Tony Le Tissier - Slaughter at Halbe

Marshal Koniev served on the Allied Control Commission in Austria until he replaced Zhukov as Commander-in-Chief Land Forces in 1946. In July 1955 he was appointed the first Commander-in-Chief of the Warsaw Pact Forces, but had to give up the post through ill health five years later. Fully recovered, he was appointed Commander-in-Chief Soviet Group of Forces in Germany on 10 August 1961, just three days before the construction of the Berlin Wall began. One year later he transferred to the Group of Inspectors upon nominal retirement, and died aged 79 on 20 May 1975.

Marshal Zhukov stayed on as Commander-in-Chief of the Group of Soviet Forces in Germany until 1946, when Stalin appointed him Commander-in-Chief of Land Forces, but soon afterwards downgraded him to commander of the Odessa Military District and later to the Ural Military District, posts normally occupied by a colonel-general. Following Stalin’s death in March 1953, Zhukov became Minister of Defence in the new government under Nikolai Bulganin, receiving his fourth star as ‘Hero of the Soviet Union’ on his 60th birthday in 1956. He supported Nikita Khrushchev’s take-over in 1957 and was retained in his post, but upon returning from a triumphant visit to Yugoslavia and Albania in October that year, he was dismissed on charges of high-handedness, establishing a personality cult and obstructing Party work within the army.

Deprived of his positions as a member of the Presidium and the Central Committee, and as Minister of Defence, Zhukov withdrew to the dacha outside Moscow that Stalin had given him for life during the war. Pravda then published an article by Marshal Koniev that amounted to a scathing attack on Zhukov’s role during the war and as Minister of Defence. In March 1958 Zhukov was further humiliated by his contrived retirement as a Marshal of the Soviet Union, an unprecedented step, for marshals were normally transferred to the Group of Inspectors, whose occasional duties justified the continuation of their active-duty perquisites, such as an aide-de-camp and a chauffeur-driven car. Zhukov was now fair game for his old antagonists, and in March 1964 Chuikov attacked Zhukov in his book The End of the Third Reich , the first of the senior commanders’ memoirs allowed to be published after the war.

However, in 1965, under the Brezhnev regime, Zhukov was invited to attend a celebration of the twentieth anniversary of the victory over Germany, at which he received a great ovation. The next day he joined his old colleagues in reviewing the victory parade from the top of Lenin’s mausoleum. A request then arrived from a French publisher for permission to include a book on Zhukov in a series of twenty books on commanders of the Second World War. Somehow this request managed to get through the system, resulting in Zhukov producing his memoirs, upon which he had been working since his retirement. There followed considerable delays in obtaining official clearance, during which Zhukov suffered a heart attack, his second, but then the manuscript was eventually approved by no less than General Secretary Brezhnev, and by the end of April 1968 the book was on sale in Moscow. Despite an official ban on any form of publicity, Zhukov’s memoirs were an instant success, and the feedback from the readers, amounting to over 10,000 letters, encouraged Zhukov to start work on a second edition with his morale greatly enhanced. He died aged 77 in Moscow on 18 June 1974.

Based on F. D. Vorbeyev, I. V. Propotkin and A. N. Shimanky, The Last Storm, with some additional information drawn from various sources.