Stalin's General (9 page)

Shortly after this report, in February 1931, Zhukov was again promoted—this time to an assistant inspector of the cavalry.
²³
The Cavalry Inspectorate was based in Moscow where Zhukov was made responsible for combat training. He was also elected secretary of his local Communist Party branch. The Inspectorate worked closely with the Combat Training section of the Defense Commissariat where Alexander M. Vasilevsky was employed. Zhukov would develop a close personal and working relationship with him during the Great Patriotic War when Vasilevsky was chief of the General Staff and Zhukov was Stalin's deputy supreme commander.

Born in 1895, Vasilevsky was the son of a Russian Orthodox priest and destined for the church until the outbreak of war in 1914 interrupted his seminary studies. Unlike most of the Red Army elite, Vasilevsky was infantry, not cavalry. During the First World War he fought on the southwest front and rose to the rank of captain. Conscripted into the Red Army he ended the civil war with the rank of deputy regimental commander. Given his education Vasilevsky tended to be posted to teaching, training, and staff jobs. But because of his “bourgeois” background Vasilevsky was not accepted as a candidate member of the Communist Party until 1931 and a full member until 1938.

In his memoirs Vasilevsky recalled of Zhukov that his “military talent was becoming increasingly evident with each year that passed. I recall the unanimously high opinion of his abilities among his comrades when he was commanding a cavalry division and a cavalry corps and was deputy commander of troops of the Belorussian military district.”
²⁴

In October 1931 Zhukov's boss at the Inspectorate, Semyon Budenny, the legendary commander of the 1st Cavalry Army during the Russian Civil War, wrote his evaluation of Zhukov, arriving at much the same conclusion as Rokossovsky. Zhukov was a “commander with a powerful will, very demanding of himself and his subordinates … unnecessarily harsh and rude.” Militarily and politically, however, he was a good all-around commander, concluded Budenny, qualified to command a division or even to head up a cavalry school.
²⁵

Zhukov's tendency to be overly disciplinarian in command was a fault he came to admit in later years. “I was said to have been unnecessarily exacting—but this I considered indispensable for a Bolshevik commander. Looking back, I admit that at times I was too exacting, not always sufficiently restrained and tolerant of the faults of my subordinates.… I could not bear to see any slackness in servicemen's work or behaviour. Some of them could not understand this, and I, for my part, was probably not tolerant enough of human frailties.”
²⁶

Zhukov's work in the Cavalry Inspectorate involved arranging field and staff exercises, organizing war games, and convening meetings of combat training officers to exchange knowledge and experiences. He was also involved in drafting Service Regulations for the Red Army Cavalry in the early 1930s, when the cavalry was incorporating mechanized, artillery, and tank units.
²⁷

After two years in the Cavalry Inspectorate Zhukov was posted, in March 1933, to command the 4th (Voroshilov) Cavalry Division based in Slutsk in Belorussia. Zhukov commanded the 4th Division (which was renamed the 4th Don Cossack Division in 1936 following its transfer from the 3rd Cavalry Corps to the 6th Cossack Corps) for four years and during this time he was “preoccupied with one thought only: to make my division the best outfit in the Red Army.” Under his command were the 19th, 20th, 21st, and 23rd Cavalry Regiments, the 4th Mounted Artillery Regiment, and the 4th Mechanized Regiment. According to Zhukov, the division was in a poor condition when he took over because it had spent the previous eighteen months building its own barracks and stables following its transfer to Belorussia from Leningrad: “as a result a splendidly trained division was reduced to an inefficient labour force. What made matters worse was that shortage of building materials, the rainy weather, and other unfavourable factors precluded timely preparation for the winter's cold, affecting morale and combat worthiness. Discipline grew lax, and the disease incidence among horses increased.”
²⁸
Zhukov's solution was his usual one of training and exercises followed by more training and more exercises plus a heavy dose of discipline. By 1935 Zhukov had turned the division around and both he and his unit were awarded the Order of Lenin in recognition of this achievement. The division's location in the Belorussian Military District meant that it took part in all the
major exercises conducted by the Red Army as it geared up for mechanized warfare and prepared to implement the doctrine of deep battle and deep operations. Hence, Zhukov paid a lot of attention to his 4th Mechanized Regiment and the activities of its tanks.

L. F. Minuk, who served as chief of staff of the 4th Cavalry Division, recalled Zhukov being an energetic, organized, and highly disciplined commander, meticulous in his attention to detail and as demanding of himself as he was of his subordinates. Minuk fully approved of Zhukov's command style because it achieved good results and was commensurate with the 4th Division's location in a frontier district—which meant that in the event of war it would bear the brunt of an enemy attack. “If a commander loses it and hesitates in front of me, what can we expect from him in battle?” Zhukov reportedly asked Minuk. But Zhukov did not only criticize his commanders, says Minuk, he corrected their mistakes and was attentive to their personal needs as well, helping them with family and health issues, for example. Off-duty, recalled Minuk, neither rank nor class existed for Zhukov and he could be very sociable: “I never noticed in him any pomposity, arrogance or conceit but there were clear boundaries between official and unofficial relations with subordinates.”
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Memoirs about Zhukov tend to be either laudatory or condemnatory and it is clear where Minuk's sympathies lie. But Minuk's recollections are consistent with an emerging picture of an uncompromising but well-respected commander who could inspire affection and fear in equal measure. Above all it is a portrait of a man driven by the desire to succeed.

ZHUKOV'S OWN MEMOIRS
say little about his personal life and concentrate almost exclusively on his military career. What knowledge we have of his private life in the 1930s derives from the reminiscences of Era, his eldest daughter. Apparently, Zhukov required order at home as well as at work and did not appreciate lateness or broken promises. Neither would he tolerate hypocrisy or dishonesty in the family. Era remembered her father as always reading and studying—an impression confirmed by her sister Ella, born in Slutsk in 1937, who said that books were always at the center of the Zhukov household. Era's memoir
is most revealing about their mother, Alexandra. She was devoted to Zhukov and functioned as his aide as well as wife, helping him, for example, to perfect his command of the Russian language during the early years of their marriage. Alexandra was a sociable woman who made friends easily, including with the wives of Zhukov's fellow officers. Era and Ella were both convinced that Zhukov was as devoted to his wife and family as they were to him.
³⁰
Even taking into account the natural exaggerations of filial devotion, it seems clear that Zhukov could rely on a supportive family environment as he made his career in the Red Army. The two daughters' portrait also suggests that like many military men—indeed, men in general—Zhukov reserved his emotional energies and outbursts for the workplace.

In July 1937 Zhukov took another step up the promotional ladder when he was appointed commander of the 3rd Cavalry Corps in the Belorussian Military District. Then, in March 1938, he was transferred to the 6th Cossack Corps—a posting that pleased him because it contained his old command, the 4th Cavalry Division. As a corps commander, Zhukov concentrated on the combat use of cavalry within a mechanized army and on operational and strategic questions. He also sat up nights reading the classics of Marxism-Leninism, “by no means an easy task” he noted in his memoirs, “especially studying Karl Marx's
Capital
and Lenin's philosophical works”!
³¹
Then, in June 1938, he was made deputy commander of the Belorussian Military District with special responsibility for training cavalry units and tank brigades.

Zhukov's relatively rapid career progression in the 1930s took place against the background of two very important developments: the gigantic expansion of the Soviet armed forces in the 1930s and Stalin's great purge of the Red Army in 1937–1938.

Defense spending increased from 10 percent to 25 percent of the budget between 1932 and 1939. In the early 1930s the Red Army grew to nearly a million strong and by the end of the decade had a complement of over four million. Most of this expansion was accomplished by turning the part-time territorial divisions into regular divisions and by extending the period of conscripted service from two to three years. Between 1932 and 1937 the defense budget increased by 340 percent in absolute terms; then between 1937 and 1940 it doubled again. By 1939
the USSR was producing more than 10,000 planes a year, nearly 3,000 tanks, more than 17,000 artillery pieces and 114,000 machine guns. As part of this expansion the pay and conditions for officers improved dramatically. Zhukov's corps commander's pay of 2,000 rubles a year in 1939 was triple what it would have been in 1934.
³²

The origins of this massive rearmament program dated back to a war scare in 1927 when the Soviets believed the British and the Poles were plotting a combined attack. The Soviets examined their defenses and found them to be highly vulnerable. That review coincided with the launch of the first five-year plan for the industrialization of the USSR, which promised to provide the Red Army with the technical resources to build up its war machine. In 1931 Japan's invasion of the northeastern Chinese province of Manchuria provoked further anxieties about the state of Soviet defenses. The Soviets had many interests in China, not least border security, and feared the Japanese attack could develop into a wider regional conflict into which they would be drawn. Also, in January 1933 Adolf Hitler and the Nazis came to power in Germany. Anticommunism and anti-Sovietism were central to the Nazis' political identity and in
Mein Kampf
Hitler had proclaimed the goal of seeking
Lebensraum
(living space) in Russia for the German people. In response to these dire threats the Soviets spent the rest of the decade trying to build an international alliance of states to counter the Japanese and, especially, the German danger. But it was the rearmed Red Army that the Soviets primarily relied upon to protect their security.

The growth of the armed forces presented talented, professional officers such as Zhukov with unprecedented career opportunities. The status of service in the Red Army also rose, particularly for higher grade commanders. In September 1935 formal ranks were reintroduced into the Red Army at lower and midlevels—lieutenant, senior lieutenant, captain, major, and colonel. There was still no rank of general, however, and brigade and corps commanders continued to be designated by their function (in Russian abbreviation:
Kombrig
and
Komkor
). While the Red Army had no generals it did have marshals and in November 1935 this title was bestowed on K. Voroshilov, Tukhachevsky, Budenny, the chief of staff, A. I. Yegorov, and V. K. Blukher, the commander of the Far Eastern Army.

Stalin's purge of the Red Army in the late 1930s was the second development to impact Zhukov's career. This was not the first purge of the Red Army—in the 1920s and early 1930s there had been several purges of former tsarist officers and those suspected of sympathies with Stalin's great rival, Leon Trotsky, driven into exile from the USSR in 1929. However, the 1937 purge was the first to engulf the Soviet High Command itself. It began in dramatic fashion in May 1937 with the arrest of Marshal Tukhachevsky and seven other high-ranking officers on charges of treason and involvement in a conspiracy with Nazi Germany to overthrow the Soviet government. In June all the accused were tried in secret, found guilty, and shot. Verdict and sentence were announced in the Soviet press and within ten days of the trial a further 980 officers had been arrested. By the time the purge had run its course more than 34,000 officers had been dismissed from the armed forces. Among the victims was Rokossovsky, who was arrested and imprisoned in August 1937. While some 11,500 officers were eventually reinstated (among them Rokossovsky), the great majority were either executed or died in prison. Among those who perished were three marshals (Tukhachevsky, Yegorov, and Blukher); sixteen officers of general-level rank; fifteen admirals; 264 colonels; 107 majors; and seventy-one lieutenants. The category of officer that suffered most losses, however, was that of political commissar, thousands of whom perished in the purges. As the guardians of political correctness in the armed forces it was easy to point the finger of blame against the commissars when the political loyalty of officers was called into question. The commissars were also resented by many professional military officers, some of whom took the opportunity to denounce them.