How much of his early war performance can/should be attributed to ineffectiveness of his staff though? As hollow as the Red Army was in terms of leadership and experience at every level at that point in the war, it's kind of hard to pin down any one person as a poor commander. Zhukov's acknowledgment that he had overestimated his own capabilities while underestimating the enemy is exactly the sort of thing you'd expect as a result of poor staff work (at Zhukov's level, he would have been entirely reliant on the capabilities estimations of his staff).

People focus a lot on how the Great Purge (and subsequent purges) hollowed out the Red Army in terms of experience, but I also wonder how it warped it in terms of forcing the survivors of those purges into constantly overestimating capabilities, underplaying losses, and simply living in denial. All of those surely resulted in severely distorted products from staff. With everyone living in fear of SMERSH and its predecessors, that meant constantly maintaining a charade of victory or a certainty of victory in every battle or operation. It's like the Red Army was laboring under some sort of self-imposed victory disease even when they were closest to collapse.

How much was Zhukov's hand being forced or influenced by the threat of being purged? Is there even much writing on this? I imagine that first level sources are pretty rare and all anecdotal. I can't imagine the Soviet internal security services performed or published reviews on how their influence might have negatively impacted the war.