Marshal Zhukov Quotes

The Japanese conquest of Manchuria and their full-scale invasion of China in 1937 led to clashes on the badly mapped Soviet-Manchurian frontier. Some of these were serious and involved large-scale tank battles, which the Russians, under Marshal Zhukov, won.

Technically speaking, Khrushchev’s coup followed the methods of his dead and denounced master very closely. He too needed an outside force in order to win power in the party hierarchy, and he used the support of Marshal Zhukov and the army exactly the same way Stalin had used his relationships to the secret police in the succession struggle of thirty years ago.

Those prisoners who were eventually liberated and returned to the Soviet Union - well over one and a half million - had to face extensive discrimination following an order issued by Stalin in August 1941 equating surrender with treason. Many of them were despatched to the labour camps of the Gulag after being screened by Soviet military counter-intelligence. Despite attempts after Stalin’s death by top military leader Marshal Georgi Zhukov to end discrimination against former prisoners of war, they were not formally rehabilitated until 1994.217

The State Defence Committee adopted some 10,000 resolutions and decisions of a military and economic nature during the war. All of them were carried out with precision and energy. They gave the start to assiduous work, assuring a single Party line in the country’s administration during that rigorous and arduous time.

Viewing the events of 1942 critically, I can say now that we misjudged the situation in the Vyazma area. We had overrated the potential of our troops and underrated the enemy. He proved to be a harder nut to crack than we believed…

Our objective,” he said, pacing up and down his study as was his wont, “is to deny the Germans any breathing space, to drive them westward without let-up, to make them use up their reserves before spring comes…

The hardships of the Civil War were forgotten. But we will never forget that each of us was motivated by the firm belief in the justice of the ideas proclaimed by Lenin’s Party in October 1917. British General Knox wrote to his government at that time that it was possible to crush a million-strong Bolshevik army, but when 150 million Russians did not want the whites, and wanted the Reds, it was futile helping the former.

The most important task was to step up party-political work, to raise the morale of the troops and their confidence in their strength and inevitable victory over the enemy on the approaches to Moscow.

Marshal Zhukov gave me a matter-of-fact statement of his practice, which was, roughly, ‘There are two kinds of mines; one is the personnel mine and the other is the vehicular mine. When we come to a minefield our infantry attacks exactly as if it were not there. The losses we get from personnel mines we consider only equal to those we would have gotten from machine guns and artillery if the Germans had chosen to defend that particular area with strong bodies of troops instead of mines’… I had a vivid picture,” Eisenhower noted, “of what would happen to any American or British commander if he pursued such tactics.