"Women will give birth to new ones" - what is this phrase and why is it attributed to Zhukov

The phrase "Women will give birth to new ones" is strongly associated with the Soviet Marshal Georgy Konstantinovich Zhukov. But did the commander say it, or, as often happens, someone else's words are attributed to him? We are ready to debunk a myth that has become so overgrown with details that it has almost become a reality.

It turns out that Zhukov never said the phrase about "giving birth to women". More precisely, I did not use it in real life. But he did say in the surreal story "The Tribunal", by the Russian writer Mikhail Weller. It was first published in 2001 in the Ogonyok magazine.

In Weller's story, Zhukov heads a military tribunal that judges... the Decembrists. Yes, those same contemporaries of Pushkin. The Soviet marshal chastises the rebellious nobles for the poor organization of the uprising against tsarism. There he said the legendary phrase, which looks like this:

Zhukov turns to Bestuzhev-Ryumin, whom he sentences to hanging. Yes, it was Weller who made this phrase famous. But he didn't invent it anyway. Before that, the mention of women appeared in Maxim Sokolov's article in Kommersant for November 1996:

Then no one appreciated Sokolov's idea and it was only thanks to Weller that she "went to the masses." Since 2001, it has been used dozens of times by writers and countless journalists and bloggers. Among the writers who put these words into the marshal's mouth again, there was even Alexander Bushkov, claiming to be a historian.

By the way, you should not blame Weller for launching a fake. After all, he is not a scientist, but a writer who is not responsible for how readers will perceive his creative findings. Thanks to the Internet, the conviction in Zhukovsky's documentary "Women will give birth to new ones" is ironclad. You can even hear that "all the front-line soldiers knew this phrase." In principle, the "front-line soldiers" are Mikhail Weller, born in 1948, and Alexander Bushkov, born in 1956.

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