ZHUKOV NEWS RELEASED

Press, Volume XCVI, Issue 28425, 4 November 1957, Page 11

ZHUKOV NEWS RELEASED

“Personality Cult” Charged

(N.Z Press Association—Copyright)

(Rec. 8 p.m.) MOSCOW, November 2. The Soviet Communist Party announced tonight it had dismissed Marshal Georgi Zhukov from its top leadership, charging him with developing a “cult of personality” and with harming the party’s role and work in the armed forces.

The party's Central Committee, in a statement issued a week after he had been replaced as Defence Minister by Marshal Malinovsky, said he had developed a personality cult with the aid of sycophants and flatterers.

Expelling him from the Central Committee and its inner top-policy making body, the Presidium, the party statement accused the Marshal, who is now 61, of violating Leninist and party principles guiding the armed forces.

Further, he had pursued a policy of “abolishing the leadership and control of the party and government over the Army and the Navy.”

The statement also said that the party secretariat “has teen instructed to provide Marshal Zhukov with other work.”

Russians listening to their main evening news bulletin on Moscow Radio were given the text of the statement —a resolution passed unanimously by the Central Committee “late in October.”

Marshal Zhukov, victor in the battles for Moscow. Stalingrad and Leningrad and a war-time associate of General Eisenhower and Field-Marshal Montgomery, is now likely to be given a relatively minor military appointment far from Moscow.

It is his second post-war exile. Stalin sent him to the provinces in 1946. fearing the emergence of Marshal Zhukov as a strong, popular personality in the leadership of the Army. Everything points to the fact that similar motives lie behind his second banishment. He was brought back to Moscow immediately after the death of Stalin in 1953 and became in turn Deputy-Defence Minister and Defence Minister. The Marshal also became a member of the party’s Central Committee in the Presidium.

Reuter’s Warsaw correspondent said widespread changes in Army commands were expected now that the influence of Marshal Zhukov had been removed.

The Communist Party would assert full control over all aspects of military policy. The first change in the top Army commands will probably affect Marshal Vassily Sokolovsky, war-time Chief of Staff, now aged 57. who had been one of Marshal Zhukov’s closest associates, although he had been in the background over the last year. Marshal Konstantin Rokossovsky, another of Russia’s top war-time commanders, has already been removed from Moscow. He was Deputy-Defence Minister to Marshal Zhukov until he was sent last month to command the TransCaucasia front bordering Turkey and Persia.

Marshal Zhukov has not oeen seen in Moscow since he returned on October 26 from a visit to Jugoslavia and Albania, but he is believed to be in the city, presumably staying at his house.