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The Bolshevik Army. When the Bolshevik Revolution broke in 1917, Zhukov was back home in his Kaluga village, a sick young dragoon of 21 and, like millions of other Russians, profoundly disillusioned vith the Czar's conduct of the war. To crush active opposition to their rule, the Bolsheviks formed an army out of bands of irregulars, war refugees, peasants, groups of industrial workers and trade unionists. "Even after defeats and retreats," reported Trotsky, the first Bolshevik War Commissar, "the flabby, panicky mob would be transformed in two or three weeks into an efficient fighting force. It needed good commanders, a few dozen experienced fighters, a dozen or so Communists ready to make any sacrifice." Commanders and experienced fighters were drawn from the old Czarist army, and the Red army soon had in its service tens of thousands of ex-soldiers. Among them was Georgy Zhukov.
In Moscow young Zhukov became a member of the revolutionary committee of his old unit. This unit was soon incorporated in a cavalry regiment, commanded by ex-Cavalry Sergeant Semyon Timoshenko, which became part of a Red cavalry army led by Semyon Budenny, an ex-Cossack. The war unfolded on a 3,000-mile perimeter around central Russia. The Red cavalrymen fought as irregular shock troops, now galloping 400 miles to strike Poland's Pilsudski, now driving south at the White forces under General Denikin, finally pinning White General Piotr Wrangel in the Prekop isthmus and bringing the war to a close. Georgy Zhukov, the barrel-chested, hard-riding kid from Kaluga Province, swung his saber with the toughest of them. Wounded at Tsaritsyn (Stalingrad), where Voroshilov was in command, he was awarded the Order of the Red Banner and became a member of the Communist Party. He never regretted it.
Because other ex-Czarist officers had been going over to the Whites, often with their troops, the Bolsheviks in 1918 appointed commissars to every Red army unit: stone-hard Communists whose job it was to make men and officers accept "the spirit of revolutionary discipline," or else. Said Realist Trotsky: "An army cannot be built without reprisals. Masses of men cannot be led to death unless the army command has the death penalty in its arsenal." Thus began the pernicious commissar system which years later was to bring the army, and Soviet Russia itself, almost to destruction.
When Commissar Trotsky set about building a peacetime defense force out of the revolutionary Red army, he had revolt on his hands. He was able to form a general staff, training and technical commands out of a nucleus of experienced ex-Imperial army officers, among whom was the future Marshal Mikhail Tukhachevsky. The old irregulars objected to being educated. Georgy Zhukov was an exception. When the chance came for a military course at Moscow's Frunze Academy, he grabbed it. Chief of Staff Boris Shaposhnikov thought him "somewhat slow," but sent him off to Germany to study under General von Seeckt. The black-haired young Russian was a strange figure among the shaven-headed, monocled Prussians, but Swordsman Zhukov could outfence any of them, as he later could outfence any Russian officer who served with him. From Von Seeckt, chief theorist of the new German army that was already forming, Zhukov learned the strategy and tactics of the "breakthrough."