Meanwhile, every day brought news of more defeats: Klin was lost; Solnechnogorsk was lost; the Germans had crossed the canal near Yakhroma, and now the way to the eastern parts of the Moscow region was open to them. It was one huge mass of confusion and catastrophe; we were no longer fighting in military units but in chance groups of soldiers and tanks. And he had scarcely any will left to believe, to force himself to believe: No, we will not let it collapse! We will hold on. (During these days of the battle for Moscow he slept only two hours a day, no more. When Molotov phoned and threatened to have him shot, he gave him a very insolent reply.)
Stalin’s call was a final blow: “Are you aware that Dedovsk has been taken?”
Dedovsk? That’s halfway between here and Istra. Absolutely impossible.
“No, Comrade Stalin, I’m not aware of that.”
Over the phone came Stalin’s malicious jeer: “A commander ought to know what is happening on his front. Go there yourself, immediately, and take back Dedovsk!”
To abandon your command post, your communications with all the units on the march, to leave all your preparations at a time like this? No, the Supreme Commander has learned nothing over these six months of war. (Zhukov himself treated the generals under him no differently, however. That was the only way to win battles.)
“But Comrade Stalin, abandoning the army group headquarters in such a critical situation is not a wise move.”
Stalin’s reply, now with an angry sneer: “Never mind, we’ll get by somehow without you there.”
In other words, you count for nothing. That’s what he thinks you’re worth.
Zhukov rushed to phone Rokossovsky and learned that, of course, Dedovsk had not fallen. As Kostya guessed, they probably meant the village of Dedovo, much farther away and in a different area.
You needed a lot of courage to argue with Stalin. But now Zhukov hoped that he could ease the tension and even offer Stalin a bit of amusement with his phone call. But Stalin immediately flew into a rage: Go at once to Rokossovsky, and the two of you will recapture Dedovo! And take the army commander with you!
It was pointless to make any more objections. He went to Rokossovsky and with the divisional staff they established once more that, indeed, a few houses in the village of Dedovo, on the far side of a ravine, had been taken by the Germans; the rest of the village, on our side, was still ours. A shot across the ravine would be enough to drive the Germans out of the houses they had taken there, but four senior generals had to plan the operation and send a rifle company supported by tanks to carry it out.
All of them had wasted a day.
Still, Zhukov began bringing up all his reserves according to plan, and on December 5 he moved into the major offensive that Stalin wanted so badly. Within a few days he had been able to push the circle of German forces a significant distance away from Moscow. (Vlasov also made some fine moves with his 20th Army, but that mustn’t be mentioned.) And the Germans never managed to take Moscow.
A resounding victory! The whole world was amazed, and rejoiced. But the Supreme Commander himself was more amazed than anyone, and it seems that he never believed it would happen. Dizzy from the victory, he didn’t want to hear that we had used up our last reserves, that now we were completely exhausted and could barely hang on to what we had taken. No! The triumphant Stalin, in an expansive fit of desperate courage, ordered that we immediately begin a massive general offensive with all our forces, from Lake Ladoga to the Black Sea. We must liberate Leningrad and Oryol and Kursk, and do it all simultaneously!
The months passed—January, February, March—in a backbreaking and unnecessary effort by all our exhausted troops just to realize Stalin’s rosy dream. And so we sent out tens and hundreds of thousands of our men in pointless attacks. (Among them were the men of Vlasov’s Second Shock Army, who rotted in the swamps of the northwestern front and were abandoned without any reinforcements—but no one should ever write about that, and you’d better just forget about it yourself. Vlasov, in any case, later turned out to be a traitor.) We reached the point that our artillery was allowed only one or two shells per day.
Nothing was achieved anywhere. All we did was to spoil the picture of our Moscow victory. There was a single notable success, however, and it was achieved by the Western Army Group under Zhukov. Then Stalin took away the First Shock Army from him. Zhukov telephoned him, confident that he could convince him that he had prospects of a victory, but Stalin wouldn’t discuss it; he only heaped him with abuse and hung up.
He had to master the art of speaking to Stalin, an art no less complex than the art of war. Many times he would hang up on Zhukov or shower him with obscenities. (Yet when Stalin summoned him from some faraway front, more than a day’s travel away, and if he was down with a fever or the weather was too poor for flying, he still had to fly to the Supreme Commander, and he’d better not be even ten minutes late. Once, when the plane was descending over Moscow—there was a thick fog, but he couldn’t wait for it to clear—the wing barely missed a factory chimney.)
Yet in some incomprehensible manner, Stalin’s blunders were always covered up and glossed over by history. Obviously, it was to show the superiority of our system and our ideology. Even our enemies have no business objecting to that. This is a good time to repeat that the Central Committee had insisted that we show the party’s political activities on a broader scale. This gave rise to the widespread heroism of communists and Komsomol members, and our entire population rallied even more closely around the Communist Party.
Yet Zhukov did not take Stalin’s treatment of him personally. The Supreme Commander not only had to manage the war; he had to look after our industry as well, and he kept both in his iron grip—along with the entire country.
It might have been one of Stalin’s flaws—or, perhaps, one of his virtues—but he did not like to change his mind. All our winter counteroffensives failed. Mekhlis’s landing near Kerch was a bloodbath (but since it was Stalin’s own idea, no one else was harshly punished for it). And yet, ignoring the objections of his generals on the staff, the Supreme Commander undertook a misguided attempt to recapture Kharkov in May. The result was the pointless squandering of our reserves and all our efforts. In the summer, the now reinforced Germans began a major offensive (but not on Moscow, as Stalin was expecting). It was then that Golikov, another of Stalin’s favorites (and the same political officer who had questioned Zhukov in 1937 about his contacts with enemies of the people), almost lost Voronezh. The Germans flooded across the Don and the northern Caucasus, and by September they had already taken the mountain passes. It was only then, it seems, that Stalin realized he was the one to blame for the failures of 1942. And so he did not look for generals to take the blame. At the end of August, he appointed Zhukov (still not a marshal) as Deputy Supreme Commander, and once more he admitted with obvious pain: “We could lose Stalingrad.” He sent Zhukov there. (A few days later, when he learned that the next counterattack was set for September 6, not September 4, he again hung up the phone on Zhukov. He also sent him an ominous telegram: “Your delay looks very much like a crime.”)
It was at Stalingrad, though, that Stalin for the first time kept his impatience in check. Zhukov and the clever Vasilevsky were able to win themselves almost two months for the very detailed planning of an enormous encircling operation (Stalin was also captivated by the beauty of this plan), including the systematic assembling of forces, setting up a command system, and planning joint operations. Stalin had learned from his earlier mistakes; he was patient and did not interrupt. And so they achieved the great victory of Stalingrad.
One other thing was achieved there, something that few expected. Though he’d never had any formal training in strategic planning, something had obviously found its way through his thick skull. It was only here, for the first time, in the pressure of that great struggle, that Zhukov turned into a strategist. He became a different Zhukov, someone he had not been aware of before. He acquired a real insight into the mind of the
enemy, along with a constant sense, both intellectual and instinctive, of all our forces simultaneously—their personnel, their variety, their capabilities, and the qualities of their generals. He acquired the confidence that came from his ability to see farther and more widely than the others, an ability he had never had before.
And so it was all the more deeply insulting to read, some years later, Yeryomenko’s lies of how he had planned the whole Stalingrad operation . . . together with Khrushchev. Zhukov looked him in the eye and asked, “How could you do that?” “Khrushchev asked me to do it,” was the reply.
After that it was Chuykov, the commander of only one of the Stalingrad armies, who claimed the glory for all three fronts. He also made a jab at Zhukov, now in disgrace, when he wrote in his memoirs that Zhukov had “only confused things.” Zhukov thought his heart would burst—he’d have another attack for certain. He called Khrushchev: How could he allow such lies to be printed? The “Corn King” promised to put in a word for him. (What did Chuykov’s memoirs matter, anyway? Did he, Zhukov, have nothing to say for himself? He pulled out some old army newspaper articles in which he was mentioned and used them to defend himself.)
After Stalingrad, still working with Vasilevsky, Zhukov confidently set about planning a new battle at Kursk. He took a very risky decision: He would not hurry his offensive. He would not even begin an offensive; he would first give Manstein a week to smash himself against our well-prepared defense in depth (it was almost a reckless decision: What if Manstein should break through?), and only then stun the Germans with our offensive on Oryol.
It turned out to be yet another strategic masterpiece with the beauty, power, and resounding success of Stalingrad. Zhukov’s powers as a strategist grew even stronger, and he became confident that he could smash Hitler even without the Allies’ Second Front. Now he could actually feel himself guiding this enormous process of retribution and also feel himself a component part of it: the process itself was guiding him. (And he became ever stronger in his arguments with Stalin. He even weaned the Supreme Commander from his habit of post-midnight telephone calls: you can sleep until two in the afternoon, but we have to get to work in the morning.)
Stalin’s restraint did not last long, however. The process of destroying the forces of the surrounded Paulus dragged on. Stalin was edgy, pushing him to move faster and showering him with insults. After Kursk he would not allow him time to work out encircling operations. He insisted on frontal attacks, hitting the Germans head-on, achieving nothing and allowing them to maintain their fighting capacity. All Stalin wanted was to clear them off Soviet territory as quickly as possible, even if they left fully intact. (Though when they met now, he would shake Zhukov’s hand and even joke with him. After promoting him to marshal, Stalin gave him the Order of Suvorov, First Class, then the gold stars of a Hero of the Soviet Union, three in all. He would transfer Zhukov to every spot where there had been a setback or a delay, and on one occasion, Zhukov, not without a good deal of satisfaction, was able to dismiss that same Golikov, who had once interrogated him, as commander of an army group.)
After that, we made the leap across the Dnieper and held on to the ground we captured. We rolled southward right to Romania, then Bulgaria. There was the Belorussian operation, where we easily took the Bobruisk pocket. And then another torrent of troops rolled into Poland, across the Vistula and to the Oder.
Zhukov grew in stature with each operation, and his confidence increased. His very name would now strike terror into the hearts of the Germans when they heard he was coming to their front. Now he could imagine no obstacles he could not overcome. And so on Stalin’s orders he was to take the burned-out ruins of Berlin—something Hitler could not do with Moscow—and take it quickly! They were to take it themselves, with no help from the Allies. Zhukov was to crown his war, and his life, with the Berlin operation.
Berlin was about halfway between us and the Allies. But the Germans had concentrated all their forces against us, and there was the risk that they might simply fall back before the Allies and let them through. That must not be allowed! The Motherland has demanded that we make the attack, and make it quickly. (Zhukov had absorbed something from Stalin, and now he also wanted to get this done before the May Day holiday. But that didn’t quite work out.) Zhukov was left with no choice but to attack head-on once more, never counting the casualties.
People will say that we paid a high price for the Berlin operation, with about 300,000 dead. (Perhaps even half a million.) But what about all those who fell earlier in the war? Was anyone counting casualties then? It’s useless to keep on about that now. Of course it was a hard thing to lose fathers, husbands, and sons, yet people staunchly bore these inevitable losses since they all understood that we were writing the most glorious pages in the history of the Soviet people. Those who survive will tell their grandchildren about it, but now we must move forward! (After the war, the Allies, more from envy than anything else, insisted that not only was the Berlin operation unnecessary, so was the whole spring campaign of 1945; Hitler, they claimed, would have surrendered without it and without any more battles. He was already doomed. Yet they were the ones who inflicted an unnecessary bombing on Dresden, an unmilitarized city. They also burned to death about 150,000 people, and they were civilians.)
Zhukov, in fact, was prepared to keep on waging war. His was like a machine: his grasp of strategy and his steely will demanded new obstacles to grind up. But his whole life suddenly changed, as if he had been a ship sailing along at top speed and then had run aground on a soft and comfortable shoal. Now he was appointed commander-in-chief of Soviet occupation forces in Germany. The sleepless nights spent planning operations were exchanged for long, elaborate, and drunken banquets with the Allies (they couldn’t get enough of the caviar and vodka). He struck up a kind of friendship with Eisenhower. (At one late-night banquet, he performed a Russian dance to show him how it was done.) A flood of decorations moved between the Allies and the Soviets. (He had to wear those huge medals of theirs on his belly.) Now his tasks were more economic than military—disassembling German factories and shipping them to the USSR. And, of course, he had to try to do something to help the German population. We did a lot for them, and our sense of internationalism did not allow us to take revenge. Ulbricht and Pieck the Younger also helped us understand a great deal. (Eight years later, Zhukov was astounded at the inexplicable uprising of Berlin workers: it was we, after all, who had struck down all their Nazi laws and given complete freedom to the antifascist political parties.)
There was one thing he could take pride in: in June he went back to review the victory parade through Red Square, mounted on a white horse. (Stalin, obviously, wanted to do this himself but was not certain that he could keep his seat on the horse. It was also obvious that he was envious: he seemed to be gritting his teeth. And once, suddenly, he made an exceptional confession to Zhukov: “I am the unhappiest of men. I’m even afraid of my own shadow.” Did he fear an attempt on his life? Zhukov could not believe such frankness.)
In the summer the ceremonious Potsdam Conference took place (it was in Potsdam because no place could be found for it in Berlin, utterly ravaged by our artillery and bombing). And then there were the worries about how to make the Allies return to Soviet “organs” our Soviet citizens who, again for inexplicable reasons, did not want to return to the Motherland. (How could that be? Either they have some serious crimes in their pasts or they’ve been seduced by the soft life in the West.) It meant making a stern demand that the Allies allow our representatives—professional criminal investigators— to meet with these people. (These were very capable and practical people who had always been a part of our army, but Zhukov’s high rank meant that he had had little contact with them previously.)
There were many such things to do. Zhukov did them all, but without much energy, almost sleepily. His former inspired ability to discern what the enemy would do and to devise his own plans would never return.
In any case, it was
time to give up this honorary and boring post in Berlin and go home to revamp and strengthen the Soviet Army (no longer called the Red Army) to deal with possible future conflicts and to update it with the latest military technology. Now that the war was over, Stalin would scarcely want to keep his post as the People’s Commissar (now called the Minister) of Defense, and he would give the job to Zhukov. Staying on as Stalin’s first deputy, Zhukov would have control over military affairs in any case.
But when Zhukov returned from Berlin in 1946, he was stunned by the news that the post of deputy minister of defense was given not to him but to Bulganin, a civilian through and through. As Stalin explained, waving his hand with his smoking pipe as if to indicate his powerlessness to interfere, Bulganin had already structured the staff of the Ministry of Defense with no place for a second deputy.
Zhukov felt as if he’d been thrown off the back of a galloping horse. Who cares what Bulganin has done in the ministry? What about me . . . ?
But how could he oppose the Supreme Commander? It couldn’t have been Stalin’s idea. To do that after all the victories they had won, after all the meetings in his own home, after all the work they had shared, the one-on-one dinners! It was that two-faced Bulganin’s doing, of course. (Zhukov had seen similar cunning and dexterity from other members of the Military Council—the ones who managed the political side of the fronts and the armies. They would sit quietly until the main battles were over and only then would they act. Khrushchev was such a person: on the surface he seemed simple and straightforward.)
Apricot Jam: And Other Stories Page 28
