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Bear in Karakul. Much of Malinovsky's war was spent in the Ukraine —where he had the good fortune to come under the eye of Nikita Khrushchev, then a member of the military council for the Ukraine. In January 1943, just after Malinovsky's army had completed the southern arc of the encirclement of Stalingrad, Western correspondents recall meeting him in a tiny, unheated village schoolhouse, short-legged and big-hipped, like a grizzly bear in a brown greatcoat and karakul hat. He traced with a thick forefinger the movement of the fleeing Germans on a field map, naming their divisions and commanders, all with a cool, precise assessment and without the slightest vainglory.
At dinner he drank toasts to Stalin, then Churchill, then Roosevelt, each time quaffing a full tumbler of vodka. One correspondent remembers his eyes: "bright, suspicious, ever moving, advertising the cunning thought, but also humorous and undaunted."
Happy-Go-Lucky. A British military expert who saw Malinovsky in action also found him impressive: "In defensive operations, he never panicked, no matter how hopeless the situation looked. But in offensive operations he was a bit happy-go-lucky. He planned up to the point of launching the attack. But from then on, he was inclined to improvise."
Before World War II ended, Malinovsky had plenty of practice in improvising offensives. As commander of a Ukrainian army group, he directed the capture of Bucharest, Budapest and Vienna. Then, shifted to command of Russia's Far Eastern armies, he mopped up Japanese forces in Manchuria in the "one week war" that Stalin launched against a Japan already negotiating surrender to the U.S.
For the next ten years Malinovsky stayed in the Far East. But as Khrushchev's star rose, so did Malinovsky's. In 1956, at the same party congress at which Khrushchev denounced the dead Stalin, Malinovsky at last became a full member of the Central Committee of Russia's Communist Party. Before long, he was Deputy in charge of ground forces, under Defense Minister Marshal Georgy Zhukov. Then, in 1957, Khrushchev turned on Zhukov. Resentment still smoulders over Nikita's shabby treatment of Zhukov. The army recognized Zhukov as the best soldier Soviet Russia had produced, and as a champion at court who had no patience for the party's effort to establish control over the officer corps. Zhukov once reportedly told his pudgy boss: "We each have our specialities. Mine is the army. Yours is corn."