Stalin's General (42 page)

The skirmish between Khrushchev and Molotov over the resolution of the German question was part of a running battle between the two men that had begun earlier in the year over relations with communist Yugoslavia. Khrushchev wanted to end the ideological split that had developed between Stalin and the Yugoslav leader, Marshal Tito, in 1948. As Stalin's right-hand man Molotov had been at the forefront of the campaign to expel Tito from the communist bloc and was reluctant to rescind or repudiate his sharp ideological critique of the Yugoslav leader. Zhukov was drawn into the dispute when he published an article in
Pravda
on the tenth anniversary of the victory in the Great Patriotic War that praised Tito's leadership of the partisan movement in Yugoslavia during the war and expressed the hope that relations between Belgrade and Moscow would improve. At the Presidium meeting on May 19, 1955, Molotov expressed his disagreement with the article, saying, “the Red Army was founded by Trotsky but we don't glorify him.” He also characterized Zhukov's piece as “anti-Leninist” but later withdrew this remark as being made in the heat of the moment.
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Molotov lost the battle and relations with Tito's communists were restored. At a meeting of the Central Committee in July Molotov was sharply criticized for his stance on Yugoslavia. Zhukov attended the meeting but did not speak, thereby avoiding direct involvement in the battle between the two titans of the post-Stalin Soviet leadership.
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By the end of 1955 the focus of the struggle between Khrushchev and Molotov had switched to preparations for the forthcoming 20th Party Congress. Khrushchev was planning to deliver a wide-ranging critique
of Stalin at the congress and Molotov objected on grounds that the achievements as well as the failings of the Soviet dictator should be recognized. He pointed out, too, that not long ago everyone had been praising Stalin to the skies, including Khrushchev. Molotov's position gained some traction with other Presidium members, notably the disgruntled Malenkov, and Lazar Kaganovich, another former member of Stalin's inner circle. But Khrushchev commanded a majority on the Presidium and his Secret Speech, as it came to be called, went ahead as planned.

Khrushchev's famous speech denouncing Stalin and the cult of his personality was delivered on February 25, 1956 to a closed and private session attended only by congress delegates. Khrushchev electrified them with his account of Stalin's reign of terror that peaked in the late 1930s with mass repressions of party and state officials. Among the victims were members of the Soviet officer corps and Khrushchev reported that since 1954 more than 7,500 military victims of the purges had been rehabilitated, many of them posthumously. Khrushchev also attacked Stalin's war leadership. The country had not been prepared adequately for war and Stalin had refused to heed warnings of the imminent German attack. Khrushchev claimed that when war broke out Stalin suffered a nervous breakdown and only came back to work at the behest of the rest of the Soviet leadership. After his recovery Stalin continued to interfere in military affairs in an amateurish way and only the country's talented military leaders had saved the Soviet Union from an even greater disaster than the catastrophic losses the Red Army suffered during the early years of the war. Khrushchev also went out of his way to present himself as Zhukov's loyal friend who had defended him when he came under attack by Stalin. After the war, Khrushchev said, Stalin had sought to magnify his own role in winning victory and minimize that of his generals, including Zhukov. “Not Stalin,” concluded Khrushchev, “but the party as a whole, the Soviet Government, our heroic army, its talented leaders and brave soldiers, the whole Soviet nation—these are the ones who assured the victory in the Great Patriotic War. (
Tempestuous and prolonged applause
).”
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Khrushchev's Secret Speech was not officially published but it was read out at party meetings throughout the Soviet Union, causing much confusion and divided opinions.

A week before Khrushchev's dramatic intervention Zhukov had delivered a more sedate report on military matters to a public session of the congress. This was an important moment for Zhukov personally as it was the first time he had addressed a party congress and it was also an opportunity to make a wide-ranging statement on Soviet defense policy in the new, nuclear age. A future war, Zhukov told the delegates, would be very different from past wars. It would be characterized by extensive use of planes and rockets to deliver weapons of mass destruction, not only atomic bombs but chemical and bacteriological weapons as well. This new form of warfare required that resources be transferred to the air force and to air defenses. At the same time, conventional land, air, and sea forces continued to be essential since only they could prosecute a war to a successful conclusion. Zhukov did not ignore the human factor: “Military equipment, even the most effective, cannot by itself decide a battle or an operation or achieve victory. The outcome of armed struggle in future wars will be determined by people who have complete control over their military equipment, who believe in the rightness of the war, who are deeply devoted to their government and are always ready to defend their people.”
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Zhukov concluded his speech the way he had begun it, pledging the armed forces' eternal loyalty to the Soviet motherland.

At the congress Zhukov was elected an alternate (i.e., nonvoting) member of the Presidium, propelling him to the highest level of Soviet political decision-making. Zhukov immediately aligned himself with Khrushchev and the critique of Stalin. Shortly after the congress he drafted a speech on the impact of the cult of personality on military affairs. The speech was intended for a plenum of the Central Committee held in June 1956 but for some reason Zhukov did not get to deliver it, possibly because the party leadership had decided to moderate its denunciations of Stalin.

As might be expected, Zhukov's draft report to the Central Committee followed the main lines of Khrushchev's Secret Speech: Stalin was criticized for the prewar purge of the Red Army, for his role in the debacle of June 22, 1941, and for operational mistakes during the early years of the war. But Zhukov also introduced some new criticisms, including the unjust execution of General Pavlov and the members of the Western Front command in July 1941, linking this episode
to a more general defense of the Red Army's honor against Stalin's accusation that it had been too prone to retreat during the war. Zhukov pointed to the Red Army's astronomical number of casualties during the early years of the war and argued that it had “honorably and valiantly fulfilled its military duty, defending the socialist motherland.” Zhukov also raised the question of the treatment of surviving Soviet POWs after the war, most of whom had been captured through no fault of their own. Not only had many of them suffered postwar repression, they were still being treated badly by party and state bodies: “it is necessary to remove the moral disapproval of the former POWs, to repudiate their illegal punishment, and to eliminate reservations about them.”
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Pressure to alleviate the suffering of former POWs had been building for some time. In September 1955 the government had granted amnesty to former POWs convicted of voluntarily entering captivity. In April 1956 a commission headed by Zhukov was established to examine the status of former POWs, including the issue of whether they should be readmitted to the party. Zhukov's commission reported in June, proposing a range of measures to end discrimination against the former POWs: payments for time spent in captivity; pensions for them and their families; and a propaganda campaign to extol the POWs' heroic contribution to the wartime struggle. In September 1956 the government issued a directive ordering the full implementation of the year-old amnesty decree.
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The issue of Pavlov and the Western Front command was trickier for Zhukov to resolve. There was no problem with repudiating their execution and rehabilitating their reputations as patriots and communists. Many such rehabilitations took place in the years following Stalin's death. Those involved in the Aviators Affair that had led to Zhukov's demotion in 1946 were rehabilitated as early as June 1953. In July 1954 the heads of the Red Air Force who had been executed in October 1941 were rehabilitated. Tukhachevsky and the group of generals and marshals shot for supposedly conspiring against Stalin in 1937 were rehabilitated in January 1957. The problem with Pavlov's case was that there was no denying the disaster that had befallen the Western Front in June 1941. The solution to this tricky problem was to hold a General Staff inquiry into the command failures of the leadership
of the Western Front. Completed in November 1956, the General Staff review concluded that because Pavlov lacked experience of high command he had been unable to cope with the demands of wartime decision-making but he had not been guilty of cowardice or of deliberately allowing his troops to succumb to German encirclement without a fight.
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This verdict suited Zhukov because while Pavlov was partly exonerated the spotlight remained on his mistakes rather than those of the General Staff who had ordered the overambitious counteroffensive that led to the destruction of the Western Front. Pavlov and his colleagues were formally rehabilitated by the party in July 1957.

With his promotion to the Presidium Zhukov became an active participant in high-level political as well as military decision-making, most notably in the Hungarian crisis of 1956. This crisis was preceded by and, indeed, prompted by a crisis in Poland. When news of Khrushchev's Secret Speech leaked it encouraged hopes in Poland that there could be a fundamental reform of the authoritarian communist system imposed after the Second World War. Popular dissent increased, as did agitation by reform-minded communists seeking a change in the Polish party leadership. Matters came to a head during the Poznan riots of June 1956 when hundreds of demonstrators were shot by Polish security forces. Polish communists responded to the crisis by restoring the leadership of Wladyslaw Gomulka, who had been the party's leader in the 1940s until he was purged as a communist considered too nationalist. Among the reforms Gomulka proposed was sacking Rokossovsky as minister of defense—a proposal that caused particular alarm in Moscow since he was seen as the guarantor of Poland's continued alignment with the Soviet Union. As the protests and street demonstrations escalated, Khrushchev flew into Warsaw unannounced on October 19 accompanied by Molotov, Mikoyan, Kaganovich, Konev, and Zhukov. Their aim was to browbeat Gomulka into retaining Rokossovsky as defense minister and to insist that political reform in Poland proceed at a more moderate pace. In the background lurked the threat of military action to impose the Soviets' will.
Gomulka refused to capitulate but he managed to convince the Soviet delegation that neither communist rule nor Poland's alliance with the USSR within the Warsaw Pact was under threat.
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But the Soviets could not save Rokossovsky, who was dismissed as defense minister and returned to Moscow in November 1956.

Meanwhile an even bigger political crisis had developed in Hungary, also inspired by Khrushchev's denunciation of Stalin. On October 23 Hungarian security police opened fire on anticommunist crowds attempting to storm Budapest's main radio station. An armed revolt broke out across the city and the communist government asked for Soviet military assistance to suppress the rebellion. That evening Zhukov reported to the Presidium that 100,000 people had demonstrated in Budapest and that the radio station was ablaze. The consensus of the meeting was that troops should be used to restore order. Zhukov agreed: “It is different from Poland. It is necessary to introduce troops … declare martial law and introduce a curfew.”
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Soviet troops had been stationed in Hungary since the end of the war. They remained even after the signature of a peace treaty with Hungary in 1947, the ostensible rationale being the need to protect supply routes for Soviet troops based in eastern Austria, which, like Germany, was divided into zones of military occupation after the war. In May 1955 the Soviet-western occupation of Austria was ended by the Austrian State Treaty. By this time the Warsaw Pact had been signed, providing a pretext for Soviet troops in Hungary and those formerly based in Austria to be reorganized into a Special Corps. According to Colonel E. I. Malashenko, commander of the Soviet troops based in Budapest, the Special Corps was Zhukov's idea, inspired by his experience commanding a similar formation at Khalkhin-Gol in 1939.
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When the Hungarian crisis erupted the Soviets had five divisions stationed in or proximate to Hungary and on October 24 they mobilized some 30,000 troops and 1,000 tanks to seize strategic locations in Budapest and seal the Austrian-Hungarian border. Contingency plans for such an operation had been drawn up in July 1956 and the Soviets achieved their tactical goals with relative ease.
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However, the military intervention further inflamed those in armed revolt and the question arose of Soviet troops being withdrawn as part of a political
compromise similar to that achieved in Poland. When the Presidium discussed the matter on October 26 Zhukov opposed troop withdrawal, characterizing it as “capitulation.” He urged instead the use of more troops and maintenance of a “firm position.”
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In Budapest the situation stabilized when a new government headed by the reform communist Imre Nagy came to power. Nagy seemed to be a Hungarian Gomulka and appeared to offer the possibility of a political compromise that would satisfy both the insurgents and the Soviets. At the Presidium meeting on October 28 Zhukov spoke in favor of a limited troop withdrawal and of the need to support the Nagy government.
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That same day a cease-fire was arranged and Soviet troops began to withdraw to barracks outside Budapest. Replying to questions from journalists the next day Zhukov said that “in Hungary, the situation has improved. A government had been formed in which we have confidence.”
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The conciliatory mood was continued at the Presidium meeting on October 30 when it was agreed to issue a statement about the development of more equitable relations between the Soviet Union and all the socialist countries, not only Hungary. Zhukov said the statement should express “sympathy for the people” and “call for an end to the bloodshed.”
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But by the next day, October 31, the mood in Moscow had hardened once again and Zhukov was ordered to draft a plan for further military intervention.