And so he wrote, not finding the anger or the rashness within him to dispute with all the others. (Vasilevsky had given a rather sharp dressing-down to one or two of them.) You have to be relentless in battle, but not here. He had no rancor either toward Konev or Voronov. As the months and then years of his time of disgrace passed, the anger in his heart also passed, and he became reconciled to his situation. The injustices, however, could not be allowed to remain in the historical record. He had to correct the accounts of his comrades, even if only gently, and set the record straight. Do it gently, so as not to make them go on to reach for an even bigger share of the common fruits of victory. And those things he had not done or had left incomplete must not be left out of his memoirs either, for it is from such mistakes that future generals can learn. What he had to write was the full, unvarnished truth.
The problem was that the truth itself somehow steadily and irreversibly altered with the passage of time: under Stalin, the truth was one thing; under Khrushchev it was another. And there were many things that it was still premature to mention ... Yes, let it be about the war, and leave it at that. He didn’t even want to talk about what happened later, and he couldn’t, in any case.
Then, suddenly, they got rid of that gasbag Khrushchev! This time there was no Zhukov to save his skin.
But the situation of the disgraced marshal did not change after a week or after a month: the cloud of disgrace still hung over him. No one confirmed it anew (Golikov had passed on), but no one lifted it either. Who would be the first one brave enough to say the decisive word?
One thing he did allow himself: he made a trip to Kaluga Oblast, back to his native village. He had been longing to go back, and it had been—what?—fifty years since he’d lived there. It upset him deeply: he met women he had danced with in his younger days, and now they all looked so old, like beggars; and the village itself had become so impoverished. “But why are you living so badly?” “They won’t let us live any better . . .”
But then came the twentieth anniversary of Victory Day, and the new rulers had no choice but to invite Zhukov to the ceremonies in the Kremlin Palace. It was his first public appearance in seven years. Not long after that, he was unexpectedly invited to a banquet in the Writers’ Club. The marshal was both surprised and touched by the warmth of his reception. Once again in that same year he was invited back to the Writers’ Club for an anniversary of a well-known writer of war novels. He went in civilian clothes and was seated at the head table. What followed was just a regular celebration at which he was an outsider, but when, among the half-dozen speeches, his name was mentioned in passing, the whole hall full of writers—the Moscow intelligentsia—applauded furiously, and twice they all rose to their feet to honor him.
That was something to remember!
Then Zhukov permitted himself to make a trip to Podolsk to the Central Archive of the Ministry of Defense to go through some documents from the war years, including some directives he himself had issued. And now there were archivists to help him. Then a trickle of correspondents and filmmakers began appearing at the dacha that everyone had forgotten and where he was spending his years of disgrace. A woman from some publishing house of the Novosti Press Agency arrived with a contract for his memoirs. They were to be finished within six months (and he had already written them as far as Berlin). His book could come out for his seventieth birthday. And would he give them the rights for publishing abroad? Well, of course he would.
Not all that long before, no one even asked about these pages of memoirs; scarcely anyone knew about them. Now they wanted them, and quickly, and for the whole world to see!
But could he push himself to meet the deadline? This reflective, meticulous work at his desk was not at all what a professional soldier was cut out for. It seemed an easier task to move a whole division five kilometers forward than to drag his pen through another line of text.
The woman editor became a regular visitor; then a second woman came. They suggested he use a tape recorder; they could supply all the words he needed, even whole sentences, and they sounded fine. For example: “The political work of the party was a most important factor in the development of the battle-readiness of our ranks.” At first you wanted to say no to this: you yourself had prepared your troops for battle enough times to know all about the necessary factors. But then you think for a time about the political work. Well, it may not be the most important factor, but of course it’s one of the most important. Or: “The party and Komsomol organizations provided an enormous moral force to increase the combat-readiness of our forces.” You think about this, and it’s also true, and it doesn’t diminish the operational work of the commanders. They also brought in materials from the archives for which you never had any responsibility and which you can’t verify now. Here, for instance, were some reports from the political sections stating in plain black and white: “In the year 1943, our glorious partisans blew up 11,000 German trains.” How could that be possible? But then it can’t be completely ruled out: the trains might have been only partially destroyed—a few freight cars here, a wheel or a platform blown up there.
He asked the Press Agency to find out if the KGB would give him access to the reports that Beria and Abakumov had submitted on him. He was informed that all these files had just been destroyed as being without any historical significance.
He did learn something, though: There was an account, printed a fairly long time ago, by a former army translator in Berlin. She wrote that in May 1945, she taken part in the identification from false teeth of the corpse of Hitler, which had been discovered near the Imperial Chancellery. How was that? You mean they found Hitler’s body? Zhukov, the commander-in-chief, the victor in the battle of Berlin, neither then nor later knew about it! At the time, he had announced in Berlin that nothing was known of Hitler’s whereabouts. What a fool he must appear now! His subordinates had secretly reported the discovery directly to Stalin, behind Zhukov’s back. How dared they! And Stalin not only kept it from Zhukov, but in July 1945 had asked him directly whether he knew where Hitler was.
Zhukov could simply not conceive of such treachery. It was incomprehensible. And he had thought that after the years of war he had come to know Stalin through and through . . . And now how could he admit this in his memoirs? It would be politically improper as well. He found this additional deception very painful to endure. (He asked this translator to find him the documents that he himself could not get.)
Zhukov was not readmitted to the Central Committee. (He heard that Suslov opposed him.)
But Konev did come to see him. And he apologized. Zhukov forgave him, though it cost him an effort.
Good or bad, he submitted the manuscript to the publisher by the deadline. But when it came to books, there was always another obstacle. Now the Press Agency created a group of consultants “to check the facts.” Month after month they made their “suggestions” and their revisions— fifty typewritten pages in all.
Now there was no way he could expect his book to come out for his seventieth birthday. The work dragged on, and time after time he would give his assent... Many things had to be deleted or reworked. His descriptions of Tukhachevsky, Uborevich, Yakir, and Blyukher were all deleted. This was something new: you didn’t write what was in your heart, you wrote what would get through. Would they let it pass or not? What could now be said, and what could not? (And so you give your assent: Yes, that’s right. That’s fine.)
Until now he had written simply for himself, quietly and peacefully. But now he had become so eager to see his book in print! He made the concessions and wrote the revisions. He toiled with these editors for two and a half years, but still there was no book. Then he learned that for some reason the newly hatched Marshal Grechko in the Army Political Directorate had spoken out against his memoirs. But Brezhnev stepped in and proposed a solution: “To create a committee of experts to review the contents of the book.”
Meanwhile, in his own month of December (the month he was born, th
e month he had won his victory on the outskirts of Moscow), Zhukov and Galya went to a sanatorium in Arkhangelsk. There he suffered a severe stroke.
The recovery was slow. He would get out of bed, but less often than before. At first he could not walk at all without someone’s help. The massages and physiotherapy took up more than half the day. He also had an inflammation of the trifacial nerve. He had dizzy spells.
By now he couldn’t rouse much interest in his future book. And yet he wanted to live to see it in print.
That summer our troops invaded Czechoslovakia. That was the right thing to do: we couldn’t put up with the shenanigans going on there. Zhukov always took the problems of the Motherland more to heart than he did his own. And in the military sense, it was a first-class operation. It’s a fine thing—they haven’t forgotten the lessons of our old school.
The third year of editing was coming to an end. He was informed quite plainly that Leonid Ilych wanted to be mentioned in the memoirs. How’s that for you . . . ? How was he to remember anything about Political Officer Brezhnev when he had never met him during the war, not even on that tiny bridgehead near Novorossiysk? But he had to save his book, and so he put in two or three sentences.
After that, Brezhnev himself approved the book.
In December again, though in Zhukov’s seventy-second year, the proofs were sent to the publisher.
Should he rejoice or not?
Sunk in his deep armchair, overcome by weakness, he sat. And he remembered—he remembered the furious applause in the Writers’ Club (was that three years ago?). He remembered how everyone in the hall had gotten to their feet again and again as if they were using the palms of their hands to make an imprint of his immortal glory.
Their applause was like a stubborn repetition of the disappointments and hopes he had heard from the generals right after the Twentieth Congress.
There was pain in his heart. Perhaps it was then that he should have done something. Then, perhaps, then was the time he should have acted.
Can it be that I was really such a fool. . . ?
<>
~ * ~
FRACTURE POINTS
1
Who didn’t go hungry that year? Though his father was a shop foreman, he never “picked up” anything extra and never allowed anyone else to do so. In the family were his mother, grandmother, sister, and Mitya, almost seventeen, and all of them so hungry! He would stand by his lathe all day and then at night it was off in a boat with a friend to catch some fish.
His father’s shop produced shell casings for the Katyushas. The people in the Kharkov Hammer and Sickle Factory kept working—they weren’t allowed to stop—right until the city itself was in flames. They almost were caught by the Germans and left the city while bombs were dropping around them, going all the way back to the Volga.
The war? Well, by now it seemed to be coming to an end. The front lines had all moved westward, but then what would happen? Mitya was only a whisker away from his call-up. But he already knew what he could achieve, given his character and his brain, and in that spring of 1944 he passed not only his ninth but also his tenth grade as an external student, and passed with honors. In September he could make a run for some college or institute. But which one? He and his friend got their hands on a booklet, The Colleges and Universities of Moscow. Wow, what a lot of names, and then there were all the faculties, departments, and specialties. What did they all mean? Who could make sense of it? How to decide? They had almost made up their minds, but then they read that the Energy Institute on Enthusiasts’ Highway provided three meals a day! And that outweighed everything else. (Though he kept it to himself, he had been thinking about law or history.) Still, with the breeziness of youth, he applied there.
He was accepted. The student residence was in Lefortovo. The trouble was the way they calculated the three meals. Cabbage soup was one meal, a scoop of rotten mashed potatoes another. Then 550 grams of poor-quality bread. That meant they would spend the day studying and the night unloading trucks. They were paid in cigarettes. Then it was off to the market to trade a pack of “Ducats” for some potatoes. (His father helped him out as well.)
Those born in ‘26 were now all being grabbed for the army. Those born in ‘27 were ducking here and there. He managed to keep out of the way. And then the war was over.
The war was over, and yet it wasn’t over. Comrade Stalin declared that now we have to rebuild! Life went on in the same rigid military fashion as before, though without the military funerals. Rebuild! A year, two years, a third year of rebuilding meant that you had to go on working, living, and feeding yourself as if there were still a war on. He was already in his fourth year and had saved 400 rubles for a new pair of pants, but then the rumor went round of the currency reform. People rushed off to the savings banks, and immediately two lines would form, one to deposit money, another to take it out; but there was no telling which was the best. Mitya Yemtsov guessed wrong, and his pants vanished into thin air. There were some immediate gains: student grants and salaries weren’t divided by ten, and there was no more rationing. With his January grant money he bought up enough rye bread to stuff himself, and some tea and sugar as well. The head of their institute was a woman with reputation and influence—Malenkov’s wife, in fact—and she was able to get some supplemented grants. Yemtsov’s grant increased as well. He was thriving.
He was thriving not only because of the food and not only because he was doing well in his studies. (They were selecting students to specialize in atomic energy and automated aircraft guidance systems. He chose the latter, without giving it a great deal of thought. Had he taken the nuclear option, he would have been locked away in secret laboratories for years on end, as if he’d gone to prison.) He was also thriving in his community service, in the Komsomol.
It happens imperceptibly and not by any intention: we learn our own worth only with the passing of years and by the way that others regard us (“he’s exceptional”). Everyone notices that you’re energetic by nature, that you’re the first to make proposals on how the collective should handle a certain issue, that your opinions prevail over others’. So, why don’t you preside over the meeting? Will you make the report? Well, why not? And your words come together easily when you make a speech—these people must be supported, those must be denounced. Everyone applauds. And they vote for you. It all proceeded so smoothly, as if it had happened of its own accord: Komsomol leader, faculty secretary in your third year, deputy secretary of the whole institute in your fifth. (For this post, you had to be a candidate for the party. But an instruction had come from the Central Committee: Party intake is to be suspended effective 1948 [during the war they had taken in too many people]. And so the proposal was “that Comrade Yemtsov be accepted, as an exception.” There were now some war veterans at the party meeting, and they began to murmur: Why him? Why the exception, and for a young puppy like that? The meeting was against the proposal. But the head of the institute, this imposing and confident woman, rose to her feet—and remember who her husband was. Was anyone unaware of that? Her words fell weightily on the auditorium: “There are some special considerations in this case.” And that was enough. Even the veterans voted in favor.)
Very soon—you still hadn’t graduated and hadn’t yet been given your job assignment—they took you into the Moscow City Committee of the Komsomol as deputy director of student youth. (You still had to travel to the institute, but why take the streetcar? Call the city committee and you can ride in a Pobeda; call again and the Pobeda will bring you back, but not to the student residence: now you have an apartment.)
Yes, you had favorable winds behind you, to be sure. But you weren’t the least bit embarrassed in front of your classmates because there was nothing dishonest in any of this: you never pushed for it yourself, you never plotted and schemed, it just happened all by itself. And even more: the work of the Komsomol was honest, true, even sacred! (The first time you came into the Komsomol City Committee’s offices, it was like a
religious person entering a church—with reverence and awe.) This was the living, throbbing center of a resplendent life for all our people: after the world-renowned victory we had won, the streams of energy directed to reconstruction simply poured through the whole country! And the news of our grandiose construction projects resounded through the land. And you are a part of this, and you are helping guide your generation of students toward those projects and those achievements.
He wrote proudly to his father (who had remained in his factory shop, now on the Volga—they were never sent back to Kharkov). His father could appreciate what it meant to succeed through your own talents. He was the son of a blacksmith who had risen to become an engineer. He had married a girl from a Poltava landowning family who in the early 1920s was looking to shelter herself under someone’s wing. (Later, his father would get very angry when his wife spoke to her mother in French.) In 1935 he suffered the misfortune of being arrested when someone spread slander about him. (Their family immediately had to begin living in straitened circumstances, and their Schroeder grand piano was put into a cellar on its side.) Six months later, however, his father was acquitted. Being freed in such a wondrous fashion only strengthened his proletarian faith in the soundness of our system and reinforced his lifelong dedication to the path of Lenin.
Apricot Jam: And Other Stories Page 30
