Stalin's General (45 page)

That Zhukov had been replaced by Malinovsky as defense minister was announced to the world even before the plenum in a brief statement on the back page of
Pravda
on October 27.
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On November 3 the Soviet press published the Central Committee resolution “On Improving Party Political Work in the Soviet Army and Navy,” revealing that Zhukov had been sacked because he had pursued a policy of curtailing the work of the party in the armed forces. The resolution criticized the cult of Zhukov's personality and its distorting effect on the “true history” of the Great Patriotic War. The resolution referred also to Zhukov's “adventurism” in foreign policy—presumably an oblique reference to his dispute with Khrushchev over disarmament negotiations with the United States. That same day
Pravda
carried a long article by Konev attacking Zhukov's war record. Konev pointed out that when the Germans attacked in June 1941 Zhukov was chief of the General Staff and should share responsibility for the ensuing debacle. Konev also criticized Zhukov for claiming unwarranted credit for operations such as the Stalingrad counteroffensive and the assault on Berlin. According to Konev the successes of the Great Patriotic War were more the result of the efforts of Front commanders (like himself) than Stalin, Stavka, and Zhukov. And, Konev pointed out, while Zhukov was fond of attacking the Stalin cult Zhukov's purpose was not to critique the cult but to build up his own cult following.
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A few months later Zhukov came across Konev in the street. Zhukov did not want to talk to him but Konev offered him a lift in his car, saying that he had not forgotten their old friendship. Zhukov refused, reminding Konev of his performance at the plenum when he was far from being a friend.
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While there had developed a personality cult around Zhukov since his appointment as minister of defense it was not a development he encouraged. Regarding party-army relations Zhukov's ousting has
often been interpreted as evidence of institutional conflict between the two groups and of his own personal desire to assert the independence of the armed forces. The truth of the matter is both more simple and more complex. At the time and in retrospect Zhukov flatly denied seeking to undermine party control of the armed forces. “For me personally, the word of the party was always the law,” he said later,
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and he went out of his way to praise the role of political commissars and to emphasize the leadership role of the party. Zhukov, it should never be forgotten, was a lifelong communist himself. But he did have a particular view of how the party's control and influence within the armed forces should be exercised. Zhukov had been a strong supporter of
edinonachalie
—one-man command—since the Frunze reforms of the 1920s. Like Frunze, Zhukov believed commanders should be able to control military decision-making without interference from political commissars whose role was propaganda within the armed forces. The guarantee of party control was that the commanders would or should be dedicated communists themselves. Zhukov also urged that commissars be good soldiers as well as good communists.

During Zhukov's tenure at the Ministry of Defense there were numerous initiatives and instructions designed to strengthen both
edinonachalie
and the effectiveness of political work in the armed forces. For example, an instruction on the organization of the party in the armed forces issued in April 1957 had one line forbidding party meetings from criticizing the orders of commanders but the remainder of the text was devoted to strengthening the position of communists in the military, including in relation to the political behavior of professional officers.
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Many of the policies on party work in the armed forces implemented by Zhukov predated his term as minister of defense. When Zhukov issued a decree in May 1956 on improving military discipline through strengthening one-man command he was ordering the implementation of a policy that had been adopted in 1951—during the Stalin era.
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The accusation that Zhukov was seeking to undermine the party's role within the armed forces was a politically powerful pretext for removing him from office but the charge had no substance.

Zhukov believed that Khrushchev's decision to cut him adrift was mainly personal and was prompted by Zhukov's independence of
mind and his refusal to pander to the growing cult of Khrushchev's personality. Khrushchev also feared that Zhukov, like Eisenhower, aspired to higher political office. “I never wanted state power—I am a military man and the army was my business,” said Zhukov.
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Zhukov later claimed he saw Khrushchev's attack coming, but there is no contemporaneous evidence to support this assertion. All the signs are that in 1957 Zhukov was afflicted by the same combination of political naïveté and personal hubris he displayed when Stalin purged him in 1946.

As soon as Zhukov's fall from grace became known in the West speculation was rife as to the causes and consequences of his disgrace. One of the most accurate of the near-contemporary analyses was a CIA briefing paper dating from June 1959, which concluded: “The causes of the Zhukov ouster appear to have been his devotion to his duty as he saw it, his lack of political tact, and his insistence on genuinely assuming the theoretical prerogatives of a full member of the party presidium and USSR minister.”
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The most prescient comment was that of the Indian ambassador in Moscow, K.P.S. Menon, who recorded in his diary on November 5, 1957:

ZHUKOV RECOVERED FROM THE ORDEAL OF THE OCTOBER PLENUM BY GOING
home and sleeping. “I was determined not to be a victim,” he told Konstantin Simonov, “not to break down, not to fall apart, not to lose my will to live.… Returning home, I took a sleeping pill. I slept for several hours. I got up. I ate. I took a sleeping pill. Again I fell asleep. I got up again, took a sleeping pill and fell asleep. This went on for 15 days.… In my dreams I relived everything that had been tormenting me.… I disputed. I proved my point. I grieved—all in my sleep. Then, after 15 days, I went fishing.”
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Zhukov's distress was compounded by the continuing complications of his private life. Following his dismissal as defense minister his wife found out about his affair with Galina. Alexandra had known about Galina from her time in Sverdlovsk but did not know she had moved to Moscow. Nor did Alexandra know about Galina's daughter, Maria; indeed, she only found out about Maria four years later when Zhukov needed the permission of his legal wife to officially adopt Maria as his daughter. Zhukov responded to his personal crisis by swapping his flat on Granovsky Street for two smaller apartments—one for Alexandra and one for daughter Ella—while he himself went to live at his dacha with Galina and Maria. Neither Ella nor Era knew about their parents' de facto separation until the couple divorced in 1965. When they did find out they took their mother's side and did not
speak to Zhukov for more than a year.
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Then, in 1966, Zhukov married Galina.

When Khrushchev dismissed Zhukov as defense minister he promised to find him other work but the promise came to nothing and in February 1958 the Presidium retired Zhukov from the armed forces, albeit on comfortable terms by Soviet standards. He was awarded a good pension, generous medical aid and security support, and a small car for personal use. He was also allowed to keep his flat and dacha and to wear military uniform if he so desired.
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Less welcome was the surveillance of the KGB. From their reports we know that in retirement and in the privacy of his own home Zhukov was prone to criticize the Khrushchev regime. And not just at home; in September 1959 the KGB reported to Khrushchev that at the funeral of General V. V. Krukov (the husband of the singer Lidiya Ruslanova) Zhukov, in conversation with other mourners, had criticized party policy on military pensions and said that the growing authority of political officers was weakening the armed forces.

In May 1963 the KGB reported that Zhukov described as a “toady” Marshal Malinovsky, his successor as defense minister. He criticized the amount of money spent on the Soviet space program, and the gifts lavished on visiting foreign VIPs, something that would not have happened in Stalin's time. Zhukov was scathing about the multivolume official Khrushchevite
History of the Great Patriotic War
that began publication in 1960,
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which claimed that western Allied aid to the Soviet Union during the war had not been important. According to Zhukov, however, American supplies enabled the USSR to build up its reserves of equipment and to switch production to essential items such as tanks. The KGB official concluded his report by noting that Zhukov and family were due to go on holiday soon, presenting an opportunity to find out what he was writing in his memoirs.

This particular KGB report touched a nerve. In June 1963 the Presidium resolved to send a delegation headed by Leonid Brezhnev to warn Zhukov that if he did not desist from such criticism he would be
expelled from the party and arrested. But when Brezhnev visited Zhukov later that month the marshal was unrepentant. He was unable to accept the resolution passed by the October 1957 plenum, he told Brezhnev, because he had not been given an opportunity to comment on it. He was particularly incensed by the resolution's charge of adventurism: “When and where was I an adventurist? In relation to what was I an adventurist? I have been in the party for 43 years, I have fought in four wars, I have sacrificed my health for the motherland and yet somehow and somewhere I have committed adventurist acts? Where are the facts? Such facts there are not.” Zhukov denied he had criticized the party in conversation with others and demanded an opportunity to confront his accusers. On the other hand, Zhukov pledged his eternal loyalty to the party and reassured Brezhnev that he had nothing to fear from what he was writing in his memoirs.
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Zhukov had begun writing his memoirs in the late 1950s in the context of a continuing campaign to discredit both his historical reputation and his personal integrity. The first salvo of criticism had been fired by Konev in his post-plenum
Pravda
article of November 1957 that attacked various aspects of Zhukov's war record. In 1958 an authoritative article by General E. A. Boltin, a leading Soviet military historian, criticized Zhukov for his failure when chief of the General Staff in 1941 to make adequate preparations for war. His failings as chief of the General Staff also featured in the second volume of the official history of the Great Patriotic War, with Timoshenko, the people's commissar for defense in 1941, accused alongside Zhukov. More damaging still was Malinovsky's accusation at the 21st Party Congress in 1959 that Zhukov had “Bonapartist” tendencies—namely, aspiring to supreme power—a charge repeated by Khrushchev at the 22nd Party Congress in 1961.
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These very public attacks on his reputation paved the way for military memoirists to criticize Zhukov's performance during the war. Typically, they characterized him as ignorant of sophisticated military matters and bullying in his dealings with fellow officers.
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In February 1964 Zhukov wrote to Khrushchev to complain that memoirists and historians were depicting him not just as a
Bonapartist, but as an adventurist, a revisionist, and someone who was hostile to party criticism of the armed forces.
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For Zhukov the deafening silence of many historical publications regarding his role in the war was as galling as the frontal attacks. A 1958 study of the blockade of Leningrad omitted any mention of his crucial role in defending the city in September 1941. A 1960 study of the East Pomeranian operation did not even name Zhukov as the commander of the 1st Belorussian Front—one of the main fronts involved in liquidating a major German threat to the impending Soviet assault on Berlin. The first volume of the
History of the Great Patriotic War
acknowledged that Zhukov was in command at Khalkhin-Gol but gave him no credit for the Red Army's defeat of the Japanese. In 1962 Marshal V. D. Sokolovsky, former chief of the General Staff and Zhukov's deputy when he was defense minister, published the definitive Soviet textbook
Military Strategy
. Sokolovsky had served alongside Zhukov in many different capacities during and after the war but his former boss did not figure at all in the section dealing with the development of Soviet strategic thinking during the Second World War. Zhukov was no great strategic thinker but his practice of generalship during the Great Patriotic War did contribute greatly to the refinement of Soviet operational art. Nor did Sokolovsky mention Zhukov's pronouncements on military strategy when he was defense minister in 1955–1957—a key period in the Soviet transition from conventional to nuclear concepts of warfare. In 1964 Sokolovsky edited a book on the battle of Moscow that barely mentioned Zhukov, despite the fact that he had served as Zhukov's chief of staff during that battle and well knew the central role Zhukov had played at this turning point of the war. In 1965 Rokossovsky was the editor-in-chief of a definitive text on the battle of Stalingrad that limited its recognition of Zhukov's role in events to the statement that he had served as Stalin's Stavka representative during the battle.
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By this time, Zhukov must have felt a bit like the Duke of Wellington, who in old age remarked that when reading some historians' accounts of Waterloo he began to wonder whether he himself had been present at the battle!
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