Georgy Zhukov

Georgy Zhukov was the most celebrated Soviet commander of the Second World War. A peasant's son who rose from the cavalry ranks, he served as Joseph Stalin's deputy supreme commander, had a hand in nearly every great Soviet battle from Leningrad to Berlin, and accepted Germany's surrender in 1945. His fame made him politically dangerous, and both Stalin and later Khrushchev pushed him aside.

Zhukov was born on 1 December 1896 (19 November in the old calendar) in Strelkovka, a village in Kaluga province of the Russian Empire, about 100 kilometres from Moscow. His father was a cobbler and his mother a farm labourer. After three years of schooling he was apprenticed to an uncle as a furrier in Moscow. Conscripted in 1915, he served in a dragoon regiment, was twice awarded the Cross of St George and was wounded in 1916.

After the October Revolution of 1917 Zhukov joined the Bolsheviks and fought in the Russian Civil War as a cavalryman, receiving the Order of the Red Banner in 1921 for operations against the Tambov peasant rebellion. Through the 1920s and 1930s he rose steadily through cavalry commands and studied at the Frunze Military Academy.

In 1939 Zhukov commanded Soviet and Mongolian forces against Japan's Kwantung Army on the Mongolian–Manchurian border. His offensive of 20 August 1939, combining tanks, aircraft, artillery and infantry to encircle the enemy, drove the Japanese out of the disputed zone and made him a Hero of the Soviet Union. He became chief of the General Staff in February 1941.

When Germany launched Operation Barbarossa on 22 June 1941, Zhukov signed orders for immediate counter-attacks that ended in disaster. After arguing with Stalin over Kiev he lost his post in July, then led the Yelnya counter-offensive, organised the defence of Leningrad in September and commanded the Western Front in the battle of Moscow that winter. Made deputy supreme commander in August 1942, he helped plan, with Aleksandr Vasilevsky, the counter-offensive that trapped the German army at Stalingrad, and was promoted marshal in January 1943. He coordinated fronts at Kursk in July 1943, though his rival Konstantin Rokossovsky said he exaggerated his role there, and in Operation Bagration in 1944. Leading the 1st Belorussian Front, he drove across Poland to the Battle of Berlin in 1945. His troops' advance into Germany was accompanied by widespread looting and mass rape of civilians.

Zhukov accepted the German surrender in Berlin, became the first military governor of the Soviet occupation zone, and on 24 June 1945 reviewed the Victory Parade in Moscow. He got on well with Eisenhower and the other Allied commanders. But Stalin distrusted his popularity. In 1946 he was accused of arrogance and disloyalty and sent to command the minor Odessa military district, then the Urals; investigators also found large quantities of valuables he had brought back from Germany.

After Stalin's death in 1953 Zhukov became deputy defence minister and helped Khrushchev arrest the secret police chief Lavrentiy Beria, sitting on the tribunal that sentenced him to death. He was defence minister from 1955 and took part in decisions on the Soviet intervention in Hungary in 1956. In June 1957 his backing saved Nikita Khrushchev from the "Anti-Party Group" and Zhukov joined the Presidium. Only months later, in October 1957, he was suddenly removed, accused of building his own personality cult, and forced to retire at 61.

Brezhnev partly restored Zhukov's public standing after 1964. His memoirs, delayed by censors, appeared in 1969 and became a bestseller. He died in Moscow on 18 June 1974 after a stroke and his ashes were buried in the Kremlin wall.

Our 1938 map shows the Soviet Union on the eve of the war, and the 1945 map shows its armies' advance to the heart of Europe.