Georgy Zhukov certainly was, as Geoffrey Roberts puts it, "the great general who had saved the Soviet Union from catastrophic defeat by Hitler and then led the country to a great victory," but the men in whose service he labored had a strange way of expressing their appreciation.
First Josef Stalin in the immediate postwar years and then Nikita Khrushchev in the 1950s subjected him to ridicule and disgrace on wholly specious grounds, removing him from power and humiliating him. To be sure, in both instances he was rehabilitated and restored to something approximating the stature that was his due, but though the treatment he received may have been explicable by the insane standards of the Kremlin, it was wholly inexplicable by any others.
To the Russian people, though, veneration for Zhukov seems never to have wavered, indeed has grown ever more intense over the years. Here in the United States we tend, understandably, to regard the leading American generals — Eisenhower, Patton, Bradley — as the great heroes of the European theater, but it really was Zhukov who faced the most daunting challenges and won the most crucial victories. Forces under his command turned back the German invaders at Leningrad, Moscow and Stalingrad, then won the decisive victory at Kursk, after which "there was no possibility of the Germans surviving the grinding war of attrition the Soviets had the power and the will to inflict on them."
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