Memoirs of a Wartime Interpreter

5 Talking to Zhukov: Moscow, 1965

My mother called me to the phone one morning at nine o’clock. Not usually renowned for the acuity of her hearing, she added unexpectedly, ‘Sounds like an army person.’

‘Yelena Moiseyevna? This is Zhukov.’

The voice was ebullient but without military affectation. I found that straightforward ‘Zhukov’, not bolstered by his title and risking confusion with the many other less distinguished Zhukovs who shared his name, very winning.

‘Good morning, Georgiy Konstantinovich,’ hoping I had got his patronymic right because I had never before had occasion to use it.

‘I would like to meet you. Can you come tomorrow at 1600?’ I did not hear the time clearly. ‘At four in the afternoon,’ he repeated, making allowances for a non-army person on the other end of the line.

‘I can.’

He was writing my address down. I started giving directions: it was a building behind an iron fence. ‘They will find it!’ he interrupted me. ‘Write it in your notebook: tomorrow at 1600 hours.’

Hearing that I was meeting Zhukov the next day, Viktor Nekrasov became very excited. ‘I’m coming with you! I’ll pretend to be your secretary. Everything about this is interesting: what Zhukov is going to talk to you about, or the way he kicks me out of the car.’

In the evening I called Anna Mirkina at Novosti Press Agency (who was editing Zhukov’s memoirs). On his instructions she had contacted me in advance. When she heard I was planning to take Nekrasov with me she was very alarmed.

‘That is out of the question! For all my admiration of Nekrasov, it is out of the question! You must understand, this is very serious, Zhukov is traumatized, he is not meeting anyone. Every new person he meets is another trauma. You must understand… I am telling you this in confidence: he is under surveillance as someone who knows all the secrets. He is an elderly man, sixty-nine years old. He is a difficult person.’

The next day, it was 2 November, about twenty minutes before the agreed time, the phone rang and a pleasant female voice said, ‘I’m phoning on Georgiy Konstantinovich’s instructions. The car will be with you in fifteen minutes’ time. The number plate is 34–27.’

When I went down I found a big, black, unusual looking car with a yellow headlight under the radiator, parked by the pavement outside our fence. The driver opened the door and looked out. ‘We’ve just gone off to look for you.’ At this the people he had referred to as ‘we’ came back: a little girl and an elderly lady with a kindly, round face, very modestly dressed in a dark spring raincoat and with a coloured woollen headscarf.

We shook hands and the woman introduced herself: Klavdiya Yevgenievna. She introduced the little girl: ‘And this is Masha, Georgiy Konstantinovich’s daughter.’

The old black ZIS (‘Stalin used to be driven around in one of these,’ the driver told me on the return trip) moved off. In its worn interior, the many kilometres it had covered creaked and groaned and clattered, and I had the feeling that I was not just driving down Leningrad Prospekt to the ring road, but deep into the past, turning back the clock of history.

The driver I was sitting next to was a small man in a shabby blue raincoat and a khaki-coloured felt hat with a thin ribbon round the crown and a broad unbent brim, the edges of which hung down in places, giving it a dilapidated look. The only evidence that this was a former member of the armed forces was that his civilian-style trousers were sewn from cavalry twill, and the foot on the accelerator was in a battered black half-boot. He was subdued. There was none of the assertiveness or temperament usual in people of his profession. He seemed very intense, and there was something quite touching about him, as if he were a craftsman, or just in the wrong job. That was not far from the truth: he used to be the driver of the minister of defence, but now drove the ex-minister’s wife from their dacha to her job and his daughter to school and music lessons.

The little girl was fresh-faced, grey-eyed, and Masha seemed just the right name for her. It was clear she had her new front teeth, and they seemed large, as if waiting for her to grow into them. Masha was in second grade and attending a special school for English language on Kutuzovsky Prospekt. It was only a twenty-five minute drive from the dacha. ‘All the same, the air is clean,’ the elderly lady said in defence of living out there.

I thought I detected a certain reserve in the way she talked to Masha, and at first took her for a nanny, when in fact she was Zhukov’s mother-in-law. For her, though, Masha was primarily ‘Georgiy Konstantinovich’s daughter’, and only after that her granddaughter.

I was pleasantly surprised by the modest, likeable people surrounding Marshal Zhukov. There was no sense of superiority. I don’t know what I had been expecting. In this untaxing company I was approaching the goal of my journey.

I had never seen Zhukov at the front during the war, but just his name, and even more, his appearance at the front, promised reliability, steadfastness in any critical situation, and in battle – victory. I remember one time we had intercepted some German mail. I was going through the sack of unsent soldiers’ letters. There was despair in them as they hastened to say goodbye to their families: Zhukov had turned up on their sector of the front.

During the war nothing could tarnish the heroic image of Marshal Zhukov, although even then, and particularly after the war ended, I heard a lot about his rudeness, his cruelty, and outbursts of often unjustified rage. I heard he was callous about the cost in lives. I was not entirely without prejudice towards him myself. Mark Gallai, a Hero of the Soviet Union and the first pilot to shoot down a German aircraft over Moscow, told me, ‘If it had not been for Rokossovsky, we would never have known a different style of command was possible, but this does not mean Zhukov was anything other than a really big commander, and we owe more to him than to anyone else.’

We came off the ring road to a metalled forest road which ended at a green wooden gate in a high, sheer fence. The driver got out to open the gate. It seemed odd that there was nobody on the gate: no watchman, no security. A short distance away Zhukov, in a black leather coat, was strolling along the front of a two-storey house with imposing columns. He came over to me, said hello, and added, ‘There, we never did meet back then,’ referring to the 1st Byelorussian Front in Berlin.

It was hardly surprising, the distance between me, a translator at the headquarters of one of the armies making up the front, and him, its commander, was just too great.

In the hallway he helped me out of my coat, himself threw off his light leather coat, and we entered a vast hall, ceremoniously flooded with light from a huge crystal chandelier, although the daylight would have been quite sufficient.

‘Well, where should we sit?’

The fact that Marshal Zhukov was in civilian clothes made our meeting seem unofficial, but that it was taking place in such a grand setting made it less easy for a visitor to feel there was nothing official about it. The design was that of a grand, official hall, with fine, large windows that brought the garden up to the house. Everything was enormous: the table in the centre of the hall, end-on to the entrance doors and stretching away into the interior of the room; the convex buffet installed in an extremely broad niche on the wall opposite the windows; the sheer size of the carpet. Everything here belonged to those far-off days when we were the victors. Of the fashions of later years there was not a trace.

Zhukov was straightforward, natural and attentive, although there was still some awkwardness and formality (on my part). It was disorientating for me that Marshal Zhukov was in civilian clothes: that was something I took time to adjust to. In my imagination he was always in military uniform. As time passed, however, the tone became more cordial and relaxed.

Zhukov himself and the atmosphere of his house, his enforced removal from the course of events, his loneliness, his vulnerability to his much loved, playful little daughter: I took in so much during the hours of our meeting that, when I returned home, I sat until late into the night writing it all down in my notebook. The main thing, though, was the rather challenging conversation we had.

For our first few minutes together eight-year-old Masha was present, which made everything unforced and homely. Zhukov then sent her off to have her dinner, and said he had read my book. That was what he called it, although what he had seen was only my manuscript retyped on to a duplicator. He had been given a copy by Novosti, who had signed a contract with me for the translation rights. By this time the book, Berlin, May 1945, had been translated and published only in Italy, but German, Finnish, and Polish translations were being prepared. In Russia it had not been published as a book: there was only a magazine publication, which he had not seen.

He touched on his own memories of the Berlin campaign, asked me about my army service, and enquired about the archives I had worked in. Finally he got round to his real concern. Here I can quote Zhukov verbatim, because I recorded his words in my notebook. Marshal Zhukov said,

He was speaking unhurriedly, flatly, contemplatively.

After a pause, he said, ‘How is it possible that I did not know that?’

We were sitting at a round coffee table. The deputy of Josef Stalin, the supreme commander-in-chief; the hero of famous battles; the illustrious marshal who had accepted the surrender of Germany in Berlin and reviewed the Victory Parade of our troops on Red Square in Moscow was asking a rank-and-file translator why he did not know something it was inconceivable under any circumstances that he should not have known. Where in the world, in what other country could such marvels and phantasmagorias occur?

It was not a question I had seen coming, but I knew what strict secrecy had surrounded everything connected with the discovery of Hitler, and that it was reported by order of Stalin directly to him, bypassing the army command; bypassing, as I now learned, even Marshal Zhukov.

I said, ‘That is something you would need to have asked Stalin.’ That might have sounded insolent, and I did not want to repeat it word for word in my account, so I altered it slightly to, ‘Why that was so, is something only Stalin could explain.’

Zhukov immediately rejected that. ‘Under any circumstances, I should have been informed of this. I was, after all, Stalin’s deputy.’

I had, of course, no clear and convincing answer to that. Having come into possession of such an important historical fact, and perhaps not yet sure what use to make of it, Stalin had instinctively turned it into a secret. Perhaps his decisions were affected, as I wrote, by the difficulty and volatility of the relationship between these two men. It shows us Zhukov as someone whose directness was innate, something Stalin valued, but for just as long as the war continued.

Stalin had no sense of responsibility to the historical record, to the people living in the USSR, or the world. Reality was reality only to the extent that it suited his pragmatic ends, otherwise, as far as he was concerned, it simply did not exist. He evidently had no intention of letting go of such a crucial piece of information as that Hitler’s body had been found and the matter closed. What if he decided he did not want it closed?

‘If this had gone through NKVD channels, then Beria would have been in on the informing of Stalin. He said nothing,’ Zhukov reasoned, sincerely believing, it seemed to me, that that proved Beria could not have known.

At that moment I did not recall that, in the Council of Ministers Archive there was a document proving that Beria did know. Checking a few days later through what I had copied out, I again came across it. There is a detailed note sent via the government communications network, addressed to Beria and dated 23 May 1945.

‘Serov was there too, in Berlin. He still lives in the same building as I do, on Granovsky Street. I asked him. He does not know.’

General Serov who in May 1945 was Beria’s deputy, did know, if not then, then somewhat later. There are documents to prove it. But it continued to be a secret kept from Zhukov.

‘I wanted to ask you,’ Marshal Zhukov said, still in the same even, although now not so meditative, tone, ‘to help me out with a few things here.’ And then, with heavy emphasis, ponderously, ‘Since what I write in my book will decide the fate of yours…’

He sat back in his armchair and crossed his legs, and suddenly there was that heavy, menacing jaw familiar to the whole country from his old portraits.

‘If I write that I know nothing about this, you will not be believed.’

He said that more brutally than I am managing to convey here, because it is not only a matter of the words, but of the way they were delivered, a matter of his posture, and that suddenly so prominent chin. He was not asking (although that was the word he had used), but compelling, not appealing but forcing compliance, which should be all the more zealous for being done under duress. There was a strained pause. Allowing it to drag on for a time, Zhukov asked, ‘Do you have extracts copied from documents? Do you still have them?’

‘To the extent that I have used them,’ I said dryly, clamming up. My prejudice had returned.

‘And you have nothing else left?’

‘Bits and pieces from Goebbels’ diaries.’

‘Photographs?’

‘I have none. There are some in my book – in the Italian edition.’

He was not interested in published photographs.

What he was asking me was extremely modest, and I would have been more than willing to assist him, but that tone stopped me in my tracks. The trust that was in the course of being established had been violated, and after that the conversation limped along. I found it offensive to seem to be helping him out of fear for my book. By that time it had already been translated and the facts published in it had been acknowledged to be indisputable. I had written only about what the main identification witnesses, Hitler’s dental technician and his dentist’s assistant had publicly stated: that they had identified Hitler’s dead body from his teeth. That was exactly what I had written, and it confirmed that we had found Hitler. This testimony, the photograph of Echtmann in the court under oath, their reminiscences had all been published in the West.

‘Oh, they write all sorts of stuff over there,’ Zhukov grunted. But after that he repeated that he entirely believed me, having read my book, and had no doubt Hitler had been found.

Zhukov did not smoke and neither did I, so there would have been no way to discharge the tension in our conversation had it not been for Masha. She ran in from the garden, without taking off her coat and bringing in a lapdog in her arms. She sat down at our table, pulling a chair closer, put the dog in her lap and started tickling it.

‘Stop it,’ Zhukov said. She ignored his command and we carried on talking. Zhukov again told Masha to stop. ‘You can see how dirty she is.’

Her father had told her twice to put the dog down: Masha continued imperturbably to do as she pleased. And he, before whom everybody had quailed – both on our own side and the enemy’s; he to whom everyone from generals to soldiers unquestioningly submitted; he, with his reputation for ruthlessness and a will of steel, was powerless to get a vivacious eightyear-old girl to do as she was told. That truly proved a more intractable proposition than commanding the obedience of an army of many millions.

Shortly after the birth of his daughter, Zhukov’s public life had ground to a halt, and the only living evidence that time was passing was this little person growing into her life. His wife went off to work in the teeming city and he was left here. We can imagine, without exaggeration, that in his isolation he raised this daughter born so late to him, tending the small, life-enhancing shoot of her life. His daughter helped him, unaware of how much she was doing. She was now the most important person in his present mini-garrison, which had formerly been so vast. Masha sat with us for some time more, still occupying herself with the dog, and then went off.

‘I don’t suppose you have that document I sent to Stalin?’ he asked. At the very beginning of our conversation I had mentioned there was a document in the archive where he informed Stalin of the discovery of the bodies of Goebbels and his family. It had been sent to Stalin over the signatures of Marshal Zhukov and General Telegin (as a member of the military council of the front).

‘That I do have.’ Still offended by the tone he had adopted earlier, I answered curtly and reluctantly. As I write this now, I can see that I was being insensitive, not fully taking in a situation that was complicated and abnormal. Marshal Zhukov was appealing to me for documents he needed for his work and to which he had no access, even though some of them bore his signature. That was something that would be painful even for a person whose self-esteem was not so vulnerable. Nevertheless, Zhukov behaved straightforwardly and naturally. He asked me all about the archive I had worked in. I think I forgot to tell him the reason there were no references to the archive in my book was because the documents had not been declassified and, in any case, at that time I had not even known the name of the archive.

Zhukov guessed it was probably the archive of the Council of Ministers, but said there was also a Kremlin archive. His comments about that were based on impressions from further back. ‘There are serious files in there, about important matters, and some that are curious, or even a bit spicy,’ he added with a smile, which made his face suddenly fresh and youthful. He asked some more questions about me and my service in the army.

‘I was there, in the Reich Chancellery, in the garden, on the day it was captured. And for a second time on 4 May. They did not let me down there,’ he said, with an honesty that compares favourably with that of other authors of memoirs. ‘Down there was not without risk.’ Yes, in the underground complex isolated shots did ring out.

‘In the garden I saw that round, what would you call it…?’

‘Hitler’s bunker?’

‘That’s it.’

‘It was probably then they reported to you that Goebbels and his wife had been found near the exit. I’m going by the message you signed and sent to Stalin about it.’

He remembered receiving the report about Goebbels. ‘It was reported to me, on 2 May, I think, or on the 1st, that a certain number of tanks had broken out of the Berlin encirclement in a particular direction. I ordered that they should be pursued. I believed Hitler might be escaping with those tanks.’

He also remembered that a few days later he had a report that Hitler’s jaw had been found. I told him these were distorted rumours about what had actually happened. There was no separate finding of a jaw. The forensic medical examination established at the autopsy of Hitler that the main evidence for identifying the body was surviving jaws and dentures, and that was the route the identification process took.

‘We, at any rate, were waiting very eagerly for an official announcement, and some people were even hoping to be made a Hero of the Soviet Union, which General Berzarin, the commandant of Berlin, had promised to arrange for the first person to find Hitler.’

‘That was nothing to award that title for,’ Georgiy Konstantinovich grunted. And that was fair. The search had not taken place under fire, no one had given their life. In part it was luck, but more important was the genuine success and determination of a few people to gather comprehensive evidence for the investigation; and that we managed to do despite the obstacles put in our way. But then the discovery of Hitler’s body was turned into an undisclosable secret by order of Stalin. It was only many years later that I was able to make that secret public, at first as part of my book Spring in a Greatcoat.

Back then, though, in May 1945, the newspapers of the Allied occupation troops came out with headlines, ‘Russians Find Hitler’s Body’, ‘Heroic Search in Ruins of Burning Berlin Crowned with Success’. This was put out by Reuters, but in the absence of confirmation by our press, they abandoned it, perhaps believing they must have been misled by their informants. Who, after all, would keep quiet about a success like that?

I said that, back then, there was a feeling that front headquarters did not seem to be showing any great interest in the hunt. Zhukov did not disagree. Indeed, indirectly, he confirmed it by saying he had been informed about ‘the jaw’ being found. For some reason that had not prompted him to demand that he be fully informed about everything.

When, in besieged Berlin on the night of 30 April, the Chief of the General Staff of the German Army, General Krebs, appeared with a request for an armistice and a written message from Goebbels about the suicide of Hitler, this was reported to Marshal Zhukov and he called Stalin. In his book he gave this, already mentioned, account of the conversation:

It was only after everything had been completed and the main German participants in the identification and the ‘material evidence’ had been sent to Moscow that the supreme commander-in-chief asked Marshal Zhukov, ‘Where is Hitler?’ Zhukov did not have the answer. If that question had been addressed to him earlier, he would, of course, have demanded the information from all the services under his command and would have been aware of what was happening. As no questions followed, he may erroneously have believed that the supreme commander-in-chief was satisfied with that first report of Hitler’s suicide, and that that was the end of the matter.

TASS reports began appearing in our newspapers that Hitler might have landed in Argentina dressed as a woman, or might be hiding with Franco. The question of whether he was alive or had committed suicide, let alone whether he had been found, was removed from the military sphere to the sphere of international politics, and Zhukov might have stood back deliberately, taking the view that this was outside his remit. In May 1945 Marshal Zhukov was snowed under by the sheer volume of urgent matters needing his attention in the changed situation, many of them quite new to him. There was a massive redefinition of his responsibilities because, not only was he the commander-in-chief of the Soviet occupation forces, he was also commander-in-chief of the Soviet military administration. This meant he was expected to oversee every sphere, from the diplomatic, military and political to the economic. A new day had dawned, bringing complex new problems and concerns and relegating the defeated Führer to one of yesterday’s worries. That, at least, is how I imagine the situation. Information about the course of the investigation was going directly to Stalin, and I was able to explain exactly how that had come about.

So why did Stalin ask him in July, ‘Where is Hitler?’, when the investigation had long been completed? That Stalin could conceal the truth about Hitler from him was an absurdity that Zhukov did not want to consider. He would have preferred to believe that Stalin did not know either, and it was that belief he wanted to bolster by talking to me. That was his main question, and my explanation differed from what he wanted to hear. Nevertheless, he felt obliged to repeat that he believed me implicitly and now no longer doubted that Hitler had been found. An already fraught situation was, however, made worse by another circumstance, and he let me know that he now faced a dilemma. After the victory in Berlin, at a press conference of Soviet and foreign correspondents he responded to a question by saying that we knew nothing about Hitler’s whereabouts. If he confirmed now, twenty years later, that Hitler had by then been found, he would put himself in an intolerably false position. To appear on the world stage, however, with the admission that Stalin had hoodwinked him and concealed the discovery of Hitler’s body would, I think, have struck him as no less intolerable.

Asking about Hitler, had Stalin been lording it over him? Who, if not Zhukov, should have known of the achievement of his troops who had captured Berlin: that they had discovered and identified Hitler’s body? So why not goad the celebrated ‘Stalin’s military commander’ with a question he was incapable of answering? Stalin was no longer dependent on Zhukov: the war was over, and he was preparing to despatch him from Moscow.

That is what I thought then, but as I write about it now, I wonder whether Stalin had a more pragmatic reason for asking that question. It was the eve of the Potsdam Conference, where he would have to fight his corner in drawing up the postwar world order. Perhaps the reason for his question was to check whether the cloak of secrecy he had thrown over the fact that Hitler was dead might have proved imperfect and that information might have leaked out in the army.

The fact that Zhukov did not know would have satisfied Stalin on that point. He needed to galvanize the corpse of Hitler. Hitler still alive guaranteed the continuation of tension and danger without which Soviet politics could not function at home or in the world at large. It seems to me that now I am closer to clarifying why Stalin behaved as he did. Back then I did not delve any further into all the murkiness, and proposed two explanations.

One Zhukov had rejected and cast aside. ‘To the other he did not object: he saw a certain amount of sense in it,’ I wrote. Now here is something curious. I have been asked a lot of questions about this account, both by readers, journalists and historians, but no one has ever asked, ‘What was the “certain sense” Zhukov saw?’

The second hypothesis I put forward was as follows:

Zhukov ‘did not object’. He ‘saw a certain amount of sense in it.’ He remained silent, consenting.

Our conversation ranged broadly. I sensed that Zhukov felt a need to speak out about important things, things he would not retract. The content of the conversation, the degree of openness with which Zhukov talked to me, a person he was meeting for the first time, amazed me. Perhaps he was anticipating that a time would come when I would write about our conversation. When I think back, it seems to me that is the explanation.

Zhukov described Stalin’s personality very trenchantly and boldly (which, even twenty-one years later, made the censor very, very cross), but without prejudice. He had nothing but contempt for Khrushchev’s caricature of Stalin as conducting military operations around the globe. Zhukov said that at the beginning of the war Stalin really did not know anything. His only military experience was of the Civil War. ‘But he got the right idea after Stalingrad.’

I asked Zhukov if Stalin had any personal charm. He said, ‘No,’ and shook his head emphatically. ‘Quite the reverse. He was intimidating. Do you know the kind of eyes, what kind of expression he had? Scornful. He could sometimes be in a good mood, but that was unusual. If he had scored some success in international affairs, or military, then he might even sing, sometimes. He was not without a sense of humour, but rarely showed it. People went to him as if they were going to something dreadful. Yes, when he summoned people, they went as if in dread.’

‘But without him, it would have been difficult in the war… He was strong-willed.’ I am quoting Zhukov verbatim.

Here he cited the example of Stalin’s harsh, menacing, relentless insistence (we were talking about the issue of tank production), and I could feel that Zhukov had been impressed. But then he got round to talking about how Stalin had annihilated the most talented military commanders. ‘We entered the war as an army without a head. There was no one. Of course, that is something for which he can never be forgiven.’ Losing his measured tone, he began talking emphatically about documents Khrushchev had given him to read.

‘Yakir wrote him a letter,’ he said vehemently, abandoning the measured tone,

In Zhukov’s voice you could hear the shock at what he learned, when he saw and read these things with his own eyes.

‘Admittedly, Hitler tricked Stalin,’ he said, meaning that the Germans had forged and planted documents ‘incriminating’ Tukhachevsky of collaborating with them. ‘But how could he not summon him, not talk to him? Not listen to what he had to say? That was unforgivable!’

‘A giant of military thought,’ he called Mikhail Tukhachevsky in his memoirs. ‘A star of the first magnitude in the pleiad of our Motherland’s military leaders.’

I spoke again about lawlessness and its tragic consequences for the country. Zhukov agreed. I could sense he had been deeply affected by the Twentieth Party Congress.

Years later I made the acquaintance of Alexander Buchin, who had been Zhukov’s driver at the front. He visited me at home. He told me about visiting Zhukov in hospital after his heart attack. Buchin lamented, ‘What’s this, Georgiy Konstantinovich? What’s all this about?’ Zhukov replied tersely, ‘It’s about 1937, 1947, 1957…’

In 1937 he had been denounced. The storm clouds had been gathering over his head. Arrest and disappearance seemed imminent. During the war Zhukov served Stalin faithfully as a soldier, recalcitrant but reliable, more capable than anyone else. After the war Stalin needed yes-men and Zhukov was unsuited to the role. He belonged to a different breed, and so began his fall from favour. But, remembering that time of war, he could not reconcile himself to the thought that Stalin had kept him in the dark, deliberately tricking him. It was a situation worthy of Shakespeare. ‘I was very close to Stalin.’

But was Stalin close to him? Probably, when he asked him over the phone, ‘Are you sure we can hold Moscow?’ and waited for the fateful answer to come back. No doubt then he was exceedingly close. And when from time to time he threw Zhukov into the heat of battle when the situation was at its most desperate and most critical, no doubt then he waited sleeplessly by the phone to hear from him.

‘I was very close to him, closer than anyone else, until the end of 1946 when we fell out.’ That was when he was dismissed from the post of commander-in-chief of the army, so as not to detract from the aura surrounding the Generalissimo, and despatched to command the Odessa military district.

A new bout of persecution came in 1947, with Zhukov removed from the Central Committee of the CPSU and, shortly afterwards, transferred from Odessa to command the interior, also second-rank, Urals military district.

Beria and Abakumov rummaged through everything in his office; they cracked his safe. All they found was operational maps from the war or something else of that kind – all played out, out of date, stuff he should have handed in, except that for Zhukov it was not out of date.

This was a time when the generals who had worked under him were being arrested, including Telegin, staff and people who had served him personally. A ‘Zhukov anti-Soviet conspiracy’ was being concocted. His driver, Buchin, was also arrested. ‘Stalin saved me. Beria and Abakumov wanted me destroyed,’ Zhukov repeated, and it seemed to me that with his trusting nature he really believed their actions could not possibly have been agreed by Stalin. He touched in our conversation on the dysfunctional state Stalin was in after the war. I asked if Stalin had been ill.

After the war, maybe. He was traumatized by the war. He told me himself in 1947 [I wonder whether he was mistaken about the year, when he had already said they fell out in 1946], ‘I am the most unhappy of men. I’m afraid of my own shadow.’ The war traumatized him. Beria harassed and scared him. Told him some kind of agent had crossed the border on a mission to kill him.

‘To show Stalin what a good job he was doing of protecting him and keeping him safe?’ I asked. ‘To strengthen his position?’ Zhukov confirmed that was the aim: ‘When doing it he always acted through somebody else. Not himself. Mostly it was through Malenkov.’

Zhukov had once been in a car with Stalin.

After Stalin’s death in 1953, Marshal Zhukov was appointed deputy minister and then minister of defence of the USSR. He was a member of the Party Central Committee Praesidium and again in the kind of job his abilities merited. But then in 1957, while he was on an official visit to Yugoslavia, the Central Committee Praesidium decided behind his back to get rid of Marshal Zhukov, this time once and for all, by stripping him of all his positions and completely removing him from all state, Party and public engagements. Portraits of Marshal Zhukov were torn down, and his name and photographs disappeared from the history of the Second World War.

Zhukov’s years of banishment began. He devoted himself to working on his memoirs. Did he realize the snooping was still going on, even though this period was called ‘The Thaw’? This document is dated 1963:

Zhukov said again that he was writing now about the Berlin operation. ‘I make reference to you there,’ he said. ‘to The End of Hitler…’ He halted, smiling and trying to remember the continuation of the rather contrived title Novosti had given my book for foreign distribution: The End of Hitler, Without Myth or Mystification.

I looked at my watch. ‘I’ve overstayed my time. You must be tired.’ He did not want me to leave, however; I could see there were still things he wanted to discuss. We sat and talked some more. He asked if I would give him that document (a copy, of course) of his report to Stalin about the discovery of Goebbels’ body. I promised I would.

When I got up to leave, I told him I was flattered that he found my work interesting and would willingly give him all the help I could, but not because the fate of my book might depend on it. I would look through the documents I had to see if there was anything else that might be useful to him. I felt I also had to mention that mistakes had crept into documents signed by him during those unsettled, turbulent days and I could point them out to him. Zhukov readily accepted my offer. He said, repeating what he had said in the first minutes of our meeting, ‘Well, so now we have met. That is all the same something more…’

This remark, repeated at the beginning and end of our meeting (that the fact that our meeting was ‘something more’ than acquaintance only through reading a book), was the only comment in the course of the entire conversation that was vague and open-ended, and that made it eloquent and somehow on a different level from all the rest.

We went down to the car. A last handshake with Marshal Zhukov and the car moved off.

In November 1965, when I saw Georgiy Konstantinovich, he was finishing his long-term project and still in good health, strong, not yet ground down by editors, censors, commissions of the Central Committee and the sundry overseers, overt and covert, of his manuscript who were to keep him under siege. He had as yet no idea of just how much he would have to put up with to steer the book through to publication. He completed his Reminiscences and Reflections in 1965, but no sooner were the first steps taken to have it published than it was blocked.

In the presence of my friend Zoya Mikosha, who was in charge of the photograph section of his book at the publisher’s and visited him on business matters in hospital, Zhukov told the editor, ‘This book is absolutely vital for me.’ He furiously rejected the advice proffered to appeal to the then minister of defence, Andrey Grechko.

Novosti Publishers asked me for a translated copy of my book, which had been published in Italy before it appeared in the USSR, to give to him in hospital. I could not imagine why Zhukov would want the book in Italian but it was explained to me that, for the first time in many years, it included a photograph of him. There had been a complete ban on publishing them. The publisher had prepared a selection of photographs for the Italian edition, all of which were passed by the Soviet censorship, and that made their publication official. They included his photograph, and that was important to him. It is just the way things were in those days.

This proved to be the first photograph of Marshal Zhukov since he fell into disfavour eight years previously that the Soviet censorship had approved for publication abroad, even if no such liberties were allowed to be taken within the USSR. My book, Berlin, May 1945, was about the assault on Berlin, the search for and discovery of Hitler. I inscribed it, ‘Esteemed Georgiy Konstantinovich, Please accept this book about events that are wholly associated with your name.’

When he reappeared from his ‘banishment’ for the first time in eight years, in the praesidium of a solemn commemoration on 9 May 1965 of the twentieth anniversary of victory, the hall greeted him with a tumultuous ovation. That evening he attended a banquet at our House of Writers. Khrushchev, his persecutor-in-chief, had been deposed and it seemed that Zhukov’s exile was at an end.

Evidently, however, the warmth of his reception at that commemoration had not gone down well with the ‘authorities’. Bent on depriving Zhukov of fame during his lifetime, the regime learned its lesson and was less impulsive when it came to celebrating the anniversary of the Bolshevik revolution on 7 November 1965. Zhukov was expecting an invitation, but it did not come. Nothing, it seemed, had changed. One more blow, for which he was not prepared. He was offended and wounded. His heart, which in the past had borne many burdens less petty than this, reacted badly and he suffered a heart attack.

Just six days before that heart attack, I had my meeting with him. I was probably the last person outside his family to see him so healthy and buoyant, at the best moment in his life for many years, as he was finishing his memoirs. Working on them again, he relived the war; he was happy in his family life and, it seemed to me, had hopes of returning to a role in the functioning of the state.

The merciless years of 1966, 1967 and 1968 passed and it was now the beginning of 1969. Zhukov had taken a battering and was seriously ill. ‘This book is absolutely vital for me.’ To this day I find the tragic resonance of that remark deeply painful.

Subjected to cuts, and with insertions and additions imposed on it, with its emphasis altered, the book finally appeared, but it was only in 1989, fifteen years after Zhukov’s death, that Memories and Reflections began for the first time to appear in a version that was faithful to his manuscript.[1] The text had restored to it, and printed in italics, what had been excised. The appearance of this edition came as a surprise to me and was profoundly gratifying.

In it Zhukov mentions the press conference of June 1945 (which he had anxiously discussed with me). As if to explain why he replied at that time that nothing was known about Hitler’s whereabouts, he writes that he had wondered whether, after the victory, Hitler had not ‘scuttled off’ somewhere, and said so at the press conference. Somewhat later (in fact, twenty years later), ‘we began to receive additional information confirming that Hitler had committed suicide’. After that statement come the following lines, cut out during his lifetime but now restored and italicized: ‘How the investigation was conducted is described in exhaustive detail by Yelena Rzhevskaya in her book, The End of Hitler, Without Myth or Mystification, Novosti Press Agency, Moscow, 1965. I can add nothing to what Ye. Rzhevskaya writes.’

I had good reason to be moved. His decision to refer to my book and support it in his memoirs was generous. It did not cut out the circumstances Zhukov found embarrassing. To his own detriment he asserted what he had decided was true. But the Soviet guard dogs had pulled it out, and more than twenty years had to pass before it finally saw the light of day.

Zhukov, Hitler, Stalin. In that moment in time, in Berlin in May 1945, they all come together, and the future analyst of Stalin’s personality will not ignore this episode and will try to work out the answers to the riddles Stalin poses. Why did he conceal the fact that Hitler’s body had been discovered and turn it into ‘the secret of the century’? Why did he keep it from Zhukov? And why did Zhukov not pay the search for Hitler the attention it surely merited?

I am writing about things that I know, of historic events I remember as a participant and witness, and in the search for answers I have tried to trace why the conspiracy of silence began and how it was implemented. Fate decreed that I should have a role in preventing Hitler from successfully carrying through his final vanishing act, of becoming ‘the stuff of legend’ the more potently to rouse the passions of those thinking as he did, both at the time and in later days.

It took time for me to overcome obstacles that seemed insurmountable even after Stalin’s death and to make public this secret of the century. I managed not to allow Stalin’s dark, enigmatic plan to take root, concealing from the world that Hitler’s body had been discovered by the Red Army. The way was long.

When, twenty-one years after my meeting with Zhukov, I was preparing a documentary account of it for publication, I had just two notebooks to retype and one or two things to add. But although this was 1986, the censors were totally against allowing the piece to be published: the Party was not going to yield on its stance. Grigoriy Baklanov, then editor-in-chief of Znamya, has written in his memoirs about how much effort he had to put into wresting this story out of the censors’ clutches and publishing it. They were particularly incensed by my report of Zhukov’s harsh remarks about Stalin. ‘Just look at the picture of Stalin she is presenting!’ they squealed.

On 20 June 1974, I opened the newspaper in the morning and saw Zhukov’s portrait framed in black. An unspoken, half-clandestine invitation to bid him farewell.

I decided to go with my friend, Lyalya Hanelli. At the front she too had been an army interpreter. During the disastrous retreat of our troops in the south in the summer of 1942, intelligence she obtained in the mountains at a critical moment saved a division from catastrophe. From her house on Kalyaevskaya Street we set off through quiet, uncelebrated backstreets, across old, grassy Moscow courtyards as touchingly homely and unpretentious as their grass. They were in an improbably good state of preservation and there was a little functioning church tucked away in one of them. Overshadowed by soulless new buildings, they were still unexpectedly alive and perfectly adapted to drinking tea together, having a good gossip, a doze, or reading quietly on your own; to everything that makes life good and natural and unforced.

You walk through one courtyard, then another, each with its own character, and you gaze around enchanted by some places you have never seen before despite having lived in Moscow for so much of your life. At the same time, you are sadly saying goodbye to them, because in the blinking of an eye they will vanish without trace and be replaced by some new development.

And perhaps you are so acutely, so painfully drawn to them and cling to them because you are on your way to say farewell to someone who has gone now to a very different place, and you are chilled by a sense of the unfathomable, of desolation, of a misery not of this world.

We finally emerge from an archway on to the street somewhere near Commune Square and the National Soviet Army Club. The streets, however, have been cordoned off by ranks of police to stop us going any further. ‘The public will be admitted from 10.00 to 18.00’, but that was only in the newspaper, and admitted the public are in the sense that ‘representatives of the workers’ are being bussed in, unloaded, formed up in columns, and the columns are marching with orders not to allow unauthorized mourners into their carefully selected ranks. The unauthorized mourners, however, intend to work their way in. The column is instructed to form up in threes. We are not wanted. They attempt to elbow us out: ‘Stop trying to worm your way in.’ This column has been brought in all the way from Tushino. ‘And who are you with, then?’ We are not with anyone, but they are not going to get rid of us that easily. We make our way along the column, all the way to the front.

‘Where have you turned up from?’ the vanguard of the Tushino marchers demand as they turn us away. ‘From the 1st Byelorussian Front,’ I reply. Only the 1st Byelorussian Front which, under the command of renowned military commander Georgiy Zhukov, stormed and captured Berlin. My answer means little to these recently sprouted officials of district-level activism.

I appeal to the young police officer to let through two women who fought, it is fair to say, under the command of Zhukov. That gets us nowhere. We take up position to one side of the column, and are promptly removed by the police cordon that is here to ensure that nothing happens spontaneously, on personal initiative, uncontrolled, anarchic; nothing at the dictate of a human heart, only at the dictate of the Soviet authorities, officially, in accordance with instructions.

That quiet, consoling, melancholy mood that had been building up on our way here through the courtyards fades and dies, to be replaced by a growing sense of protest and outrage. What sort of way is this Russia has of bidding farewell to its greatest generals! Tsar Paul I failed to honour the dying Suvorov, and sought to quash, by his neglect, the passionate impulse of the people to show their respect. He failed. Great crowds of sorrowing people saw Suvorov to his grave.

This time the government has taken a firmer grip on the amount of honour to be allowed Marshal Zhukov, who had fallen into its disfavour, and the carefully composed columns have been arranged to file past his coffin between 10.00 and 18.00 hours on the same day as the announcement of his death and the funeral arrangements. Not everyone will have had time to open their newspaper that morning, to decide what to do, to get time off work. And to make sure this is exactly what happens, the pettyminded ‘competent authorities’ get busy, to ensure there is no outpouring of emotion. ‘Zhukov? Great was he? Don’t ask me.’

For all that, what has been decided buckles under the pressure of the ‘unorganized’ like Lyalya and me, who flood here to pay our last respects and augment the ranks of the officially approved. War veterans with medal ribbon bars on their chests, free-thinking young and not-so-young people. Bypassing our column, the stewards let through some other endless one. Thousands and thousands of people stand waiting patiently, only worried that we may not fit into the brief period allotted for the lying in state. It is a pity there are no pictures of these people, no pictures of their faces. There is no filming.

The sun is hot. Slowly, step by a step, we move past the newsstands, where the deliberately downbeat tone of today’s newspapers on the subject of Zhukov is suddenly rudely disrupted by a headline in Komsomolskaya Pravda that shouts: ‘Suvorov, Kutuzov, Zhukov!’ We go past a photo in the newspaper of Zhukov with his youngest daughter, Masha, long plaits, a frank, marvellous face.

We are shuffling about in the shade of trees by the tuberculosis hospital on Bozhedomka, and in the depths, between the cast-iron bars of the railing, we can see a sorrowful-looking Dostoevsky. Next to me is a young man who is travelling with his family and only passing through Moscow. He has left his wife and child at the station to rush here, and with every passing half hour becomes sadder as he loses hope of reaching the coffin before his train leaves.

In over three hours we have come about one kilometre and finally emerged on to Commune Square. The Museum of the Armed Forces is not far away now. I came to the museum once before, shortly after Zhukov and his wife had visited it. Neither in the Hall of Victory nor in the other halls of the museum was there a single photograph of Marshal Zhukov. Forget him! There never was a great military leader called Zhukov, the embodiment of Russia’s victory! Banished for years from all state or public office, he lived in isolation behind a high wooden fence in an official dacha.

We were nearly there when the column was diverted to move slowly round Yekaterininsky Boulevard, extending our route. Having circled round the boulevard, we set foot on to the pavement, finally almost at the National Soviet Army Club where the coffin lay. Out of the open doors of a new army hotel adjoining the club, brisk, energetic bearers appeared carrying trays of rissoles and mountains of sliced bread, crates of bottled water and basins of hot sausages. Exhausted people stampeded to drink and sate themselves with the raging gluttony that besets them at wakes and in war. In an instant all was chaos, as if some theatre director had given the signal to sweep away the solemn mood called for by the moment. Coins clattered, empty cardboard cups were thrown to the ground. Those left behind with the hawkers ran back to the column, with their mouths full and excitedly clutching their rissoles.

And then, from above, peals of thunder roared and the skies opened. The rain poured down with such unbelievable force that the money-changing in the temple was instantly washed out. Coloured umbrellas unfurled above the heads of the crowd in their bright summer clothes. Lyalya and I had not thought to bring any, so, unprotected against the wrath of heaven, with an élan born of desperation, we rushed forward to one side of the column, jumping the queue. We were so soaked from head to foot it seemed unlikely we would survive the day. Nobody stopped us. We ran a hundred metres and no one prevented us from squeezing into the soggy mass of people and with them getting inside the National Soviet Army Club.

There was a smell of pine branches, the smell of official funerals, with numerous wreaths leaned against the walls. The chandeliers were swathed in black crepe. The banisters of the staircase were draped with black and red cloth that reached down to the steps.

We went up a little and then were stuck for a long time at the second flight of stairs. The water was running down from our hair, from our clothes which clung to us, and squelched in our shoes, but through the windows we could see a column of thousands of people standing in the teeming rain, not dispersing. Some shielded their heads with umbrellas, newspapers, jackets, but the majority had no protection from the rain. They waited. No one was going to see and remember them standing there. There were no cameramen to film them.

The rain was lashing, bucketing down, bubbling on the asphalt. Peals of thunder. Only the intrusion of the elements was worthy of the grandeur of this funeral.

We entered the Hall of the Red Banner. The coffin was covered in flowers. At its head were three furled red banners with black strips fastened to their shafts. At Zhukov’s feet, a red cloth sloped down to the floor, covered in his numerous decorations. A little to one side were rows of chairs for his daughters, family and friends. His beloved wife was not by the coffin, however, having died after a long, painful illness. He survived her by six months.

How lonely that coffin looked, even from a distance. We passed slowly. No stopping, whether to take a breath or give expression to the emotion engulfing you. On a high catafalque Marshal Zhukov lay with a typical expression on his face, his lips tightly closed. Only the lowered eyelids set him apart from all earthly things. There was no sign of frailty or senility. Death had given back to him the earlier, imperious face so familiar from his portraits. The elderly man walking beside me was weeping and muttered, ‘What a shame! That was a real man! What a shame!’

After leaving the hall Lyalya and I paused on the landing. We were not ready just to leave immediately. People were coming down the stairs past us, those who had been through the war with Zhukov, and those who were born after it. Their faces showed how moved they were. An old air force lieutenant colonel in a worn, sodden tunic was sobbing as he came down the stairs, leaning heavily on a walking stick, his false leg creaking. Lyalya and I were soaked through but, as at the front, didn’t expect even to catch a cold. Outside the window, quietening, the peals of thunder were moving away.

In 1944 a German general was captured in the Carpathians, and Lyalya asked him, ‘How does the German command assess the actions of the 4th Ukrainian Front?’ ‘We are not alarmed by the actions of the 4th Ukrainian,’ the general replied. ‘We are alarmed by the inaction of Zhukov.’ They were alarmed by what he might be planning while invisible to them.

Lyalya and I spent over four hours with the thousands and thousands of people in the streets and the Soviet Army Club, bidding farewell to Marshal Zhukov. It was the same amount of time as my meeting with him had lasted, and for me this day of mourning was a silent continuation of that day and brought me closer to Zhukov.

That very night Zhukov’s body was cremated. I heard about it on the radio. For me there was something intolerable about their haste to rid themselves of this man they had long ago worn down and who was now dead, but to whose face death had suddenly returned its old expression. They wanted him reduced to ashes, to dust, to nothingness.

The procession moves towards the centre of Moscow. At the House of Unions the urn is transferred to a gun carriage. Accompanied by a military escort, the funeral procession advances to Red Square, over whose stones the hooves of a white stallion had once clattered victoriously.

It was drizzling. Not yet visible from the square, Zhukov shook the raindrops off his cap. Rokossovsky commanded, ‘Parade, atten-shun!’ and at the tenth stroke of the clock on Spassky Tower, Marshal Zhukov rode on a white horse on to Red Square.

Then he stood on the podium of the mausoleum next to Stalin and they were photographed side by side at that historic moment. The photographer was cameraman Yevgeny Khaldei. At an exhibition of his work in 1973 he took me to this photo and told me he had visited Zhukov to give him photographs. Holding this picture in his hands, Zhukov recalled he had wanted to brush the rain off the peak of his cap, but looked at Stalin and changed his mind. Stalin was standing patiently and immobile in the rain.

What was going on under the wet cap in the mind of the leader and supreme commander-in-chief? Zhukov himself did not go in for that kind of mind-reading, and in his simplicity did not realize that Stalin, with a very different personality, was trying with great concern to read his mind. Stalin had been closely watching the victor on his white stallion. ‘I’m too old to be inspecting parades.’ (He had hardly been a noted horseman when younger.) Zhukov had capered to the jubilant roar of the approving square, to the breath-taking strains of Glinka’s patriotic ‘Glory to Russia!’, and the cream of the army that had won the war, those who had survived, watched him, enraptured, in their new dress uniforms – valorous marshals, generals, majors and rank-and-file soldiers. Enraptured by him, by Zhukov. How could Stalin not be jealous, not be anxious that Zhukov, this commander with his energy, his glory, his willpower, his organizing ability, and his army might be planning something?

And so the rain poured down on Zhukov at the great hour of victory, and the sun of good fortune never again shone on him from behind the thunderclouds.

He had lived twenty-nine years after the war ended. Of those, he worked to the full extent of his abilities and stature for perhaps five. Even when he reminded the world so loudly of himself with the publication of his memoirs, he was never during his lifetime given the official recognition of his importance and achievements that was his due. And now his lightweight ashes were being borne across the renowned square on the shameless shoulders of the likes of Brezhnev, Suslov, and Grechko.

Zhukov had not asked for the Kremlin’s funeral rites; all he wanted was to be laid to rest in the ground. But what did his personal wishes matter? This was what political expediency required.[1]

Zhukov will go down in history as the victorious defender of Moscow and the vast expanses of the Motherland, but his native land expressed its gratitude by grudging him even a grave plot, awarding him instead, for his eternal rest, a slot in the Kremlin wall.

For the last time he manifested himself to Red Square as a handful of dust, Marshal Zhukov, who, at the supreme moment of his destiny had entered it on a white stallion whose hooves struck sparks from its cobbles.