Georgy Zhukov was born into extreme poverty, but ended up as the commanding general in
charge of the entire red army during World War II -- today, he is still considered by
many in Russia to be the greatest military mind in their entire history.
He Came From Humble Beginnings, Born To A Poor Family
Georgy Zhukov was born in 1896 to an incredibly poor peasant family in the Kaluga Province,
roughly 80 miles from Moscow.
His family had a small house in the relatively poor town of Strelkovka, which Zhukov was
quoted once as saying “looked the worst in the village”.
His family was rather tough when it came to discipline, and floggings with a belt by his
father Konstantin, were quite common in order to whip his boy into the shape he wanted.
However, young Georgy was not one to complain about things.
He felt that a hard life at a young age, was one of the best teachers possible -- and a
hard life he certainly had.
He had one older sister, named Maria, but almost grew up with a younger brother as well.
Unfortunately, his brother Alexei did not live past a year, and his mother Ustin’ya,
was absolutely heartbroken.
Then, at the tender age of nine, his life changed drastically.
In order to provide for his future, and probably also to have one less mouth to feed, his family
sent him off to work for his uncle Mikhail in Moscow as an apprentice furrier.
While it was still a pretty harsh life, and beatings were common if he didn’t do what
he was supposed to, he was still in a much better position relatively than he had been
in before.
He wasn’t quite as poor, he was exposed to Moscow society, and had a lot more education
than he would have had otherwise.
In the year 1920, Zhukov had his first marriage, to a woman named Alexandra Dievna Zuikova,
who he would eventually have two daughters with, named Era and Ella.
However, Zhukov was not entirely faithful to his wife.
During his first marriage, in the early years, he had an affair with a young woman named
Maria Volkhova, who he had met while laid up in the hospital, while in the army during
World War I.
They had an illegitimate child together named Margarita, but this didn’t seem to have
any real effect on Zhukov’s reputation at the time, or at any point in his career.
In fact, later on in life, he divorced and remarried to a woman named Galina Alexandrovna
Semyonova, who had a daughter with him that they named Maria -- his fourth and last child.
Georgy Zhukov was actually doing quite well as a young man recently into adulthood working
as a furrier with a few young men under him, but then World War I broke out, and Russia
needed able bodied men to come to the defense of their country.
Georgy Zhukov was conscripted into the army -- although no account says he had any complaints
about being drafted --- and quickly found himself in an advanced training program.
Likely because he was a little bit more educated than most, he got to start out training as
cavalry and quickly rose up the ranks to corporal.
During World War I, he managed to earn The Cross of St. George twice -- a Russian military
honor awarded for bravery from lower ranking or noncommissioned officers.
One award was for his capture of a German soldier, and another was for taking a grenade
explosion that left him in the hospital for most of the rest of the war.
Because he was in fact taken out of the war so early due to injury, he never really felt
that his part in it was very significant.
Georgy Zhukov, after going through so much poverty in his early life, had never been
a fan of the tsars or the old political system, so when things started shaking up in Russia,
he found himself fighting the old system.
When the tsar Nicholas II abdicated, things were in chaos and a provisional government
took over.
Georgy and the soldiers working with him decided to refuse to obey this new government, and
were soon branded as deserters and ended up on the run.
However, once the Bolsheviks seized power, Zhukov was once again able to leave the shadows
and join up with them as a soldier.
After several years of participating in mopping up actions against various rebel factions,
he decided to join the communist party in order to further his career.
His steady hand as a commander, as well as his background of poverty, made him a great
asset for the new regime and his star continued to rise.
As he rose up the ranks in the military, he became more well known, but his most decisive
early action was a situation people aren’t as aware of about World War II, in which two
years before the Germans actually declared war on the Soviet Union, the Russians had
already had their hands full with the Japanese.
The Japanese had been adventuring into Russian territory for some decades, and the Russians
had been struggling to push them back out -- the Japanese even reached so close they
could almost disrupt the crucial Trans-Siberian railway.
The Japanese wanted more land, and more oil, and at the time, they saw expansion into Russia
as the best option to achieve their goals.
The Japanese had been having border clashes at Russian allied territory -- basically trying
to sneak through their weakest point -- for almost a year, when Zhukov, who had been given
command of Soviet forces, finally readied for his full on offensive where the Japanese
had amassed at the Khalkhin Gol River.
He amassed over 200 artillery pieces, over 500 planes and almost 500 tanks.
He had the greatest armored offensive in known human history, and in one big push, started
barraging the Japanese position first with bombers, then artillery barrage and then tanks,
finally encircling the enemy to the point that almost none escaped.
This secured Georgy Zhukov’s reputation as a great leader, able to move incredible
amounts of new armored units effectively and earned him special attention from Soviet high
command.
Career In World War II -- His Elevation To The Highest Of Command Positions
There are some people who argue that Zhukov exaggerated his role in the battle of Khalkhin
Gol and other battles as well, in order to aggrandize himself, and that he got away with
it because the Soviet Union wanted a standard bearer, and because he managed to get along
well with Stalin.
One researcher named Suvorov, who has written critically of Zhukov, claims that the real
credit for the strategy at the battle of Khalkhin Gol should have gone to his chief of staff,
a brigade commander named M.A Bogdanov, who was often considered to be the greatest leader
that the Soviet Union had at the time.
He also laments that most of the first officers or other lesser leaders involved, seemed to
still be classified, as if the Soviet Union wanted all credit to go to Zhukov.
However, apart from the fact that M.A. Bogdanov was a great leader at the time, there is no
reason to believe Zhukov didn’t plan or make his own decisions in the battle -- he
was the acting commander, after all.
Despite criticisms and claims of proper credit, he became Stalin’s favorite general, and
despite occasional disagreements, he quickly became Stalin’s quasi-official second in
command for the rest of the war.
Now, there were of course some major faults that Zhukov had as a military leader.
Mainly, he could often be seen getting very angry, using lots of foul language and being
abusive with people.
However, this was not entirely uncommon for a lot of military leaders of the day, and
there is reason to believe that his men respected him, because he actually valued their lives.
One thing many people like to talk about in the Soviet Union is the casual disregard they
had for the lives of their soldiers -- such as throwing massed infantry at fortified positions
with no proper strategy and as commander of Soviet forces, he gets a lot of the blame
for this.
However, at one point, he criticized these tactics and called them criminal, to throw
lives away in such a way, and in another writing, he was a bit less critical sounding, but pointed
out that skill and tactics would win wars, not throwing the “people’s meat” at
the enemy.
General Zhukov became very close to Joseph Stalin over the course of World War II -- at
least as close as you can get to a brutal dictator -- and he gained a certain respect
for him.
While Zhukov may have been more critical of Stalin’s influence and style of leadership
in his later life and memoirs, at the time, he had nothing but good things to say, and
seem to be at least mostly enamored by Stalin’s growing cult of personality.
Over the course of roughly 120 in person meetings, he got to know the man and felt that he had
a good measure of him.
Some people thought that Stalin could be too angry, or moody, but Zhukov seemed to prefer
this.
He felt that Stalin’s show of anger, frustration, or other emotions were just an example of
him being exactly the straight shooter that Zhukov wanted to work with.
He also felt that when not moody, Stalin was very analytical, and was always willing to
listen to all viewpoints, or hear an argument against his own ideas in order to better understand
the situation.
In fact, Zhukov knew Stalin so well, that he was said to be able to gauge his moods,
and thus how to react, by how Stalin handled his smoking pipe.
If Stalin was slowly taking long, luxurious drags from his pipe, it usually meant he was
in a particularly good mood.
However, if he didn’t refill his pipe and get it going again quickly when it was out,
it could mean he was about to get very, very angry.
Zhukov used these signs to help him know how to talk to Stalin, even when he was in a very
bad mood.
At the battle for Berlin, General Zhukov was in charge of the 1st Belorussian front, and
urged his men to exact a terrible vengeance on the Germans.
They were entirely successful both in finally defeating the Germans, but also in terms of
vengeance.
As the Russian front moved into Germany from the East, they brought terror upon civilians
wherever they went, with looting and rapes being especially common.
After the Battle of Berlin, General Zhukov was given the honor of presiding over the
Soviet Victory Parade in Moscow in 1945, which he happily took part in, before being sent
back to preside as the commander in charge of Soviet occupied Germany.
Zhukov was quickly using his post as military governor to become good friends with other
world leaders like Eisenhower, and increase his influence abroad by doing a really good
job of taking care of civilians in the aftermath of World War II in Germany.
Stalin quickly became paranoid that Zhukov could become a political or military threat
to him, and removed him from his post, bring him back home to face charges of disloyalty.
Stalin was a military commander himself, but from a day before mechanized warfare.
Even though Zhukov was no real threat, as he never had the political chops of Stalin,
he was seen as a threat, because he had an understanding of mechanized warfare, and a
certain popularity with the military, that Stalin would always be jealous of.
His Career After The War Was Fraught With Greater Peril Than Guns And Blades
When Stalin started to fear General Zhukov at the end of the war, he decided to make
an example of him, but not too big of one.
Considering his popularity, Stalin did not think it wise to kill, arrest or punish him
too harshly, but he wanted to put him firmly in his place.
Upon his return to Moscow, he was raked over the coals and privately accused of disloyalty
to the party.
In order to take away his ability to potentially take over the government, his position as
commander in chief of military forces was taken away, and he was sent off to a secondary
position in Odessa, a much smaller command far from Moscow, where he suffered his first
heart attack.
Not long after he found himself back in Moscow for a time, but Lavrenty Beria, Stalin’s
radically loyal security chief, was trying to find a way to destroy him.
Beria never trusted a man with so much military power, and believed he could be a dangerous
threat to the cult of Stalin.
Beria finally searched Zhukov’s apartment in 1948 and found a huge trove of treasures
that Zhukov had taken back from Soviet occupied Germany without telling anyone.
Despite his popularity, it was a big hit to his reputation, and Zhukov was forced to publicly
apologize, before finding himself being sent to an even more insulting, and pathetic position,
in the Urals District.
While Zhukov’s life may have taken quite a bad turn after the war, it could have been
worse.
Beria likely would have had him arrested or executed if he could, but Stalin was not really
interested in going that far against Zhukov, whether for personal, or politically pragmatic
reasons.
Lavrenty Beria was one of Stalin’s most radical followers, so when Stalin died in
1953, many of the top leaders of the Soviet Union were struggling to decide who would
be the one in power, and a small group of conspirators worked together to overthrow
the last of Stalin’s main influence.
In order to destroy Beria, Malenkov, Molotov and Kruschev met with Zhukov and hatched a
plan to arrest him.
There would be a major party meeting with many high profile members, and at the right
moment, Zhukov would come in with a few military officers and arrest Beria.
The arrest went off without any hitch at all, and Beria was taken away to be accused formally
of terrorism and counter revolutionary activities, judged officially and shot for his crimes.
Zhukov likely placed a large portion, if not all of the blame, for the horrible positions
he had been increasingly relegated to after Stalin’s death, as well as the horrific
embarrassment of the trophy affair, on the shoulders of Beria.
While Zhukov did like to think he was getting rid of the influence of the cult of Stalin,
and likely told himself that was part of his justification, he must have certainly got
a lot of personal satisfaction out of the man's destruction -- he even once said arresting
Beria was the greatest thing he had done in his life.
While all his looting from the trophy affair wasn’t exactly a great thing to do, it is
understandable for him to harbor resentment at having his loot taken away and being forced
to apologize for it, as that kind of looting was quite common among the Soviet leadership
after World War II.
After the death of Stalin and the arrest of Beria, leading to the end of Stalin’s cult
of personality, Zhukov soon found himself appointed as Minister of Defense under Nikolai
Bulganin.
During these years, he tried to foster peace between the United States, the Soviet Union
and the rest of the world, being reluctant to take military action unless absolutely
necessary.
This partly stemmed from long conversations that he had had with Dwight D. Eisenhower,
with whom he had struck up a friendship years previously.
At the end of World War II, Zhukov took Eisenhower on a tour of the Soviet Union, and Eisenhower
even invited Zhukov to America -- although he was not allowed to go on such a tour.
The two of them talked a lot, and even corresponded through letters for years later.
After meeting with Zhukov and getting to know him so well, Eisenhower actually believed
that true and lasting peace with the Soviet Union was entirely possible and he hoped that
his relationship with Zhukov, and Zhukov’s influence in government and with the Russian
people, would help make that happen.
Unfortunately, Zhukov was such a reformist, and continued to take power to himself in
such a way, that those in charge became increasingly worried of him.
When Zhukov wrote extremely critically of the cult of Stalin, denouncing the way government
used to be run under the old dictator, wily old Kruschev used Zhukov’s statements and
popularity to institute real reforms with himself as the head, but he became even more
worried about Zhukov.
The former general, and now Minister of Defense, was asking soldiers to go to him first before
any of the politicians, and Khrushchev had him removed as Minister of Defense in 1958,
for fear of him being a bonapartist.
After how badly Napoleon had thrashed them relatively recently in their history, the
Russians feared a leader who would take over from within the military, and run the country
by military dictate.
Politicians like Khrushchev believed that Zhukov was loyal, and loved to use the popularity
that he had with the people, but they found those same traits dangerous to their continued
political rule of the country.
End Of Life and Legacy
Unfortunately, Georgy Zhukov had a history of being used by politicians to achieve their
own ends, and then thrown aside later.
It is hard to say if this kept happening simply because Zhukov was hoping to gain more political
power, but simply did not have the political skills, or whether he knew he was unlikely
to gain any real power, but simply did what he thought was best for the country at the
time.
Regardless, it would likely be quite a different world if Zhukov had the political skills to
truly advance in the power structure that emerged in the Soviet Union after World War
II.
If he were to have taken control, his relationship with Eisenhower might have helped bridge the
divide among the two countries, and history might have turned out very, very differently.
However, things were not all bad with Khrushchev in control.
Until the end of his premiership in 1964, Khrushchev was a tireless reformer, who got
rid of a lot of the repressive Stalinist policies and tried to bring more art and creativity
back to the country again.
When Leonid Brezhnev came to power in 1964, he saw Zhukov, as so many had before him,
as someone he could use.
While Zhukov had been largely ignored under Khrushchev, it was under the premiership of
Brezhnev that he was allowed to publish his memoirs -- after properly groveling to the
latest leader of the country -- and had his public image greatly rehabilitated by Brezhnev,
in order to shore up his own popularity.
While Brezhnev used Zhukov for his popularity, he did not trust him in politics after all
the accusations of Bonapartism over the years, and apart from writing his memoirs, Zhukov
would remain retired for the rest of his remaining years.
When Georgy Zhukov retired, his thoughts went to writing his memoirs and he started working
on Reminiscences and Reflections.
He also spent a lot of time just relaxing, hunting, and socializing with people he used
to know.
As he wrote his memoirs, however, his health continued to steadily decline.
His bouts with heart disease earlier in life were a sign of things to come, and in 1967,
Zhukov had another heart attack that hit him so hard, it took away the use of the left
side of his body for his remaining years.
During his struggle with heart disease, his wife Galina was attending to him and trying
to help him get his memoirs finished.
Finally, in 1969, they were completed, passed the censors and published, becoming the most
popular account of the war from the Soviet perspective, and selling millions of copies
around the world.
Fan letters and suggestions poured into Zhukov’s mailbox, in the tens of thousands, wishing
him well and praising him for all of his loyal life’s work.
Unfortunately for Zhukov, this resurgence of his old popularity was not to be enjoyed
for long.
In 1973, his second wife Galina passed away, and Zhukov was left entirely alone.
His memoirs were published, his life’s work was done.
His children were accounted for and his wife was gone.
Without her physical and emotional support, and with years of heart disease building up,
he didn’t outlast her by long.
In 1974, a final heart attack took him and the Soviet Union lost their greatest military
hero of the age.
When Zhukov died, he was given a state funeral led by Leonid Brezhnev, who had his ashes
laid to rest in honor at the Kremlin Wall.
Zhukov’s legacy will always enjoy some controversy, but there is no doubt that he was one of the
greatest military minds of World War II, and one of the greatest men of the Soviet Union.