The chief of the General Staff was now Vasilevsky, and that was only as it should be. Zhukov was offered the post of commander-in-chief of land forces. That meant he would have no control over the air force and navy; he would have no role in strategic planning and, even more, he would be directly subordinate to Bulganin and without the right to appeal to Stalin (so it was stated in the ministry’s new table of organization).
Here it was: from a full gallop to flat on the ground. It was painful. Like the time in Tambov Province when he had been knocked from his saddle. And Zhukov was just now turning fifty, at the very peak of his strength and abilities.
His heart ached for his vanished military past . . .
But his current sentence to inactivity turned out to be a good deal more involved than he had expected. He still had not foreseen all the troubles in store for him.
In late 1945, at a Kremlin meeting in which Stalin reproached Zhukov for claiming responsibility for all the victories, Zhukov readily responded that he had never claimed responsibility for all of them. And when in April 1946 he had the bitter experience of Bulganin’s treachery, he still did not realize the extent of his troubles. He lasted only one month as commander-in-chief of land forces. The Supreme Military Council suddenly began reviewing the testimony of Zhukov’s former adjutant (he had now been arrested!) and the chief marshal of the air force, Novikov (also, it emerged, recently arrested!), as well as statements from some other arrested officers. These indicated that Zhukov had supposedly been organizing a military conspiracy. What utter nonsense! Who could ever have invented such a thing? But Rybalko, Rokossovsky, and Vasilevsky stepped forward and spoke up in Zhukov’s defense, for which he was grateful. They convinced Stalin, and Stalin saved him from Beria’s vengeance. Zhukov was merely sent to head the Odessa Military District.
It was a hard fall, and it was painful; still, it was better than prison.
To describe in his memoirs, in his own hand, how after all his famous victories and his three Heroes of the Soviet Union (the only person in the country who could claim that!) he was cast aside to command a military district—no, that he could not do. He could never put that down on paper; he would be shamed before history. He would have to gloss over it somehow.
But that was still not the limit of his troubles. Before two years had passed, General Telegin was arrested. He had been a member of the Military Council with Zhukov at the end of the war. (And, as it came out later, they had knocked out all his teeth after his arrest, and he lost his mind. Novikov was also tortured—and then released.) It was then Zhukov realized that Beria was after him. And it was then that he had his first heart attack.
Beria and Abakumov suddenly burst into Zhukov’s suburban dacha (a gift from Stalin for saving Moscow, the place where he was now writing his memoirs). They came supposedly to check that the documents in his possession were being kept securely. They rummaged through cases of documents and opened his safe; they discovered some old operational maps that had to be turned in—and this from a commander-in-chief! And then they slapped him with a severe reprimand.
No, they still hadn’t arrested him: Stalin interceded and saved him! But he was exiled to the Ural Military District, not even on the border and with little strategic importance. This looked very much like Tukhachevsky’s exile to the Central Volga Military District in 1937, though he had been immediately arrested on the train. That was what Zhukov was expecting now. He kept a little suitcase ready, with some underwear and a few toiletries.
His fame might never have existed. His power might never have existed. He was cast aside, forced into idleness, an agonizing idleness, when he still preserved all of his powers, his will, his mind, his talent, his experience as a strategist.
There were times when he thought: Might this really be Stalin’s own idea? (Has he not forgiven me for that white horse at the Victory Parade?) But no, it has to be Beria who’s pulled the wool over Stalin’s eyes and slandered me.
On the other hand, there were anti-Soviet forces in the world that found it useful to create a Cold War climate. And Zhukov was quite useless fighting a Cold War, that was true.
In those years, however, it never entered his head to sit down and write his memoirs. That would be as much as admitting that his life was over.
But Stalin never forgot his slandered but faithful commander and hero. In 1952 he admitted him to the party congress and as a candidate member of the Central Committee. He transferred him back to Moscow and was preparing some very important post for him in this new and complex situation that was developing.
But then, suddenly, he passed away . . .
May Eternal Memory be his! And the situation became more and more complex. Beria was one of the ruling circle, but he was not alone. Zhukov once again became commander-in-chief of land forces and the first deputy minister of defense.
Two more months passed, and Zhukov proved to be most useful. He was summoned by Khrushchev and Malenkov: Tomorrow in the Politburo (they had now given it a somewhat softer name, the Presidium), there will be a military issue on the agenda, and you will be called in and will have to arrest Beria immediately! For the moment, only the three of us know about this. Bring two or three trusted generals with you and some adjutants, of course. Make sure you’re armed.
At the appointed hour, they were sitting in the reception room awaiting their call. (The generals were speculating on why they had been called in. He explained their task only moments before they were to enter the chamber and assigned people with drawn pistols to guard the doors.) He entered, took a few paces and then rushed at Beria! He took him by the elbows and with the strength of a bear jerked him away from the table-— Beria might have a button there to summon his guards. And he barked at him: “You’re under arrest!” Got you at last, you bastard. You snake in the grass! (The Politburo just sat there, no one moving a muscle-—none of them would have dared interfere.) Then he remembered what they used to do in Tambov when they took a prisoner. He told his adjutant to remove the prisoner’s belt and cut off all his trouser buttons: let him use both hands to hold up his pants. And they took him away. They put him on the floor of a large limousine, tightly rolled up in a carpet and with a gag in his mouth; otherwise, the guards might stop them as they drove out of the Kremlin. Four generals got into the same car, and the sentries only saluted them. They took the son of a bitch into a bunker in the inner courtyard of the military district headquarters; they also brought in some tanks with guns trained on the bunker. (Konev was given the job of running the tribunal.)
But still, you can’t put this very sweet moment into your memoirs. It’s not appropriate. It does nothing to support the work of the Communist Party. And above all, we are communists.
After this operation, the Collective Leadership again summoned Zhukov to do a real job. It was only then that he became minister of defense, with all the powers that went with the post. He was running the army. And at what a crucial moment: the development of atomic weapons! (He and Khrushchev made a friendly flight to the Tots Camps in the Urals where a test was being made on the survival potential of our troops, 40,000 of them in the field immediately after an atomic explosion. They were working out a tactical warning strike against NATO.) He was preparing the army for great tasks, even against America, if need be.
Now he made trips to Geneva for summit meetings with the Allies. (And there he met his old colleague, Eisenhower. Imagine: now he’s the president!)
And so it happens in life: one trouble follows another, one happiness follows another. He married a second time, to Galina, thirty-one years younger. And another daughter was born, his third and all the more dear since she was still a child. Like a granddaughter . . .
He had no anger left toward Stalin. All that had happened over these last years he simply erased from his memory. Stalin was a great man. And how well he had worked with him in those final years of the war, how many things they had pondered together, how many decisions they had made.
But the Twentiet
h Party Congress shook him: The crimes of Stalin they had uncovered! So many! Absolutely unthinkable!
At the Twentieth Congress, he became a candidate member of the Politburo.
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 bad-mouth him. The artillery marshal, Voronov, even went so far as to claim responsibility for planning 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.
Apricot Jam: And Other Stories Page 29