enduring faith in him, which survived the setbacks of Mars, Polar Star, and other failed operations. When Zhukov made the cover of
Time
magazine in December 1942 the headline could not have been more appropriate: “Stalin's Liubimets”—Stalin's favorite.

FIGHTING THE WAR LEFT LITTLE TIME FOR ZHUKOV'S FAMILY LIFE. IN AUGUST
1941 his wife, Alexandra, and daughters Era and Ella were evacuated from Moscow to Kuibyshev, a city 500 miles southeast of the capital that was the destination of many government officials' families that summer. They were joined there by Zhukov's mother and by his sister, Maria, who had been forced to flee their home village of Strelkovka, occupied by the Germans in autumn 1941.

The Zhukov family did not return to Moscow until 1943. During the intervening period there was only one family reunion—a New Year's celebration at the Perkhushkin headquarters of Zhukov's Western Front in January 1942. The family flew from Kuibyshev overnight, recalled Ella. “In the little house where Father lived there was a fir tree and a table with loads of sweets, or so it seemed to me. Actually there weren't so many, it just seemed a lot after Kuibyshev where we never saw any sweets. But, above all, there was the holiday atmosphere. This happiness, and Father's elation, was the result of the great success [of the Moscow counteroffensive].”
¹

After their return to now secure Moscow, the family would talk to Zhukov on the telephone and see him when he visited the capital, which in 1943–1944 was not very often since he spent so much time at the Front. Zhukov's absence from home notwithstanding, “we did not feel cut off from Father or from his big and important work,” recalled Era.
²

According to Era, her father did not write home much during the war and when he did the letters were short. But the few letters that survived do reveal a little of the man behind the commander who took decisions and gave orders that resulted in the deaths of millions of people.

On January 8, 1943, Zhukov wrote to Alexandra:

Complaints about his health seem to have been a theme of Zhukov's correspondence with his wife. On October 5, 1943, he wrote to her:

In a similar vein, on October 23, 1943, he wrote:

Perhaps with one eye on the security officials who might be reading his mail, Zhukov could also be more formal and constrained in his correspondence. On February 10, 1944, he wrote to Alexandra:

This letter was signed “Your G. Zhukov” rather the more familiar diminutive “Zhorzh.”
⁴

During the war Zhukov resumed contact with Margarita, his daughter by Maria Volkhova. When Margarita's stepfather was killed
at Stalingrad and her stepbrother went missing in action (he later died of his wounds), Maria appealed to Zhukov for help. This led to an exchange of affectionate correspondence with his daughter and when Margarita fell seriously ill from emaciation and exhaustion Zhukov sent his Douglas DC-3 to take her to a children's sanatorium run by the military and six months later flew her home again.
⁵

The people who spent the most time with Zhukov during the war were the members of his personal support team—adjutants, drivers, chefs, bodyguards, and medical staff.
⁶
His head of security was Nikolai Bedov, who remembered the great strain that Zhukov was under, especially during the battle of Moscow when he sometimes went several nights without sleep and kept himself awake only with the aid of strong coffee. On his travels to the front line Zhukov frequently came under bombardment, recalled Bedov, and after the battle of Moscow he became a German assassination target and traveled under an assumed name. Bedov was emphatic that Zhukov was never depressed, not even during the darkest days of defeat in 1941–1942: “the more acute and dangerous the situation, the more controlled and energetic was Zhukov.” Bedov agreed that Zhukov could be rough on subordinates but felt this was justified by wartime conditions. Asked what qualities Zhukov most admired, Bedov replied: “Courage, decisiveness, truthfulness and, above all, exactitude in the appraisal of complex conditions.”
⁷

Another of Zhukov's aides was Alexander Buchin, a driver. Buchin calculated he traveled some 170,000 kilometers with Zhukov during the war and published a memoir under that title. One of the coworkers mentioned in Buchin's memoir was Lida Zakharova, a medical aide, who joined the team during the battle of Moscow. A nicer, kinder person would be hard to find, recalled Buchin. Shy and retiring, Lida found Zhukov's rudeness and loudness hard to take and was sometimes reduced to tears by him. But she did not complain and stayed on.
⁸

After his memoir was published, Buchin elaborated on Zhukov's relationship with Lida, claiming that Zhukov, attracted by her shyness, had an affair with her. They were inseparable, claimed Buchin, and given to overt displays of affection. After the war, when Zhukov
was banished by Stalin, Lida followed him to the Odessa Military District and then to Sverdlovsk when he was transferred to the Urals Military District. Only when he fell in love with another young woman—Dr. Galina Semonova, who eventually became his second wife and the mother of his fourth daughter, Maria—did Zhukov's relationship with Lida end. Subsequently, Lida married and moved to Moscow, where Zhukov helped find her a flat. According to Era, her mother, Alexandra Dievna, knew about the affair but put up with it because Zhukov was discreet and because “she knew what an interesting man Father was and how the women ran after him.”
⁹

Lida Zakharova's name also came up in a deposition by a former adjutant of Zhukov's, A. S. Semochkin. This was just after the war when the Soviet security apparatus was trying to smear Zhukov. Semochkin made various allegations, including that Zhukov had shown favoritism toward Lida because of their personal relations. In January 1948 Zhukov wrote to the party Central Committee replying to these accusations. With regard to Lida, Zhukov insisted that there was no favoritism; in the work context his relations with her were honorable and honest. He did admit to having an affair with her but denied emphatically that he had carried on with her in public.
¹⁰

During the war it was not uncommon for senior officers of the Red Army to have a “PPZh”—a mobile field wife (
Polevaya Pokhodnaya Zhena
). Zhukov was certainly aware of the practice and did not object to it in principle. In February 1945 Zhukov complained about one of his generals spending too much time with his mistress but on practical, not moral, grounds:

In his memoirs Buchin cited one or two other examples of Zhukov's dalliances, portraying him as a bit of a ladies' man. Given his status, looks, and powerful personality, it is not hard to imagine women's attraction to him. But, as far as we know, only four women (apart from his mother and his daughters) were significant figures in Zhukov's personal life: Alexandra Dievna; Maria Volkhova; Lida Zakharova; and Galina Semonova. It was apparent, too, that Zhukov had an eye for pretty young women. The pattern of his relationships with them suggests also that Zhukov preferred self-effacing, supportive women, who could be trusted not to interfere with his soldiering. Indeed, the complete absence of negative testimony about Zhukov from any of the four women, or from his four daughters, speaks volumes about their devotion to him. In his own way, Zhukov was devoted to them, too, but his military career and service to the Soviet state always came first.

The hearing problem Zhukov alludes to in his letters to Alexandra may have been the result of a close encounter with a mortar during the battle of Kursk in July 1943.
¹²
After Moscow and Stalingrad, Kursk was the third decisive battle of the Soviet-German war. In the case of Kursk Zhukov's contribution was threefold. First, he helped to frame the strategic concept behind the Soviet battle plan; second, he supervised the preparation of the two main Fronts involved in the Kursk operation—the Central and the Voronezh; and third, during the battle itself he acted as Stavka coordinator of the Briansk, Central, Steppe, and Western Fronts.

By April 1943 the spring
Rasputitsa
, the season of bad roads caused by rain and the thawing of the winter ice, had arrived forcing the Red Army onto the defensive. The question Stavka faced was what to do when summer came, when the rains stopped and the roads hardened,
and when offensive action could be resumed. As noted previously, on April 8 Zhukov wrote to Stalin proposing the adoption of a strategic defense posture with the aim of absorbing the next German attack and then launching an all-out offensive.
¹³
S. M. Shtemenko, the General Staff's deputy chief of operations, recalled that when Stalin received Zhukov's report he polled the Front commanders' views on what the Germans' likely next move would be. The consensus backed Zhukov's prediction of a German attack in the Kursk area.
¹⁴
Kursk was at the center of an outward bulge in the Soviet line—a salient—at the junction of the Central and Voronezh Fronts. If the Germans pinched out the Kursk salient they could shorten their defensive line by 150 to 200 miles and free up to twenty divisions for offensive operations. Such an operation would also be a much needed, morale-boosting victory for the Germans after their failure at Stalingrad.