Apricot Jam: And Other Stories (48 page)

People came to him like this more than once, and also on the sly or at parties (though Zhukov never drank to excess), saying, it was a
Russian
army that finished off Hitler, yet they
’
re treating us like a pack of idiots again. Hasn
’
t the time come, Georgy Konstantynych . . . ? And some even said plainly: Now that you
’
re minister of the armed forces, you
’
ve got more power than the whole Politburo taken together. And
so ...
?
Perhaps . . . ?

Zhukov even gave it some thought: Perhaps they were right. All the power was in his hands, and he was as sharp as ever as a soldier; toppling all of
them
wouldn
’
t be difficult in the operational sense.

But if you
’
re a real communist?
How can you even think about it when we owe our victory to ... yes, even to the political apparatus and the people from SMERSH? No, gentlemen, that
’
s not for me.

But word still leaked out and spread through Moscow, if not through the army as well. He was asked some anxious questions about it in the Politburo. He assured his comrades:
“
How can you even think such a thing? I was never against the institution of political sections in the army. We are communists and will always remain so.
”
And with that they survived the ideological crisis of 1956.

Zhukov was now sixty, in the full prime of his life, and once again he was needed when some discord broke out within the Collective Leadership. They rose up against Khrushchev almost to a man, saying that he had become authoritarian,
that he was trying to become another Stalin, and that it might even be necessary to depose him. Khrushchev rushed to Zhukov, saying,
“
Save me!
”

Saving him meant collecting votes in the Central Committee, because Khrushchev had only a tiny minority of support in the Politburo and his enemies had refused to convene the Central Committee.

This was a ridiculously simple job. Zhukov sent out about seventy military aircraft and brought all the members of the Central Committee to Moscow in flash. With their support, Khrushchev won out. He declared the Molotov-Malenkov-Kaganovich group and those siding with them an anti-party faction. (Bulganin and Voroshilov had also supported them.)

Saving his homeland from German fascism, saving it from the degenerate Beria, and saving it from the anti-party faction were victories that gave Georgy Zhukov, a worthy, beloved son of his Fatherland, a triple crown.

It would never have occurred to him to indulge in such a frivolous pastime as writing
memoirs.

It was then that he had to pay an official visit to Yugoslavia and Albania. He went with a flotilla of several warships via the Black Sea, the Mediterranean, and the Adriatic. It was a wonderful voyage, something he
’
d not experienced before.

While visiting Albania, he found out that he had been
removed
from his post as minister of armed forces! What was going on in Moscow? Was it some misunderstanding? Were they simply changing the name again or making reforms in the ministry? Would there be some new post for him, one just as important or even more so?

He felt his heart contract. His chest felt empty and all the official visits meaningless. He hurried back with the hope of getting an explanation from Khrushchev: Was he incapable of remembering the good that Zhukov had done in
twice
saving him?

Not only was Khrushchev incapable of remembering, it turned out that he had already declared in the Central Committee and in Kremlin circles that Zhukov was
“
a dangerous person
”
! A
Bonapartiste
! Zhukov wants to topple our own Soviet power! Back in Moscow and fresh off the airplane, who should meet him but Konev! He escorted Zhukov to the Kremlin, and there he was removed from the Politburo and from the Central Committee.

There was nothing he could have done from Albania. And when he came back to Moscow, he had been rendered harmless; everything had been altered here, and he had no lines of communication left open.

It was only now, only with
hindsight, that
Zhukov understood: he was too large a figure for Khrushchev. The man was incapable of keeping such a person near him.

Where could he defend himself?
Pravda
—it was Konev again!—published a vile article against him. Konev!
Saved by Zhukov from Stalin
’
s tribunal back in October
‘
41.

Never in his life had he been so insulted, so humiliated, so wronged. (Stalin, now, was a legitimate Boss; he was above all of them, and he had a right to power. But what right did this little speck of cornmeal have?) It was so painful that he tried to deaden his feelings with sleeping pills. A pill at night, then another, and when he awoke in the morning his heart gnawed at him so that he needed another pill.
And again at night.
And again during the day.
And so he deadened himself for more than a week, simply in order to survive.

But this was not the end of it: he was thrown out of the army altogether and sent
“
into retirement.
”
Even this was not the end of it: Khrushchev made that same Golikov, Zhukov
’
s old enemy, the head of the political administration of the army and navy, and now it was Golikov who ensured that all the movements of the disgraced marshal were blocked, as were the visits of any of his friends—those who had not turned away from him—to his dacha in a suburban forest, this home with the ridiculous colonnade. (He should be thankful that they didn
’
t take away his dacha.)

It was then that Zhukov suffered his second heart attack (if not something even worse).

When he recovered, he was not the same iron man he had been. His entire body seemed to weigh him down, and he had grown weak beyond recovery. The skin on his neck grew loose and flabby. His unyielding chin, familiar to the whole world, now had grown soft. His cheeks had swollen, and his lips seemed to move unevenly and with difficulty. For a time he had nurses at the dacha watching over him twenty-four hours a day.

Now Zhukov only had his wife (a doctor, and most often away at work), his little daughter, his mother-in-law, and his old, faithful driver from the war. He became very involved in following
Mashenka
’
s
progress when she began studying in her music school. (He himself had always wanted to play the accordion, and after Stalingrad he found the time to work at it a little. And now, with time on his hands, he would play a few tunes. He would happily play
“
The Peddlers,
”
“
Baikal,
”
and the old wartime tune,
“
Dark Night.
”
) The only long trips he made were to go fishing, which he loved. The rest of his time he spent on his own wooded lot, taking walks, tending the flower gardens, and, when the weather was
bad, wandering about the spacious dining hall, from the huge oak buffet to the bust of himself sculpted by
Vuchetich
and the model of a T-34 tank.

Life outside went on in its own way, as if he
’
d never been a part of it. A multivolume
History of the Great Patriotic War
appeared, but no one ever came to ask Zhukov for any
information .
.. They passed over his achievements and did their best to omit his very name. He heard that photographs of him had been removed from the Armed Forces
’
Museum. (Everyone had turned away from him, apart from
Vasilevsky and Bagramyan, who still visited. Rokossovsky would have come, but he
’
d been sent to take charge of the Polish Army.)

This was the time when so many marshals and generals were rushing to write and publish their memoirs. Zhukov was struck by how jealous they were of each other, how they put themselves in the limelight, tried to take away the glory from their neighbors, and dumped their mistakes and failures on others. Even Konev had now dashed off his memoirs (or did he have someone else write them?). And he emerged as pure as the driven snow, while he shamelessly stole all the glory of the achievements of the modest and talented Vatutin (killed by Bandera
’
s Ukrainian nationalists). Knowing Zhukov was defenseless, the lot of them, almost, would bad-mouth him. The artillery marshal, Voronov, even went so far as to claim responsibility for planning the operation at Khalkhin-Gol and take credit for its success.

It was at this point that Zhukov sat down to write his own memoirs. (And he did it in his own hand, without any secretaries, working slowly, carefully, and gradually. He was grateful to have some help from his former personal assistant, an officer who could help him check dates and facts in military archives: it was awkward now to go to the ministry
’
s archives
himself
, and he might well have been refused entry.)

War memoirs are something inevitable and necessary. Just look at how many the Germans have turned out! And then there were the
Americans, though their war over there wasn
’
t much compared with ours. The memoirs of some of our ordinary officers, even junior officers, sergeants, and airmen, were coming out as well—and they all have their use. But when a general or a marshal sits down to write, he has to be aware of his responsibilities.

And so he wrote, not finding the anger or the rashness within him to dispute with all the others.
(Vasilevsky had given a rather sharp dressing-down to one or two of them.) You have to be relentless in battle, but not here. He had no rancor either toward Konev or Voronov. As the months and then years of his time of disgrace passed, the anger in his heart also passed, and he became reconciled to his situation. The injustices, however, could not be allowed to remain in the historical record. He had to correct the accounts of his comrades, even if only gently, and set the record straight. Do it gently, so as not to make them go on to reach for an even bigger share of the common fruits of victory. And those things he had not done or had left incomplete must not be left out of his memoirs either, for it is from such mistakes that future generals can learn. What he had to write was the full, unvarnished truth.

The problem was that the truth itself somehow steadily and irreversibly altered with the passage of time: under Stalin, the truth was one thing; under Khrushchev it was another. And there were many things that it was still premature to mention ... Yes, let it be about the war, and leave it at that. He didn
’
t even want to talk about what happened later, and he couldn
’
t, in any case.

Then, suddenly, they got rid of that gasbag Khrushchev! This time there was no Zhukov to save his skin.

But the situation of the disgraced marshal did not change after a week or after a month: the cloud of disgrace still hung over him. No one confirmed it anew (Golikov had passed on), but no one lifted it either. Who would be the first one brave enough to say the decisive word?

One thing he did allow himself: he made a trip to Kaluga Oblast, back to his native village. He had been longing to go back, and it had been—what?—fifty years since he
’
d lived there. It upset him deeply: he met women he had danced with in his younger days, and now they all looked so old, like beggars; and the village
itself
had become so impoverished.
“
But why are you living so badly?
”
“
They won
’
t let us live any better . . .
”

But then came the twentieth anniversary of Victory Day, and the new rulers had no choice but to invite Zhukov to the ceremonies in the Kremlin Palace. It was his first public appearance in seven years. Not long after that, he was unexpectedly invited to a banquet in the Writers
’
Club. The marshal was both surprised and touched by the warmth of his reception. Once again in that same year he was invited back to the Writers
’
Club for an anniversary of a well-known writer of war novels. He went in civilian clothes and was seated at the head table. What followed was just a regular celebration at which he was an outsider, but when, among the half-dozen speeches, his name was mentioned in passing, the whole hall full of writers—the Moscow intelligentsia—applauded furiously, and twice they all rose to their feet to honor him.