Dragoon's Day
(See Cover)
I love a dragoon
I love the young one
I love the young one
Right out of a brave regiment.
He had barely arrived
When he had to leave
And his beauty-darling
Sobs and cries
Sobs and cries
Begs him to stay.
Stay with me my lovely darling
Another night.
Spend the night my love
I'll wake you early
I'll wake you early.
--Song of the Russian Dragoons
In the 10th Regiment of the Novgorod Dragoons, few were younger and none was braver than Georgy Zhukov, the kid from Kaluga Province. While their beauty-darlings sobbed and cried, the 10th dashed in behind the German lines and with saber and carbine cut down the enemy gunners. This was World War I, and twice young Georgy received the coveted St. George Cross, awarded only for valor in battle. In his black tunic, blue breeches and patent-leather kepi with bronze double-eagle, he was a doughty figure in the Czarist army.
This week, in a scene reminiscent of the Czarist days at their most imperial, ex-Dragoon Zhukov, now a chunky, 59-year-old marshal, reviewed the crack regiments of the world's largest army. Standing in a pale blue Zis limousine, his broad chest loaded with decorations, his hand in a stiff salute, Zhukov watched the young cadets of Russia's top military academies goose-step their way through Moscow's Red Square in unwavering, platoon-wide lines. The cadets wore smart new uniforms; steel-blue with sleeves laced with gold-braided laurel leaves; their officers wore striped yellow-and-white moire belts from which hung short gilt swords.
After the cadets came the steel-helmeted motorized infantry in green armored cars, tanks with Tommy gunners at the ready, air-force officers in new dark blue uniforms, and then the day's showpiece: a huge, gleaming cannon, mounted on a rubber-tired platform, thought by some military observers to be an atomic weapon (one of the "daring discoveries" of Soviet science, said Radio Moscow).
A 1,000-man massed band, from whose front line of trumpeters fluttered scarlet banners and golden tassels, struck up a martial air. Rain had canceled the air flypast, and Party Secretary Khrushchev, clad in a fawn raincoat and bright green hat, had stolen some of the show by escorting attractive Ekaterina Furtseva, a Moscow party official, to the podium. But now, after the trumpets, Zhukov, with all the pomp and ceremony which the occasion demanded, went to center stage to deliver the official speech.
This was the platform, and this the occasion on May Days past, when the chunky rulers of Russia had hurled their condemnations at the U.S. "warmongers" and bellicosely pointed to their own armed strength in the square below and in the skies above. But now, like any bureaucrat in any Communist town hall, Marshal Zhukov read off the standard mimeographed tributes to workers in animal husbandry fulfilling their norms. His speech was short and sweet. Even when he came to foreign policy, he denounced West German rearmament almost more in sorrow than in anger. It "hampers," he said, "the lessening of international tension." As for Russia, he proclaimed, its policy is Lenin's: "The possibility of a peaceful coexistence and economic competition of states regardless of social and state systems."
The band struck up the National Anthem, and a salute was fired. "After the thunder of the salute," whispered Radio Moscow's announcer, "how quiet it is in Red Square!"
My Old Friend. A fortnight earlier, Zhukov had written to President Eisenhower, addressing him as "Dear Old Comrade in Arms." Reminding Ike of their friendship in Berlin at the end of World War II, he had asked Ike's help in persuading the runaway son of a Russian colonel to return home. Only last week, at his press conference. Eisenhower referred once again to "my old friend" Zhukov.
Red army marshals do not enter lightly into correspondence with old friends abroad. Zhukov's letter, taken together with his May Day speech, was an official gesture toward the West. Coming from Zhukov, and not from Molotov the Great Stone Face, the message was, and was meant to be, more acceptable. For Georgy Zhukov is a great professional soldier, whose name will be linked in Russian history with the victories of Moscow, Leningrad, Stalingrad and Berlin. Zhukov has always faithfully obeyed party orders, but he also seems to have stayed out of power politics and cliques. From the point of view of the Central Committee of the Communist Party (of which he is a full member), Zhukov was the perfect channel for a direct approach to President Eisenhower. Around the world last week, people asked: Could the friendship of two old soldiers provide the basis for a genuine easing of tensions between the U.S. and Russia?
The question begot other questions. Does Zhukov represent a new force in Soviet affairs? Has the Red army assumed a new and stronger role in Soviet policy? Not knowing all the answers, the White House reacted skeptically to Zhukov's overtures, but kept open a small hedge on the future. The past, in Georgy Zhukov's case, is also instructive. His hazardous climb from Czarist dragoon to Communist marshal, his differences with the military commissars, his fallings in and out of Communist favor, are significant clues to the nature of the instrument he has wielded with such success.
The Bolshevik Army. When the Bolshevik Revolution broke in 1917, Zhukov was back home in his Kaluga village, a sick young dragoon of 21 and, like millions of other Russians, profoundly disillusioned vith the Czar's conduct of the war. To crush active opposition to their rule, the Bolsheviks formed an army out of bands of irregulars, war refugees, peasants, groups of industrial workers and trade unionists. "Even after defeats and retreats," reported Trotsky, the first Bolshevik War Commissar, "the flabby, panicky mob would be transformed in two or three weeks into an efficient fighting force. It needed good commanders, a few dozen experienced fighters, a dozen or so Communists ready to make any sacrifice." Commanders and experienced fighters were drawn from the old Czarist army, and the Red army soon had in its service tens of thousands of ex-soldiers. Among them was Georgy Zhukov.
In Moscow young Zhukov became a member of the revolutionary committee of his old unit. This unit was soon incorporated in a cavalry regiment, commanded by ex-Cavalry Sergeant Semyon Timoshenko, which became part of a Red cavalry army led by Semyon Budenny, an ex-Cossack. The war unfolded on a 3,000-mile perimeter around central Russia. The Red cavalrymen fought as irregular shock troops, now galloping 400 miles to strike Poland's Pilsudski, now driving south at the White forces under General Denikin, finally pinning White General Piotr Wrangel in the Prekop isthmus and bringing the war to a close. Georgy Zhukov, the barrel-chested, hard-riding kid from Kaluga Province, swung his saber with the toughest of them. Wounded at Tsaritsyn (Stalingrad), where Voroshilov was in command, he was awarded the Order of the Red Banner and became a member of the Communist Party. He never regretted it.
Because other ex-Czarist officers had been going over to the Whites, often with their troops, the Bolsheviks in 1918 appointed commissars to every Red army unit: stone-hard Communists whose job it was to make men and officers accept "the spirit of revolutionary discipline," or else. Said Realist Trotsky: "An army cannot be built without reprisals. Masses of men cannot be led to death unless the army command has the death penalty in its arsenal." Thus began the pernicious commissar system which years later was to bring the army, and Soviet Russia itself, almost to destruction.
When Commissar Trotsky set about building a peacetime defense force out of the revolutionary Red army, he had revolt on his hands. He was able to form a general staff, training and technical commands out of a nucleus of experienced ex-Imperial army officers, among whom was the future Marshal Mikhail Tukhachevsky. The old irregulars objected to being educated. Georgy Zhukov was an exception. When the chance came for a military course at Moscow's Frunze Academy, he grabbed it. Chief of Staff Boris Shaposhnikov thought him "somewhat slow," but sent him off to Germany to study under General von Seeckt. The black-haired young Russian was a strange figure among the shaven-headed, monocled Prussians, but Swordsman Zhukov could outfence any of them, as he later could outfence any Russian officer who served with him. From Von Seeckt, chief theorist of the new German army that was already forming, Zhukov learned the strategy and tactics of the "breakthrough."
When he returned to Belorussia, under Timoshenko's command, Zhukov became a crack training officer. Patiently and methodically he polished the rough muzhik regiments. Once he was reported to have shined a soldier's boots as an example to a mud-footed unit. When the Red army began to get tanks, Zhukov was assigned to make tankists out of peasant lads. He got a spit-and-polish reputation by insisting that all tanks be washed down after the day's work. Appearing in the controlled press, little stories like these were no accident: somewhere along the line Zhukov had attracted Stalin's attention. In 1935 his name appeared over a sharp attack on Tukhachevsky's conduct of the Red army maneuvers, and the following year he was given the honor of appearing on a military committee that approved the draft of Stalin's U.S.S.R. constitution.
The Comrades Disappear. This was a time when Trotsky was already in exile and the party purged, but in his bid for supreme power, Stalin was still meeting opposition in the army. The political department of the army was quietly infiltrated by secret police, chief among whom was a certain Ivan Serov. Stalin began a clean sweep of the military apparatus. His commissars indicted Tukhachevsky and seven other top generals for treason, brought them to secret trial and had them shot within 48 hours. Within a few weeks all but a few of the 80 members of the Soviet War Council had disappeared, and by the time the purge was over, 374 generals and an estimated 30,000 officers had been liquidated. What must it have been like for Professional Soldier Zhukov to stand by while hundreds of his old comrades disappeared, to see the whole army structure virtually destroyed? Men who knew him then say that he never smiled, never was gay, gave the impression of being stonyhearted.
The first effect of a weakened Red army was a Japanese penetration deep into Outer Mongolia in 1939. Stalin sent Zhukov there. By bringing tanks from a railhead 150 miles away and using them with air support, Zhukov achieved complete tactical surprise, annihilated the Japanese Sixth Army and drove the Japanese back into Manchuria. A grateful Stalin made him a Hero of the Soviet Union.
The Irregulars Fade. For his new Red army command, Stalin pulled in the old irregulars--Budenny, Voroshilov, Timoshenko--but the decapitated Red army was desperately in need of a professional brain. Zhukov took a hand in the creation of a new officer corps, pressed for a "lone command . . . extending the rights and authority of the commander . . . introducing ranks of generals." But when Russia attacked Finland in 1940, the new command organization fell apart. Field commanders, old, half-literate civil war irregulars recently promoted from junior ranks, fell back in confusion before the tough, disciplined Finns, and some were shot in front of their regiments. To improve morale, Zhukov and Timoshenko persuaded Stalin to abolish the hated commissars. It was only after the two had taken a direct hand in the Finnish war that the Mannerheim Line was broken. Said Zhukov proudly: "This was the acid test . . . the only instance to date of a breach being driven through modern, permanent fortifications."
The real acid test came months later, when Germany sent the whole weight of the powerful, cocky, victorious Wehrmacht charging into Russia. Zhukov fought a battle at Yelnia, near Smolensk, which drove the invaders back 20 miles. It was one of the few successful delaying actions. Stalin's first act of war was to reinstate the army commissars, but commissars were unable to prevent hundreds of Red army commanders, thinking they preferred Nazi to Communist tyranny, from surrendering their arms and their men. Quite a few commissars went over, too. Others, like Old Irregular Budenny, defeated in the Ukraine, beat it back to Moscow. Within four months the Wehrmacht was at the gates of Moscow and Leningrad, and 4,000,000 Red army men were prisoners. Stalin was paying for his policy of purge-and-be-damned.
Moscow Saved. In the deep, bombproof shelters of the Kremlin, the dictator faced up to a frightened group of party sycophants. Outside in the streets of Moscow the angry, dismayed mob was ready to tear them limb from limb. Stalin was forced to yield all military decisions to the man with the highest professional qualifications in Russia: Georgy Zhukov. Zhukov's first decision: save Moscow.
When Hitler bellowed, "Moscow must be finished off at any price," Zhukov answered in the Biblically inspired words of Russia's famed 13th century hero Alexander Nevsky: "Whosoever comes against us with the sword shall perish by the sword. Such is the law of the Russian land, and such it will always be." Following the tactics of General Gallieni, who defended Paris against the Germans in 1914, Zhukov requisitioned every automotive vehicle he could find in Moscow, including the Kremlin limousines, and put a scratch army of volunteers on the Moscow-Mozhaisk road. He brought the Siberian army across on the trans-Siberian railroad and deployed them in five columns around Moscow. The fresh, well-officered Siberians pushed Von Bock's columns back out of artillery range of the capital. Then the Russian winter, the severest in 50 years, halted all but patrol activity. In the six months of snow and thaw, Zhukov, using methods like those employed by Trotsky in the civil war, created and equipped vast new armies.
Plans and Practice. Zhukov's driving force and professional skill were needed in both planning and field operations. A staff organization called the Stavka was created, which allowed him to rough out tactical plans for Chief of Staff Vasilevsky to complete, leaving Zhukov time, as the need arose, to go out to take over a battle that was not going well. One of his first field commands after Moscow was to relieve Old Irregular Timoshenko, whose spring drive towards Kharkov had run into trouble. During this period Zhukov's field headquarters were near Kaluga, not far from Strelkovka, the village of his birth. As the Germans were driven from Strelkovka, they prepared to destroy the village and in the course of doing so, they rounded up the Zhukov family, locked them in a cottage and set fire to it. The story goes that Zhukov's men dashed into Strelkovka just in time to rescue their commander's family.
Incidents of this kind were the stuff of the new propaganda funneling out of Moscow. The old Communist slogans were dropped and the Russians were urged to fight the "patriotic war" for the liberation of "the motherland" from the "fascist beasts." The propaganda was immensely effective. But not yet so effective that it prevented General Vlasov, one of Zhukov's top men in the defense of Moscow, from going over to the Germans and organizing Red army prisoners and defectors into an anti-Communist army. Morale was still wobbly.
The turning point was the tough, bitter, bloody battle of Stalingrad (September 1942 to February 1943). Zhukov masterminded Stalingrad, but was not there to take the German surrender, because he had to fly to besieged Leningrad to get Old Irregular Voroshilov out of a mess. During the Stalingrad campaign Zhukov told Stalin that his young, upcoming commanders could be trusted, and got Stalin to abolish the commissars. The crafty old dictator, however, instituted a system of Zampolits who, while they were not supposed to interfere with command decisions, were still the army's political directors. But Stalin promoted Zhukov to the rank of marshal.
"Our next step in the war." says Zhukov, "was to prevent Hitler maneuvering." This Zhukov did in a series of masterly battles, the sweep and magnitude of which have never been equaled. Over a front that stretched from far inside the Arctic Circle down to subtropical Sukhumi, he manipulated some 300 divisions. Every man or woman who could walk was either in the army or in a war factory. Factories in the Urals were pouring out tanks and guns. Vital supplies of ammunition, aircraft, gasoline and trucks were arriving from the Allies. Zhukov began to knock the stuffing out of the Wehrmacht.
His strategy and tactics were orthodox: there was no time for trickery. He would hit a 20-mile sector of the German line with successive waves of infantry, each wave 20 to 30 divisions strong. Sometimes the German gunners would run out of ammunition. When he had punched a hole in the line, Red army tanks with infantry riding on their backs would drive through, sweep around and encircle the enemy flanks. Sometimes Zhukov trapped as many as ten German divisions this way. He would then stand off and pound them to pieces with his artillery. Writes German General Guderian: "Whenever the German army fell into a dangerous, disorganized or shilly-shally state, we always looked for the skillful hand of . . . Zhu-kov." Eisenhower once asked Zhukov how his men negotiated minefields. Zhukov's answer chilled Ike: "When we come to a minefield, our infantry attacks as if it were not there. The losses we get from personnel mines we consider equal to those we would have gotten from machine guns and artillery if the Germans had chosen to defend that particular area." Mass attack was Zhukov's master weapon: massive casualties his expectation.
Driving through birch woods, through forests of fir, bridging huge rivers, crossing the deep, black-soil plains of the Ukraine, filtrating through the great marshlands, fighting, always fighting, in winter blizzard or in blistering summer heat, the Red army recaptured half a million square miles of territory in two years, and liberated Soviet Russia. New names had come up beside Zhukov's: Konev, Rokossovsky, Vatutin, Tolbukhin, Malinovsky, Chuikov, Govorov, Voronov and others, almost all men less than 40 years of age. One name that did not make the headlines was that of Secret Police Commissar Serov, who came close in the wake of Zhukov's victories. His assignment : to liquidate all anti-Soviet elements.
Hot Time in Berlin. The last great push to Berlin cost the Red army a million casualties. Zhukov arrived, tough and imperturbable, fully conscious of his great feat, but also plainly glad that the war was over. In Berlin, Zhukov met General Eisenhower. Wrote Ike in Crusade in Europe: "I thought Marshal Zhukov an affable and soldierly-appearing individual . . . There was discernible only an intense desire to be friendly and cooperative." Zhukov won the respect of almost all the Allied generals, but between himself and Eisenhower there was genuine affection. "That friendship was a personal and an individual thing," wrote Ike, who went with Zhukov to a football game at Moscow's Dynamo Stadium, and put his arm around Zhukov's shoulder as they took the wild cheers of 100,000 Russians. The two used to argue the relative merits of capitalism and Communism, and Ike never heard from Zhukov a despairing word about Communism. But of course they usually talked through a Russian interpreter.
Later, in Berlin as an occupation High Commissioner, Zhukov relaxed. He danced a Cossack dance for French General de Lattre de Tassigny, ate all the salted peanuts he could lay his hands on, amused himself with Reichsmarshal Goring's private zoo, had a pretty German cottage dismantled and shipped back to Moscow. He went riding every morning, ice skating when there was ice, and was proud of his fitness. Years before, New York Herald Tribune Correspondent Walter Kerr, explaining how difficult it was to learn anything about Zhukov's personal life, had said that the only time he had come close to Zhukov was when a little boy in a Moscow street had pointed to a house and told him that Zhukov lived there with his two sons and a wife "taller than he is." In Berlin, Zhukov (5 ft. 6 in.) took Eisenhower aside one day, presented his wife, stood beside her to show that he was the taller. "Now you see what kind of lies some of your writers publish about us," he said angrily. "Also, we have no sons. We have two daughters."
On official occasions he came out in full marshal's regalia: robin's-egg-blue trousers with yellow stripes, dark green tunic and bright red sash. Underneath the blouse, he wore a brass plate to carry the weight of his vast collection of decorations. A horrified British officer noted that Britain's cherished Order of the Bath was hanging just about where the marshal's navel would be. The only medals Zhukov seemed genuinely proud of were the three gold stars of his thrice-awarded Hero of the Soviet Union.
There was something of the old dragoon about Zhukov's stiff, yet colorful, swagger. Says U.S. General James Gavin (who also rose from the ranks) : "He has a hard face, which can break into a wonderful smile. He's a man of the earth, short, pudgy fingers and a lot of brains."
On the Allied Control Council, Zhukov sat like a Buddha and let the political generals do the maneuvering. When an American parachute captain shot four Red army deserters who were holding up Germans in the U.S. sector, Zhukov wrote a stiff note of protest, explained afterwards: "I had to write that. That's just a formality. What I really want to know is, where do you get men like that captain?" At public dinners Vishinsky ordered Zhukov about, and Zhukov dutifully read speeches handed to him by Zampolit officers. He did not gag when Stalin took credit for the great victories. The Zampolit organization had grown to huge proportions and was again the terror of the Red army. Into East Germany came Commissar Serov, to superintend the liquidation of dissidents, the dismantling of factories and museums, the kidnaping of scientists and the setting-up of spy schools. Politically, the Red army was back where it started.
In September 1945, Eisenhower invited Zhukov to visit the U.S., and Zhukov accepted. But there were delays in the arrangements. Zhukov said two bodyguards would have to accompany him. He also wanted Ike's son, Lieut. John Eisenhower, to go along. Later, when Zhukov returned to Moscow, the invitation was declined on the ground of illness. Asked what had ailed him, Zhukov said laconically: "Ear trouble."
Round Trip to Odessa. Early in 1946 Zhukov disappeared. The grapevine said that he had refused to take orders from Vice Minister of Defense Bulganin (not yet a marshal), and that Stalin had come on the phone and told Zhukov he had better take a rest. Whatever the truth of these rumors, the fact was that Zhukov had grown too big for Stalin's comfort, i.e., too big to be quietly liquidated, and had been sent to the Odessa military district, where he was living quietly--under the watchful eye of Commissar Serov.
For five years almost nothing was heard of Zhukov. Occasionally a friendly word would reach Ike through relays of military men and from Western visitors to Russia. But the name Zhukov disappeared from Russian newspapers. The bronze bust, which is erected by statute in the home town of anyone who is twice Hero of the Soviet Union, did not appear at Strelkovka.
Then came the war in Korea. Like magic, Zhukov turned up beside Molotov at a gathering in Warsaw, and again on the 1952 Moscow party Congress. But his real return to favor dates from Stalin's death on March 5, 1953, and the arrest four months later of arch-Commissar Beria. The same plenary meeting of the Central Committee which denounced Beria elevated Zhukov to full membership on the Central Committee of the Communist Party.
At that perilous moment, the Russian masses could well be wondering just how monolithic the monolithic "collective leadership" of the new regime was. Zhukov and his fellow marshals and generals publicly pledged the army's loyalty to the new regime--a singular step that betrayed the public's need for reassurance. Zhukov attended official parties, talked again with Americans. At one such party he insisted, though others tried to shush him, on toasting "Justice." Shortly thereafter, giving point to the toast, a tribunal sentenced Beria to death. Pravda announced that a bust of Zhukov had been erected at his birthplace.
When Malenkov fell and Bulganin became Premier, Zhukov inherited Bulganin's old job as Minister for Defense. At last, a real soldier--not a commissar--had the top military post in the Soviet Union. In the same reshuffle, Serov became Minister for State Security.
The appointments balanced one another. Zhukov is the nearest thing the Soviet Union has to a popular hero; the victorious Red army is its only publicly esteemed institution. But in Communist Russia, heroes, hero worship and every institution in the country is controlled through Serov's mechanism.
Stalin, supreme realist of power, arranged it that way. By ruthless and capricious purge he made the Red army a dependent organism. By lacing rank and file with secret police and informers, he made certain that the Red army could not become a power unto itself, as the army is in ordinary tyrannies. The system so weakened the Red army's fighting capacity that in times of desperate urgency its effectiveness was saved only by men like Zhukov insisting on less politics. This does not mean that Zhukov disapproved of the system; he objected only to the shortsightedness of some of its methods.
With comparative safety, the party has thus been able to bring the Red army and its greatest hero forward to a place of prominence. The reason for doing so is not difficult to understand: in the confused power situation following Stalin's death, Zhukov and the Red army give the regime a reassuring semblance of stability. Western intelligence specialists, looking on, find a certain satisfaction in Zhukov's ascendancy: they believe that in the great question of war or peace, his counsel is caution.
For no one knows better than Zhukov that a realistic appraisal of the Red army must consider not only its material might (see box) but its morale. No army in history has suffered such casualties. No army has had so many defections, so many disastrous defeats and brilliant victories. As a fighting organization it is only as good as its commissars, and to judge by World War II, they are good only when they can invoke courage in the name of the motherland. So little trust has the command in its soldiers that a 700,000-man special army-inside-the-army has been created for such routine jobs as watching borders, guarding material or supervising prison camps. In small wars, or in wars of intervention, these specially indoctrinated troops, commanded by professional officers, are a formidable danger. But in a great conflict it takes a Zhukov to beat the commissars and the enemy too.
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