Stalin's General (4 page)

In March 1953 Stalin died and Zhukov was a prominent member of the military guard of honor at the dictator's state funeral.
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Zhukov's appointment as deputy minister of defense was among the first announcements made by the new, post-Stalin Soviet government. Zhukov's rehabilitation continued apace with his appointment in February 1955 as minister of defense by Khrushchev, Stalin's successor as party leader. In July 1955 Zhukov attended the great power summit in Geneva of Britain, France, the Soviet Union, and the United States—the first such gathering since the end of the war. There he met and
conversed with President Dwight Eisenhower, with whom he had served in Berlin just after the war. “Could the friendship of two old soldiers,” wondered
Time
magazine, “provide the basis for a genuine easing of tensions between the U.S. and Russia?”
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As minister of defense, Zhukov emerged as a prominent public figure in the Soviet Union, second only in importance to Khrushchev. In June 1957 Zhukov played a pivotal role in resisting an attempt to oust Khrushchev from the leadership by a hard-line faction led by Vyacheslav Molotov, the former foreign minister. Unfortunately for Zhukov his bravura performance in the struggle against Molotov turned him into a political threat in Khrushchev's eyes. In October 1957 Zhukov was accused of plotting to undermine the role of the Communist Party in the armed forces. Among Zhukov's most active accusers were many of the same generals and marshals he had served with during the war. Khrushchev sacked Zhukov as minister of defense and in March 1958 he was retired from the armed forces at the relatively young age of sixty-one.

During the remainder of the Khrushchev era Zhukov suffered the same fate of excision from the history books he had experienced during his years of exile under Stalin. In 1960, for example, the party began to publish a massive multivolume history of the Great Patriotic War that barely mentioned Zhukov while greatly exaggerating Khrushchev's role.
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Another expression of Zhukov's disgrace was his isolation from the outside world. When American author Cornelius Ryan visited the USSR in 1963 to research his book on the battle of Berlin, Zhukov was the only Soviet marshal he was prohibited from seeing.
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Zhukov took solace in writing his memoirs. His authorial role model was Winston Churchill, whose memoir-history of the Second World War he had read when a restricted-circulation Russian translation was published in the USSR in the 1950s. Churchill's motto in composing that work was that history would bear him out—because he was going to write the history! Zhukov seems to have harbored similar sentiments and his memoirs were designed not only to present his own point of view but to answer and refute his Khrushchevite critics, even if that meant skewing the historical record in his own favor.

While Khrushchev continued to rule the Soviet Union there was no chance Zhukov's memoirs would be published. When his daughter
Ella asked him why he bothered he said he was writing for the desk drawer. In October 1964, however, Khrushchev was ousted from power and there began a process of rehabilitating Zhukov as a significant military figure. Most notably, the Soviet press began to publish Zhukov's articles again, including his accounts of the battles of Moscow, Stalingrad, Kursk, and Berlin.

Zhukov's second rehabilitation rekindled interest in him in the West, which had faded somewhat after he was ousted as defense minister. In 1969 the American journalist and historian Harrison E. Salisbury published an unauthorized translation of Zhukov's articles in a book called
Marshal Zhukov's Greatest Battles
. In his introduction to the volume Salisbury famously described Zhukov as “the master of the art of mass warfare in the 20th century.”
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Most reviewers agreed. John Erickson, the foremost British authority on the Red Army, writing in
The Sunday Times
, said “the greatest soldier so far produced by the 20th century is Marshal Georgi Zhukov of the Soviet Union. On the very simplest reckoning he is the general who never lost a battle.… For long enough the German generals have had their say, extolling their own skills … now it is the turn of Marshal Zhukov, a belated appearance to be sure but the final word may be his.”
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When Zhukov's memoirs were published in April 1969 it was in a handsome edition with colored maps and hundreds of photographs, including some from Zhukov's personal archive.
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The Soviet public was wildly enthusiastic about the memoirs. The initial print run of 300,000 soon sold out and millions more sales followed, including hundreds of thousands in numerous translations. The memoirs quickly became—and remain—the single most influential personal account of the Great Patriotic War.

Zhukov's triumph in the battle for the historical memory of the Great Patriotic War was not one that he lived to savor. By the time a revised edition of his memoirs was issued in 1974 he was dead.
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In 1968 Zhukov had suffered a severe stroke from which he never really recovered. His health problems were exacerbated by the stress of his second wife, Galina, suffering from cancer. When she died in November 1973 at the age of forty-seven, Zhukov's own health deteriorated rapidly and he passed away aged seventy-seven in the Kremlin hospital in June 1974.

Zhukov's funeral was the biggest such occasion in the Soviet Union since the death of Stalin. As Zhukov lay in state in the Central House of the Soviet army in Moscow thousands came to pay their respects. When his ashes were interred in the Kremlin wall on June 21 the chief pallbearer was party general secretary Leonid Brezhnev and at the memorial service that followed the main speaker was Minister of Defense Marshal A. A. Grechko.
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In Russia Zhukov was—and still is—considered not only the greatest general of the Second World War but the most talented
polkovodets
(military leader) in Russian history. In the West Zhukov's reputation is only slightly less exalted. Of course, Zhukov is not everyone's hero. Even in Russia he has his critics. There are those who consider him an egotistical brute with an inflated military reputation. According to Viktor Suvorov, a former Soviet intelligence officer, whose history books are huge bestsellers in Russia, “all the top military leaders of the country were against Zhukov. The Generals knew, the Marshals knew, that Zhukov was vainglorious. They knew he was both a dreadful and a dull person. They knew he was rude and a usurper. They knew he was in a class of his own as a careerist. They knew he trampled over everyone in his path. They knew of his lust for power and the belief in his own infallibility.”
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As we shall see, Zhukov certainly was a flawed character and his fellow generals did have many negative things to say about him during the course of his career, but Suvorov accentuated only the negatives. Suvorov's critical onslaught had little impact on Zhukov's popularity in Russia. If anything, the continuing controversy only added to Zhukov's allure as a deeply flawed character of epic achievements.

One of the most common criticisms leveled against Zhukov was that he was profligate in expending the lives of the soldiers under his command and was little troubled by the human cost of his victories. Zhukov rejected this vehemently, pointing out that it was easy for armchair critics to claim in retrospect that this battle or that campaign could have been won at the cost of far fewer lives. He was, it is true, an offensive-minded general. But during the war, he learned the virtues of withdrawal and retreat. Indeed, there is plenty of evidence that Zhukov did what he could to conserve his forces and protect his troops. His preparation for battle was always meticulous, and he
would garner as many resources as Stalin allowed. Certainly the troops under Zhukov's command suffered no greater casualty rates than those of other Soviet generals, including those such as Rokossovky, who had a reputation for being a more benign commander. The idea that Zhukov was personally indifferent to the fate of his troops is also mistaken. His sometimes brutal treatment of subordinates was not a matter of personal cruelty but of command style, and when frustrated and dissatisfied, most of his ire was directed at senior commanders—which may explain why some were so critical of Zhukov later.

When Zhukov published his memoirs the Russian archives were closed and little or no independent documentary evidence was available. To write his biography was perforce to gloss his officially sanctioned memoirs, and the result was a lopsided story of his life. The situation began to improve with the publication in the early 1990s of new editions of Zhukov's memoirs incorporating a large amount of material excluded by the Soviet censors in the 1960s.
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After the end of the Soviet regime in 1991 many thousands of documents concerning Zhukov's career were published from Russian military and political archives. More recently these materials have been supplemented by direct archival access to some of Zhukov's private papers.
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Now it is possible to render an account of his life that is grounded in the documentary evidence.

Zhukov's life consists of far more than a chronology of the battles he fought. His story reflects both the triumphs and the tragedies of the Soviet regime he served. Above all, Zhukov was a dedicated communist and a loyal servant of Stalin and the Soviet regime. While his victories over the Nazis served humanity well, they also helped to buttress and legitimate a system that was itself highly authoritarian and harshly repressive. As an ideologue as well as a soldier Zhukov accepted Soviet repression as necessary to progress the communist cause in which he believed. Had he lived to see the end of the Soviet Union it is doubtful that Zhukov would have felt the need to repudiate his beliefs or apologize for his role in saving Stalin's regime. Rather, like many of his generation, he would have argued that he was a patriot as well as a communist and that the Soviet regime—for all its faults—was the only one he could serve on behalf of his country.

Zhukov was neither the unblemished hero of legend nor the unmitigated villain depicted by his detractors. Undoubtedly, he was a great general, a man of immense military talent, and someone blessed with the strength of character necessary to fight and win savage wars. But he also made many mistakes, errors paid for with the blood of millions of people. Because he was a flawed and contradictory character it will not be possible to render a simple verdict on Zhukov's life and career. But it is those flaws and contradictions, as well as his great victories and defeats, that make Zhukov such a fascinating subject.

THE ACCEPTED STORY OF GEORGY ZHUKOV'S CHILDHOOD AND YOUTH READS
like a rags-to-riches fairy tale. Born into a poor peasant family in rural Russia in 1896, the story goes, Zhukov was apprenticed to a furrier at the age of twelve and sent to work in Moscow. Conscripted into the tsar's army in 1915 to fight in the First World War, he was wounded and decorated for bravery. Politicized by the Russian Revolution of 1917, the young Georgy joined the Red Army and then the Communist Party and fought on the victorious Bolshevik side of the Russian Civil War. Selected for officer training, Zhukov then rose through the ranks of the Red Army to become a marshal of the Soviet Union and the most famous Soviet general of the Second World War.

There is a lot of truth in this story and Zhukov's humble origins and stratospheric rise are keys to understanding his lifelong loyalty to communism and to the Soviet system. The regime that Zhukov served all his adult life was brutal, repressive, authoritarian, and at times terroristic. Economically, it was not particularly efficient, although capable of mobilizing resources effectively in emergency situations (such as wars). It was a system that consistently failed to live up to its egalitarian ideals and was ruled by a political party that rarely, if ever, enjoyed the support of a majority of the population. But compared with the old tsarist regime it offered people like Zhukov unprecedented and previously unimaginable opportunities for social mobility. With advancement came material privileges, high social status, and a strong
sense of identity as a member of an elite committed to building a new socialist society. This is not to say that Zhukov's commitment to the Soviet system was merely a matter of career opportunities. For Zhukov and the many others who succeeded in becoming members of the new Soviet elite, there was no contradiction between their ideals and the perks of promotion. Both were seen as integral to progress toward a better world.

The problem with this story of Zhukov's early life is that its main source is Zhukov himself and while he did have a tough childhood by modern standards his background was not as underprivileged as the myth suggests. Because of where he was born and the connections of his family he was a relatively privileged peasant.