Word: zhukov
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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APPOINTED Minister of Defense last week, and boss of all armed forces in the Soviet Union: Marshal Georgy Konstantinovich Zhukov...
...thick-bodied Great Russian with broad Slav face and close-cropped head, Zhukov, a peasant's son, is the giant of modern land armies. No other man, not even General Eisenhower, can match his experience in the maneuvering of so many millions of men over so many thousands of square miles, in the simultaneous use of massed tanks, artillery and tactical aviation. Zhukov is a lifelong professional soldier and a Russian patriot; he is also a dedicated Communist. He speaks three or four languages (French, German, Spanish), is a specialist on the history of war (his favorite campaigner: Hannibal...
Early Career. Zhukov was born in a hut in the primitive village of Strelkovka, not very far from Moscow. As a youth he was a furrier's apprentice, but in 1915 he joined the Novgorod Dragoons and won at least two Czarist decorations for bravery before he had read a line of Karl Marx. Came the Revolution, and Zhukov, a veteran cavalryman, joined 1) the Red Guard, and 2) the Communist Party. Commanding a cavalry division, he won the notice of its political commissar: J. V. Stalin...
With Stalin's backing, Zhukov went to Germany in the 19203 to attend lecture courses on armor. He was later to clash with his instructors on the civil war battlefields of Spain...
Wartime Hero. Zhukov was lucky to be away from Moscow when Stalin liquidated thousands of Red army officers in the purge of 1937, and like many of his fellows, profited by stepping into dead men's shoes. In 1939 he commanded the Red Banner army in Outer Mongolia, where the Russians were engaged in a frontier struggle with the Japanese. Zhukov applied classic cavalry tactics to armored warfare: he massed his tanks, smashed a hole through the center of the Japanese Sixth Army, and bloodily crushed its flanks between his fanning-out Panzers and advancing infantry. This little-known...