• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 580 0

his adversary, seizing the Kremlin; an alarmed Stalin appointed him chief of the general staff, responsible for preparing for a real war with Germany, which the Soviet leader refused to believe would ever come. When it did, as Zhukov and many others had predicted, the marshal resigned rather than accept Stalin’s stubborn belief that the line had to be held at Kiev. Zhukov had wanted to fall back farther east and regroup, laying the same trap that had lured Napoleon in 1812 and forcing the enemy to stretch its supply lines in the dead of the Russian winter. When Hitler smashed through to Moscow’s outskirts in a matter of months, Stalin—in a rare and uncharacteristic moment of humility—begged his insubordinate general to return, even naming him deputy commander in chief, a de facto admission that Russia’s fate was now in his hands. Zhukov drove the invaders back all the way to Hitler’s underground bunker in Berlin. But victory came at a high cost: Zhukov lost more than one million men in the battle of Stalingrad alone, and his tactics were said to be so brutal and callous that they seemed premised on the notion that his enemies would run out of bullets before he ran out of soldiers to send to the slaughter.

Some of his officers hated him for the unnecessary carnage, but the people loved him for rescuing the nation. “Where you find Zhukov, you find Victory,” a saying was coined, and after the war, Stalin was so jealous of Zhukov’s status as the most decorated soldier in Soviet history that he had him removed from his exalted perch. Yet even the murderous Stalin was too afraid of a backlash to arrest or execute Mother Russia’s favorite son. Zhukov was merely sent to rot away in a series of meaningless posts far from the capital until Stalin’s death, when Khrushchev rehabilitated him to legitimize his coup against Beria.

Khrushchev had also invoked Zhukov’s popularity and unimpeachable reputation as a national patriot to stare down Lazar Kaganovich and the other coup plotters when they had the upper hand. And of course it was Zhukov who ferried, via long-range bomber, the Central Committee members whom Khrushchev had needed for his own survival, and it was the marshal who delivered the main charges against the conspirators at the extraordinary plenum that had been held after the putsch.

Zhukov had emerged from the failed coup as a kingmaker, arguably the second most powerful man in Russia—and probably the country’s most revered public figure, for he did not carry with him the taint of Communist Party purges. He was a product of the military, historically the nation’s most trusted institution, especially after its glorious role in the Great Patriotic War. Alas, the military was now unhappy with Khrushchev, particularly for his ruinous love affair with missiles.

Since starting work on the ICBM, Khrushchev had unilaterally slashed troop forces by a staggering 2 million men. He had canceled long-range bomber orders and converted aircraft factories to building passenger planes. Military airfields had been turned over to civilian use, under the expectation that rockets would soon arrive to protect the Soviet Union. Entire artillery divisions had been similarly scrapped, while dumbfounded admirals had helplessly watched brand-new battle cruisers—“shark fodder,” as Khrushchev derisively called them—get cut up into scrap steel before ever having a chance to leave their naval shipyards. Following the R-7’s August success, Khrushchev had announced a further round of three-hundred-thousand-troop reductions for the end of the year. Only submarines, which would carry the unproven missiles on which he was basing his entire defense doctrine, saw an increase in orders.

Not surprisingly, the wholesale cuts had roiled the Soviet armed forces. The uniformed services were not at all convinced that missiles were the panacea Khrushchev was promising, and they resented having to give up their heavy artillery, battle tanks, cruisers, and infantry units to pay for the experiment. “Some voices of dissatisfaction were heard blaming me for this policy,