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At that perilous moment, the Russian masses could well be wondering just how monolithic the monolithic "collective leadership" of the new regime was. Zhukov and his fellow marshals and generals publicly pledged the army's loyalty to the new regime—a singular step that betrayed the public's need for reassurance. Zhukov attended official parties, talked again with Americans. At one such party he insisted, though others tried to shush him, on toasting "Justice." Shortly thereafter, giving point to the toast, a tribunal sentenced Beria to death. Pravda announced that a bust of Zhukov had been erected at his birthplace.
When Malenkov fell and Bulganin became Premier, Zhukov inherited Bulganin's old job as Minister for Defense. At last, a real soldier—not a commissar—had the top military post in the Soviet Union. In the same reshuffle, Serov became Minister for State Security.
The appointments balanced one another. Zhukov is the nearest thing the Soviet Union has to a popular hero; the victorious Red army is its only publicly esteemed institution. But in Communist Russia, heroes, hero worship and every institution in the country is controlled through Serov's mechanism.
Stalin, supreme realist of power, arranged it that way. By ruthless and capricious purge he made the Red army a dependent organism. By lacing rank and file with secret police and informers, he made certain that the Red army could not become a power unto itself, as the army is in ordinary tyrannies. The system so weakened the Red army's fighting capacity that in times of desperate urgency its effectiveness was saved only by men like Zhukov insisting on less politics. This does not mean that Zhukov disapproved of the system; he objected only to the shortsightedness of some of its methods.
With comparative safety, the party has thus been able to bring the Red army and its greatest hero forward to a place of prominence. The reason for doing so is not difficult to understand: in the confused power situation following Stalin's death, Zhukov and the Red army give the regime a reassuring semblance of stability. Western intelligence specialists, looking on, find a certain satisfaction in Zhukov's ascendancy: they believe that in the great question of war or peace, his counsel is caution.
For no one knows better than Zhukov that a realistic appraisal of the Red army must consider not only its material might (see box) but its morale. No army in history has suffered such casualties. No army has had so many defections, so many disastrous defeats and brilliant victories. As a fighting organization it is only as good as its commissars, and to judge by World War II, they are good only when they can invoke courage in the name of the motherland. So little trust has the command in its soldiers that a 700,000-man special army-inside-the-army has been created for such routine jobs as watching borders, guarding material or supervising prison camps. In small wars, or in wars of intervention, these specially indoctrinated troops, commanded by professional officers, are a formidable danger. But in a great conflict it takes a Zhukov to beat the commissars and the enemy too.