Елена Ржевская - Memoirs of a Wartime Interpreter - From the Battle for Moscow to Hitler's Bunker

I read them in 1957. Khrushchev showed me them. Yezhov presented him with a list of people to be shot and Stalin signed it, and with him Molotov, Voroshilov and Kaganovich. Without trial. He did not even summon them, talk to them. Uborevich, Yakir…

‘Yakir wrote him a letter,’ he said vehemently, abandoning the measured tone,

It is unbearable to read that letter. That he is devoted to the revolution… Unbearable. Heart-rending…

In Zhukov’s voice you could hear the shock at what he learned, when he saw and read these things with his own eyes.

‘Admittedly, Hitler tricked Stalin,’ he said, meaning that the Germans had forged and planted documents ‘incriminating’ Tukhachevsky of collaborating with them. ‘But how could he not summon him, not talk to him? Not listen to what he had to say? That was unforgivable!’

‘A giant of military thought,’ he called Mikhail Tukhachevsky in his memoirs. ‘A star of the first magnitude in the pleiad of our Motherland’s military leaders.’

I spoke again about lawlessness and its tragic consequences for the country. Zhukov agreed. I could sense he had been deeply affected by the Twentieth Party Congress.

Years later I made the acquaintance of Alexander Buchin, who had been Zhukov’s driver at the front. He visited me at home. He told me about visiting Zhukov in hospital after his heart attack. Buchin lamented, ‘What’s this, Georgiy Konstantinovich? What’s all this about?’ Zhukov replied tersely, ‘It’s about 1937, 1947, 1957…’

In 1937 he had been denounced. The storm clouds had been gathering over his head. Arrest and disappearance seemed imminent. During the war Zhukov served Stalin faithfully as a soldier, recalcitrant but reliable, more capable than anyone else. After the war Stalin needed yes-men and Zhukov was unsuited to the role. He belonged to a different breed, and so began his fall from favour. But, remembering that time of war, he could not reconcile himself to the thought that Stalin had kept him in the dark, deliberately tricking him. It was a situation worthy of Shakespeare. ‘I was very close to Stalin.’

But was Stalin close to him? Probably, when he asked him over the phone, ‘Are you sure we can hold Moscow?’ and waited for the fateful answer to come back. No doubt then he was exceedingly close. And when from time to time he threw Zhukov into the heat of battle when the situation was at its most desperate and most critical, no doubt then he waited sleeplessly by the phone to hear from him.

‘I was very close to him, closer than anyone else, until the end of 1946 when we fell out.’ That was when he was dismissed from the post of commander-in-chief of the army, so as not to detract from the aura surrounding the Generalissimo, and despatched to command the Odessa military district.

A new bout of persecution came in 1947, with Zhukov removed from the Central Committee of the CPSU and, shortly afterwards, transferred from Odessa to command the interior, also second-rank, Urals military district.

Beria and Abakumov rummaged through everything in his office; they cracked his safe. All they found was operational maps from the war or something else of that kind – all played out, out of date, stuff he should have handed in, except that for Zhukov it was not out of date.

This was a time when the generals who had worked under him were being arrested, including Telegin, staff and people who had served him personally. A ‘Zhukov anti-Soviet conspiracy’ was being concocted. His driver, Buchin, was also arrested. ‘Stalin saved me. Beria and Abakumov wanted me destroyed,’ Zhukov repeated, and it seemed to me that with his trusting nature he really believed their actions could not possibly have been agreed by Stalin. He touched in our conversation on the dysfunctional state Stalin was in after the war. I asked if Stalin had been ill.

After the war, maybe. He was traumatized by the war. He told me himself in 1947 [I wonder whether he was mistaken about the year, when he had already said they fell out in 1946], ‘I am the most unhappy of men. I’m afraid of my own shadow.’ The war traumatized him. Beria harassed and scared him. Told him some kind of agent had crossed the border on a mission to kill him.

‘To show Stalin what a good job he was doing of protecting him and keeping him safe?’ I asked. ‘To strengthen his position?’ Zhukov confirmed that was the aim: ‘When doing it he always acted through somebody else. Not himself. Mostly it was through Malenkov.’

Zhukov had once been in a car with Stalin.

The car windows were like this. [He indicated the thickness of the glass with his fingers, about 10 cm.] Stalin’s chief bodyguard sat in front. Stalin told me to sit in the back seat. I was surprised. That was how we drove: Vlasik, the chief bodyguard, was in front, behind him was Stalin, and behind Stalin there was me. I asked Vlasik afterwards why he had told me to sit there. ‘He always arranges it like that, so that, if they’re firing from in front, they’ll get me, and if from behind, they’ll hit you.’

After Stalin’s death in 1953, Marshal Zhukov was appointed deputy minister and then minister of defence of the USSR. He was a member of the Party Central Committee Praesidium and again in the kind of job his abilities merited. But then in 1957, while he was on an official visit to Yugoslavia, the Central Committee Praesidium decided behind his back to get rid of Marshal Zhukov, this time once and for all, by stripping him of all his positions and completely removing him from all state, Party and public engagements. Portraits of Marshal Zhukov were torn down, and his name and photographs disappeared from the history of the Second World War.

Zhukov’s years of banishment began. He devoted himself to working on his memoirs. Did he realize the snooping was still going on, even though this period was called ‘The Thaw’? This document is dated 1963:

Top secret. Committee of State Security of the Council of Ministers of the USSR, 27 May 1963, No. 1447c, Moscow. To Comrade N. S. Khrushchev.

I report to you certain information recently received concerning the mood of former Minister of Defence G. K. Zhukov.

In… a conversation about the publication The History of the Great Patriotic War Zhukov said: ‘… this is rewritten history. I consider that in this respect the description of history given by the German generals, although it too is perverse, is nevertheless more honest; they write more truthfully. The History of the Great Patriotic War , though, is completely untruthful.

‘This is not history as it was but history as it has been written… It corresponds to the spirit of the present time: who is to be glorified, who is to be kept quiet about… And what matters most is what it is silent about… I do not know when it will be possible to bring this to light, but I am writing everything as it was. I have already got around a thousand pages behind me…’

According to information in our possession, Zhukov is intending to go to the south in the autumn with his family to one of the Ministry of Defence sanatoria. At that time we shall take measures to acquaint ourselves with the part of his memoirs he has written.

Zhukov said again that he was writing now about the Berlin operation. ‘I make reference to you there,’ he said. ‘to The End of Hitler …’ He halted, smiling and trying to remember the continuation of the rather contrived title Novosti had given my book for foreign distribution: The End of Hitler, Without Myth or Mystification.

I looked at my watch. ‘I’ve overstayed my time. You must be tired.’ He did not want me to leave, however; I could see there were still things he wanted to discuss. We sat and talked some more. He asked if I would give him that document (a copy, of course) of his report to Stalin about the discovery of Goebbels’ body. I promised I would.