l i f e o f t h e s w o r d r i c h a r d o v e r y

Saviour of Moscow Stalin’s General: The Life of Georgy Zhukov

By Geoffrey Roberts (Icon Books 375pp £25)

On a visit to the Lenin Museum out- side Moscow last year, I bought some trinkets from the small booth selling souvenirs. I saw two miniature diecast metal figurines, not very clearly, and asked to buy them. I assumed they would be models of Lenin. It turned out that one was Stalin and the other was a familiar military figure, Stalin’s deputy supreme commander, Marshal Georgy Zhukov. Lenin was nowhere to be found.

This says much about Russia today. As Geoffrey Roberts points out in this fine new biography of Zhukov, while the leaders who brought Russia to victory in 1945 are more popular than ever, the revolution is a more ambiguous and distant legacy. Zhukov is probably better known in the West than any other Soviet wartime commander. The upsurge of interest in present-day Russia, and the opening of most (though not all) former Soviet archives, now makes it possible to reassess Zhukov’s own history and perhaps also to understand better why he is the only soldier on sale at the Lenin Museum.

The tale Roberts tells is, on one level, well known. Zhukov was born into a humble cobbler’s household, became an apprentice furrier, fought in the First World War, joined the Red Army and the Bolshevik Party in 1918, survived the purges in the 1930s, became army chief of staff at the very young age of fortyfour in early 1941, was redeployed as a field commander and distinguished himself during the Yelnya Offensive. He was then sent off to Leningrad, saved Moscow, encircled Paulus at Stalingrad and finally stormed Berlin. Most earlier accounts of this meteoric career have relied heavily on Zhukov’s own memoirs, now available in several editions. Roberts does not indulge in cheap revisionism, but he does show where Zhukov was economical with the truth, or had forgotten what the truth was.

The result is a more accurate account of Zhukov’s military career and his contribution to the Soviet victory. Many Soviet generals, envious of his success and popularity, spent much of the postwar period trying to undermine Zhukov’s image and denigrate his abrasive military personality. There is no doubt that Zhukov was a tough commander, who bawled people out when he needed to, was keen on punishing incompetence and bad faith in those serving beneath him, and had a strong sense of his own operational infallibility. Yet as Roberts makes clear here, the Zhukov

Zhukov: award-winning myth is by no means all myth. He was a remarkably successful battlefield manager, a proletarian hero taking on the cream of Germany’s military aristocracy. There is a strong sense with Zhukov that operational skill is inherent at birth rather than learned.

Yet the one feature of Zhukov’s wartime career that stands out is his special relationship with Stalin. He became deputy supreme commander in late 1942, but he had to spend much of the war in Stalin’s close company, trying to fulfil the dictator’s wishes and mitigate the failures of his amateur grasp of military operations. Stalin was not, of course, a military simpleton and could understand a good deal of what was going on. But he was not a soldier and it was Zhukov’s great skill to be able to play Stalin sufficiently to get what he wanted. The reason for his success lies perhaps in Zhukov’s straightforwardness. Roberts has found a ‘celebrity questionnaire’ filled out by Zhukov late in his life in which he claimed that the characteristic he valued above all was integrity, and the one thing he could never forgive was betrayal. Zhukov spoke his mind to Stalin when others might have been more prudent; but prudence was not something Stalin valued.

In the end Zhukov was to find betrayal and a lack of integrity all around him. He basked briefly in his wartime glory in 1945, but the knives were out for him. When his name came up during the torture and interrogation of the wartime Soviet Air Force chief, Alexander Novikov, in 1946, Stalin manoeuvred to get Zhukov condemned for a lack of communist modesty. He was perhaps too famous to be given the Novikov treatment, but he was sent to run a military district in the Caucasus, and finally given an even smaller job at Sverdlovsk. Roberts speculates here on Stalin’s motives, though this kind of charade was surely typical of the way Stalin had played with people’s destinies in the 1930s. Once the war was over, the whole dangerous, messy and vindictive political structure was back in place. Stalin liked people to suffer a bit, even if he later tolerated their reinstatement.

The later Zhukov years are in some ways the most interesting, because they are the least known. Zhukov was rehabilitated just before Stalin’s death in 1953, having done his time. What followed was, according to Zhukov, one of the most important actions of his life. On the Politburo’s instructions he personally arrested the NKVD chief, Lavrentiy Beria, in the middle of a meeting and bundled him off to prison, where he was later executed. It is hard to imagine a more bizarre political system and it is no surprise that generations of Western Sovietologists puzzled over what made it tick. Zhukov did not really understand it either, and soon ran foul of his former wartime political commissar, Nikita Khrushchev. After a short spell as defence minister he was once again sacked, accused of Bonapartism.

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