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

There was a smell of pine branches, the smell of official funerals, with numerous wreaths leaned against the walls. The chandeliers were swathed in black crepe. The banisters of the staircase were draped with black and red cloth that reached down to the steps.

We went up a little and then were stuck for a long time at the second flight of stairs. The water was running down from our hair, from our clothes which clung to us, and squelched in our shoes, but through the windows we could see a column of thousands of people standing in the teeming rain, not dispersing. Some shielded their heads with umbrellas, newspapers, jackets, but the majority had no protection from the rain. They waited. No one was going to see and remember them standing there. There were no cameramen to film them.

The rain was lashing, bucketing down, bubbling on the asphalt. Peals of thunder. Only the intrusion of the elements was worthy of the grandeur of this funeral.

We entered the Hall of the Red Banner. The coffin was covered in flowers. At its head were three furled red banners with black strips fastened to their shafts. At Zhukov’s feet, a red cloth sloped down to the floor, covered in his numerous decorations. A little to one side were rows of chairs for his daughters, family and friends. His beloved wife was not by the coffin, however, having died after a long, painful illness. He survived her by six months.

How lonely that coffin looked, even from a distance. We passed slowly. No stopping, whether to take a breath or give expression to the emotion engulfing you. On a high catafalque Marshal Zhukov lay with a typical expression on his face, his lips tightly closed. Only the lowered eyelids set him apart from all earthly things. There was no sign of frailty or senility. Death had given back to him the earlier, imperious face so familiar from his portraits. The elderly man walking beside me was weeping and muttered, ‘What a shame! That was a real man! What a shame!’

After leaving the hall Lyalya and I paused on the landing. We were not ready just to leave immediately. People were coming down the stairs past us, those who had been through the war with Zhukov, and those who were born after it. Their faces showed how moved they were. An old air force lieutenant colonel in a worn, sodden tunic was sobbing as he came down the stairs, leaning heavily on a walking stick, his false leg creaking. Lyalya and I were soaked through but, as at the front, didn’t expect even to catch a cold. Outside the window, quietening, the peals of thunder were moving away.

In 1944 a German general was captured in the Carpathians, and Lyalya asked him, ‘How does the German command assess the actions of the 4th Ukrainian Front?’ ‘We are not alarmed by the actions of the 4th Ukrainian,’ the general replied. ‘We are alarmed by the inaction of Zhukov.’ They were alarmed by what he might be planning while invisible to them.

Lyalya and I spent over four hours with the thousands and thousands of people in the streets and the Soviet Army Club, bidding farewell to Marshal Zhukov. It was the same amount of time as my meeting with him had lasted, and for me this day of mourning was a silent continuation of that day and brought me closer to Zhukov.

That very night Zhukov’s body was cremated. I heard about it on the radio. For me there was something intolerable about their haste to rid themselves of this man they had long ago worn down and who was now dead, but to whose face death had suddenly returned its old expression. They wanted him reduced to ashes, to dust, to nothingness.

The procession moves towards the centre of Moscow. At the House of Unions the urn is transferred to a gun carriage. Accompanied by a military escort, the funeral procession advances to Red Square, over whose stones the hooves of a white stallion had once clattered victoriously.

Here it was, the day so long awaited and unforgettable! I was summoned to his dacha by the supreme commander-in-chief. He asked if I had forgotten how to ride a horse. I answered, ‘I have not.’

‘Well, here’s what,’ said J. V. Stalin. ‘It is for you to inspect the Victory Parade. Rokossovsky will be in charge of the arrangements.’

I replied ‘Thank you for such an honour, but will it not be better for you to inspect the parade? You are the supreme commander-in-chief. It is your right and obligation to inspect the parade.’

J. V. Stalin said, ‘I’m too old to be inspecting parades. You do it, you are younger.’ [Zhukov was forty-eight.]

At three minutes to ten I was on horseback at the Spassky Gate.

It was drizzling. Not yet visible from the square, Zhukov shook the raindrops off his cap. Rokossovsky commanded, ‘Parade, atten-shun!’ and at the tenth stroke of the clock on Spassky Tower, Marshal Zhukov rode on a white horse on to Red Square.

Then he stood on the podium of the mausoleum next to Stalin and they were photographed side by side at that historic moment. The photographer was cameraman Yevgeny Khaldei. At an exhibition of his work in 1973 he took me to this photo and told me he had visited Zhukov to give him photographs. Holding this picture in his hands, Zhukov recalled he had wanted to brush the rain off the peak of his cap, but looked at Stalin and changed his mind. Stalin was standing patiently and immobile in the rain.

What was going on under the wet cap in the mind of the leader and supreme commander-in-chief? Zhukov himself did not go in for that kind of mind-reading, and in his simplicity did not realize that Stalin, with a very different personality, was trying with great concern to read his mind. Stalin had been closely watching the victor on his white stallion. ‘I’m too old to be inspecting parades.’ (He had hardly been a noted horseman when younger.) Zhukov had capered to the jubilant roar of the approving square, to the breath-taking strains of Glinka’s patriotic ‘Glory to Russia!’, and the cream of the army that had won the war, those who had survived, watched him, enraptured, in their new dress uniforms – valorous marshals, generals, majors and rank-and-file soldiers. Enraptured by him, by Zhukov. How could Stalin not be jealous, not be anxious that Zhukov, this commander with his energy, his glory, his willpower, his organizing ability, and his army might be planning something?

And so the rain poured down on Zhukov at the great hour of victory, and the sun of good fortune never again shone on him from behind the thunderclouds.

He had lived twenty-nine years after the war ended. Of those, he worked to the full extent of his abilities and stature for perhaps five. Even when he reminded the world so loudly of himself with the publication of his memoirs, he was never during his lifetime given the official recognition of his importance and achievements that was his due. And now his lightweight ashes were being borne across the renowned square on the shameless shoulders of the likes of Brezhnev, Suslov, and Grechko.

Zhukov had not asked for the Kremlin’s funeral rites; all he wanted was to be laid to rest in the ground. But what did his personal wishes matter? This was what political expediency required. [1] Many years later Mikhail Pilikhin, a cousin of Zhukov, told me he had been present during a telephone conversation in which Brezhnev promised Zhukov he could be buried in the ground.

Zhukov will go down in history as the victorious defender of Moscow and the vast expanses of the Motherland, but his native land expressed its gratitude by grudging him even a grave plot, awarding him instead, for his eternal rest, a slot in the Kremlin wall.

For the last time he manifested himself to Red Square as a handful of dust, Marshal Zhukov, who, at the supreme moment of his destiny had entered it on a white stallion whose hooves struck sparks from its cobbles.