Stalin's General (6 page)

Behind the tsar's downfall lay a rising tide of popular discontent and protest. The war had not gone well for Russia. It had suffered a series of defeats and territorial losses and incurred millions of casualties. The tsarist government had proved incapable of organizing the country's war effort. There were inadequate supplies of weapons and ammunition and many of the troops' basic needs—food, clothing, and medical aid—were provided for by civic organizations. Printing money to pay for the war created rampant inflation and consequent food shortages in the cities as peasants were reluctant to part with their produce for a devaluing currency. The urban population responded with strikes and political demonstrations. In November 1915 Tsar Nicholas took over command of the armed forces and became personally identified with Russia's military defeats and its other wartime woes. Adding to his troubles was a loss of middle-class confidence in his leadership and its constant calls for the modernization and democratization of Russia.

Matters came to a head when strikes and demonstrations by female textile workers in Petrograd in March 1917 developed into citywide protests. Troops were ordered to restore order and a number of demonstrators were shot. But the city's garrison soldiers then mutinied and joined the side of the protesters. Having lost control of his capital Nicholas was persuaded to resign in the national interest. He abdicated in favor of his brother, the Grand Duke Michael, who refused to take the throne. That was the end of the autocratic Romanov dynasty.

The tsarist administration was replaced by a Provisional Government of liberal, democratic, and socialist politicians whose aim was to implement urgent political, economic, and social reforms and to prepare elections to a Constituent Assembly that would agree on a new constitution for the country. These plans were thwarted, however, by the development of a situation of “dual power” in which power and authority were shared between the Provisional Government and the representatives of Workers', Peasants', and Soldiers' Soviets—popularly elected councils that took over the running of the country at the local level. More radical than the Provisional Government, the Soviets provided fertile ground for the agitation and propaganda of the Bolsheviks and other revolutionary groups struggling for a socialist as well as a democratic regime in Russia. Led by Vladimir Ilyich Lenin, the Bolsheviks called for all power to be transferred to the Soviets and for Peace, Bread, and Land—land for the peasants, bread for the workers, and an end to Russia's participation in the war. Bolshevik policy was very popular, particularly among soldiers and the working class. Within six months they were the strongest and best-organized political party in Russia. In November 1917 the Bolsheviks staged a coup in Petrograd that overthrew the Provisional Government and proclaimed a new socialist government that would rule on behalf of the Soviets.

An important feature of these upheavals, which soon spread from Petrograd to the rest of the country, was the politicization of the armed forces; one of the first acts of the Provisional Government was to issue a decree authorizing the formation of soldiers' and sailors' committees to elect delegates to their local Soviets. Zhukov was elected chairman of his cavalry squadron's committee and a delegate to the regimental
Soviet. He later claimed to have supported the Bolshevik faction within the regiment but his election probably reflected his status and popularity as a good NCO rather than his politics. Zhukov also related how the regimental Soviet was taken over by anti-Bolshevik elements. As a result, some of the regiment's units sided with counterrevolutionary Ukrainian nationalists. His own unit was disbanded and the soldiers told to go home, while Zhukov himself had to go into hiding for several weeks to evade capture by officers serving with the Ukrainian nationalists. This seems to be the reason he did not arrive in Moscow until after the Bolsheviks seized power.

Zhukov was back in his home village of Strelkovka by the end of 1917, intending, he said in his memoirs, to have a rest before joining the Red Army, which the Bolsheviks established in January 1918. But he contracted typhus and was unable to join up for another six months. It is more likely, however, that Zhukov did what most demobbed soldiers from the former tsarist army did—he went home and waited to see what happened next.

In March 1918 the Bolsheviks signed the Brest-Litovsk Treaty with Germany, withdrawing Russia from the war. Peace came at a high price, however, and the Bolsheviks were forced to concede vast tracts of territory to the Germans. The treaty also inspired the Bolsheviks' opponents to organize an armed insurgency against Lenin's government—something they had been reluctant to do while Russia was still in the war. In response to the incipient civil war the Bolsheviks began to organize an armed force capable of defending their revolutionary seizure of power. The revolutionary militias that had brought the Bolsheviks to power were replaced with a professional army. The election of officers was abolished and a traditional command structure established. Proper rates of pay were also introduced. Most important, the Bolsheviks began to conscript former officers and NCOs of the tsarist army. In early September 1918 the Bolsheviks issued a decree ordering Zhukov's age cohort to report for military duty by the end of the month.
¹⁷

Although he lived in the heart of Bolshevik Russia, Zhukov could have ignored the conscription decree, as many Russian peasants did. That he chose to accept conscription was in all likelihood a professional rather than a political choice: it offered him the possibility of continuing with his military career. Like many among that first generation
of soldiers to serve in the Red Army, Zhukov's political convictions were the result of his military service rather than the reason he joined up.

Zhukov enrolled in the 4th Regiment of the 1st Moscow Cavalry Division of the Red Army on October 1, 1918.
¹⁸
Bolshevik Party members were the first group to be conscripted into the Red Army and Zhukov's unit had many communist cadres serving in it. In this context it is not surprising that Zhukov gravitated to the Bolsheviks and became a candidate member of the Communist Party (the Bolshevik Party's new name) in March 1919. Candidate membership provided for a probationary period during which applicants had to prove their commitment to the communist cause; Zhukov did not become a full member of the party until May 1920.
¹⁹

In May 1919 Zhukov's division was dispatched to the southern Urals to take part in the Bolshevik campaign against Admiral Alexander Kolchak, a former tsarist commander who had seized power in Siberia and was dedicated to the overthrow of the Bolshevik government. In June Zhukov experienced his first combat as a member of the Red Army, a fierce fight with some 800 mounted Cossacks. In September Zhukov saw action again, this time at Tsaritsyn (renamed Stalingrad in 1924) in southern Russia. At the end of October Zhukov was involved in a hand-to-hand engagement that left him injured by a grenade explosion. When he was sent to a field hospital in Saratov to recover he met a young schoolgirl, Maria Volkhova. The two were inseparable for a month but the relationship ended when Maria returned to her home town of Poltava and Zhukov was sent home to Strelkovka for a further period of recuperation. This turned out to be a temporary separation and the relationship resumed three years later, notwithstanding Zhukov's marriage in the meantime to another woman. In due course Maria would bear Zhukov an illegitimate daughter, Margarita.
²⁰

In January 1920 Zhukov reported for duty again but because he was not fully fit (he had been stricken by another bout of typhus, a common ailment of the time) he was assigned to the 3rd Reserve Cavalry
Division. Three months later Zhukov's career in the Red Army took a new turn when he was sent on the Red Commanders Cavalry Course at Ryazan, about 100 miles southeast of Moscow. The Red Commanders Cavalry Course was in effect a training course for junior officers but the Bolsheviks had abolished officer titles and would not reintroduce them until the Second World War. Until then the Red Army used the generic title of “commander” to distinguish higher from lower ranks.

A number of documents relating to Zhukov's time at Ryazan provide a fascinating glimpse of his activities during this period.
²¹

Zhukov had been recommended for the course by his division's party cell. He was enrolled on March 15, 1920, and placed on a preparatory course devoted to the basic education of participants. He achieved good or excellent marks in all his subjects—Russian, Arithmetic, Geography, Hygienics, Military Administration, Political Education, and Military Rules and Regulations—and quickly graduated to specialist courses in cavalry tactics, although because of his experience in the tsarist army he ended up helping to train the other cadets.

Zhukov was very active in his party cell at Ryazan, at one point becoming its secretary, but he seems to have resigned because of a controversy concerning the group's chairman, Stavenkov, who was accused of napping on duty. When the cell met to consider the case Zhukov defended Stavenkov strongly, arguing that he was a good party worker and a good commander. Zhukov opposed the proposed exclusion of Stavenkov from the cavalry course and argued instead that his accuser should be thrown out of the party cell and then out of the party altogether. Zhukov's motion was passed unanimously except for one abstention.

Zhukov's abilities were recognized, too, by his appointment to a troika overseeing sanitary conditions at the school and his membership in a mandates commission that was charged with examining the credentials of incoming trainees. Zhukov's record at the school was not exemplary, however. At the end of July 1920 he was suspended from the course for a few days following an infringement of military discipline, for what, precisely, is unknown.

The Ryazan course ended for Zhukov in August 1920 when he and 120 other cadets were sent to join the 2nd Moscow Rifle Brigade, a
composite unit of two infantry regiments and one cavalry regiment. At the end of August the brigade was sent to Krasnodar in the northern Caucasus to take part in the fight against the forces of Baron Wrangel—the leader of an anti-Bolshevik army based in the Crimea. After taking part in a few engagements Zhukov was transferred to the 1st Cavalry Regiment of the 14th Detached Cavalry Brigade, tasked with mopping up the remnants of Wrangel's forces in the vicinity of Novozherelievskaya.

By October 1920 Zhukov had been placed in charge of a platoon and he was promoted to squadron commander when the brigade was posted to Voronezh Province to put down a peasant uprising against the Bolsheviks. This uprising developed into the so-called Tambov Revolt, led by A. S. Antonov, a former commander of the local militia. It was in battles with Antonov's forces that Zhukov experienced some of the fiercest fighting of the Russian Civil War. As a result of one of these skirmishes Zhukov was awarded his first Red Army decoration—the Order of the Red Banner. According to the award citation Zhukov's squadron had “held off an onslaught of the enemy numbering from 1500–2000 sabers for seven hours … on March 5 1921 and then counterattacking, smashed the bandits after six hand-to-hand clashes.” In his memoirs Zhukov recalled that “in a hand-to-hand fight an Antonovite fired his sawed-off rifle at me and killed my horse. We fell, the horse pinning me down, and the next moment I would have been slashed to death but for Nochevka, the political instructor, who came to my rescue. With the swing of his saber he killed the bandit, caught the reins of his horse, and helped me into the saddle.”
²²

By summer 1921 the Tambov Revolt had been defeated but Zhukov's unit continued to chase the remnants of Antonov's forces until nearly the end of the year. Among his companions was his young wife. According to daughter Era, Zhukov met her mother, Alexandra Dievna (b. 1900), who was a village schoolteacher, when he transferred to Voronezh. If, as Era says, they married in 1920, it must have been a whirlwind romance, since Zhukov did not arrive in the area until October. “The times were difficult, and,” says Era

None of this featured in Zhukov's memoirs. But then apart from the account of his childhood and early youth, there was little that was truly personal in his memoirs. Once he joins the Red Army his recollections become a catalogue of his military career and service to the Soviet state. He did not even bother to mention, for example, that his father died in 1921.

Zhukov's dedication to what he saw as his sacred socialist duty as a Soviet soldier is certainly the central part of his life story but it is far from being the whole truth. Even in the regimented and repressive Soviet system citizens had personalities and private lives as well as public ones. Zhukov was no exception. Behind the stunning success of his military and political career was a driving personal ambition and strength of character that enabled him to take failure in his stride. It would be too simple to say that in the story of his childhood and youth we can discern all his personal qualities and characteristics but there are quite a few of enduring importance: equanimity in the face of hardship; dedication to study and self-education; bravery in battle; and the willingness to accept responsibility and exercise leadership.

The quintessential lesson of the young Georgy's journey through life—from childhood to adulthood, from village to city, through war and revolution, and into the Red Army and the Communist Party—was that tumultuous events and upheavals offered opportunities for advancement for those with the talent to take them. This was a pattern that was to be repeated throughout his life and career.