The Greatest Battle

by Andrew Nagorski

  Eventually the villagers buried some of the dead, but they mostly stayed clear of the forest, where the worst fighting had taken place. As late as the following spring, an occasional Red Army survivor would appear among the trees. “They were so ugly with their long beards that almost reached their waists,” Denisova recalled. “We were scared of them.” But they never harmed the surviving villagers. “I don’t know how they survived and what they ate,” she added, noting that their clothes were so tattered that it was impossible to tell whether they were ordinary soldiers or officers. Since the area around Vyazma would remain in German hands for two years, it’s hard to imagine that many of them lived to see the end of that occupation.

  The only individual grave I saw was near the last village before the forest. It was for a Russian general who hid among the villagers as the Germans were completing their job of wiping out the encircled Soviet forces. It’s a simple grave with a metal cross. There’s no name on the grave, since no one knows who he was. According to the villagers, he helped save some of the local children by instructing them where to hide during the fighting. He changed into civilian clothes, but the Germans heard that he was still in the village and demanded his surrender. They then lined up the villagers and announced that they would start shooting every tenth person unless the village gave him up. At that point, the general stepped forward himself, and he was promptly executed.

  In a place where hundreds of thousands perished without a trace, as if they had never existed, the nameless general stands out as one of the few who anyone still remembers. For the rest of the fallen, it’s only the ground that remembers and tells their story to those willing to listen.

  Foreigners have long been confounded by the way Russians have displayed a seemingly limitless stoic endurance in the face of suffering and despotism. In his classic account of his journey to Russia in 1839, the Marquis de Custine described the country as “an absolute government and a nation of slaves.” In Russia, the Frenchman added, “fear replaces, that is to say, paralyzes thought.” Push Russians to explain their history and their behavior as they have dealt with the long list of tragedies that make up that history, and, sooner or later, they are likely to start talking about sudba—fate. After all, Russians point out, so much of life is not an accident. Just as it is no accident that Vasily Grossman’s epic novel about how Russians endured the terror of both Hitler and Stalin during World War II is entitled Life and Fate.

  But fate can deliver blessings, not only curses. And Ella Zhukova is firmly convinced that Stalin’s decision to entrust the defense of Moscow to her father, Marshal Georgy Zhukov, was one of those blessings. “I’m not a religious person, but I believe he had some gift from above,” she said, speaking of her father, who was assigned “such a great responsibility” for the Soviet capital at the moment when the Germans looked virtually unstoppable. Maybe fate was at work, too, in elevating a man to this position who was born in 1896 in a village called Strelkovka. The name comes from the word streltsy, or archers, because it was one of the places where Ivan the Terrible’s archers set up camp to defend Moscow from Tartar invaders.

  Whatever the case, the man charged with saving Moscow, who would go on to become his country’s supreme military leader for the rest of the war, wasn’t exactly easy to like. He was famous for his angry tirades laced with obscenities (“You are not a general but a bag of shit!” he would tell subordinates), and he never flinched when it came to sacrificing his men on the field of battle. “If we come to a mine field, our infantry attack exactly as if it were not there,” he told General Eisenhower after the war. “The losses we get from personnel mines we consider only equal to those we would have gotten from machine guns and artillery if the Germans had chosen to defend the area with strong bodies of troops instead of mine fields.”

  In that, along with his unhesitating punishment of anyone who disobeyed orders, he was the perfect general for a leader like Stalin. Like the dictator, he was quick to threaten execution. His message to commanders in the field was all too often brutally simple: carry out the order, no matter how suicidal, or you will be shot for treason. In September 1941, when he was in Leningrad, which was already under siege, he decreed that any soldier who abandoned his post without written permission would meet the same fate.

  Marshal Konstantin Rokossovsky, another top commander during the war, who worked closely with Zhukov, offered a decidedly diplomatic but nonetheless revealing description of him after the war. “Zhukov was always a man of strong will and decisiveness, brilliant and gifted, demanding, firm and purposeful,” he declared. “All those qualities, unquestionably, are necessary in a great military leader and they were inherent in Zhukov. It is true that sometimes his toughness exceeded what was permissible. For example, in the heat of the fighting around Moscow Zhukov sometimes displayed unjustified sharpness.”

  Unlike most of his fellow officers, Zhukov wasn’t a serious drinker, certainly not by Russian standards, and he didn’t smoke. He prized his good looks and wasn’t shy about insisting that he had to be portrayed the way he liked. In 1940, he called up the editor of Krasnaya Zvezda, the military newspaper, to complain that it was about to print a photo of him that he was convinced did him an injustice. “I look as if I were bald,” he said. “You have plenty of artists, don’t you? Can’t they fix it?” Of course they could—and did.

  The son of a shoemaker, Zhukov started as an apprentice furrier in Moscow at the age of eleven and quickly learned some hard lessons. “Grin and bear it when you’re beaten,” one of his co-workers told him. “A beaten man is worth two who aren’t.” Conscripted into the tsarist cavalry in 1915, he frequently ran afoul of officers who considered him insolent and unrepentant after his alleged infractions of the rules. But others recognized talent and audacity in the recruit, and he soon proved his courage in battle. In 1919, as part of the new Red Army fighting the Whites, he was wounded by a hand grenade. Hospitalized with multiple fragments in his left side and thigh, he came down with typhus.

  But soon he was back in uniform. As a professional military man, he found himself frequently on the move. This wasn’t exactly conducive to stable romantic relationships. He married Aleksandra Zuikova in 1922, a union that officially lasted more than forty years and resulted in the birth of two daughters, Era in 1928, and Ella in 1937. In 1929, though, he also fathered a third daughter, Margarita, with another woman. (All three daughters still live in Moscow, but Era and Ella only learned about Margarita’s existence in the 1950s and there’s no love lost between them.) Zhukov was frequently involved with other women. According to his driver Aleksandr Buchin, he had a long affair during the war with “a young and pretty” nurse by the name of Lidia Zakharova. In 1957, Zhukov fathered a fourth daughter, Maria, with Galina Semyonova, an officer in the army’s medical service, who was thirty years younger than he was. In 1965, at the age of sixty-nine, he divorced Aleksandra so that he could marry Galina.

  Nonetheless, his daughter Ella, who freely admits that her father had “some lovers,” portrays him as “always kind, attentive and loving to his family.” He wrote short letters home that indicated he was thinking of his children. In a letter written to Era and Ella in September 1941, he inquired about their health and said, “I think that as soon as I’m done with the Germans, I’ll immediately come to you or you’ll come over. Please write to me more often. I don’t have time at all because we have battles all the time.” Even in this letter written to his two young daughters while he was trying to hold off the Germans in Leningrad, he promised to produce a victory. “I’m planning not only to defend the city, but also to pursue them right to Berlin.” At a time when the situation looked dire everywhere, this was quite a leap of faith.

  Zhukov knew he was lucky to have survived the purges that swept away so many of his fellow officers in 1937. According to his daughter Ella, he always kept a small brown suitcase packed with two changes of underwear and a toilet kit in case the next knock on the door was for him. She remembers that i
t stood near his bed and that from time to time her mother would put in fresh clothes. While even a child could feel the pervasive atmosphere of fear, she added, “We never spoke openly about it at home.”

  Zhukov only broke this habit of keeping the suitcase ready in 1957, when Khrushchev, who had always distrusted Zhukov, dismissed him from the post of defense minister and from all his official duties. Zhukov had helped the new Soviet leader arrest Beria and then to outmaneuver his political rivals, but Khrushchev feared that Zhukov might have political ambitions of his own. As the unquestioned military architect of the victory over Germany, Zhukov commanded a high level of prestige and popularity.

  Khrushchev’s distrust of Zhukov harked back to his relationship with Stalin. Although Khrushchev had also loyally served the discredited tyrant, Zhukov had worked especially closely with him. At the same time, he was prone to speak up more honestly in the presence of Stalin than anyone else. This marked Zhukov as someone who wouldn’t be intimidated by power, even of the absolute variety. Marshal Timoshenko would later claim that Zhukov was “the only person who feared no one. He was not afraid of Stalin.” Maybe so, but the packed suitcase indicates an acute awareness of the consequences if he fell out of favor.

  Not surprisingly, there were distinct limits to what Zhukov could do, particularly in the period of the purges, when he still hadn’t risen to the heights he would achieve later. Zhukov would write afterward, in a part of his memoirs that was censored until the 1990s, that the purges constituted “a huge slanderous epidemic” in which “quite often they slandered honest people and even close friends.” He also maintained in his memoirs that he tried to protect those officers he could help or at least do them no harm as the interrogators conducted their witch-hunts.

  While he was serving in the Belorussian Military District, a member of the military council, Filipp Golikov, interrogated him in Minsk. (Golikov would later play his ignominious role as the military intelligence chief who kept funneling reports to Stalin that downplayed the chance of a German attack in 1941.) Asked about Rokossovsky and other officers who had been arrested, Zhukov defended them as “real patriots.” Given another chance to answer the same question, he replied, “Yes, even now I think that they are real patriots and devoted communists.”

  According to Zhukov’s account, Golikov was visibly upset by that response. His face turned red, and he asked if he didn’t think it was dangerous “to praise enemies of the people?” But Zhukov held his ground, saying he had no idea why his fellow officers were arrested.

  Golikov then shifted gears, bringing up reports that Zhukov was rude to his subordinates and political officers. Zhukov acknowledged he could be sharp-tongued, but he claimed he acted this way only with those who didn’t perform well. Finally, the interrogator asked about rumors that Ella, his newest daughter, was baptized—which, if true, would have condemned him on the spot. He denied it, and Ella is convinced to this day that there’s no reason to believe that the rumor was anything more than part of the general slander campaign.

  Zhukov maintained later that he regarded the purges as a period of mad folly that cost the lives of many good officers. “Of course, I regard them as innocent victims,” Andrei Gromyko, the veteran Soviet foreign minister, reported him as saying. Referring to the most prominent victim, the aristocratic commander who had transformed the Red Army into a modern fighting force, he added, “Tukhachevsky was an especially damaging loss for the army and the state.” Ella Zhukova also reports that he condemned the purges. But, of course, those condemnations came after Stalin’s death. While Zhukov would complain in his memoirs that the purged officers were replaced by “new people who were not so experienced,” he was part of a new generation of military leaders whose careers were accelerated to fill that void. In fact, he admits that he was lucky that he wasn’t promoted more quickly, since that would have made him a more visible target and made it harder for him to avoid being purged. On another occasion, when he heard that there might be new accusations against him, he admitted, “Actually I was nervous, because at that time it was very easy to be labeled an ‘enemy of the people.’”

  In the summer of 1939, Zhukov faced the first test of his military leadership skills. Japanese forces had attacked Soviet troops in Mongolia, an action that Zhukov would later characterize as an attempt by Japan to expand its empire and gauge the fighting ability of its Soviet neighbor. Taking command of the Soviet First Army Group, Zhukov demonstrated his willingness to order his troops into the most dangerous situations, knowing full well that they would pay a big price. In one instance, the Japanese attacked in force in an area where Zhukov didn’t have access to infantry reserves. So he sent his tanks into battle without infantry support, knowing that this would result in heavy losses, which was exactly what happened. The Soviet brigade lost about half of its tanks and men, but the Japanese suffered high casualties as well, and their assault failed. As Zhukov put it, that fully justified the sacrifice of his men.

  But Zhukov also patiently built up his forces to ensure that they would enjoy a healthy advantage in manpower and firepower when he launched his major attack in what was known as the battle of Khalkin Gol on August 20. Despite fierce resistance by the Japanese troops, Zhukov’s forces achieved a decisive victory by the end of the month, and two weeks later Japan signed an agreement with the Soviet Union and Mongolia that formally ended hostilities. Both sides had sustained heavy losses, but the Red Army had emerged the clear-cut winner. The Japanese now knew that the Soviet Union was an opponent they couldn’t afford to underestimate—which would play a major role in their thinking later, when their alliance with Germany would raise the question whether they should support Hitler by attacking the Soviet Union from the east.

  For his role in orchestrating this victory, Zhukov received the title Hero of the Soviet Union and, more important, attracted the attention of Stalin. The following May, he was appointed commander of the Kiev military region. During Zhukov’s first face-to-face conversation with Stalin, the Soviet dictator wanted to discuss the successful campaign against the Japanese. Puffing his pipe, he questioned him about the performance of his troops and their officers. Stalin listened attentively and urged him to apply the lessons he’d learned to his new job in the Kiev district and work them into his training courses. When Zhukov returned that night to his room at the Hotel Moskva, he had a hard time falling asleep. He was impressed by Stalin’s seriousness and attention to detail, along with his calm demeanor. “If he is always like this, I can’t understand why there are so many rumors that he is a monster,” he mused, indicating a very different mind-set from the one he would ascribe to himself later. “At the time, I could not believe the bad things.”

  Even in the fuller version of his memoirs that was released in the 1990s, Zhukov wrote defensively about Stalin’s failure to prepare the Soviet Union for the German attack and about the subsequent early successes of the enemy. Stalin had been trying to avoid a war with Germany by all possible means, he pointed out. “Stalin wasn’t a coward, but he clearly understood that it was too late to make the important preparations for such a great war against an enemy who was so strong,” he added. “He understood that we were late…with the rearmament of our troops with new weapons and the reorganization of the armed forces.”

  Zhukov largely preferred to avoid the question why such preparations hadn’t been made earlier and to avoid mentioning Stalin’s direct responsibility for these failures. But he was less reticent about pointing out that Stalin had kept most of the key intelligence reports about Germany’s intentions to himself, preventing Zhukov and other top military leaders from seeing them. “I wasn’t informed by Stalin about information which was in our intelligence reports that he received personally,” Zhukov noted. While those reports were shared with other members of the Politburo, they were “kept secret from the military commanders of the country.” When Zhukov tried to find out why this was the case, he was told that those were Stalin’s orders. On another occasion in ea
rly 1941, both Zhukov and Marshal Timoshenko asked the Soviet leader directly why this was happening. “You will be informed only about the things you really need to know,” Stalin replied tersely.

  On September 11, when it appeared that the Germans were close to succeeding in their drive on Leningrad, the Soviet leader dispatched Zhukov to take over from Marshal Voroshilov, who was clearly not up to the task of defending the city. “The situation is almost hopeless there,” a gloomy Stalin told Zhukov. The new arrival quickly began issuing orders, dismissing or reassigning those generals he felt weren’t doing their job, and insisting that the troops stop retreating and launch new attacks, no matter what the odds, or face the firing squad if they disobeyed. By the end of the month, the German advance had been arrested, and it settled into what would become the nine-hundred-day blockade of the city to starve its inhabitants.

  Their ordeal would prove to be horrific: With food supplies rapidly dwindling, 632,253 civilians would die during the siege, according to official Soviet figures. But Zhukov’s actions—and a bit of good fortune—had prevented the Germans from achieving victory. What Stalin and his generals didn’t realize at first was that in the second half of September, Hitler was already redeploying many of his troops to prepare for Operation Typhoon, the attack on Moscow. This eased the pressure on Leningrad.

  In the early days of October, as the Germans trapped the Red Army units in the Vyazma cauldron, other troops in the area were desperately fleeing similar encirclements. Vasily Grossman, the Krasnaya Zvezda correspondent and novelist, witnessed those events and recorded in his notebooks the impressions that never could be published in his newspaper. “I thought I’d seen retreat, but I’ve never seen anything like what I am seeing now, and could never imagine anything of the kind,” he wrote. “Exodus! Biblical exodus! Vehicles are moving in eight lanes, there’s the violent roaring of dozens of trucks trying simultaneously to tear their wheels out of the mud…. There are also crowds of pedestrians with sacks, bundles, suitcases…. There are moments when I feel with complete vividness as if we have been transported back in time to the era of biblical catastrophes.”