Stalin's General (38 page)

Zhukov himself was not without sin when it came to pillage. While in Germany he amassed a hoard of trophies, including 70 pieces of gold jewelry, 740 items of silverware, 50 rugs, 60 pictures, 3,700 meters of silk, and 320 furs. Zhukov later claimed that he bought these items or they were gifts but their acquisition sat ill with his supposed socialist principles and with his self-righteous insistence, both at the time and in his memoirs, that the Red Army was a model of good discipline in both the invasion and occupation of Germany.

In February 1946 elections were held to the Supreme Soviet, the USSR's parliament. Zhukov was a candidate in one of a number of special constituencies created to facilitate the participation of voters serving in the armed forces in Germany and elsewhere. As was usual in the Soviet system, only Communist Party—backed candidates were allowed to stand for office and Zhukov's election was a foregone conclusion. But there seems to have been genuine enthusiasm for his candidacy in the immediate afterglow of victory, as there was for Stalin and other Soviet leaders, and
Pravda
published a laudatory account of an election meeting that Zhukov addressed.
⁶⁸

Shortly after the election Zhukov was recalled to Moscow to become commander-in-chief of Soviet ground forces. His appointment on March 22 was one of a number of high-level military appointments. Vasilevsky returned as chief of the General Staff and Nikolai
Bulganin, who had served as Zhukov's political commissar during the war, was made Stalin's deputy in the Ministry of the Armed Forces (the new name of the People's Commissariat of Defense).
⁶⁹
Within three months of his return to Moscow, however, Zhukov had been sacked and banished to the command of a provincial military district. This turn of events was extraordinary enough, but it proved merely the opening act in the drama of Zhukov's postwar political career.

WHEN ZHUKOV RETURNED TO MOSCOW FROM BERLIN IN APRIL 1946 HE HAD
no idea his fortunes were about to take a marked turn for the worse. As he reviewed the May Day Parade in Red Square the hero of the Great Patriotic War seemed set for a prolonged and glorious tenure as Stalin's right-hand military man. Just a month later Zhukov was arraigned before the Higher Military Council and accused of egoism and disrespect for his peers.

Chaired by Stalin himself, the meeting, held on June 1, was attended by top party leaders Lavrenty Beria, Nikolai Bulganin, Georgy Malenkov, and Vyacheslav Molotov as well as an array of generals and marshals, including Semyon Budenny, Filipp Golikov, Leonid Govorov, Ivan Konev, Konstantin Rokossovsky, Pavel Rybalko, Sergey Shtemenko, Vasily Sokolovsky, Alexander Vasilevsky, and Nikolai Voronov. Konev and Sokolovsky later claimed to have come to Zhukov's defense at the meeting and Zhukov himself recalled that the majority of the military leaders supported him.
¹
It is difficult to imagine, however, that their opposition to Stalin was any more than perfunctory. We do not have the stenographic record of this session of the Higher Military Council but the likely scenario is that after a reading of the indictment there would have been a few speeches in support of the charges followed by a mea culpa from Zhukov. Those present may have had some kind words about Zhukov's loyalty and record of service, but that is all. Any stronger protest would likely have resulted in
them sharing Zhukov's fate. What we know for certain is that the meeting resolved to remove Zhukov as commander-in-chief of the ground forces and transfer him to the command of a military district, a resolution implemented by the Council of Ministers on June 3. The next day Zhukov handed over command to his deputy, Konev.
²

The events leading to Zhukov's fall from grace began in March 1946 with the removal of Marshal A. A. Novikov as head of the Soviet Air Force. Novikov was a victim of the so-called Aviators Affair—a purge of the Soviet aircraft industry following accusations that during the war the fighter planes produced had been of poor quality. Zhukov was a member of the commission charged with investigating the affair, although he does not appear to have taken an active part in its proceedings.

Novikov was arrested in April and interrogated by Soviet security officers. On April 30 the head of the Ministry of States Security (in Russian: Ministerstva Gosudarstvennyi Bezopastnosti—MGB), Viktor Abakumov, sent Stalin a statement from Novikov denouncing Zhukov as “an exceptionally power-loving and self-obsessed person, who loves glory, demands respect, expects submissiveness and cannot bear dissent.” Novikov then recounted how Zhukov was only interested in the importance of his own role during the war and discounted the contribution of others. Most damagingly Novikov detailed what he claimed was Zhukov's disrespectful attitude toward Stalin as the supreme commander.
³

When Novikov was released from prison and rehabilitated after Stalin's death he claimed his attack on Zhukov was prompted by interrogation pressure and torture. This is very likely true, but it may be that Novikov was encouraged to point the finger at Zhukov because he saw Zhukov's membership of the investigation commission as instrumental in his downfall. In any event, Stalin chose to accept Novikov's claims at face value and on June 9 he issued a decree to the higher ranks of the military repeating the accusations and announcing Zhukov's posting to the Odessa Military District in the Crimea. Zhukov was deemed guilty of “unworthy and harmful conduct” in his relations
with the Supreme Command. As a man of overweening personal ambition, said the decree, Zhukov had falsely claimed credit for all the big operational successes during the Great Patriotic War and had gathered around himself a group to whom he had expressed criticisms and disagreements with the government. One of the successes that Zhukov took credit for was the Berlin operation. But, said the decree, Berlin would not have been taken in such a short time had it not been for the support of Konev's and Rokossovsky's armies. Zhukov, the decree noted, had recognized that his “serious mistakes” made it impossible for him to continue as commander-in-chief of the ground forces.
⁴

Why did Stalin decide to use Novikov's accusations to remove Zhukov from a post to which he had so recently appointed him? One possibility is that Stalin had his own sources of information on Zhukov that confirmed some of Novikov's claims. At this time it was common for Soviet military and political leaders to be kept under close security surveillance, including bugging of their apartments and dachas.
⁵
While it is hard to believe that Zhukov would have disparaged Stalin even in private, it is not difficult to imagine him making exaggerated claims of credit for wartime victories. Demoting Zhukov might seem an extreme response relative to the sin of boastfulness—a common trait of generals, after all—but Stalin was in a brittle mood after the war. An aging man of nearly seventy by then, the war had taken its physical and emotional toll on the dictator. He was tetchy and disposed to upbraid or censure the members of his inner circle for even minor perceived transgressions. Zhukov was only one of many to suffer such a fate in the 1940s. In 1949, for example, Stalin removed Molotov from the post of foreign minister because he refused to vote for the expulsion of his own wife (who was Jewish and accused of association with Zionist supporters of Israel) from the Communist Party.
⁶
Stalin was also determined to bring the Soviet military to heel and to prevent the overlauding of its war record. Stalin's demotion of Zhukov showed the Red Army he was still the boss and warned other generals that he would not tolerate any sign of disloyalty.
⁷

When asked in the 1960s about his demotion Zhukov blamed jealousy but not so much on the part of Stalin as those around the dictator, especially Beria.
⁸
Another theory of Zhukov's was that Bulganin
had turned Stalin against him. Bulganin was Stalin's political deputy within the Defense Ministry and, indeed, was to succeed Stalin as armed forces minister in 1947. In the post-Soviet edition of Zhukov's memoirs a passage describes how he clashed with Bulganin shortly after his return to Moscow in 1946 about the chain of command and relations between the military and Stalin. Bulganin wanted the chain of command to run through him to Stalin whereas Zhukov wanted direct access to the Soviet leader. Unfortunately for Zhukov, when the dispute was reported to Stalin the dictator sided with Bulganin. In another unpublished writing Zhukov described how he clashed with Bulganin over command of demobilized troops who had been placed on the reserve list.
⁹

Zhukov left for Odessa in mid-June intent on behaving normally. “I firmly resolved to remain myself,” he told Konstantin Simonov. “I understood that they were waiting for me to give up and expecting that I would not last a day as a district commander. I could not permit this to happen. Of course, fame is fame. At the same time it is a double-edged sword and sometimes cuts against you. After this blow I did everything to remain as I had been. In this I saw my inner salvation.”
¹⁰
One outer sign of normality was that Zhukov took his family on their first postwar holiday in August—to the popular Soviet resort of Sochi on the opposite side of the Black Sea from Odessa. Marshal Rokossovsky was among his fellow holidaymakers.
¹¹
But Zhukov's troubles were far from over. On August 23 Bulganin reported to Stalin that a train with seven wagons containing eighty-five cartons of Germanmade furniture had been stopped by customs on the Soviet-Polish border. The furniture was bound for Zhukov in Odessa. The train was allowed to continue its journey but customs officials in Odessa were instructed that the cargo was not to be given any privileged treatment.
¹²

In February 1947 Zhukov was excluded from candidate (i.e., nonvoting) membership of the party Central Committee on grounds that he had an antiparty attitude. On February 21 Zhukov wrote to Stalin:

On February 27 Zhukov wrote to Stalin again, admitting that during the war he had made mistakes, including claiming too much credit for successes and failing to acknowledge fully the role of the supreme commander. But he remained adamant that Novikov's accusation that he was hostile toward the government was slanderous: “Comrade Stalin, you know that without regard for my own life, without hesitation in the most dangerous situations, I always tried as much as I could to fulfill your instructions.”

By Soviet standards Zhukov's pleas were quite dignified. It was not uncommon for people who found themselves in Zhukov's position to go to much greater lengths to ingratiate themselves with Stalin, usually by praising the Great Leader's genius. Both letters were passed to Stalin by Bulganin but the dictator did not reply and never met Zhukov again.
¹³
Instead the campaign against Zhukov continued. In June 1947 he was censured for awarding a military medal to the singer Lidiya Andreevna Ruslanova when she visited Berlin in August 1945. (After one of her performances Zhukov accompanied her on the accordion. He did not play badly “for a marshal,” the singer later recalled.) Also censured was one of Zhukov's long-serving political officers, General K. F. Telegin, who had signed the award decree. While Zhukov's punishment was a reprimand, Telegin was dismissed from the army and reduced from full membership of the party to candidate membership. In 1948 Telegin, Ruslanova, and her husband, General V. V. Krukov, were arrested and imprisoned because of their connections with Zhukov.
¹⁴
“In 1947 I feared arrest every day,” recalled Zhukov, “and I had a bag ready with my underwear in it.”
¹⁵

The next development was even more ominous: an investigation into the war booty that Zhukov had extracted while in command of the Soviet zone of occupation in Germany. In January 1948 Stalin authorized covert searches of Zhukov's Moscow flat and country dacha. On January 10 Abakumov, head of state security, reported to Stalin on the extensive haul of gold, jewelry, silverware, silk, expensive books, furs, and foreign furniture that his officers had found. Looking around the dacha, Abakumov wrote to Stalin, it was difficult to tell if it was located in Moscow or in Germany.
¹⁶