TOP GENERAL: ZHUKOV

APPOINTED Minister of Defense last week, and boss of all armed forces in the Soviet Union: Marshal Georgy Konstantinovich Zhukov, 58.

A 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), has won Russia's top honorary title (Hero of the Soviet Union) three times.

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 action helped deter the Japanese from attacking the Soviet rear in 1941, leaving Stalin free to bring his Siberian troops westward to the defense of Moscow'.

Zhukov was the man in charge of Moscow's defense. He administered the first major defeat the Wehrmacht suffered. Assigned to Stalingrad, he transformed a threatened Russian disaster into a German catastrophe. Then it was Leningrad's turn, and again Zhukov--ruthless and. imperturbable, yet strangely capable of inspiring his peasant soldiers--broke a German siege. From defense he turned to offense, flaming westward across the Ukraine in 1943, into Poland in 1944.

Zhukov's military apogee was the Battle of Berlin. He launched 4,000 tanks, supported by 5,000 planes and 22,000 guns. into a 50-mile-wide front. Describing the victory to a group of Americans, Zhukov said: "I brought my tanks against them like this," pushing a matchbox forward. "Then two fresh artillery groups over here. And the infantry here . . ."

"What was Stalin's part?" asked an American.

Zhukov, the hero, looked stunned. His voice trailed off: "Generalissimo Stalin directed every move . . . made every decision . . . He is the greatest and wisest military genius who ever lived . . ."

Obscurity & Comeback. After victory, to make sure that the army could not threaten the regime, Stalin shook up the command, and banished Hero Zhukov to Odessa and the Urals. Never again in Stalin's lifetime did Russia's top soldier hold a top command. But with Stalin's death, Zhukov came marching home. An uncertain new regime, needing the support of the Red army marshals, made him a Deputy Minister of Defense. After Beria's arrest, Zhukov took his seat on the Communist Central Committee. In last week's shuffle, Zhukov at last reached a position of first rank--though still lower than that of the party's watchdog of the military, Marshal Bulganin.

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