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After Stalin's death, Zhukov helped Khrushchev in destroying Secret Police Chief Lavrenty Beria. And in 1957, when a coalition led by Molotov actually defeated Khrushchev in a Presidium vote, Zhukov used his air force to fly into Moscow enough pro-Khrushchev "backwoodsmen" to reverse the vote in the Central Committee. The cunning Khrushchev was both grateful and apprehensive that a soldier should have such power. Khrushchev fired him. Malinovsky was quick to denounce his old boss as a "fresh-baked Bonaparte." Perhaps, as his enemies charged, Malinovsky had never forgiven Zhukov for stepping in and taking charge of a lagging Malinovsky offensive in Rumania in 1944. More likely, he had his eye on the payoff Khrushchev quickly gave him. Stepping once again into the shoes of a purged superior, Rodion Malinovsky at last became Defense Minister of the U.S.S.R.
Back to the Lathe. When he took command of Russia's armed forces, Malinovsky also took over Nikita Khrushchev's most vulnerable political flank. Though infiltrated at every level by the commissars, the army has a fighting elite that is dubious of Khrushchev's adventures. And as Russia began to feel the manpower pinch resulting from its low wartime birth rate, it became clear that Khrushchev could not make good on his promises of the fuller life so long as the nation had nearly 4,000,000 men in uniform and continued to spend 25% of its national income (v. 12% for the U.S.) on defense.
Khrushchev, ever the pragmatist, reacted by seeking "a bigger bang for a buck" by ordering a switch away from manned airplanes to missiles. He even set up his rocketeers as a separate branch of the Soviet armed forces. Last January, ostensibly as a "disarmament" measure, he decreed that by 1961 the Red army must cut its strength by 1,200,000 men.
To Russia's career officers, Khrushchev's jest that the Soviet army might be the first to "voluntarily liquidate itself" had the macabre ring of hangman's humor. Under Nikita's demobilization plan, 250,000 officers were slated for return to civilian life. For most of them, demobilization would mean sharply reduced income, loss of pension rights, and, in effect, expulsion from the Soviet aristocracy; nearly two-thirds of the officers discharged in previous troop cuts wound up as ordinary workers.
Qualms & Tactics. Dutiful Rodion Malinovsky publicly spared no effort to reconcile the army to Nikita's policies. "The interests of the state must come first," he cried. But, at heart, Old Infantryman Malinovsky almost surely had qualms, too. Khrushchev's reliance on rockets was in flat violation of strongly held Soviet strategic doctrine that nuclear weapons, far from reducing the need for ground forces, made them more necessary than ever; it is the nation with the strongest conventional army, argue Soviet military theorists, that will roll on to victory over the debris of nuclear devastation. Nikita's policy also made harder the army's task of maintaining Soviet mastery of the satellites. To the generals' way of thinking, talk of coexistence made people like the Hungarians restless, and the army needed all the men it could muster to keep the lid on.