And in the wake of the Congress, a number of generals began approaching him, the all-powerful minister of defense. Some came alone, others in pairs: “Georgy Konstantynych, we don’t need these political sections and commissars in the army anymore. They only tie our hands. Can’t you get rid of them? These days, no one would dare try to stop you.” “And let’s get rid of these SMERSH people who are always trying to arrest someone, and the Special Sections as well. That would be completely in the spirit of the Congress.”
People came to him like this more than once, and also on the sly or at parties (though Zhukov never drank to excess), saying, it was a Russian army that finished off Hitler, yet they’re treating us like a pack of idiots again. Hasn’t the time come, Georgy Konstantynych . . . ? And some even said plainly: Now that you’re minister of the armed forces, you’ve got more power than the whole Politburo taken together. And so . . . ? Perhaps . . . ?
Zhukov even gave it some thought: Perhaps they were right. All the power was in his hands, and he was as sharp as ever as a soldier; toppling all of them wouldn’t be difficult in the operational sense.
But if you’re a real communist? How can you even think about it when we owe our victory to . . . yes, even to the political apparatus and the people from SMERSH? No, gentlemen, that’s not for me.
But word still leaked out and spread through Moscow, if not through the army as well. He was asked some anxious questions about it in the Politburo. He assured his comrades: “How can you even think such a thing? I was never against the institution of political sections in the army. We are communists and will always remain so.” And with that they survived the ideological crisis of 1956.
Zhukov was now sixty, in the full prime of his life, and once again he was needed when some discord broke out within the Collective Leadership. They rose up against Khrushchev almost to a man, saying that he had become authoritarian, that he was trying to become another Stalin, and that it might even be necessary to depose him. Khrushchev rushed to Zhukov, saying, “Save me!”
Saving him meant collecting votes in the Central Committee, because Khrushchev had only a tiny minority of support in the Politburo and his enemies had refused to convene the Central Committee.
This was a ridiculously simple job. Zhukov sent out about seventy military aircraft and brought all the members of the Central Committee to Moscow in flash. With their support, Khrushchev won out. He declared the Molotov-Malenkov-Kaganovich group and those siding with them an anti-party faction. (Bulganin and Voroshilov had also supported them.)
Saving his homeland from German fascism, saving it from the degenerate Beria, and saving it from the anti-party faction were victories that gave Georgy Zhukov, a worthy, beloved son of his Fatherland, a triple crown.
It would never have occurred to him to indulge in such a frivolous pastime as writing memoirs.
It was then that he had to pay an official visit to Yugoslavia and Albania. He went with a flotilla of several warships via the Black Sea, the Mediterranean, and the Adriatic. It was a wonderful voyage, something he’d not experienced before.
While visiting Albania, he found out that he had been removed from his post as minister of armed forces! What was going on in Moscow? Was it some misunderstanding? Were they simply changing the name again or making reforms in the ministry? Would there be some new post for him, one just as important or even more so?
He felt his heart contract. His chest felt empty and all the official visits meaningless. He hurried back with the hope of getting an explanation from Khrushchev: Was he incapable of remembering the good that Zhukov had done in twice saving him?
Not only was Khrushchev incapable of remembering, it turned out that he had already declared in the Central Committee and in Kremlin circles that Zhukov was “a dangerous person”! A Bonapartiste! Zhukov wants to topple our own Soviet power! Back in Moscow and fresh off the airplane, who should meet him but Konev! He escorted Zhukov to the Kremlin, and there he was removed from the Politburo and from the Central Committee.
There was nothing he could have done from Albania. And when he came back to Moscow, he had been rendered harmless; everything had been altered here, and he had no lines of communication left open.
It was only now, only with hindsight, that Zhukov understood: he was too large a figure for Khrushchev. The man was incapable of keeping such a person near him.
Where could he defend himself? Pravda—it was Konev again!—published a vile article against him. Konev! Saved by Zhukov from Stalin’s tribunal back in October ’41.
Never in his life had he been so insulted, so humiliated, so wronged. (Stalin, now, was a legitimate Boss; he was above all of them, and he had a right to power. But what right did this little speck of cornmeal have?) It was so painful that he tried to deaden his feelings with sleeping pills. A pill at night, then another, and when he awoke in the morning his heart gnawed at him so that he needed another pill. And again at night. And again during the day. And so he deadened himself for more than a week, simply in order to survive.
But this was not the end of it: he was thrown out of the army altogether and sent “into retirement.” Even this was not the end of it: Khrushchev made that same Golikov, Zhukov’s old enemy, the head of the political administration of the army and navy, and now it was Golikov who ensured that all the movements of the disgraced marshal were blocked, as were the visits of any of his friends—those who had not turned away from him—to his dacha in a suburban forest, this home with the ridiculous colonnade. (He should be thankful that they didn’t take away his dacha. )
It was then that Zhukov suffered his second heart attack (if not something even worse).
When he recovered, he was not the same iron man he had been. His entire body seemed to weigh him down, and he had grown weak beyond recovery. The skin on his neck grew loose and flabby. His unyielding chin, familiar to the whole world, now had grown soft. His cheeks had swollen, and his lips seemed to move unevenly and with difficulty. For a time he had nurses at the dacha watching over him twenty-four hours a day.
Now Zhukov only had his wife (a doctor, and most often away at work), his little daughter, his mother-in-law, and his old, faithful driver from the war. He became very involved in following Mashenka’s progress when she began studying in her music school. (He himself had always wanted to play the accordion, and after Stalingrad he found the time to work at it a little. And now, with time on his hands, he would play a few tunes. He would happily play “The Peddlers,” “Baikal,” and the old wartime tune, “Dark Night.”) The only long trips he made were to go fishing, which he loved. The rest of his time he spent on his own wooded lot, taking walks, tending the flower gardens, and, when the weather was bad, wandering about the spacious dining hall, from the huge oak buffet to the bust of himself sculpted by Vuchetich and the model of a T-34 tank.
Life outside went on in its own way, as if he’d never been a part of it. A multivolume History of the Great Patriotic War appeared, but no one ever came to ask Zhukov for any information . . . They passed over his achievements and did their best to omit his very name. He heard that photographs of him had been removed from the Armed Forces’ Museum. (Everyone had turned away from him, apart from Vasilevsky and Bagramyan, who still visited. Rokossovsky would have come, but he’d been sent to take charge of the Polish Army.)
This was the time when so many marshals and generals were rushing to write and publish their memoirs. Zhukov was struck by how jealous they were of each other, how they put themselves in the limelight, tried to take away the glory from their neighbors, and dumped their mistakes and failures on others. Even Konev had now dashed off his memoirs (or did he have someone else write them?). And he emerged as pure as the driven snow, while he shamelessly stole all the glory of the achievements of the modest and talented Vatutin (killed by Bandera’s Ukrainian nationalists). Knowing Zhukov was defenseless, the lot of them, almost, would badmouth him. The artillery marshal, Voronov, even went so far as to claim responsibility for pl
anning the operation at Khalkhin-Gol and take credit for its success.
It was at this point that Zhukov sat down to write his own memoirs. (And he did it in his own hand, without any secretaries, working slowly, carefully, and gradually. He was grateful to have some help from his former personal assistant, an officer who could help him check dates and facts in military archives: it was awkward now to go to the ministry’s archives himself, and he might well have been refused entry.)
War memoirs are something inevitable and necessary. Just look at how many the Germans have turned out! And then there were the Americans, though their war over there wasn’t much compared with ours. The memoirs of some of our ordinary officers, even junior officers, sergeants, and airmen, were coming out as well—and they all have their use. But when a general or a marshal sits down to write, he has to be aware of his responsibilities.
And so he wrote, not finding the anger or the rashness within him to dispute with all the others. (Vasilevsky had given a rather sharp dressingdown to one or two of them.) You have to be relentless in battle, but not here. He had no rancor either toward Konev or Voronov. As the months and then years of his time of disgrace passed, the anger in his heart also passed, and he became reconciled to his situation. The injustices, however, could not be allowed to remain in the historical record. He had to correct the accounts of his comrades, even if only gently, and set the record straight. Do it gently, so as not to make them go on to reach for an even bigger share of the common fruits of victory. And those things he had not done or had left incomplete must not be left out of his memoirs either, for it is from such mistakes that future generals can learn. What he had to write was the full, unvarnished truth.
The problem was that the truth itself somehow steadily and irreversibly altered with the passage of time: under Stalin, the truth was one thing; under Khrushchev it was another. And there were many things that it was still premature to mention . . . Yes, let it be about the war, and leave it at that. He didn’t even want to talk about what happened later, and he couldn’t, in any case.
Then, suddenly, they got rid of that gasbag Khrushchev! This time there was no Zhukov to save his skin.
But the situation of the disgraced marshal did not change after a week or after a month: the cloud of disgrace still hung over him. No one confirmed it anew (Golikov had passed on), but no one lifted it either. Who would be the first one brave enough to say the decisive word?
One thing he did allow himself: he made a trip to Kaluga Oblast, back to his native village. He had been longing to go back, and it had been—what?—fifty years since he’d lived there. It upset him deeply: he met women he had danced with in his younger days, and now they all looked so old, like beggars; and the village itself had become so impoverished. “But why are you living so badly?” “They won’t let us live any better . . .”
But then came the twentieth anniversary of Victory Day, and the new rulers had no choice but to invite Zhukov to the ceremonies in the Kremlin Palace. It was his first public appearance in seven years. Not long after that, he was unexpectedly invited to a banquet in the Writers’ Club. The marshal was both surprised and touched by the warmth of his reception. Once again in that same year he was invited back to the Writers’ Club for an anniversary of a well-known writer of war novels. He went in civilian clothes and was seated at the head table. What followed was just a regular celebration at which he was an outsider, but when, among the half-dozen speeches, his name was mentioned in passing, the whole hall full of writers—the Moscow intelligentsia—applauded furiously, and twice they all rose to their feet to honor him.
That was something to remember!
Then Zhukov permitted himself to make a trip to Podolsk to the Central Archive of the Ministry of Defense to go through some documents from the war years, including some directives he himself had issued. And now there were archivists to help him. Then a trickle of correspondents and filmmakers began appearing at the dacha that everyone had forgotten and where he was spending his years of disgrace. A woman from some publishing house of the Novosti Press Agency arrived with a contract for his memoirs. They were to be finished within six months (and he had already written them as far as Berlin). His book could come out for his seventieth birthday. And would he give them the rights for publishing abroad? Well, of course he would.
Not all that long before, no one even asked about these pages of memoirs; scarcely anyone knew about them. Now they wanted them, and quickly, and for the whole world to see!
But could he push himself to meet the deadline? This reflective, meticulous work at his desk was not at all what a professional soldier was cut out for. It seemed an easier task to move a whole division five kilometers forward than to drag his pen through another line of text.
The woman editor became a regular visitor; then a second woman came. They suggested he use a tape recorder; they could supply all the words he needed, even whole sentences, and they sounded fine. For example: “The political work of the party was a most important factor in the development of the battle-readiness of our ranks.” At first you wanted to say no to this: you yourself had prepared your troops for battle enough times to know all about the necessary factors. But then you think for a time about the political work. Well, it may not be the most important factor, but of course it’s one of the most important. Or: “The party and Komsomol organizations provided an enormous moral force to increase the combat-readiness of our forces.” You think about this, and it’s also true, and it doesn’t diminish the operational work of the commanders. They also brought in materials from the archives for which you never had any responsibility and which you can’t verify now. Here, for instance, were some reports from the political sections stating in plain black and white: “In the year 1943, our glorious partisans blew up 11,000 German trains.” How could that be possible? But then it can’t be completely ruled out: the trains might have been only partially destroyed—a few freight cars here, a wheel or a platform blown up there.
He asked the Press Agency to find out if the KGB would give him access to the reports that Beria and Abakumov had submitted on him. He was informed that all these files had just been destroyed as being without any historical significance.
He did learn something, though: There was an account, printed a fairly long time ago, by a former army translator in Berlin. She wrote that in May 1945, she taken part in the identification from false teeth of the corpse of Hitler, which had been discovered near the Imperial Chancellery. How was that? You mean they found Hitler’s body? Zhukov, the commander-in-chief, the victor in the battle of Berlin, neither then nor later knew about it! At the time, he had announced in Berlin that nothing was known of Hitler’s whereabouts. What a fool he must appear now! His subordinates had secretly reported the discovery directly to Stalin, behind Zhukov’s back. How dared they! And Stalin not only kept it from Zhukov, but in July 1945 had asked him directly whether he knew where Hitler was.
Zhukov could simply not conceive of such treachery. It was incomprehensible. And he had thought that after the years of war he had come to know Stalin through and through . . . And now how could he admit this in his memoirs? It would be politically improper as well. He found this additional deception very painful to endure. (He asked this translator to find him the documents that he himself could not get.)
Zhukov was not readmitted to the Central Committee. (He heard that Suslov opposed him.)
But Konev did come to see him. And he apologized. Zhukov forgave him, though it cost him an effort.
Good or bad, he submitted the manuscript to the publisher by the deadline. But when it came to books, there was always another obstacle. Now the Press Agency created a group of consultants “to check the facts.” Month after month they made their “suggestions” and their revisions—fifty typewritten pages in all.
Now there was no way he could expect his book to come out for his seventieth birthday. The work dragged on, and time after time he would give his assent . . . Many things had to be delet
ed or reworked. His descriptions of Tukhachevsky, Uborevich, Yakir, and Blyukher were all deleted. This was something new: you didn’t write what was in your heart, you wrote what would get through. Would they let it pass or not? What could now be said, and what could not? (And so you give your assent: Yes, that’s right. That’s fine.)
Until now he had written simply for himself, quietly and peacefully. But now he had become so eager to see his book in print! He made the concessions and wrote the revisions. He toiled with these editors for two and a half years, but still there was no book. Then he learned that for some reason the newly hatched Marshal Grechko in the Army Political Directorate had spoken out against his memoirs. But Brezhnev stepped in and proposed a solution: “To create a committee of experts to review the contents of the book.”
Meanwhile, in his own month of December (the month he was born, the month he had won his victory on the outskirts of Moscow), Zhukov and Galya went to a sanatorium in Arkhangelsk. There he suffered a severe stroke.
The recovery was slow. He would get out of bed, but less often than before. At first he could not walk at all without someone’s help. The massages and physiotherapy took up more than half the day. He also had an inflammation of the trifacial nerve. He had dizzy spells.
By now he couldn’t rouse much interest in his future book. And yet he wanted to live to see it in print.
That summer our troops invaded Czechoslovakia. That was the right thing to do: we couldn’t put up with the shenanigans going on there. Zhukov always took the problems of the Motherland more to heart than he did his own. And in the military sense, it was a first-class operation. It’s a fine thing—they haven’t forgotten the lessons of our old school.
The third year of editing was coming to an end. He was informed quite plainly that Leonid Ilych wanted to be mentioned in the memoirs. How’s that for you . . . ? How was he to remember anything about Political Officer Brezhnev when he had never met him during the war, not even on that tiny bridgehead near Novorossiysk? But he had to save his book, and so he put in two or three sentences.
Apricot Jam Page 28