Stalin's General (7 page)

WHEN THE RUSSIAN CIVIL WAR ENDED IN 1921 THE BULK OF THE RED ARMY
was rapidly demobilized. From a force five million strong the Red Army declined to about half a million by the middle of the decade. Zhukov was among those who remained in its ranks. In his memoirs he gave no direct reason for his decision to continue in military service, but he did note a party instruction of February 1921 ordering all communists to remain in the Red Army. There were many such instructions during this period, but they did little to stem the exodus of party members from the army. Zhukov stayed in the army because it suited him. As he said himself, “most of the men who stayed in the ranks did so because, by virtue of their inclination and ability, they had chosen to devote themselves to military service.”
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Although still only a junior commander when the civil war ended, Zhukov was in a strong position to make a good career for himself in the Red Army. He had served as an NCO in the tsarist army, as a junior commander in the Red Army, and both armies had decorated him for bravery. He was also relatively well educated and a graduate of the Red Commanders Cavalry Course. Above all, Zhukov was a member of the Communist Party—the most important qualification for career progress under the new Soviet regime.

Zhukov's rise through the ranks of the Red Army in the 1920s and 1930s was steady rather than spectacular. He started off in 1922 as a squadron commander and progressed to regimental and brigade commands
by the end of the decade. His first higher command appointment was as an assistant to the inspector of cavalry of the Red Army in 1931. Divisional and corps commands followed and in 1938 he was made deputy commander of the Belorussian Military District, with special responsibility for training. It was not until May 1939, when Zhukov was posted to the Far East to investigate the failings of Soviet-Mongolian forces fighting a border war with Japan, that his name came to prominence.

The organization in which Zhukov made his career was a key institution of the authoritarian and repressive Soviet socialist system. Indeed, a typical description of the young Soviet regime is that it was a form of “militarized socialism” and was as much a product of the Russian Civil War as the revolutionary events of 1917.
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During the civil war millions of people had been killed or starved to death. The Bolsheviks had learned to be ruthless in pursuit of victory, using whatever level of violence was required to defend their regime. Coercion replaced persuasion as a method of political mobilization. The Bolshevik Party (it changed its name to Communist in 1918) became even more rigidly hierarchical and authoritarian in its administration. At the height of the civil war in 1919–1920 the Bolsheviks came close to defeat as their stronghold in central and northern Russia came under siege from all sides by counterrevolutionary White armies. The Whites were aided militarily by a number of foreign governments—Britain, France, Japan, and the United States—who feared the contagion of a successful Bolshevik revolution could spread to their own countries. Hence the Bolsheviks characterized the civil war as a life-and-death struggle not only with their internal foes but with the whole capitalist world. The Bolsheviks hoped revolutionary socialist movements in other countries would come to their aid but when this did not happen they accepted that the Soviet socialist state had to coexist with capitalism, at least for a while.

Despite their civil war victory the Bolsheviks continued to fear the threat posed by a potentially lethal combination of external capitalist attack and internal subversion. War scares were common in the USSR
in the 1920s and 1930s, and throughout much of the interwar period the Soviet regime was in a state of semi-mobilization for war. In this tense context the Red Army was seen as the indispensable shield and sword protecting the revolution.

The Red Army—whose official title was the Workers' and Peasants' Red Army—was also seen as a school of socialism for the masses, a model of discipline and political commitment that would bind the population to the Soviet regime. That was the theory; in practice service in the Red Army was a brutal and brutalizing experience for most of its conscripts. For career officers like Zhukov the experience was more positive. They were treated with respect and their pay and conditions were much better than those of conscripts. The high status accorded the Red Army by the regime also reinforced their faith in the Soviet system and its leadership.

At the end of the 1920s the Red Army became even more important for the regime when the country embarked upon a program for the rapid modernization of the Soviet Union. This program had two main prongs. First was accelerated industrialization and urbanization. In 1928 the Soviets adopted the first of a series of five-year plans to radically raise industrial production and to transform the country from a largely peasant society into an advanced, industrialized state. According to official statistics industrial production increased by 850 percent in the 1930s. The true figures were probably somewhat lower but there is no doubting the vast scale of industrialization, which resulted in the construction of thousands of factories, the building of many new dams, canals, roads, and railways, and an increase of thirty million in the urban population. Much of the industrialization effort was directed at the defense industry and was motivated by fear of a capitalist attack. As the Soviet leader Joseph Stalin famously put in a speech in February 1931: “We are fifty or a hundred years behind the advanced countries. We must make good this distance in ten years. Either we do it, or they crush us.”
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Second there was the forced collectivization of Soviet agriculture. The Bolsheviks were ideologically committed to a state-controlled agricultural sector but not until the late 1920s did they begin to force peasants to give up their land and become members of collective farms. By 1937 more than 90 percent of Soviet agriculture had been
collectivized. But there was considerable peasant resistance and severe disruption of agricultural production. The communist regime's response to the crisis caused by the collectivization drive was mass executions, arrests, and deportations. The result was the deaths of millions of peasants, particularly in 1932–1933 when the brutalities of collectivization combined with bad weather to produce a famine in Ukraine and parts of Russia. The main agencies of coercion were the Communist Party and state security agencies but the Red Army played its part, too, although there is no evidence that Zhukov took direct part in the collectivization campaign.

When Zhukov decided to continue his military service the Red Army was a far less exalted institution than it later became. In the immediate post–civil war period chaotic demobilization disrupted its functioning and undermined its morale. From within the Communist Party came the call to do away with a permanent army and rely instead on a part-time militia—the Bolsheviks' original idea when they seized power in 1917. In response, Red Army leaders argued that continued internal and external threats warranted retention of a professional standing army.

The outcome of the inner party debate was a compromise between the two positions—the creation of a regular army of about 500,000 plus a number of territorial divisions of mainly part-time soldiers required to serve for a couple of months each year. The regular armed forces were concentrated in border districts, while the territorial divisions were generally located in the safer interior of the country. But even the so-called regular troops were mostly two-year conscripts. The professional core of the Red Army remained quite small. Nearly all the territorial divisions were infantry, with only one territorial division among the Red Army's eleven cavalry divisions and eight cavalry brigades. The staffing, supply, and technical efficiency of cavalry units were maintained at a relatively high level of operational preparedness, putting Zhukov among the elite of the Red Army as it re-formed after the civil war. This partly explains why so many cavalry officers went on to serve at the highest rank during the Great Patriotic War.

The key figure in the post–civil war re-formation of the Red Army was its chief of staff, Mikhail V. Frunze, who also served as people's
commissar for the army and navy (i.e., the defense minister). Frunze reorganized the Red Army's command structures, abolishing the system of dual military-political leadership that had developed during the civil war, under which political commissars had a veto over command decisions. In 1924 Frunze introduced one-man command—
edinonachalie
—which ended the commissars' role in military decision-making.

Zhukov served under Frunze in the 1st Moscow Cavalry Division and, like many Soviet military memoirists, spoke with great affection and admiration for Frunze's feat in reestablishing the Red Army after the civil war. Frunze died prematurely in October 1925 following an unsuccessful stomach operation but his legacy of professionalism in the new Red Army lived on. Frunze believed in iron discipline, intensive training, and the professional as well as political education of officers—tenets that Zhukov later adopted in his own command style.

Notwithstanding his fervent commitment to the communist cause, Frunze was also open to innovative thinking about military affairs, not least in relation to strategic doctrine. The Red Army that he helped re-form was an organization in which lively debates took place about military strategy, tactics, and technology. Because the Red Army was so vital to defending the USSR it was allowed to maintain an unusually creative and dynamic environment in a Soviet system in which independent thinking was increasingly frowned upon and even the mildest critical discussion of the party line absolutely forbidden.

One reason for this peculiar combination of orthodoxy and creativity was that it suited the leadership style of the man who from the mid-1920s onward was the overwhelmingly dominant personality in the dictatorial Soviet regime—Joseph Stalin, who became general secretary of the Communist Party in 1922. When Lenin died in 1924 Stalin emerged as his successor and through a series of inner-party struggles against his political rivals he established dominance. By the end of the 1920s Stalin was well on the way to becoming the dictator of the party and of the country it ruled. One of the hallmarks of Stalin's leadership was his constant demand for new methods and new solutions to achieve prescribed goals—as long as the innovations did not question the power of the party or his own dictatorship. As both a
loyal communist and a devotee, albeit a mild one, of the growing cult of Stalin's personality, Zhukov had no difficulty working in the prescribed framework, constrictive though it was at times.
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Zhukov was appointed a squadron commander in the 38th Cavalry Regiment in June 1922, which meant he was in charge of about 100 men. In March 1923 he was promoted to assistant commander of the 40th Cavalry Regiment of the 7th Samara Cavalry Division. In July he was appointed temporary and then permanent commander of the 39th Buzuluk Cavalry Regiment in the same division. Aged twenty-six, Zhukov had reached the rank equivalent of a lieutenant colonel in a western army. He was to remain a regimental commander for the next seven years. As he said in his memoirs, it was the most formative period in his military education:

When Zhukov took command of the 39th Buzuluk the regiment was in bad shape: it lacked combat readiness and its officers were unclear about how to go about their work in peacetime conditions.
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Zhukov soon turned the regiment around, an achievement recognized in the higher command's review of his work for 1923: “Theoretically and practically well-prepared. Likes and knows cavalry work. Able quickly to orient himself to the situation. Disciplined to the highest
degree. In a short time has raised his regiment to the highest level. His appointment as regimental commander was entirely correct.”
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Judging by Zhukov's regimental edicts and reports, assiduous attention to detail in relation to training, discipline, and political instruction was the key to his success.
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According to A. L. Kronik, who served under him in the 1920s, Zhukov was a straightforward but strict commander who was reserved in personal relations, especially with his subordinates, never indulging in overfamiliarity with his men. Zhukov's attitude, noted Kronik, “expressed his understanding of his responsibilities for his subordinates and his understanding of his role not just as their commander but as their teacher.”
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