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	Pearson Marshal Zhukov: The Man Who Beat Hitler By Albert Axell Pearson 270 pages. $36.65

Unknown Soldier

While books about the Allied generals of the West number in the hundreds, Marshal Georgy Zhukov faded into obscurity soon after World War II and remains an enigma to this day.

By Sam Thorne
Published: March 12, 2004

On the 50th anniversary of the D-Day landings in Normandy, Time magazine published a photograph of U.S. General Dwight Eisenhower on its front cover titled "The Man Who Beat Hitler." This lavish epithet is echoed in journalist and historian Albert Axell's new book "Marshal Zhukov: The Man Who Beat Hitler," a rare portrait of the man who carried the attack to Nazi Germany from the east.

Compared to Eisenhower and other lionized World War II commanders such as British Field Marshal Sir Bernard Montgomery and U.S. General George Patton, Marshal Georgy Zhukov is hardly known in the West, but he was arguably more influential than anyone in determining the outcome of the war, inflicting on the German army crushing defeats at Stalingrad, Kursk and ultimately Berlin. Eisenhower himself acknowledged as much in June 1945, saying of Zhukov's contribution to the Allied victory: "The war in Europe has been won and to no man do the United Nations owe a greater debt than to Marshal Zhukov."

Why then has so little been written about Zhukov? Axell counts more than 65 books available in the West on the life of Montgomery, 190 on Eisenhower and 45 on Patton, but only three works on Zhukov. This imbalance can be ascribed partly to Cold War antipathies, but even in the Soviet Union Zhukov faded into obscurity after the war, when he was discredited initially by a jealous Stalin and later (following a brief rehabilitation) by Nikita Khrushchev. As a result, Zhukov's name virtually disappeared from Soviet history books until the age of glasnost. Since then a great deal of previously undisclosed archive material has emerged about the Soviet war effort, and Zhukov's memoirs, titled "Reminiscences and Reflections," finally appeared in a 10th and full, version in 1990, 16 years after his death, allowing historians such as Axell to reappraise him both as a soldier and as a man.

Born the son of a shoemaker in 1896, Zhukov had, by his own account, a tough childhood, enduring regular beatings as a young boy in the country and later as a furrier's apprentice in Moscow -- experiences that perhaps sowed the seeds of his uncompromising, occasionally brutal style of military command. In 1915, Zhukov entered the Army as a cavalry conscript, and it was here that he first encountered the murmurings of revolutionary discontent.

Zhukov obviously underwent a political awakening during his stint in the cavalry, for in 1918 he joined the Red Army and a year later the eventual Communist Party. Unfortunately, Axell only hints at Zhukov's state of mind at this time -- with woolly phrases such as "... he could no longer brook Tsarist despotism" -- where perhaps he could have dug deeper, given the important role that Zhukov's political beliefs played in his life. What the reader is left with are some rather stilted professions of Zhukov's faith in communism, culled from his memoirs, such as: "I have forgotten many things, but I will remember the day I joined the Party as long as I live. Since then I have tried to suit all my thoughts, aspirations and actions to the demands made of a Party member." Yet surely someone who had witnessed Stalin's purges of the 1930s, to which many of Zhukov's colleagues fell victim, or who had himself been prey to the petty machinations of the Party leadership after the war, would have a more nuanced view of the Soviet political system?

Yevgeny Khaldei / MT Archives Marshal Zhukov even stood up against Josef Stalin for his opinions on how a battle should be waged.

If Zhukov did have any private doubts about the party he served so faithfully, then his memoirs are probably not the place to look for them. Until the 1990 edition was published, they were subject to myriad revisions by the Soviet censors, including one notorious passage where Zhukov was persuaded to write that he had "wanted to consult" with Leonid Brezhnev (who was the Soviet leader when the first edition of Zhukov's memoirs came out in 1969) during a visit to the North Caucasian Front in 1943, when Brezhnev was a lowly political officer.

After describing some of Zhukov's exploits in the Civil War, Axell fast-forwards to 1939, when Zhukov made his name fighting a Japanese invasion force at the Battle of Khalkin Gol in Mongolia. At Khalkin Gol, Zhukov displayed many of the qualities that he later brought to bear against the Germans: decisive leadership, tactical know-how and the ability to maneuver mass armored formations. Axell argues that Zhukov's triumph at Khalkin Gol, though little reported, had a significant impact on World War II as a whole, as it possibly persuaded Japan not to join Germany in invading the Soviet Union.

A large part of Axell's book is naturally devoted to Zhukov's key role in the Great Patriotic War from 1941 to 1945, during which he orchestrated the three great defensive operations in and around Leningrad, Moscow and Stalingrad before leading the Red Army's charge toward Berlin. Crucially, Zhukov always stood up for his opinion of how a battle should be waged, even when challenged by Stalin, whose interference hindered the Soviet Army in the early months of the war. Axell describes how Zhukov quarreled regularly with the dictator, which was testament to his bravery when insubordination could have meant exile to Siberia or a bullet in the brain.

Zhukov's own courage was reflected in his intolerance of cowardice or indiscipline among his subordinates -- and he was not afraid to invoke the firing squad when necessary. Other Red Army commanders admired his ruthlessness but some found him coarse and arrogant, and many were antagonized by his propensity to hog the plaudits for successful operations. Axell tends to gloss over the less likable aspects of Zhukov's character, however, and also any mistakes that Zhukov made on the battlefield.

The uncritical tone of the book is implied in the title and confirmed in the introduction, where on one occasion Axell lapses into the kind of salty language that might have appeared in a wartime propaganda rag: "Zhukov was consistently victorious; the Nazi beast, after initial huge advances, was in due time thrashed or held back, licking its wounds." Elsewhere in the introduction, Axell states his intention to depict Zhukov as more than a "cutout picture" of a hero, but for much of the book he does not quite succeed -- perhaps because he relies too heavily on Zhukov's wooden memoirs when he could have used some alternative viewpoints. The "missing human dimension" that Axell aspires to bring out in Zhukov does not really become apparent until near the end of the book, where there are some interesting chapters on Zhukov's relations with his two wives, three daughters and Eisenhower. In researching the book, Axell actually interviewed Zhukov's daughters, and it is a shame that their insights are tagged onto the end when they could have added depth to earlier chapters.

As it stands, "Marshal Zhukov" is an honorable attempt to breathe life into one of Russia's greatest military leaders and to win him the recognition in the West that he deserves. But while it is worth a read, Axell's account ultimately leaves a few too many stones unturned to be considered a definitive biography.

A former editor at The Moscow Times, Sam Thorne now freelances from Britain.

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