After the Second World War the civilian leadership concluded that the military was supportive of the government under most conditions and political pressure on the military receded. Albright links this tendency to the late Stalin era.3) However, the action of Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev against the defence minister, Marshal Georgi Zhukov, in the late fifties, after the latter weakened the MPA's influence in the military, suggests a later date.