The chimes of the Kremlin clock tower rang ten times as Marshal Georgy Zhukov made his entrance on a white Arabian stallion. High above the ranks of soldiers and officers from the army, navy, and air force, he received the military’s tribute.
From the podium above Lenin’s Mausoleum, Joseph Stalin, the nation’s supreme leader, cast approving glances toward his favorite general. A wave of admiration and awe swept over the short, stocky man, impeccably dressed in uniform and adorned with the highest honors, as he held the reins firmly.
Two months earlier, on April 30, 1945, he had captured Berlin. Now, Zhukov seemed untouchable.
The victory parade on June 24 marked the pinnacle of Zhukov’s career. More than anyone else, he could claim credit for the Soviet Union’s victory over Germany.
With sharp strategic insight, iron will, and unquestionable authority, he not only halted Adolf Hitler’s advance on the Eastern Front but also relentlessly drove the Nazi army back in a death march across the Russian steppes.
Zhukov Was Erased from History
All signs pointed to Zhukov securing a prominent position in the leadership of the new superpower, the Soviet Union. But that did not happen.
Barely had the cheers on Red Square faded before Stalin sent the general to a remote military district, erased his name from history books, and had his face retouched out of official photographs.
His fall from power was sudden, absolute, and ruthless. But political maneuvering had always been a part of Zhukov’s career, which began in the small town of Strelkovka, 130 km southwest of Moscow.
There, he was born on December 2, 1896. His father, Konstantin, was a shoemaker, but he rarely earned enough to feed the family. Hardship forced his mother, Ustinya—a strong, resilient woman—to work in the fields so her husband, son Georgy, and daughter Maria could have food.
Despite their poverty, Zhukov was allowed to attend school for three years—one year longer than was customary for ordinary folk. Later, family connections secured him an apprenticeship in Moscow, where his uncle was a furrier. The train journey to Moscow in 1908—Zhukov’s first—marked the beginning of a new life for the 12-year-old boy.
At the time, dissatisfaction simmered in Russia. Tsar Nicholas II and a small elite ruled the country, while most of the population lived in extreme poverty.
Exploited peasants and factory workers in the emerging industrial sector began voicing their discontent. Three years before Zhukov arrived in Moscow, in January 1905, some of them gathered for a peaceful demonstration in front of the Winter Palace, the tsar’s residence in St. Petersburg.
The episode ended in tragedy when police opened fire, killing nearly 1,000 demonstrators.
Zhukov Was Busy Studying
Politics did not interest Zhukov. In his memoirs, he later explained his lack of engagement by stating that he and his furrier colleagues, as members of the artisan class, did not share the workers’ sense of solidarity.
In reality, the young man was too busy adapting to city life and pursuing his education. His village schooling had given him a taste for knowledge, and despite a 12-hour workday, he continued his studies at night school.
In his spare time, he studied Russian, German, mathematics, and natural sciences with his cousin Alexander, his employer’s son, who had studied in Leipzig.
“I got some magazines from Alexander and bought my own books with money I saved on tram fares. I walked instead and saved money that way,” Zhukov recalled in his memoirs about his busy years in Moscow.
By 1912, Zhukov had completed his apprenticeship as a furrier, and by 1914, he had a stable income, three employees under him, and prospects for a life in Russia’s small middle class.
Like millions of others, however, Zhukov saw his dream shattered when World War I broke out. In August 1915, the 18-year-old Zhukov joined the tsar’s troops, enrolling in a dragoon regiment stationed by the Dniester River in Moldova, then a province of the Russian Empire.
Aided by his knowledge of German, he specialized in capturing enemy soldiers. During a patrol in 1916, he was wounded by a mine and hospitalized in Ukraine, but by then, he had developed a taste for military life.
Besides earning recognition for his service, the war secured Zhukov an officer’s education. When the Russian Revolution erupted in 1917, he chose to join Lenin’s Bolshevik army.
Many soldiers who had suffered through the war’s hardships were drawn to Lenin’s promise of “peace, bread, and land,” but Zhukov was no ardent communist. He did not join the Communist Party until 1919, two years after the tsar’s abdication.
The fall of the tsar did not bring peace, as the revolution was followed by a civil war in which various factions—some backed by Western powers—fought against Lenin’s forces.
Among the counterrevolutionaries was Alexander Antonov, whose troops Zhukov was sent to fight in 1920. The mission was successful but nearly cost Zhukov his life.
“An Antonov supporter fired his rifle at me, killing my horse. We fell, and the horse pinned me down—I would have been dead in the next moment if Notjevka, the political commissar, had not come to my aid.
With a swing of his saber, he killed the enemy, seized his horse, and helped me into the saddle,” Zhukov later wrote in his memoirs.
Zhukov Became Invincible
The combat experience and the honors that followed—such as the prestigious Order of the Red Banner—became Zhukov’s ticket to a career in the Red Army, which was rapidly expanding. From 1932 to 1937, Soviet military spending increased by 340%, and the following year, it doubled again. At the same time, the army grew to an impressive four million men.
This expansion benefited young and ambitious officers like Zhukov. He became known as the man who could whip even the most hopeless regiment into shape and quickly rose through the ranks. His formula was strict discipline—he once berated an officer for allowing his unit’s vehicles to remain unwashed overnight after an exercise.
“The exhaustion you feel during exercises is child’s play compared to what awaits you in a war,” thundered Zhukov, ordering the soldiers to get to work with brushes and buckets. When they were finally done and allowed to go to bed, the officer had to stay behind for another verbal lashing.
The disciplined and politically astute Zhukov skillfully avoided the purges that wiped out many of his colleagues in the 1930s, as Stalin consolidated power after Lenin’s death.
In fact, the purges worked to Zhukov’s advantage. In 1939, he was sent to Manchuria to replace the disgraced officer Feklenko, who had fallen out of Stalin’s favor. Feklenko had been tasked with repelling the Japanese, who were advancing across the border between Manchuria and Mongolia.
Zhukov secured a decisive Soviet victory at the Battle of Khalkhin Gol, bringing an end to years of border conflicts. Stalin showed his gratitude by awarding Zhukov the nation’s highest honor—Hero of the Soviet Union.
The victory at Khalkhin Gol earned him Stalin’s attention, the rank of general, and, a year and a half later, the position of Chief of the General Staff. But then disaster struck.
In the summer of 1941, German forces swept into the Soviet Union. Casualties climbed into the hundreds of thousands, and Zhukov was immediately summoned to Stalin’s office for questioning.
A shaken Zhukov requested a transfer to frontline service. When Stalin accused him of trying to avoid responsibility and seek an easier position, Zhukov replied:
“No. I do not want easier work; I want to be of greater use to my country by doing a job I know more about.”
In July, Zhukov was sent to Yelnya, near Smolensk, with the task of halting the German advance toward Moscow. The battle was bloody and brutal, but when the cannons finally fell silent, Zhukov emerged victorious.
For the first time, Nazi Germany had encountered serious resistance on the Eastern Front, and Zhukov had taken his first step toward national hero status.
Just three days after this triumph, Zhukov was sent to Leningrad, which had just been encircled by German forces. After halting the German assault on the city, Stalin dispatched his super-general on yet another emergency mission—this time to Moscow.
The German advance threatened the Soviet capital, but Zhukov’s reputation alone could sway the outcome. The official newspaper of the Ministry of Defense, Red Star, published a front-page photo of the general to reassure the city’s residents—an unprecedented move.
As the Communist Party’s mouthpiece, the newspaper was not supposed to glorify an individual at the expense of the collective—except for Stalin himself. Zhukov’s portrait was the first ever to appear on its front page.
Although he had become a symbol of the Soviet system’s power, Zhukov was not a hardline Communist. During the Battle of Moscow, he read War and Peace, Leo Tolstoy’s epic novel about Russia during the Napoleonic Wars, and his speeches to the soldiers carried as much Russian nationalism as Communist ideology.
“The fields and forests where we now stand to defend Mother Moscow are stained with the sacred blood of our ancestors, who went down in history for their losses to Napoleon’s hordes. Blood for blood. For honor and freedom, for our motherland, for our sacred Moscow,” Zhukov proclaimed to his troops before sending them into battle.
Zhukov’s reputation as invincible and his relentless discipline saved Moscow. When, on August 23, 1942, the Germans reached the gates of Stalingrad, Stalin recalled Zhukov to make him his deputy.
Documents from Soviet archives reveal that from that point on, Zhukov played an almost equal role to Stalin in making strategic decisions about the war. Even in the West, Zhukov was a well-known figure, and in December 1942, Time magazine featured his portrait on the cover under the headline “Stalin’s Favorite.”
His fame grew even further when Zhukov drove the Germans back through Poland to Berlin and triumphantly planted the red flag atop the bombed-out Reichstag. The celebration in Red Square on June 24, 1945, was the crowning achievement of his career.
Stalin Feared Competition from Zhukov
The triumph was short-lived. At the reception following the victory parade in Moscow, Stalin raised his glass—not, as expected, to Zhukov and his closest generals, but to the millions of “ordinary people who made victory possible.”
The message was unmistakable—Zhukov was no longer Stalin’s favorite. A year later, he stood before the highest military council, accused of egotism and a lack of respect for his peers.
No sources reveal exactly why Zhukov fell out of favor, but historians suggest that Stalin, now approaching 70, was exhausted, politically vulnerable, and increasingly wary of anyone who might challenge his absolute power.
Zhukov was immensely popular, both among the people and within the armed forces, making him a potential rival that Stalin needed to eliminate.
On June 1, 1946, the military council stripped Zhukov of his position as commander of the ground forces and reassigned him to a post as head of the military district in Odessa on the Crimean Peninsula.
Through letters, Zhukov tried to reason with Stalin, but the dictator ignored him, and Zhukov’s downfall continued.
In June 1947, he was reprimanded for awarding a medal to a singer who had entertained the troops in Berlin in 1945. Six months later, he came under scrutiny for looting war trophies from the front.
Zhukov’s spoils—including gold, jewels, silverware, and furs—were substantial, but plundering was not uncommon, and the charges against him were clearly politically motivated. On January 20, 1948, authorities decided to confiscate Zhukov’s war loot and reassign him to the military district in Sverdlovsk, a remote and harsh region known for its long, cold winters and short summers.
At the same time, the former war hero was being erased from history. A 1948 documentary about the Battle of Moscow failed to mention him. The following year, a propaganda poster depicted Stalin and his top generals just before the great counteroffensive at Stalingrad. Zhukov was nowhere to be seen.
Zhukov Led a Double Life
At the same time, his private life was in chaos. Since 1920, he had been married to Aleksandra Djevna, with whom he had two daughters, Era and Ella. Meanwhile, he had an affair with Maria Volohova, with whom he had a daughter, Margarita.
Aleksandra lived in blissful ignorance of Zhukov’s second family until the early 1950s, when the two nearly same-aged daughters, Margarita and Era, enrolled in law school in Moscow and happened to meet.
An enraged Aleksandra demanded that the two half-sisters cut all contact with each other. To prove his love, Zhukov also had to go to the authorities to have their marriage officially re-registered.
The situation only grew more complicated when he fell in love with Galina Semonova, a 24-year-old doctor who treated him when he was hospitalized in Sverdlovsk during the summer of 1950. Over the next two years, their relationship developed, but it was not until the mid-1960s that he finally divorced Aleksandra and married Galina.
The Regime Reinstated Zhukov
By this time, much had changed in Zhukov’s life. After Stalin’s death in 1953, he received a phone call instructing him to come to Moscow the next day. At a meeting with party leaders, he was informed that Stalin’s successor, Nikita Khrushchev, wanted to offer him the position of Deputy Minister of Defense.
Khrushchev sought to distance himself from Stalin’s harsh regime and introduced slightly more open policies. Zhukov, despite his memoirs claiming that “for me personally, the party’s word was always law,” had always resisted party interference on the battlefield. He used his new position to prevent political commissars from meddling in military decisions.
At the same time, he was seen by the public as a guarantor of national security, which soon became too much for Khrushchev, who felt threatened. In 1957, Zhukov was banished from the Kremlin for the second time.
Forced into retirement at 62, Zhukov suddenly had an abundance of free time, which he used to write his memoirs, published in 1969. The old general recounted how he had bravely opposed Stalin, and the book became highly popular in the West.
Zhukov’s reputation also began to rise again within the Soviet Union. With Khrushchev’s removal, the Kremlin—now under Leonid Brezhnev—softened its stance on the old military hero. In 1965, he was invited to the podium on Red Square, where he was met with thunderous applause.
Zhukov died in 1974 as one of only two four-time recipients of the title “Hero of the Soviet Union.” Brezhnev received his four gold stars as birthday gifts. Zhukov earned them through his career as the Soviet Union’s most significant general.
