Stalin's General (47 page)

Without access to the unexpurgated text of Zhukov's original manuscript it is difficult to gauge the full extent of the changes wrought by the process of censorship, but certainly hundreds of pages and entire passages were excised or significantly altered. There were also many additions. One notorious example was the inclusion of a passage in which Zhukov stated that he would have liked to have been able to consult political commissar Colonel Leonid Brezhnev while on a trip to the north Caucasus in April 1943 but unfortunately the future Soviet leader was not available. “The wise will understand,” daughter Maria recalled Zhukov saying—meaning that marshals did not seek the counsel of colonels. According to Maria, it was her mother who convinced Zhukov that “no one would believe he had written these lines and that if he did not make a compromise, the book would not come out at all.”
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The officially sanctioned memoirs were finally published in April 1969. Although the plan was to print half a million copies paper shortages meant that only 100,000 could be printed followed by a further print run of 200,000 in a format that required fewer pages.
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These soon sold out and eventually millions more copies of the memoirs would be printed and sold, not only in the Soviet Union, but throughout the world and in numerous translations. The Soviet public was wildly enthusiastic and Zhukov received thousands of letters from readers offering congratulations, corrections, and suggestions for future editions.
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The official reception was more muted, at least initially; in April 1969 the party Central Committee issued a directive that no reviews, commentaries, or excerpts from Zhukov's memoirs were to be published.
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In July, however,
Kommunist
published a long and very positive review by Vasilevsky, who wisely played down Zhukov's personal exploits, emphasizing instead his patriotism and his loyalty to the Communist Party and the Soviet state. The article was entitled “Sovetskomu Soldatu Posvyashchaetsya” (Dedicated to the Soviet Soldier)—the same dedication that adorned Zhukov's memoirs. Another highly positive review appeared in
Voenno-Istoricheskii Zhurnal
in November.
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Although publication of his memoirs was a triumph for Zhukov it came at an increasingly difficult time in his personal life. In December 1967 Galina had an operation that revealed she had cancer and the prognosis was that she had five years to live. That same month Alexandra died of a stroke. Zhukov was ill and unable to attend the funeral but he locked himself in his room for a whole day.
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As if these were not troubles enough, in January 1968 Zhukov himself suffered a severe stroke while resting at a sanatorium at Arkhangel'skoe outside Moscow that left him paralyzed on his left side. He was incapacitated for a month. After his recovery his speech remained slurred and he could walk only with assistance. In December 1968 Zhukov wrote to Brezhnev asking if he could swap his fifteen-year-old Zil for a more comfortable Chaika. He had to visit the clinic for treatment quite often, he explained to Brezhnev, and the Chaika was a better-constructed car that would give him a “softer ride.”
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What action Brezhnev took in relation to Zhukov's request is not known.

Galina's illness and Zhukov's incapacity forced the couple to spend long periods apart while Galina was being treated at different clinics. “Day and night, I think only about you,” he wrote to her in July 1973. In November 1973 Galina's condition took a turn for the worse and she died on November 13 at the age of forty-seven. Zhukov was unable to get to see her in the hospital before her death. Galina was buried in the Novodevichy cemetery, a famous Moscow resting place for many of the most prominent figures of the Soviet era, including Khrushchev, who had died in 1971. Zhukov attended the funeral walking with the aid of a cane and the assistance of Bagramyan. “Such a blow I will not survive,” he told Maria.
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But he did survive and indeed completed revisions for the second edition of his memoirs, incorporating corrections and adding new chapters based on reviews and reader feedback: the siege of Leningrad, the Yel'nya battle, and the workings of Stavka and the Soviet High Command. To help Zhukov with the Stavka chapter the publishers drafted in the historian Evgeny Tsvetaev, who had worked with General Shtemenko on his memoirs. Preparation of the second edition
began in 1973 but progress was slow because of Zhukov's poor health and the doctor's orders that he should work only an hour a day. Tsvetaev wanted Zhukov to provide a detailed account of the workings of Stavka but Zhukov insisted he was writing a memoir, not a scientific tract. The result was a compromise—a chapter that combined elements of memoir with a general description of the operation of Stavka. Even so, it was a chapter that was destined to become a key text for historians seeking to understand how the Soviet High Command operated during the war.
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Despite his and Galina's poor health Zhukov continued to respond to requests for interviews and articles. In February 1972, for example, TASS asked for an article that would be published in the country's youth papers on February 23—Soviet Army Day. “Defence of the motherland and service in the Soviet army,” Zhukov told his young readers, “is a sacred obligation, an honourable and noble duty, a matter of honour and pride.” In December 1972 Zhukov contributed the preface to a book by a group of war veterans: “Years pass. Many war veterans are no longer with us. Old age is catching up with others. But veterans never give up. They retain their youthful spirit, they remain indefatigable.”
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It was an apt epitaph for Zhukov himself, whose struggle with bad health and old age was nearing its end. After Galina's death Zhukov's own health deteriorated and he did not live to see the publication of the second edition of his memoirs. He died in the Kremlin hospital on June 18, 1974. His revised memoirs were published just a few weeks later.

Zhukov's funeral was the biggest state occasion in the Soviet Union since the death of Stalin. Among those in attendance were his four daughters—Era, Ella, Margarita, and Maria—the one and only occasion they were seen together.

The death notice was published in
Pravda
on June 20. Heading the long list of signatures by senior Soviet political and military leaders was party general secretary Brezhnev. The announcement stated:

A second eulogy, written by Vasilevsky, was published in
Pravda
the next day. He paid particular tribute to Zhukov's operational art—his ability to plan, prepare, and execute large-scale military operations. “Possessing great military talent Georgi Konstantinovich excelled in the ability to understand complex strategic situations and make the correct analysis of developing events.… In preparing plans for operations he always took a creative, original approach.”
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As Zhukov lay in state in the Central House of the Soviet army in Moscow thousands of citizens queued to pay their respects. When his ashes were interred in the Kremlin wall on June 21 the chief pallbearer was Brezhnev and at the memorial service that followed the main speaker was Minister of Defense Grechko.
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More ambivalent feelings about Zhukov were apparent in “On the Death of Zhukov” (1974)—a poem by the exiled Soviet writer Joseph Brodsky:

As is so often the case, Zhukov achieved an even greater reputation in death than he had latterly enjoyed in life. His funeral marked the beginning of a Zhukov cult that lauded his status as the greatest Soviet general of the Second World War. Although the cult was kept somewhat under control by Brezhnev, Zhukov was celebrated in official historiography, in numerous documentary films about the war, and even in a specially produced book about his exploits produced for children and young adults.
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His birth village was renamed Zhukov in his honor and in 1980 a newly discovered planetoid was named after him, too.

In the late 1980s two collections of reminiscences about Zhukov were published.
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Among the contributors were Era and Ella, who both depicted a devoted husband and a loving father, a family man who did his best to overcome the difficulties his military career imposed on his personal life. The two sisters also published letters written by their father to them and to their mother, showing that in private Zhukov could be attentive, caring, and gentle, notwithstanding his professional persona as a tough commander.

Equally fervent in support of her father was Maria, who inherited his private papers when Zhukov died. A number of files were taken away by party officials and deposited in state archives but among the remaining papers were the original manuscripts of his memoirs. Most of the material excluded by the party censors was only of scholarly interest but included, for example, an extensive discussion by Zhukov of the prewar purge of the Soviet armed forces, including an account of how he almost became one of Stalin's victims himself. The original draft of the memoirs also showed Zhukov was more critical of Stalin than the officially approved version published in 1969 and revised in 1974. The tenth edition of Zhukov's memoirs, published in 1990 with Maria's support, incorporated a large amount of the excluded material and the eleventh edition published two years later included even
more.
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This new version of the memoirs put some distance between Zhukov and Stalin.

Another important event shaping Zhukov's image in the 1980s was the posthumous publication in 1987 of Konstantin Simonov's “Notes Towards a Biography of G. K. Zhukov.” The famous Soviet writer had died in 1979 and the notes were based on meetings and conversations he had with Zhukov from the late 1930s through the mid-1960s. Simonov's treatment of Zhukov focused on the person rather than the general, in particular on how he had coped emotionally with the travails of his postwar career. The book's overall effect humanized Zhukov and redrew the Khrushchevite picture of him as an egotistical brute. Simonov showed Zhukov as emotionally vulnerable as well as tough-minded, self-reflective as well as self-confident, strong-willed but flexible to change if experience warranted.
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Another influential publication of the late 1980s—the era of Mikhail Gorbachev, glasnost, and more openness in the USSR about the Soviet past—was a series of articles on Zhukov by Lieutenant General N. G. Pavlenko entitled “Reflections on the Fate of a Commander.” Pavlenko, a former editor of
Voenno-Istoricheskii Zhurnal
, had been instrumental in getting Zhukov published again in 1965. Like Simonov, Pavlenko highlighted the injustice of the party's postwar treatment of Zhukov, not only during his periods of exile under Stalin and Khrushchev but the failure to rehabilitate him fully during the Brezhnev era. One example of ill treatment cited by Pavlenko was Zhukov's exclusion from the 24th Party Congress in 1971, even though he had been elected to attend as a delegate, because of the fear that his popularity at the congress would outshine Brezhnev's.
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When the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, post-Soviet Russia needed new heroes to replace the icons of the discredited communist regime. Zhukov fit the bill perfectly. In the late 1980s he had been successfully reinvented as an independent figure whose patriotism and professionalism were seen as more significant than his loyalty to Stalin and the Soviet system. He was the hero of the Great Patriotic War, a war that the vast majority of Russians still considered sacred. He was also an authentically, ethnically
Russian
hero. As his daughter Era put it, Zhukov “was completely Russian by nature. He loved everything Russian: land and people, music and arts, customs and food.”
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Zhukov's
specifically Russian identity was important to the post-Soviet regime, which replaced socialism with nationalism as the legitimizing foundation of the state.

An early sign that Zhukov was destined for celebrity status in the new Russia was the striking of a commemorative ruble adorned with his image. In May 1994 Boris Yeltsin, then Russian president, issued two further decrees in relation to Zhukov. The first directed that a memorial to Zhukov be built in time for the fiftieth anniversary of victory in the Great Patriotic War in May 1995. The second created two new military decorations—a Zhukov Medal and an Order of Zhukov. The memorial—a large statue by the sculptor V. M. Klykov and architect U. Grigoriev depicting Zhukov riding his horse at the 1945 Victory Parade—was finished in time for the anniversary and duly erected at the main entrance to Red Square where it remains as a major attraction for Russian and foreign tourists. On the 100th anniversary of his birth in 1996 the boundaries of Zhukov village were extended and the area upgraded to town status and a museum in his honor opened. In 1999 the Yeltsin government published the report of a presidential commission exonerating Zhukov of all charges leveled against him by Khrushchev in 1957. It also resolved to publish the records of the Central Committee plenum of October 1957 at which Zhukov had confronted and replied to his Khrushchevite accusers.
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