Stalin's General (13 page)

From Zhukov's point of view his stay in Ulan Bator was a mixed blessing. On the one hand, Europe was where the action was. In response to Hitler's invasion of Poland, Great Britain and France declared war on Germany on September 3. The Soviets had been negotiating an anti-German triple alliance with Britain and France for several months. But Stalin was convinced that the British and French were trying to entice him into doing their fighting for them. In a stunning diplomatic maneuver he signed a nonaggression treaty with Hitler that kept the Soviet Union out of the war. Part of the deal was a secret agreement dividing Poland and the Baltic states of Estonia, Finland, Latvia, and Lithuania into Soviet and German spheres of influence. In accordance with this deal the Red Army joined the German attack on Poland on September 17, recapturing western Belorussia and western Ukraine—territories lost to the Poles during the Russo-Polish War of 1919–1920. The Poles put up little resistance to the Soviet invasion but it was by far the Red Army's biggest operation since the civil war. There followed an expansion of Soviet influence in the Baltic area as Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania succumbed to Stalin's demands for military bases.

On the other hand, being in Mongolia meant that Zhukov stayed out of the Red Army's disastrous campaign in Finland in the winter of 1939–1940. During that conflict the Red Army suffered 200,000 casualties, including nearly 50,000 dead. The so-called Winter War came to an end in March 1940 with the signature of a Soviet-Finnish peace
treaty. Encouraging both sides to conclude peace was the possibility of British and French involvement in the conflict—a move that would have drawn the Germans into the Soviet-Finnish conflict and likely plunged the whole of Scandinavia into war.

The Soviets had barely digested the lessons of the Winter War when Hitler launched his Blitzkrieg invasion of Western Europe in May 1940. Within six weeks France had surrendered and Britain stood alone against Hitler. But by then Zhukov was back on the Western Front and ready to become a key figure in preparations for the coming Soviet war with Germany.

ZHUKOV'S RECALL FROM THE FAR EAST IN MAY 1940 WAS PART OF A RADICAL
shake-up of the Red Army after the debacle of the war with Finland.

When the Red Army invaded Finland in December 1939 Stalin and the Soviet leadership expected a quick and easy victory. The Soviets even entertained delusions that the Finnish working class would rise in revolt and welcome the Red Army as socialist liberators. Instead the Finns put up a spirited defense that won worldwide sympathy and admiration. One of the many negative political consequences suffered by the Soviets was the humiliation of being expelled from the League of Nations for aggression—a fate Nazi Germany, imperial Japan, and fascist Italy all had avoided by leaving the organization of their own accord. In the 1930s the Soviet Union had been the foremost advocate of collective security and League action against aggression. Now it was subject to international condemnation for that very sin.

On the military front the Soviet-Finnish War had two main phases. (See
Map 2
: The Soviet-Finnish War, 1939–1940
.) In December 1939 the Red Army launched a broad-front attack on Finnish defenses, employing five separate armies with about 1.2 million troops, supported by 1,500 tanks and 3,000 aircraft. The main attack was on the Mannerheim Line on the Karelian Isthmus. Named after the commander-in-chief of the Finnish armed forces, this was a belt of defenses, natural and constructed, that ran the entire width of the isthmus. The main assault on the Mannerheim Line was by the 7th Army under the leadership
of K. A. Meretskov, who commanded the Leningrad Military District. The Soviet aim was to breach the Mannerheim Line, occupy the town of Viipuri, and then turn west toward the Finnish capital of Helsinki. When the initial attack failed—partly because of bad weather but mainly because of the Red Army's incompetence—the Soviets regrouped, reinforced, and launched another offensive in January 1940 under the command of S. K. Timoshenko, chief of the Kiev Special Military District, who was transferred north for the duration of the campaign. Timoshenko's attack succeeded. By March 1940 the Red Army was in a position to collapse the remnants of Finnish defenses and march on Helsinki. But Stalin, fearing Anglo-French intervention in the conflict, decided to negotiate a peace treaty with the Finns, signed on March 12, 1940. Under the terms of the treaty the Finns conceded Soviet territorial demands, including moving their border away from Leningrad, but retained their political independence and thereby their freedom to join the attack on Russia when Germany invaded in June 1941.

In the aftermath the Soviets conducted a postmortem on the conflict to explain why they had suffered so many casualties (200,000, including 50,000 dead) and why it had proved difficult to subdue a small country like Finland. At a special conference of the High Command in April 1940 Stalin complained that the Red Army was still obsessed by the experience and lessons of the Russian Civil War and had failed to modernize its thinking, especially in relation to the role of artillery, tanks, planes, and rockets in contemporary warfare.
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After the conference a commission was established to further distill the lessons of the Finnish war. The work of this commission contributed to a series of reforms of the Soviet armed forces. In May the government restored the titles of general and admiral and in June promoted to these ranks hundreds of combat-blooded officers. Around the same time Stalin reinstated thousands of purged and disgraced officers. Among the returnees was Colonel K. K. Rokossovsky, Zhukov's classmate from the 1920s, who had been arrested and imprisoned in 1937. On May 16, 1940, training regulations were revised to provide for more realistic preparation for combat. In July the armed forces' disciplinary code was strengthened and in August unitary command (abolished during the prewar purges) was restored at the
tactical level so that field officers no longer had to agree on command decisions with a political commissar. Steps were also taken to improve propaganda work in the armed forces and to recruit more officers and men into the Communist Party.

Another stimulus to reform of the Red Army was the astounding success of Germany's Blitzkrieg invasion of Western Europe in May–June 1940. Impressed by the success of Hitler's panzer divisions, Stalin reversed the decision to abolish mechanized corps. In July 1940 a decree established nine mechanized corps, consisting of more than 1,000 tanks each, supported by motorized infantry, signal, and engineering units. Around the same time decisions were made to produce the models of many of the tanks, guns, and planes that were to become the mainstay of the Soviet armed forces during the Great Patriotic War, including the famous T-34 tank.

The key figure in these reforms was Timoshenko, who had replaced Kliment Voroshilov as defense commissar in May 1940. Indeed, the reforms are often referred to as the “Timoshenko reforms.” Another change was a revamp of the Main Military Council—the body responsible for the overall organization, functioning, and mobilization of the Red Army. Stalin left the council and Timoshenko took over the chair from Voroshilov.
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During the war the BBC famously joked that Timoshenko had Irish roots and that his real name was Tim O'Shenko.
³
But Semyon Konstantinovich Timoshenko had, in fact, been born in the Odessa region in 1895. The same age as Zhukov, he, too, was from peasant stock and also served in the tsarist cavalry during the First World War. After the 1917 revolution he joined the Red Army and the Communist Party and during the civil war rose rapidly through the ranks to divisional commander. Timoshenko was a member of the so-called cavalry clique, a term that referred to a group of senior officers who served with Stalin during the civil war and took part in the defense of Tsaritsyn, later renamed Stalingrad. Another member of the cavalry clique was Voroshilov.
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After the civil war Timoshenko commanded the 3rd Cavalry Corps where among his divisional commanders was Rokossovsky and below him regimental commander Georgy Zhukov. It was Timoshenko who promoted Zhukov to brigade commander in 1930. The two men served
together again from 1933 to 1935 when Timoshenko was deputy commander of the Belorussian Military District and Zhukov a divisional commander. Timoshenko's next command was as head of the Kiev Special Military District, which led the Soviet invasion of eastern Poland in September 1939. Timoshenko's handling of that operation impressed Stalin, as did his cleaning up of the Red Army's mess in Finland. That his daughter was married to Stalin's son Vasily may also have helped Timoshenko's career prospects. Timoshenko was, thus, the obvious successor to Voroshilov as defense commissar when Stalin finally lost patience with his longtime crony because of the incompetence he displayed during the Winter War.

Timoshenko's appointment as people's commissar for defense thus created a vacancy at the head of the Kiev Special Military District. And Zhukov's triumph at Khalkhin-Gol, in contrast to the dismal performance of many of his peers during the Finnish war, made him a natural successor to Timoshenko in Kiev—a district destined to be in the front line of the coming war with Germany. No doubt Zhukov's personal connection to Timoshenko helped, too.

Zhukov's recall from Mongolia in May led to his first meeting with Stalin on June 2, 1940. Stalin's habit was to rise late and work late and Zhukov saw him in his office at 11:00
P.M
.
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The meeting lasted half an hour and, according to Zhukov, the discussion centered on Khalkhin-Gol. Stalin wanted to know what Zhukov thought of the Japanese army and what difficulties he had encountered in Mongolia. In the version of his memoirs published during the Soviet era Zhukov wrote of his first impression of Stalin: “Stalin's appearance, his soft voice, the depth and concreteness of his judgement, his knowledge of military matters, the attention with which he listened to my report—all this had impressed me deeply.” In the post-Soviet versions of his memoirs published in the 1990s there was a coda: “if he was like this with everyone, then why was there all this talk about him being such a terrible person?”
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On June 5
Pravda
announced that Zhukov had been promoted to general of the army, the next highest rank after marshal, noting in particular his effective use of tanks during the Khalkhin-Gol battle. Also promoted was Zhukov's co-commander at Khalkhin-Gol, G. M. Shtern, but only to the rank of general-colonel.
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This was the first of a
series of announcements by
Pravda
of promotions to general, including that of Rokossovsky to major general on June 10.

When he arrived in Ukraine in May 1940 to take charge of the Kiev Special Military District, Zhukov seemed set for a prolonged as well as a challenging posting. The Kiev District, the largest in the Soviet Union, encompassed the reunited Ukraine and guarded a state border 500 miles long. It was one of three Special Military Districts on the USSR's western borders—the other two being the Western, with its headquarters in Minsk, and the Baltic, based in Riga. Designated “Special” because of their importance to the defense of the Soviet Union and their readiness to undertake independent strategic operations without the need to mobilize extra reserves, each would also play an important role in the counterinvasion of enemy territory in the event of war. Because this was a time of constant reorganization and expansion for the Red Army it is difficult to specify the precise strength of the Kiev District when Zhukov took over in mid-1940. But he certainly commanded a force consisting of multiple armies and divisions, a complement several hundred thousand strong, in addition to thousands of tanks, planes, and artillery pieces.
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