Stalin's General (10 page)

No one really knows exactly why the purge happened but it seems Stalin truly believed he was threatened by elements of the Red Army, even though there is not a single shred of evidence of disloyalty or malign intention. After the Second World War all the victims of Stalin's military purges were rehabilitated, many of them during Zhukov's stewardship of the Ministry of Defense in the mid-1950s.
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The armed forces were not the only targets of Stalin's ire and paranoia. Following the December 1934 assassination of Sergey Kirov,
head of the Leningrad Communist Party, thousands of party members were arrested, suspected of involvement in a plot to kill Soviet leaders. In the mid-1930s there was a series of public political show trials of former leading members of the Bolshevik Party, accused of being spies, saboteurs, and plotters against Stalin. The chief defendant in absentia was Trotsky, who was assassinated in Mexico in 1940 by an agent of Stalin's. Then there was the so-called
Yezhovshchina
—named after Stalin's security chief Nikolai Yezhov—a frenzied hunt for the alleged “enemy within” that led to mass arrests and executions of party and state officials. These events, known collectively as the Great Terror, were an intense period of political repression and officially sanctioned violence in which millions of people were arrested and hundreds of thousands executed, mostly in 1937–1938. In this context the purge of the military was relatively restrained; apart from the assault on the Higher Command it was a moderate onslaught compared with what other sections of the Soviet population suffered.
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What impact did these events have on Zhukov? In the version of his memoirs published in the Soviet era he noted that in 1937 there “were unfounded arrests in the armed forces that year in contravention of socialist legality. Prominent military leaders were arrested, which, naturally, affected the development of our armed forces and their combat preparedness.”
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In the posthumously published post-Soviet version of the memoirs there was more extensive coverage of the purges in which Zhukov named some of the prominent victims that he knew personally and described the suspicion he came under because of his connections with them. He also related how he successfully intervened in support of one of his divisional commanders who came under attack at a party meeting. The climax of Zhukov's account of the purges is a description of how he was arraigned before a meeting of leading party members of the 6th Cavalry Corps and accused of harshness and rudeness and having dubiously good relations with “enemies of the people.” Zhukov defended himself forcefully and turned the meeting in his favor, thus escaping censure and possible exclusion from the party—the first step toward arrest.
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According to Era and Ella, their father expected to be arrested anytime and kept a bag ready just in case. In a 1971 interview Zhukov told the Soviet writer and journalist Konstantin Simonov:

The problem with Zhukov's version of events is that there is no supporting documentary evidence and only one surviving eyewitness—himself. Zhukov's self-portrayal as a near victim of the purges seems designed to fend off any accusations that he was a beneficiary of the purges, even though his promotion to command the 3rd and then the 6th Corps came about precisely because the previous incumbents had been purged. Moreover, had Zhukov actually acted as he described in the post-Soviet version of his memoirs he would undoubtedly have joined them. Only those who conformed and raised no fuss—the vast majority of the armed forces, it should be said—survived the purges. This is not to say that Zhukov was untroubled by the purges or that he did not suffer some real scares. But it is difficult to avoid the conclusion that Zhukov, like most Soviet citizens, kept his head down, repressed his doubts, and took refuge in the belief that Stalin must know what he was doing.
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Equally problematic is Zhukov's claim that he only escaped the purges because he was sent to Khalkhin-Gol in May 1939. Why would the Soviet leadership have assigned such an important mission to him if there were any doubts about his loyalty? Furthermore, Zhukov was sent to Khalkhin-Gol not to fight a battle but to investigate the failings of the local military leadership during clashes with the Japanese on the Mongolian-Manchurian border. In effect, he was sent to the Far East to conduct a purge. Once again the harshness and repressiveness of the Soviet system had worked in Zhukov's favor.

ZHUKOV'S POSTING TO THE FAR EAST IN MAY 1939 CAME IN THE AFTERMATH
of a series of bloody clashes between Soviet and Japanese troops along the Khalkhin-Gol River on the Mongolian-Manchurian border. His mission was to lead an inspection team to investigate the reasons for the “unsatisfactory work” of N. V. Feklenko, commander of the 57th Special Corps, which did battle with the Japanese. Zhukov's detailed orders were set out in a directive from Defense Commissar Kliment Voroshilov dated May 24: “to study the work of the 57th Corps Commander and his staff in relation to battle training, what measures the Corps Commander took to support his subordinates in readying their units for action, to verify the strength and composition of the 57th's personnel, and the state and security of the Corps' arms and supplies. In the event that deficiencies in battle training are detected to take, together with the Corps Commander, immediate and decisive measures to remedy them.”
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Zhukov's appointment made sense given his work in the Cavalry Inspectorate in the early 1930s and his well-known prowess when it came to battle training. In the year preceding his posting to the Far East he was deputy commander of the Belorussian Military District with special responsibility for training cavalry units and tank brigades, and the General Staff's view was that armor and rapid movement would play an important role in upcoming battles with the Japanese on the flat and open terrain of Khalkhin-Gol.

On May 24 Zhukov wrote to his wife, Alexandra:

The conflict at Khalkhin-Gol was rooted in a long history of rivalry between Russia and Japan in China.
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For both strategic and economic reasons the two countries penetrated deeply into China in the late nineteenth century. As a result of the Sino-Japanese War of 1894–1895 Japan wrested control of Korea from the Chinese emperor. The Chinese also conceded the Liaodong Peninsula in southern Manchuria to Japan. However, Russia, supported by France and Germany, who also had extensive interests in China and were equally worried about Japan's penetration of the country, pressured the Japanese to relinquish control of Liaodong. Subsequently, the Russians moved into the peninsula and leased a naval base from the Chinese at Port Arthur (Lushan), an acquisition that gave them an all-year warm water outlet to the Pacific. To establish land communications with Port Arthur
they began the construction of what became known as the Chinese Eastern Railway—a line that ran through Manchuria and linked up with Vladivostok and the Trans-Siberian Railway. They also began to encroach on Japanese economic interests in Korea. Alarmed by these developments the Japanese attempted to negotiate a deal with the Russians whereby their control of Korea was recognized in exchange for Russian hegemony in Manchuria. When these negotiations failed the Japanese launched a surprise attack on the Russian fleet at Port Arthur in February 1904.

During the Russo-Japanese War of 1904–1905 the tsar's forces suffered a series of defeats on both land and sea, including the loss of Port Arthur. Tens of thousands of casualties were incurred by both sides. Russian military setbacks contributed to the outbreak of the 1905 Revolution—a series of strikes, protests, and violent disturbances aimed at forcing Tsar Nicholas II to reform his autocratic regime. In a weak position internally as well as externally, the tsar was forced to sign the humiliating Treaty of Portsmouth with Japan in September 1905. Under the treaty the Russians were forced to withdraw from Manchuria, to accept Japan's domination of Korea, and to return to Japanese control the southern half of the island of Sakhalin, occupied by Russia since 1875. The Japanese also gained control of the southern section of the Chinese Eastern Railway.

The next clash between Russia and Japan occurred after the Bolsheviks seized power in 1917. In summer 1918, 70,000 Japanese troops supported by American, British, and French units landed in Vladivostok and linked up with the Bolsheviks' opponents in Siberia. The context of the intervention was the Soviet peace treaty with Germany in March 1918 and Russia's exit from the First World War. The ostensible purpose of the Japanese-western expeditionary force was to secure war materials supplied to their erstwhile Russian allies. In reality the expedition was part of a broader intervention in the Russian Civil War aimed at toppling the revolutionary Bolshevik regime. But when the Bolsheviks won the civil war the western forces withdrew from Siberia in April 1920. The Japanese, with ambitions to establish a permanent base in Siberia, stayed for another two years and only withdrew because of determined Soviet resistance to their continued presence.

But Japan remained entrenched in Korea, annexed by the Japanese in 1910, and in Manchuria with its Kwantung Army protecting the Japanese-controlled section of the Chinese Eastern Railway and surrounding areas. In September 1931 the Kwantung Army used the sabotage of a section of the line, supposedly by Chinese nationalist dissidents, as a pretext to invade and occupy all Manchuria. In February 1932 the Japanese established a puppet state in Manchuria called Manchukuo.

The Soviets viewed these developments with considerable alarm, fearing the revival of Japanese imperial ambitions in relation to Siberia; fears that intensified when the Japanese refused the Soviet offer of a nonaggression treaty in December 1932. Moscow responded by continuing to build up its military forces in the Soviet Far East.

The most pressing issue for Moscow was what to do with the northern sections of the Chinese Eastern Railway in Manchuria, controlled by the Soviets but located in what was now Japanese-occupied territory. This problem was resolved by selling the railway to the Japanese in March 1935. More difficult to resolve were disputes about the border between Soviet and Manchurian territory, which led to a series of frontier clashes involving Soviet and Japanese forces. Adding to the tensions in Soviet-Japanese relations was Japan's signing of the anti-Comintern pact with Nazi Germany in November 1936. Ostensibly directed against the activities of the Communist International—established by the Bolsheviks in 1919 to foment world revolution—the pact was in fact directed against the Soviet Union and contained a secret agreement that Japan and Germany would maintain a benevolent neutrality should either become involved in war with the USSR. The pact reinforced Stalin's belief that Japanese spies and saboteurs had penetrated Siberia. He responded with mass arrests of indigenous Koreans and Japanese living in the region.

In July 1937 Japan invaded northern China, quickly capturing Peking and Shanghai. During the Sino-Japanese War—seen by many historians as the opening phase of the global conflict that developed into the Second World War—the USSR became a major supplier of munitions to China. Between 1937 and 1941 the Soviet Union supplied to China 904 planes, 82 tanks, 602 tractors, 1,516 automobiles, 1,140 heavy guns, 9,720 machine guns, 50,000 rifles, 180 million cartridges,
31,600 bombs, and two million shells. Hundreds of Soviet military advisors served in China, including many pilots.
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