The Fall of Zhukov
NICOLAEVSKY, BORIS I.
A preliminary assessment By Boris I. Nicolaevsky THE FALL OF ZHUKOV The new Kremlin conflict is of wider scope and carries more serious implications than it seemed at first. That much is apparent...
...More surprises seem in store...
...Who helped him at that time...
...Under cover of this campaign, the apparatus will bring the Army under its control...
...Zhukov...
...soon after...
...Nevertheless, the political commissars remain, although their role has been transformed over the years: They are now the agents of the Party's political-police control of the Army and, above all, of political-police surveillance of the military men...
...The military men have always felt that this work, not subject to Army command, tends to vitiate the Army, to impair its solidarity and battle-readiness...
...Konev has been known as a bitter, envious foe of Zhukov since the late summer of 1939...
...Surely not Nikolai Bul-ganin, who had been Zhukov's implacable foe since the defense of Moscow in 1941, when he was political commissar under Zhukov...
...Stalin was aware of Konev's resentment and did his best to fan his hostility...
...Much more than Zhukov's personal fate is involved, however, even though the plenum resolution and the press comments stress the personal element in Zhukov's conduct...
...First, he was named a delegate to the 19th Party Congress, held that October, which elected him a candidate member of the Central Committee...
...His disgrace had ended by the summer of 1952...
...One final aspect of Zhukov's position must be noted: his determined condemnation of the Stalinist terror and his insistence on severe measures against those responsible...
...According to reliable sources, this motivated his stand during the crisis last June...
...Zhukov was removed from the Central Committee as well as his top Army post, but he remained a member of the Supreme Soviet...
...If this be true, one can well imagine that Khrushchev was more frightened by Zhukov's support than by the accusing speeches of his adversaries...
...His speeches, of course, were aggressive, but all speeches by Soviet leaders have always been aggressive...
...Malenkov was unable to support Zhukov in 1946 only because he himself had been forced by Zhdanov to leave the Central Committee Secretariat...
...He revived the Military Council, which had in effect ceased to exist under Stalin, and transformed it into an organ for determining the general views of the military on defense matters...
...In May 1953, he was named First Deputy Defense Minister...
...The information on his behavior since 1953 is frequently contradictory and dubious...
...Zhukov's disgrace had thus ended before Stalin's death, but his meteoric rise began afterward...
...At present, some 90 per cent of Soviet Army officers are Party members—100 per cent above the rank of major...
...What is involved here is clearly a dispute nearly as old as the Soviet Arm v. During the Russian Civil War (1918-20), the Communists, lacking military specialists of their own and forced to entrust command to non-Party people, attached political commissars to the Red Army—reliable Communists who oversaw the military specialists...
...Zhukov also organized the re-equipping of the Soviet Army with nuclear weapons...
...The year 1955, when he became Defense Minister, was the turning point...
...we have now learned...
...The Party Secretariat has been directed to utilize his qualifications in a secondary post...
...In view of his expulsion in 1946, this was most significant...
...He is accused of having "lost the Communist modesty which Lenin taught us...
...So far as one can judge from Red Star, all these conferences (except for that in Kiev) adopted resolutions pointing out deficiencies in political work and stressing the need to subordinate it to the task of building up the Army's battle-readiness...
...Marshal Ivan Konev has opened the barrage of personal accusations...
...At a conference of the Moscow Military District, Zhukov himself made a cautious speech along these lines...
...imagined that he was the sole hero of all [our] victories," and attempted, with the aid of "sycophants and flatterers," to implant a new "cult of personality" (his own) in the Soviet Army...
...Zhukov became chief nf the General Staff...
...The conflict in the summer of 1040 was also related to this issue, for the purge of the Armv was designed to subordinate it to Central Committee control...
...Stalin needed the Army then, and made concessions, hut he felt no fondness for Zhukov ill so doing...
...The conferences constituted a smashing defeat for the Political Administration, which led to the 20th Party Congress's failure to elect any Political Administration men to the Central Committee...
...The Political Administration suffered a serious blow after the war with Finland (1939-40), in which the absence of unified leadership had grave consequences...
...In 1946...
...As a member of the supreme State Defense Council, Malenkov could compel Zhdanov, the Leningrad Party boss, to carry out Zhukov's orders...
...The Central Committee announcement now speaks of Zhukov's "adventurism" in foreign policy...
...But certain facts appear indisputable...
...The resolution accuses Zhukov of curtailing the powers of Party organizations and political organs in the Soviet Army and trying to abolish "the leadership and control of the Party, its Central Committee and Government...
...Zhukov's disgrace is often said to have ended with Stalin's death...
...Now Konev is revising the history of World War II in Pravda, searching for Zhukov's errors and failures...
...Zhukov has been removed not only as Defense Minister, but from the Presidium and Central Committee of the Communist party...
...Right at the start, the commissar issue produced many disputes...
...That much is apparent from the official Soviet announcement of the Communist Central Committee plenum which dealt with Marshal Georgi Zhukov and the initial comments on it by the Soviet press...
...For that reason, a reform in the summer of 1940 decreed "a strict and firm single leadership" in the Army and made all political workers subordinate to appropriate military commanders...
...An experienced journalist, Simonov would not have done this if it had been risky...
...The nub of the case is the bitter behind-the-scenes struggle between the Soviet military command under Zhukov and the central Communist party apparatus headed by Nikita Khrushchev...
...It became especially controversial, however, after large numbers of Communists had been trained as officers...
...The issue of Novy Mir in which the first part of the story appeared went to press on April 5, 1952...
...In September 1941, when Zhukov was rushed to the defense of Leningrad, Malen-kov accompanied him...
...After the defeat of the Communist economic managers last spring, the defeat of the Army consolidates the victory of the Party machine headed by Khrushchev...
...The first is his effort to unite the Soviet military group and strengthen its political position...
...Another sign of Zhukov's return to favor was the appearance of Kon-stantin Simonov's story, "Comrades-in-Arms," which portrayed Zhukov very favorably...
...in opposing Malenkov, Molotov and Kaganovich, he cited chapter and verse on their personal responsibility for Stalin's bloody deeds...
...This emerges even from the plenum resolution, which stresses his policies as chief of the armed forces...
...This was after Zhdanov's death, at a time when the purge of his followers was under way...
...Malenkov again aided Zhukov in 1952, during the preparations for the Party Congress and at the Congress itself, and even more after Stalin's death...
...Zhukov's ouster has, of course, unleashed a fierce campaign against him by the Party apparatus he fought...
...From this vantage point, the history of the Soviet Army under Stalin and his heirs is a story of unending struggle between the Soviet military command and the so-called Chief Political Administration which, as a special section of the Party Central Committee, directs all political work in the Army...
...Khrushchev's Party-police machine has certainly won the first round...
...Although Zhukov was always acutely conscious of checks to his ambition, in his recent conduct personal motives were not decisive...
...There is little doubt that in the critical months before Stalin's death Zhukov opposed foreign-policy adventures, and there is no reason to believe that his position changed...
...In 1953-54, military outlays were reduced by 15-18 per cent...
...In 1949, Ogonyok magazine recorded his appearance at the spring session of the Soviet...
...We do not know on what this statement is based...
...At that time, Stalin entrusted Zhukov, and not Konev, with organizing a blow against the Japanese along the Manchurian-Mongolian border, although Zhukov was then chief of staff in Kiev while Konev commanded the troops in Transbaikalia...
...Yet both the belated official communique and the press comments clearly suggest that even the current stage of the struggle, centering on Zhukov's personal fate, is far from ended...
...In spite of all this, Zhukov did not join the Malenkov camp...
...The indications are that it was Georgi Malen-kov who backed Zhukov...
...But the victories do not remove the internal contradictions which created the two groups' opposition to that machine...
...The reform of 1940 was connected with the names of Marshal Semvon Timoshenko and his then aide...
...He did not utter a word on the issues then under discussion, but approached the whole dispute from this single point of view...
...There are no other cases in recent Party history of an individual being expelled from the Central Committee and then readmitted within a few years...
...Despite this, however, Zhukov was never able to oust any of the leading figures of the Political Administration...
...That is not accurate...
...Even those who yesterday completely agreed with Zhukov will now repudiate him, so as not to share his fate...
...This issue brought Zhukov into conflict with Malenkov, who was trying to curtail arms outlays...
...While strengthening his visible power, Khrushchev has at the same time narrowed the base on which it rests...
...On the other hand, it is certain that Zhukov energetically and persistently demanded that all political work in the Army be subordinated to the Defense Ministry...
...This led Konev to accept Zhukov's post in June 1946, after Zhukov, as commander of all Soviet ground forces, had resisted the postwar purge of the Army inspired by the late Andrei Zhdanov...
...Demands for a bigger defense budget may have played some part...
...Malenkov also accompanied Zhukov when the latter went to Stalingrad in 1942...
...Especially significant was the campaign of criticism of the Political Administration's work, which was launched—obviously on Zhukov's instructions—at the conferences of Army and Navy Party organizations in December 1955 and January 1956...
Vol. 40 • November 1957 • No. 45
