Zhukov made Marshal of the Soviet Union

In mid-January 1943 Georgy Zhukov – General of the Army, Deputy Supreme Commander and representative of the Stavka at the front – received the highest military rank in the Red Army, that of Marshal of the Soviet Union. He was the first commander to earn it during the war with Germany; all the earlier marshals had received their batons before June 1941.

Popular chronologies place the promotion on 19 January. The decree of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet of the USSR, however, is dated 18 January 1943 – the same day on which the troops of the Leningrad and Volkhov Fronts linked up by Lake Ladoga. The Soviet press announced the appointment over the following days, hence the discrepancy. A second distinction came in the same month: on 28 January Zhukov received the very first Order of Suvorov 1st Class.

A commander for special assignments

From the autumn of 1941 Zhukov was the man Stalin sent wherever the situation looked most dangerous. In September 1941 he organised the defence of Leningrad; in October he took over the Western Front and led the defence of Moscow and then the counter-offensive before the capital. In August 1942 Joseph Stalin appointed him his deputy and sent him to Stalingrad. Together with the Chief of the General Staff, Aleksandr Vasilevsky, he then prepared the plan for the great counter-offensive which in November trapped the German Sixth Army in a pocket.

During Operation Uranus, however, Zhukov himself was mainly occupied with another sector. He coordinated the offensive of the Western and Kalinin Fronts against the Rzhev salient – Operation Mars, launched on 25 November 1942. It ended in heavy losses and failure, and Soviet historiography kept silent about it for decades. Stalin did not blame Zhukov; the triumph on the Volga overshadowed the defeat at Rzhev.

In January 1943 Zhukov, together with Marshal Kliment Voroshilov, served as the Stavka’s representative with the Leningrad and Volkhov Fronts in Operation Iskra. On 12 January the two fronts struck at the narrow strip of land between Shlisselburg and Sinyavino, and on 18 January their units met near Workers’ Settlements Nos 1 and 5. The siege of Leningrad had been broken: a land corridor between a few and some fifteen kilometres wide now linked the city with the rest of the country.

A marshal’s baton on the day the siege was broken

The decree making Zhukov a marshal was signed on 18 January, the day the fronts joined up at Leningrad. On the same day Nikolai Voronov, who as the Stavka’s representative was then overseeing the Don Front’s destruction of the Stalingrad pocket, received the rank of Marshal of Artillery (PL) – a new rank recently introduced into the Red Army hierarchy. The coincidence of dates was no accident: Stalin was rewarding those he regarded as the architects of the winter’s two great successes.

The rank of Marshal of the Soviet Union had been created in 1935. Five commanders received it in the first round of appointments: Kliment Voroshilov, Mikhail Tukhachevsky, Alexander Yegorov, Vasily Blyukher and Semyon Budyonny. Three of them perished in the Great Purge. In May 1940, after the war with Finland, Semyon Timoshenko, Grigory Kulik and Boris Shaposhnikov were made marshals. Kulik was demoted in 1942 for the loss of Kerch and Rostov. So when Zhukov received his baton, the Red Army had four serving marshals – Voroshilov, Budyonny, Timoshenko and Shaposhnikov – none of whom was any longer among the principal architects of Soviet operations. Zhukov became the first marshal of a new generation: commanders raised up by this war rather than by the Civil War and the 1930s.

The appointment also served a propaganda purpose. After a year and a half of defeats and retreats, the country was receiving news of the encirclement of Paulus’s army and the breaking of the Leningrad siege. Promoting a commander associated with the defence of Moscow and Leningrad and with planning the Stalingrad counter-offensive tied these successes to a single name – although the press credited them above all to the “genius” of Stalin, who himself assumed the rank of marshal in March 1943.

Order of Suvorov No. 1

On 28 January 1943 the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet of the USSR issued its first decree awarding the Order of Suvorov 1st Class. It was conferred on 23 marshals and generals “for skilful and courageous leadership of combat operations” and the successes achieved in them. Zhukov received the order numbered 1, Vasilevsky number 2 and Voronov number 3. Those honoured included the front commanders Kirill Meretskov (Volkhov), Leonid Govorov (Leningrad), Konstantin Rokossovsky (Don), Nikolai Vatutin (South-Western), Filipp Golikov (Voronezh), Andrei Yeremenko (Stalingrad) and Rodion Malinovsky (Southern), as well as army commanders, among them Vasily Chuikov, the defender of Stalingrad, and Mikhail Shumilov.

Neither the date nor the fact itself is in doubt. It is worth adding only that Zhukov was not the only one decorated that day: the decree of 28 January was a collective tribute to the commanders of the winter offensives, and the number 1 reflected Zhukov’s standing within that group.

Orders for commanders and the return of shoulder boards

The Order of Suvorov was a new decoration. The Presidium of the Supreme Soviet had instituted it on 29 July 1942, in the darkest weeks of the German summer offensive, together with the Order of Kutuzov and the Order of Alexander Nevsky. These were the first Soviet orders intended exclusively for commanders and named after military leaders of tsarist Russia – or, in Nevsky’s case, a medieval prince. The Order of Suvorov was the first Soviet order to have three classes; the 1st Class was reserved for front and army commanders for operations in which superior enemy forces had been routed. The statute stressed the offensive: the order rewarded victories, not stubborn defence.

The turn to Suvorov and Kutuzov was part of a wider change carried out by the Soviet authorities during the war. The war with Germany was named the “Great Patriotic War”, an allusion to the war of 1812, and propaganda increasingly invoked the Russian military tradition that had earlier been condemned as a legacy of tsarism. On 9 October 1942 the institution of military commissars in units was abolished and unified command introduced; the commissars became deputy commanders for political affairs.

In the same spirit, on 6 January 1943, less than two weeks before Zhukov’s appointment, a decree of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet restored shoulder boards – pogony – to the Red Army, a symbol of the old tsarist army that the Bolsheviks had abolished in 1917. Order No. 25 of the People’s Commissar of Defence of 15 January required the switch to the new rank insignia in the first half of February 1943; the navy received its shoulder boards somewhat later. With them the word “officer” returned to general use, after a quarter of a century in which it had been replaced by terms such as “commander” or “command cadre”. The new marshal was thus one of the first to put on shoulder boards bearing the large star and the state emblem of the USSR.

Place in the war

Zhukov’s appointment opened a series of promotions with which Stalin rewarded victorious commanders in 1943. On 16 February Aleksandr Vasilevsky became Marshal of the Soviet Union, and on 6 March Stalin himself assumed the rank. In the years that followed, front commanders received their batons: Ivan Konev, Leonid Govorov, Konstantin Rokossovsky, Rodion Malinovsky, Fyodor Tolbukhin and Kirill Meretskov. The Order of Suvorov 1st Class, for its part, became the most important decoration for offensive operations – by the end of the war several hundred commanders had received it, Allied ones among them.

For Zhukov himself 1943 was a year of coordinating one great operation after another: preparing the defence of the Kursk salient, the counter-offensive at Oryol and Belgorod, and then the advance to the Dnieper. His name, linked in January 1943 with the breaking of the Leningrad siege and the victory at Stalingrad, came to stand for the Red Army’s victory in the eyes of Soviet society and of the Allies. After the war this popularity proved dangerous for the marshal: in 1946 Stalin removed him from command in Moscow and sent him to Odessa.