Stalin's General (40 page)

Beria was found guilty of terrorism and counterrevolutionary activities, sentenced to death, and shot. Sometime later, when he was asked what was the most important thing he had done in his life, Zhukov replied: “the arrest of Beria.”
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The use of senior army officers to deal with Beria was a significant symbol of the new post-Stalin-era relationship forged between the communist regime and the Soviet military. After Stalin's death the status of the armed forces was raised, even glorified, particularly in relation to the victory in the Great Patriotic War. The military was allowed more autonomy in its professional sphere and a greater say in political decision-making, albeit in a context in which the party leadership remained firmly in control. Under Stalin the internal security forces had been the main coercive prop of the regime. Now more reliance was placed on the army as the state's guarantor of last resort. The choice of Zhukov to lead the arrest of Beria was no accident. He was a popular war hero and, with him on their side, party leaders could be sure not only of support from the armed forces but from a
good part of the general population, too. In time Zhukov would come to personify both the more equitable power balance between the party and the army as well as the new political activism of the military—a phenomenon not seen in the Soviet Union since the 1920s and 1930s when Zhukov's heroes Frunze and Tukhachevsky were in charge of the armed forces.

Despite his role in the Beria affair, Zhukov did not move to center stage in Soviet politics until he was appointed defense minister in 1955. In the meantime Bulganin made sure he was sidelined politically. What responsibilities Zhukov did have as deputy defense minister kept him out of the limelight and away from Moscow.

One of Zhukov's jobs was to oversee the development of the Soviet armed forces' nuclear-war-fighting capabilities.
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The USSR had tested its first nuclear bomb in August 1949. In the 1950s there was a further series of tests, including the explosion in August 1953 of the first Soviet H-bomb. During this same period the Soviets found themselves threatened by the growing American arsenal of more than 1,000 atom bombs, including tactical and battlefield nuclear weapons sited in Europe. Since the Soviet nuclear arsenal at that time numbered only fifty bombs this meant the USSR had to rely for its defense on conventional as well as nuclear forces.

In autumn 1953 the Soviets conducted a field exercise in the Carpathian Military District in western Ukraine in which troops were subjected to a simulated battlefield nuclear attack. In charge of the district was Konev, who had been posted there in 1951 following stints as commander-in-chief of Soviet ground forces (1946–1950) and chief inspector of the Soviet army (1950–1951). Zhukov assisted in the preparation and conduct of the exercise. It was also decided to conduct a live exercise as well—to detonate a nuclear bomb with troops in the vicinity and to observe the effects on their performance. Preparations for this test, which took place at Totskoe in the southern Urals in September 1954, began in April with Zhukov in charge.

Ahead of the planned detonation the local population was evacuated and/or given instructions about protection from radioactive fallout.
Troops were trained, equipped with protective clothing, and placed in specially constructed fortifications. Zhukov visited the test zone frequently. On one occasion he watched a tank attack passing through a supposedly contaminated zone. They moved so slowly that Zhukov stopped them, gathered the tank commanders together, and asked if any of them had taken part in the advance on Berlin. On being told that some had, he asked them to conduct a proper tank attack, which they then did. Zhukov was also concerned about troops being frightened by all the precautions being taken. “You have frightened people too much with your safety measures,” he reportedly told the exercise commanders. “Now you'll have to ‘unfrighten' them.”

The live bomb exercise began on September 14 when a medium-size atomic bomb was exploded 1,000 feet above the ground. Troops were entrenched as close as three or four miles from ground zero while Zhukov, Bulganin, and members of the High Command watched from about ten miles away. The shock wave blew off their hats, including Zhukov's.

Overall, the exercise was judged a great success and its lessons were distilled into a new set of Field Regulations, adopted in 1955, which assumed use of battlefield nuclear weapons as well as the strategic bombing of cities. On Zhukov's urging the transfer of nuclear weaponry from the industrial ministry responsible for building the bombs to the military and the Ministry of Defense took place around the same time.
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As deputy defense minister, Zhukov occupied an important but secondary place in the military and political hierarchy. There is no evidence he exercised any real influence over the government's defense policy and he did not feature prominently as a national public figure. Zhukov might well have languished in that middling position in the Soviet hierarchy until retirement were it not for the vagaries of Soviet internal politics. In January 1955 they took a twist that propelled him into the country's top leadership, indeed made him the kingmaker in the sharply contested post-Stalin succession struggle.

IN JANUARY 1955 THE SOVIET PRIME MINISTER, GEORGY MALENKOV, WAS REMOVED
from office. Malenkov's place was taken by Nikolai Bulganin, thus creating a vacancy at the Defense Ministry. The obvious candidate for the job was Zhukov. He had the status, the charisma, and the requisite energy and determination. When the matter came up at the Presidium (the new name for the Politburo), Zhukov modestly deferred to Vasilevsky, who had previously served as war minister. But Vasilevsky insisted that Zhukov had more experience and was the outstanding figure among the armed forces.
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Behind both Malenkov's fall and Zhukov's elevation was the rise of the new party leader, Nikita Khrushchev. While there were some policy differences between Malenkov and Khrushchev the conflict that led to Malenkov's dismissal was mainly personal. Since succeeding Stalin as party leader in March 1953 Khrushchev had become more and more domineering. Malenkov was not the only Soviet leader with whom Khrushchev fell out. Next was Foreign Minister Vyacheslav Molotov, sacked by Khrushchev in 1956, followed by Zhukov himself in October 1957.

Khrushchev was forceful, flamboyant, and volatile. He deferred to no one (except Stalin when he was alive) and he didn't like sharing the limelight.

Like many in the Soviet leadership Khrushchev was born into a peasant family. He joined the Bolshevik Party in 1918 when he was
twenty-four and served as a political commissar in the Red Army during the Russian Civil War. In the 1920s and 1930s he worked his way up the party hierarchy, becoming head of the Moscow party organization in 1934. In 1937 Stalin appointed him secretary of the Ukrainian Communist Party. One of Khrushchev's more unsavory career episodes was his role in the infamous Katyn Massacre of March–April 1940. This was the name given to the execution by the Soviet authorities of some 20,000 Polish POWs deemed to be incorrigible enemies of the communist system. It was Khrushchev, together with Stalin's later disgraced security chief, Lavrenty Beria, who had proposed the further security measure of deporting the POWs' families to Kazakhstan for ten years—an operation completed by mid-April 1940.
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When Ukraine was invaded and occupied by the Germans in 1941 Khrushchev reverted to the role of political commissar, serving at Stalingrad in 1942–1943 and then in Ukraine. After the war Stalin brought Khrushchev back to Moscow and once again appointed him head of the capital's Communist Party, placing him in a prime position to succeed as party leader when the dictator died in March 1953. The post-Stalin leadership was supposedly collective—and for a couple of years it was. But Khrushchev's control of the party—the key institution of the Soviet state—made him first among equals with control over key appointments and policies.

One of the ways Khrushchev asserted his leadership was by promoting the de-Stalinization of the Soviet system—a break with many of the policies and practices of the Stalin era. The most significant was ending the practice of mass repression and releasing millions of political prisoners from the Gulag—the Soviet system of labor camps. At the same time there was a thaw in Soviet cultural policy. Writers, musicians, and other artists were allowed more freedom of artistic expression and the country was open to increasing contact with the outside world. There was also a more relaxed atmosphere within the Communist Party, although discussion that challenged the leadership was still not allowed. In other words, Khrushchev presided over a much more benign form of authoritarianism than had prevailed in Stalin's time. There was repression but dissent within certain limits was permitted and outright opposition to the system was more likely to get you imprisoned than shot.
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Khrushchev first encountered Zhukov in 1940 when the latter commanded the Kiev Special Military District. Their paths crossed again at Stalingrad and when the two men worked closely together during the Ukrainian campaign of 1943–1944. In his memoirs, published in 1971, Khrushchev expressed a high opinion of Zhukov:

Khrushchev must have seen in Zhukov what Stalin saw: a powerful but reliable and loyal personality. Khrushchev was right about Zhukov's loyalty to him, but he was no Stalin and Zhukov expected a certain autonomy to go along with his promotion. Nor could Zhukov resist the temptation to bask in the glory of his war record, something that rankled with the insecure Khrushchev even more than it did Stalin. Zhukov was not outwardly hostile to Khrushchev when he served with him during the war or as his defense minister but his later attitude to Khrushchev was one of barely concealed contempt. Indeed, he came to consider Khrushchev's betrayal of him in 1957 as having been greater than Stalin's in 1946.
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Unlike Khrushchev, Stalin didn't deny Zhukov his military career, nor did he orchestrate a distortion of Zhukov's war record or make ridiculous claims about his own role in particular battles. And for Zhukov military honor and pride were of utmost importance.

Zhukov was formally appointed minister of defense on February 7, 1955, and that day he gave a lengthy interview to a group of American journalists.
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Asked whether he thought the battle of Moscow was more important than Stalingrad, Zhukov replied that the tide of war
turned as a result of a series of operations: Moscow, Stalingrad, and Kursk. While he had directed preparations for the Stalingrad operation, it was Vasilevsky who had carried it through. Asked about Hitler's mistakes during the war, Zhukov said that at the strategic level the German dictator had underestimated the capacity of the Soviet Union, while at the tactical level Hitler had underrated the importance of the coordination of the different branches of the armed forces and underestimated the value of artillery as opposed to aircraft: “The air force is a delicate arm. It is greatly dependent on weather and a number of other factors.” When the conversation switched to the question of atomic weapons Zhukov emphatically denied they made the world a safer place because of their deterrent effect:

Zhukov also noted that “war cannot be won by atomic bombs alone.” Much of the interview concerned American-Soviet relations and Zhukov expounded the Soviet line that the USSR posed no threat to the United States and wanted only peaceful relations. Zhukov complained about American military bases ringing the Soviet Union and called for an end to the arms race. He concluded by recalling the good relations he had with President Eisenhower when they served together on the Allied Control Council in Germany, urging a renewal of friendly relations. Notwithstanding his completely conventional responses, it was an impressive political debut, one that exuded confidence and a good command of his brief.