He accepted the unconditional surrender of Nazi Germany and rode a white horse through Red Square at the 1945 victory parade. Then his own government stripped him of power, exiled him to the Urals, and treated him as an enemy of the state. This episode uses declassified Soviet records, censored memoirs and modern analysis to trace Georgy Zhukov’s life from a peasant furrier’s apprentice to the strategist who, more than any single person, engineered the physical defeat of the German army.

We cover his combined-arms victory over the Japanese at Khalkhin Gol, the 1940 war games where he exposed the Soviet defenses, and his firing after telling Stalin to abandon Kiev, a warning vindicated when 600,000 soldiers were lost. Then we follow his rescues at Leningrad and Moscow, the Stalingrad encirclement, the postwar friendship with Eisenhower and the secret batch of clear Coca-Cola, the Bonapartism campaign and looted-goods investigation that exiled him, his arrest of Beria after Stalin’s death, and Khrushchev’s betrayal in 1957.

• Why Zhukov’s bluntness was so dangerous in an inner circle that watched Stalin’s pipe for signs of rage
• How maskirovka deception trapped the German Sixth Army at Stalingrad
• The dispute with Rokossovsky over who really planned the Battle of Kursk
• Why a declaration that no tank would move without his order turned his political allies against him
• His final battle against Soviet censors over the memoirs that became an instant bestseller