Stalin's General (5 page)

Zhukov's story begins on December 1, 1896, in the village of Strelkovka in the Kaluga Province about eighty miles southwest of Moscow.
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His father, Konstantin, was a cobbler and his mother, Ustin'ya, a peasant laborer. The Zhukov family name derived from the Russian word for beetle—“Zhuk.” In Russian slang it can also mean someone who is a bit of a rogue. For both of Zhukov's parents it was a second marriage, each having lost their previous partner to tuberculosis.
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In his memoirs Zhukov recalled that his father and mother were quite old when they married, fifty and thirty-five, respectively. However, according to his youngest daughter, Maria, the church records (not available to Zhukov when he wrote his memoirs) show that Konstantin was forty-one and Ustin'ya twenty-six when they married in 1892.
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But given the physical toll exacted by the harshness of peasant life in Russia it is perhaps not surprising that Zhukov remembered or imagined them to be older than they were.

Georgy was the family's second child, a sister, Maria, having been born two years earlier. When he was five his mother had a second son, Alexei, but the child did not live beyond a year. “My sister and I, let alone Father and Mother, grieved bitterly and often went to his grave-side.”
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All three children were baptized into the Russian Orthodox Church. “Father was by birth, upbringing and outlook an Orthodox person,” claimed Zhukov's daughter Maria, “just like his soldiers,
who said with him before battle, ‘we go with God!' ”
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During the Second World War it was rumored that Zhukov carried an icon in his car. However, when Zhukov's wartime driver was asked about this, he described it as nonsense: “he was a communist … if there had been an icon in the car I would have known about it.”
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His daughter's beliefs notwithstanding, there is no evidence that religious conviction played any part in Zhukov's life.

The Russia into which Zhukov was born was a vast land empire that stretched thousands of miles across ten time zones from Warsaw to Vladivostok, from the Arctic Ocean to the Caspian and Black seas. Within its borders there lived more than 100 nationalities and ethnic groups, although most of the population were Russians like Zhukov. In 1900 the population of Russia was some 140 million, the great majority of whom were peasants.

Zhukov's birthplace in Kaluga Province was located in an area called the Central Industrial Region—Moscow and its surrounding provinces. Unlike the fertile “Black Earth” steppes of southern Russia and Ukraine the topography of the Central Industrial Region was dominated by lakes, rivers, and adjacent forests—good for hunting and fishing—which Zhukov loved—but not so conducive to agriculture. Flax and vegetables, rather than cereals, were the main crops and much of the labor was provided by peasant women like Zhukov's mother, while many peasant men in the Central Industrial Region had nonagricultural jobs and trades, often migrating to Moscow for work, where they found a city brimming with their compatriots from the countryside.

At the beginning of the twentieth century peasant life in Russia was undergoing a cultural revolution as primary education spread to the countryside. Schools were established in most villages of any size. One beneficiary was Zhukov, who took the full three-year primary education course, as opposed to the two-year course favored by most peasants—evidence that, poor though they might be, his parents had aspirations for their son. Education as the route to personal advancement was an attitude that Zhukov retained throughout his life and passed on to his own family.

Despite having a trade Zhukov's father, Konstantin, never had much work. Consequently, Georgy's early childhood was one of
grinding poverty, a common fate of Russian peasants, even those living in the relatively prosperous Central Industrial Region.

In looks Georgy took after his mother and he also inherited her great physical strength—she was apparently capable of carrying a 200-pound sack of grain some distance.
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But emotionally he seems to have been much closer to his father, notwithstanding—or perhaps because of—Konstantin's frequent absences from home in search of work in Moscow: “I adored Father, and he spoiled me. Still, now and again he punished me for some fault, taking it out on me with his belt and demanding an apology. I was stubborn and no matter how hard he thrashed me I bit my lips and never asked for pardon. One day he gave me such a flogging that I ran away from home and spent three days hiding in a neighbor's hemp field.”
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Physical punishment featured also in Zhukov's life as an apprentice, and again when he joined the army, but he did not harbor resentment about his treatment. “A difficult life is life's best school,” he told his daughter Maria many decades later.
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Georgy started school in 1903 at the age of seven and completed successfully the three-year elementary course. To celebrate his success his mother gave him a new shirt, while his father made him a new pair of boots. The family soon decided that Zhukov should go to Moscow to work for his mother's brother, Mikhail, as an apprentice furrier.

Moscow was only four hours from Strelkovka by train (today the journey would take a little over an hour) but to the young Georgy it was a world very different from the one he was used to. When he arrived in summer 1908 he was shocked and confused by the crowds of people, the high buildings (in the village there was nothing taller than two stories) and the frenetic pace of life. On the other hand, Moscow was a city full of people like himself: educated peasant lads with family connections in the city who worked in artisan trades as furriers, tailors, carpenters, and cobblers.

His uncle's business was in the city center, not far from Red Square. Zhukov's working day was twelve hours, including an hour for lunch. The work was hard, and punctuated by beatings of the apprentices by the craftsmen (and women), but Georgy survived quite well, finding time to enroll in night school to continue his education. Disciplined study habits were to stay with Zhukov for the rest of his life. Zhukov
was not an intellectual general. He was rather what the Soviets called a
praktik
—a practical man of action. But he was a good student of military theory, strategy, and tactics and a voracious reader of a wide range of literature. According to his daughter Ella, reading was always at the heart of the Zhukov household and by the time the marshal died he had amassed a library of 20,000 books at his dacha, his country cottage. Unfortunately, most of the collection was pulped when the dacha was repossessed by the state after his death, although a few hundred of his volumes did end up in museum collections.
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Georgy's partner in self-education was cousin Alexander, the boss's son. Together they studied the Russian language, math, geography, and popular science texts. Another subject was German. Alexander was sent to Leipzig by his father to learn German to help with the business. On his periodic trips home to Moscow he found time to teach his cousin the language
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—knowledge that Zhukov was to put to good use during his military career.

By 1914 Zhukov had finished his apprenticeship and was earning good money as a trained furrier with three young boys working under him. A photograph of him and his fellow furriers dating from this time shows affluent, smartly dressed young urbanites seemingly confident of their future. Another picture of Zhukov with Alexander similarly displays a young man who had already transcended his humble origins and successfully adapted to his new urban environment. Were it not for the outbreak of the First World War in August 1914 Zhukov no doubt would have continued his career as a furrier and ended up running his own business.

Zhukov was frank in his memoirs about his youthful lack of politics, pointing out that political apathy was common among his fellow furriers, which he attributed to the petit bourgeois individualist mentality of artisan workers, in contrast to the proletarian solidarity of the industrial working class. At the same time he claimed to have been influenced by various revolutionary ideas that were spreading in Russia under the impact of the events of the First World War and his narrative suggested a gradual conversion to communism. But aside from Zhukov's own testimony, there is no evidence of incipient class consciousness and militancy. His embrace of the communist cause was probably more hesitant than he later presented it. He did become a
committed communist, but it was more by accident than design, the result less of socialist revelation than the contingencies of military and political events. The most important of these events was the First World War, which led to his military career.

The First World War broke out as a result of the July Crisis of 1914. Following the assassination of the heir to the Austro-Hungarian throne, Archduke Franz Ferdinand, by a Bosnian Serb nationalist in Sarajevo at the end of June (the Archduke's wife, Sophie, was also killed), Austria-Hungary mobilized for war against Serbia. When Austria-Hungary declared war on Serbia on July 28 Russia mobilized in support of its Balkan ally and fellow Slav state. In response to the Russian mobilization Germany, Austria-Hungary's ally, declared war on Russia on August 1 and two days later attacked Russia's ally France. The picture was completed by a British declaration of war on Germany on August 4 in response to German violations of Belgian neutrality. Subsequently, a number of other states became involved in the war—Turkey (1914) and Bulgaria (1915) on the side of Germany and Austria-Hungary, Japan (1914), Italy (1915), and the United States (1917) on the side of Britain, France, and Russia.

From the Russian point of view they were involved in a war of national defense against the aggressors Germany and Austria-Hungary. The outbreak of war inspired a massive patriotic mobilization in Russia—in much the same way that it did a quarter of a century later when Hitler attacked the Soviet Union. Zhukov, caught up in the patriotic fervor, was tempted to volunteer but after talking it over with another furrier from his home village, he decided to wait until his age cohort was called up. Alexander volunteered, however, and tried to persuade Georgy to follow suit.

When Zhukov was conscripted in summer 1915 he consulted with Uncle Mikhail, who told him that he could get a deferment for a year on medical grounds. When Zhukov pointed out that he was in good health and well able to serve on the front his uncle asked him whether he really wanted to be a fool like Alexander. “I told him,” recalled Zhukov, “that it was my duty to defend the motherland.”
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Zhukov reported for military duty in Kaluga Province in August 1915 and was assigned to the 5th Reserve Cavalry Regiment, where he was “very happy to serve … for I entertained many romantic feelings about [the cavalry].”
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In September Zhukov was sent with his regiment to the Kharkov province in Ukraine to join the 10th Cavalry Division. It was there that he received his cavalry training. His first horse was a shrewish dark gray mare called Chashechnaya, whom he groomed three times a day.

Zhukov completed his cavalry training by spring 1916 but was then selected for further training as a noncommissioned officer. During this course Zhukov had his first adult clash with authority, a particularly brutish NCO nicknamed “Four-and-a-Half” because he was missing half his right-hand index finger. Four-and-a-Half picked on Zhukov and pressured him to leave the cavalry to become a clerk. Although Zhukov expected to graduate at the top of his class, a fortnight before the exams it was announced that he was being discharged for disloyalty and insubordination toward Four-and-a-Half. He thought that was the end of his cavalry career but was rescued from this fate when a fellow trainee reported the matter to the commanding officer, who decided to allow Zhukov to finish the course.

In his memoirs Zhukov looked back on his NCO training with mixed feelings. On the one hand it was good training in horsemanship, weapons use, and drill techniques. On the other hand, the “NCO was not taught the human approach. He was expected to mould the soldier into a pliant robot. Discipline was maintained by harshness. Though regulations did not stipulate corporal punishment, it was rather common.”
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In August 1916 Zhukov was posted to combat duty along the River Dnestr in Moldova, at that time a province of tsarist Russia. Before he even arrived at the front Zhukov had his baptism of fire when his unit was bombed by a reconnaissance plane, killing one soldier and wounding five horses. Not long after his arrival at the front Zhukov won his first medal—the St. George Cross—for capturing a German officer. In an unpublished interview with a Soviet journalist in Berlin in 1945 Zhukov recalled that he was fascinated by intelligence work and because he knew some German he had specialized in capturing prisoners.
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While on another reconnaissance patrol in October 1916
Zhukov was blown off his horse by a mine that badly injured his two companions. A shell-shocked Zhukov was evacuated to Kharkov in Ukraine and hospitalized. It was for this wounding that Zhukov received his second St. George Cross. He was posted back to his original unit, the 5th Reserve Cavalry Regiment, at the end of 1916. As he recalled in his memoirs: “I had left the squadron a young soldier. I was now returning with my NCO stripes, combat experience, and two St. George Crosses.”
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Zhukov's old unit was based at Lageri near Balakleya, about eighty miles southeast of Kharkov. Here Zhukov and his fellow soldiers were soon caught up in the revolutionary events of 1917 that began with the fall of the autocratic Romanov dynasty that had ruled Russia for 400 years and culminated with the seizure of power by Lenin and the Bolsheviks. The precipitating event was the abdication of Tsar Nicholas II in March 1917 following a general strike and soldiers' mutiny in Petrograd, the Russian capital. (Petrograd was formerly St. Petersburg—a name it reverted to after the collapse of the USSR, in 1991. During Soviet times, the city was called Leningrad.)