El labrador y la serpiente

En una ocasión el hijo de un labrador dio un fuerte golpe a una serpiente, la que lo mordió y envenenado muere. El padre, presa del dolor persigue a la serpiente con un hacha y le corta la cola. Más tarde el hombre pretende hacer las paces con la serpiente y ésta le contesta "en vano trabajas, buen hombre, porque entre nosotros no puede haber ya amistad, pues mientras yo me viere sin cola y tú a tu hijo en el sepulcro, no es posible que ninguno de los dos tenga el ánimo tranquilo".

Mientras dura la memoria de las injurias, es casi imposible desvanecer los odios.

Esopo

viernes, 29 de enero de 2021

 

STALIN: THE COURT OF THE RED TSAR

BY

SIMON SEBAG MONTEFIORE



PART EIGHT

WAR: THE TRIUMPHANT GENIUS 1942–1945

 

39. The Supremo of Stalingrad

During Stalingrad, the Supremo usually fell asleep wearing all his clothes on the metal camp bed that stood under the stairs that led to the second floor at Kuntsevo. If there was an emergency, the “bald philanthropist” Poskrebyshev, who slept in his office, would call. He awoke around eleven when Shtemenko called from the Operations Department to give him his first report of the day. The Politburo and Staff had already been working for hours since they not only had to share Stalin’s insomnia but also had their own onerous empires to run: Mikoyan worked from 10 a.m. until almost 5 a.m., napping in his office.

At noon, Stalin ate a light breakfast, served by Valechka, often remaining at home, whether at Kuntsevo or the Kremlin, to work in the early afternoon. But wherever he was, the Supremo, now sixty-three, would spend the next sixteen hours running the war. He now received bulletins from all his roving Stavka plenipotentiaries, who had to report twice a day, noon and 9 p.m.: Vasilevsky in Stalingrad was the most eagerly awaited that day. Stalin turned very nasty if his envoys neglected to report. When Vasilevsky once failed to do so, Stalin wrote:

It’s already 3:30 . . . and you have not yet deigned to report . . . You cannot use the excuse that you have no time as Zhukov is doing just as much at the front as you yet he sends his report every day. The difference between you and Zhukov is that he is disciplined . . . whereas you lack discipline . . . I am warning you for the last time that if you allow yourself to forget your duty . . . once more, you will be removed as Chief of General Staff and sent to the front.

Malenkov was always punctilious in his reports but even the meticulous Zhdanov was sometimes distracted by battle, provoking another reprimand: “It’s extremely strange that Comrade Zhdanov feels no need to come to the phone or to ask us for mutual advice at this dangerous time for Leningrad.” Independence was dangerous in Stalin’s eyes.

At 4 p.m., General Alexei Antonov, “young, very handsome, dark and lithe,” who became his trusted Chief of Operations, after Vasilevsky’s promotion, and after trying a series of officers all of whom were swiftly sacked, arrived with the next report. Antonov was a “peerlessly able general and a man of great culture and charm,” wrote Zhukov. Stalin was a stickler for accurate reporting and would, recalled Shtemenko, “not tolerate the slightest . . . embellishment.” Antonov handled him deftly: always calm, “a master at assessing the situation,” he graded the urgency of his files by colour and “knew when to say, ‘Give me the green folder.’ ” Then Stalin smilingly replied: “Well now, let’s look at your ‘green file.’ ”

In the early evening, Stalin arrived in the Kremlin in his convoy of speeding Packards or else walked downstairs from his flat to the Little Corner where the “cosy” anteroom, with its comfortable armchairs, strictly policed by Poskrebyshev, was already full. Visitors found themselves in a world of control, sparseness and cleanliness. There was nothing unnecessary anywhere. Everyone had shown their papers repeatedly and been searched for weapons. Even Zhukov had to surrender his pistol. “The inspection was repeated over and over again.” Poskrebyshev, now in NKVD General’s uniform, greeted them at his desk. They waited in silence though regulars greeted one another before falling quiet. It was tense. Those who had never met Stalin before were full of anticipation but as one colonel recalled, “I noticed that those . . . not here for the first time, were considerably more perturbed than those . . . here for the first time.”

At around 8 p.m., when Stalin arrived, a murmur passed through the room. He said nothing, but nodded at some. The colonel noticed “my neighbour wiped drops of sweat from his brow and dried his hands on a handkerchief.” A small room, a cubbyhole, contained the last bodyguards at a desk before the office. Stalin entered that “bright spacious room,” with its long green table. At the other end of the room was his desk, on which there was always a heap of documents in their papki, a broad-frequency telephone, a line of different-coloured telephones, a pile of sharpened pencils. Behind the desk, there was a door that led to Stalin’s own lavatory and the signal room which contained easy chairs, all the Baudot and telegraph equipment to connect Stalin to the fronts, and the famous globe at which he had discussed Operation Torch with Churchill.

That night, Molotov, Beria and Malenkov, the perennial threesome, were waiting with Voroshilov and Kaganovich. Stalin nodded and opened the GKO with no chit-chat; its sessions continued until he left many hours later. Stalin sat at his desk and then paced up and down, returning to get his Herzogovina Flor cigarettes which he broke into pieces to fill his pipe. The civilians, as always, sat with their backs against the wall, looking up at the new portraits of Suvorov and Kutuzov while the generals sat on the other side of the table, looking up at Marx and Lenin, a deployment that reflected the constant war between them. The generals immediately spread their maps on the table and Stalin continued his pacing, waddling somewhat. “He would stop in front of the person he was addressing and look straight into his face” with what Zhukov called a “clear tenacious gaze that seemed to envelop and pierce through the visitor.”

Poskrebyshev began calling in the experts from the anteroom: “soon my neighbour also rose . . . the receptionist called him by name, he went livid, wiped his trembling hands on his handkerchief, picked up his file . . . and went with hesitant steps.” As he showed them in, Poskrebyshev advised: “Don’t get excited. Don’t think about disagreeing with anything. Comrade Stalin knows everything.” The visitor must report quickly, no small talk, then leave. Inside the room, the grim troika of Molotov, Beria and Malenkov swivelled to peer coolly at the newcomer.

Stalin exuded power and energy. “One felt oppressed by Stalin’s power,” wrote his new Railways Commissar who reported to him hundreds of times, “but also by his phenomenal memory and the fact that he knew so much. He made one feel even less important than one was.” Stalin drove the pace, restless, fidgeting, never far from an eruption. Most of the time he was laconic, tireless and icily cold. If he was displeased, wrote Zhukov, “he lost his temper and objectivity failed him.”

The visitors could always sense the danger, yet they were also surprised by the genuinely collegiate argument at these sessions. Mikoyan looked back on the “wonderfully friendly atmosphere” among the magnates during the first three years of the war. The country was run in the form of the GKO through Stalin’s meetings with key leaders in the presence of whoever was in his office—usually the GKO with Mikoyan and, later, Zhdanov, Kaganovich and Voznesensky.

“Sharp arguments arose,” recalled Zhukov, with “views expressed in definite and sharp terms” as Stalin paced up and down. Stalin would ask the generals’ opinions: “Stalin listened more” when “they disagreed. I suspect,” thought Admiral Kuznetsov, “he even liked people who had their own point of view and weren’t afraid to stand up for it.” Having created an environment of boot-licking idolatry, Stalin was irritated by it.

“What’s the point of talking to you?” he would shout. “Whatever I say, you reply, ‘Yes Comrade Stalin; of course, Comrade Stalin . . . wise decision, Comrade Stalin.’ ” The generals noticed how “his associates always agreed with him,” while the military could argue, though they had to be very careful. But Molotov and the brash newcomer Voznesensky did argue with him: “The discussions were frank,” recalled Mikoyan. When Stalin, reading one of Churchill’s letters, said the Englishman thought “he had saddled the horse and now he can enjoy a free ride . . . Am I right, Vyacheslav?” Molotov replied: “I don’t think so.”

Zhukov “witnessed arguments and . . . stubborn resistance . . . especially from Molotov when the situation got to the point where Stalin had to raise his voice and was even beside himself, while Molotov merely stood up with a smile and stuck to his point of view.” When Stalin asked Khrulev to take over the railways, he tolerated his refusal: “I don’t think you respect me, refusing my proposal,” he said, indulging the quartermaster, one of his favourites. Amid rows, Stalin insisted “Come to the point” or “Make yourself clear!”

Once Stalin had formed his opinion and argument had ceased, he appointed a man to do the job with the usual death threat as an added incentive. “This very severe man controlled the fulfillment of every order,” recalls Baibakov, the oil engineer, “When he gave the command, he always helped you to carry it out so you received every possible means necessary to do it. Hence I wasn’t scared of Stalin—we were direct with one another. I fulfilled my tasks.” But Stalin had a “knack for detecting weak spots in reports.” Woe betide anyone who appeared before him without mastery of their front. “He would at once drop his voice ominously and say, ‘Don’t you know? What are you doing then?’ ”

Operation Uranus seemed to refresh Stalin who, observed Khrushchev, started to act “like a real soldier,” considering himself “a great military strategist.” He was never a general let alone a military genius but, according to Zhukov, who knew better than anyone, this “outstanding organizer . . . displayed his ability as Supremo starting with Stalingrad.” He “mastered the technique of organizing front operations . . . and guided them with skill, thoroughly understanding complicated strategic questions,” always displaying his “natural intelligence . . . professional intuition” and a “tenacious memory.” He was “many-sided and gifted” but had “no knowledge of all the details.” Mikoyan was probably right when he summed up in his practical way that Stalin “knew as much about military matters as a statesman should—but no more.”1

At about 10 p.m., Antonov made his second report. There were limits to the friendly spirit that Mikoyan described. War was the natural state of the Bolsheviks and they were good at it. Terror and struggle, the ruling Bolshevik passions, pervaded these meetings. Stalin liberally used fear but he himself lived on his nerves: when the new Railways Commissar arrived, Stalin simply said, “Transport is a matter of life and death . . . Remember, failure to carry out . . . orders means the Military Tribunal” at which the young man felt “a chill run down my spine.” When a train was lost in the spaghetti of fronts and railways, Stalin threatened, “If you don’t find it as general, you’ll be going to the front as a private.” Seconds later the Commissar, “white as a sheet,” was being shown out by Poskrebyshev who added, “See you don’t slip up. The Boss’s at the end of his tether.”

Stalin was always pacing up and down. There were various warning signals of a black temper: if the pipe was unlit, it was a bad omen. If Stalin put it down, an explosion was imminent. Yet if he stroked his moustache with the mouthpiece of the pipe, this meant he was pleased. The pipe was both a prop and a weather vane.[1] His tempers were terrifying: “he virtually changed before one’s eyes,” wrote Zhukov, “turning pale, a bitter expression in his eyes, his gaze heavy and spiteful.” When some armies complained that they had not received their supplies, Stalin berated Khrulev: “You’re worse than the enemy: you work for Hitler.”

The three guard dogs of the Little Corner, Molotov, Malenkov and Beria, “never asked questions, just sat there and listened, sometimes jotting a note . . . and looking at either Stalin or whoever came in. It was as if Stalin needed them either to deal with anything that came up or as witnesses to history.” Their purpose was to preserve the illusion of collective rule and terrorize the generals. Stalin and the magnates all regarded themselves as amateur commanders and shared their Civil War suspicion of “military experts.”

“Look at an old coachman,” Mekhlis explained. “They love and pity the animals but the whip is always ready. The horse sees it and draws its own conclusions.” There in a nutshell, from one of Stalin’s mini-dictators, was the essence of the Supremo’s style of command. “We could all remember 1937,” said Zhukov. If anything went wrong, they knew “you’d end up in Beria’s hands and Beria was always present during my meetings with Stalin.” The generals’ sins were recorded: Mekhlis had accused Koniev of having kulak parents in 1938. Rokossovsky and Meretskov were naturally keen not to return to Beria’s torture chambers. Stalin received information, complaints and denunciations from the secret police and from his generals.

When they wrote their memoirs in the sixties, the generals presented themselves as Beria’s innocent victims. They were certainly under the constant threat of arrest but were themselves avid denouncers. Timoshenko had denounced Budyonny and Khrushchev. Even now, Operation Uranus was launched in a fever of denunciations: Golikov (the hapless pre-war spymaster), denounced the commander Yeremenko. Stalin simultaneously used Malenkov to watch Khrushchev and Yeremenko. When Stalin accused Khrushchev of wanting to surrender Stalingrad, the Commissar started to distrust his own staff. But Khrushchev himself was no slouch at denouncing generals, having blamed Kharkov on Timoshenko. Simultaneously at Stalingrad, a member of the rising General Malinovsky’s staff had committed suicide, leaving a note emblazoned “Long Live Lenin” but not mentioning Stalin: perhaps Malinovsky, who had served in the Russian Legion in France during World War I, was an Enemy?

“You’d better keep an eye on Malinovsky,” Stalin ordered Khrushchev, who protected the general.

The magnates fought ferociously for power and resources with one another and with the generals. When Beria requested 50,000 extra rifles for the NKVD, General Voronov showed the request to Stalin.

“Who made this request?” he snapped.

“Comrade Beria.”

“Send for Beria.” Beria arrived and started trying to persuade Stalin, speaking in Georgian. Stalin interrupted him angrily and told him to speak Russian.

“Half’ll be enough,” ruled Stalin but Beria argued back. Stalin, “irritated to his limit,” reduced the numbers again. Afterwards, Beria caught up with Voronov outside.

“Just you wait,” he hissed, “we’ll fix your guts.” Voronov hoped this was an “Oriental joke.” It was not.

Stalin frequently acted as a conciliator in rows over resources: when he ordered that the artillery be given 900 trucks, Beria and Malenkov, who worked as a gruesome duo, caught up with Voronov: “Take 400 trucks.”

“I’ll go back and report to the Supremo,” threatened the general. Malenkov delivered the full quota of trucks.[2]

Living in this environment of fear and competition, the magnates themselves were tormented by mutual jealousies: “Molotov was always with Stalin,” wrote Mikoyan disdainfully, “just sitting in the office, looking important, but really discharged from actual business.” Stalin only needed him “as the second man, being a Russian” but kept him “isolated.” Molotov assisted on foreign policy but lacked the responsibilities of the others. Mikoyan was one of the chief workhorses, overseeing the rear, rations, medical supplies, ammunition, the merchant navy, food, fuel, clothing for the people and armies, while also as Commissar of Foreign Trade negotiating Lend-Lease with the Allies, a stupendous portfolio. “Only Molotov saw Stalin as often as I did,” he boasted, forgetting the tireless, omnipresent Beria.

The “terror of the Party,” Beria, who behaved like a villain in a film noir, blossomed in wartime,[3] using the Gulag’s 1.7 million slave labourers to build Stalin’s weapons and railways. It is estimated that around 930,000 of these labourers perished during the war. But his NKVD was the pillar of Stalin’s regime, representing the supremacy of the Party over the military. After General Voronov had twice defied him in front of Stalin, Beria was finally allowed to arrest him. When Voronov did not appear at a meeting, Stalin casually asked Beria:

“Is Voronov at your place?” Beria replied that he would be back in two days. The generals are said to have coined a euphemism for these terrifying interludes: “Going to have coffee with Beria.” His minions watched the soldiers on every front, their reports pouring in to Beria and often to Stalin himself. In 1942, Stalin raised the surveillance another step by ordering Kobulov to bug Voroshilov, Budyonny—and Zhukov himself whose officers were harassed and arrested.

Yet Stalin was wary of Beria’s empire-building. When Beria got Kaganovich dismissed from the railways, he tried to nominate his successor.

“Do you think I’d agree to the candidate . . . Beria imposes on me? I’ll never agree to it . . .” But the railways were a constant headache and only Kaganovich, that “real man of iron” in Stalin’s admiring words, could perform the necessary miracles.[4]

For sixteen hours, Stalin never ceased “issuing instructions, talking on the phone, signing papers, calling in Poskrebyshev and giving him orders.” When he heard from Mikoyan and Khrulev that the soldiers were short of cigarettes, he made time during the battle of Stalingrad to telephone Akaki Mgeladze, Party boss of Abkhazia, where the tobacco was grown: “Our soldiers have nothing to smoke! Tobacco’s absolutely necessary at the front!” He personally drafted every press release, a master of succinct yet rousing phrases such as “Blood for blood!,” inserting quotations from Suvorov. Yet while jealously checking the kudos of his generals, he was punctilious in giving them credit for their victories.[5]

Stalin’s hours of pressure and work were awesome but his commissars and generals had invariably been up since dawn, a life that demanded “enormous physical and moral resources” with “nervous exhaustion” a real danger. Stalin legislated the lives of his generals, personally decreeing their rota of work and rest. Vasilevsky had to sleep from 4 a.m. to 10 a.m. without fail. Stalin sometimes rang Vasilevsky like a strict nanny to check he was asleep. If he answered the phone, Stalin cursed him. Yet Vasilevsky found it impossible to attend Stalin’s nocturnal dinners and films and then do all his work, so he had to break the rules, stationing his adjutant at the telephone to reply: “Comrade Vasilevsky’s resting until ten.” Stalin’s other workhorses, Beria and Mikoyan, were expected to spend most nights with him while achieving a Herculean workload, yet they managed it, running sprawling and sleepless administrative empires on the adrenalin of war and patriotism, Bolshevik threats and the talent to survive.

Stalin drank little and expected others to be sober. Artillery general Yakovlev once arrived to report, fortified with cognac. Without raising his head from his desk, Stalin said: “Come closer, Comrade Yakovlev.” Yakovlev stepped forward. “Come closer.” Then: “You’re a little drunk, aren’t you?”

“Yes slightly, Comrade Stalin.” Stalin said no more about it.[6]

At midnight, Vasilevsky reported jubilantly from Stalingrad: Hitler’s Romanian allies were crumbling. As he listened, Stalin called Poskrebyshev and ordered tea. When the tea arrived in a glass in a silver ornamental holder, the commissar or general, usually Antonov, fell silent. All watched Stalin’s ritual as he squeezed his lemon into the tea, then slowly got up, opened the door behind his desk into the restroom, opened the cupboard, built into the wall, and took out a bottle of Armenian brandy. Then he returned, poured a half a teaspoon of this into the tea, replaced the brandy, sat, stirred it and said: “Carry on.”

In high spirits at this instant success, Stalin and his companions left the Little Corner and probably headed over to Kuntsevo for dinner and then a film, but these dinners were not the drunken carousals of later years. When the exhausted Berias and Molotovs staggered home with only a few hours until they had to start work again, Stalin read his history books on his divan until he fell asleep in the early hours.[7]

Within four days of the launch of Operation Uranus, the German Sixth Army, 330,000 men, was encircled in what Stalin called the “decisive moment of the war.” As the Russians tightened their grip, Manstein’s counter-attack failed to break through. The Luftwafe proved incapable of supplying from the air. The encircled Germans suffered a cruel slow death from starvation, ice and dynamite. On 16 December, the Russians counter-attacked into Manstein’s rear, threatening to cut off Army Group Don and break through towards Rostov. In the Little Corner, the impatient Stalin chose General Rokossovsky, not the Stalingrad commander Yeremenko, to oversee Operation Ring, the liquidation of the Sixth Army.

“Why don’t you say anything?” he asked Zhukov, who had frowned.

“Yeremenko will be very hurt,” replied Zhukov.

“It’s no time for feeling hurt,” said Stalin. “We’re not schoolgirls. We’re Bolsheviks!”

On 10 January, Rokossovsky attacked the benighted Germans, slicing their pocket in half. The Sixth Army diminished daily. The military defeat became a human struggle for survival, as the Germans ate horsemeat, cats, rats, each other, and finally nothing. On 31 January, Field Marshal Paulus surrendered and 92,000 starving, frostbitten scarecrows, barely recognizable as men let alone soldiers, became prisoners. Stalin himself wrote out this news flash: “Today our armies trapped the commander of the Sixth Army near Stalingrad with all his staff . . .”[8]

Now a confident, preening Stalin and a gold-braided, bemedalled, imperial Bolshevik Russia emerged, blood-spattered but swaggering with pride, from behind the iron mask of Soviet austerity, to fight their way into Europe.[9]

On 6 January 1943, Stalin, having consulted two old comrades Kalinin and Budyonny, overturned the Bolshevik slogan “Down with the golden shoulder boards!” and restored the auric epaulettes and braid of Tsarist officers. He teased Khrulev “for suggesting we restore the old regime” but personally instructed the media how to spin it: the gold braid was not “just decoration but also about order and discipline: tell about this.”

Two weeks later, he promoted Zhukov to Marshal. On 23 February, the omniscient military amateur himself joined the Marshalate: during the next two years, Stalin rarely appeared out of its uniform.

Simultaneously, he slightly clipped Beria’s powerful wings: in April,[10] he brought military counter-intelligence, with its dreaded Special Departments, under his own aegis as Defence Commissar. He renamed it Smersh, an acronym for “Death to Spies” that he coined himself, but kept Abakumov in charge. This slick but vicious secret policeman of thirty-five had worked closely with Beria but Stalin, the ultimate patron, now took him under his wing.

Yet Stalin’s world-historical triumphs were always embittered by private disappointments.[11] Soon after Stalingrad, Stalin received two disturbing messages: a letter that denounced the debauchery of his son Vasily and revealed the seduction of his adored Svetlana, and a German offer to exchange his prisoner son, Yakov.

 

 

40. Sons and Daughters: Stalin’s and the Politburo’sChildren at War

The unprecedented surrender of a German Field Marshal humiliated Hitler just as acutely as Yakov’s capture exposed Stalin: both dictators expected these embarrassments to fall on their swords. Now Count Bernadotte of the Red Cross approached Molotov with an offer to swap Yakov for Paulus. Molotov mentioned the offer but Stalin refused to swap a marshal for a soldier.

“All of them are my sons,” Stalin replied like a good Tsar, telling Svetlana, “War is war!”

The refusal to swap Yakov has been treated as evidence of Stalin’s loveless cruelty but this is unfair. Stalin was a mass murderer but in this case, it is hard to imagine that either Churchill or Roosevelt could have swapped their sons if they had been captured—when thousands of ordinary men were being killed or captured.[12] After the war, a Georgian confidant plucked up the courage to ask Stalin if the Paulus offer was a myth.

He “hung his head,” answering “in a sad, piercing voice”: “Not a myth . . . Just think how many sons ended in camps! Who would swap them for Paulus? Were they worse than Yakov? I had to refuse . . . What would they have said of me, our millions of Party fathers, if having forgotten about them, I had agreed to swapping Yakov? No, I had no right . . .” Then he again showed the struggle between the nervy, angry, tormented man within and the persona he had become: “Otherwise, I’d no longer be ‘Stalin.’ ” He added: “I so pitied Yasha!”

A few weeks later, on 14 April in a POW camp near Lübeck, Yakov, who courageously refused to cooperate with the Germans, committed suicide by throwing himself onto the camp wire. At the Little Corner that night, oblivious to Yasha’s heroism, Stalin worked with Molotov and Beria before heading off to dinner at about 1 a.m. He did not find out the truth for some time but when he did, he regarded his son with pride. Once at Kuntsevo, he left his own dinner and was found looking at Yasha’s photograph.

“Did you ever see Yasha?” he asked the Georgian after the war, drawing out the photograph. “Look! He’s a real man eh! A noble man right to the end! Fate treated him unjustly . . .” He ordered the release of Yakov’s wife Julia (though she returned damaged by the trauma). Like Nadya, Yakov forever troubled him.[13]

Stalin now received a letter from the leading documentary film-maker Roman Karmen that denounced Colonel Vasily Stalin for the seduction of his wife and flaunting his debauchery. This letter opened a can of worms that ruined Stalin’s relationships with both drunken Vasily and treasured Svetlana. Stalin started to look into their lives and what he found shocked him profoundly.

By the climax of Stalingrad, Vasily was back in Moscow, living a life that was a caricature of the decadent wassails of aristocratic swells in Pushkin’s Onegin. Spoiled by the sycophancy of his own Tsarevich’s court, scarred by a mother’s loss and a father’s irritation, over-promoted and arrogant yet also terrified of his eminence and wildly generous to friends, Vasily took over Zubalovo, once the home of his ascetic mother and severe father, and turned this mansion (rebuilt after its dynamiting) into a pleasure dome of drinking, dancing and womanizing. The Tsarevich’s set were glamorous film stars, screenwriters, pilots, ballerinas and freeloaders, a sort of Stalinist “Ratpack”: Karmen and his beautiful actress wife, Nina, were the centre of it along with the dashing poet Konstantin Simonov and his film-star wife, Valentina Serova. Stalin knew them all personally and liked Simonov’s best-selling collection of love poems With You and Without You.

“How many copies are you printing?” Stalin asked Merkulov.

“Two hundred thousand,” replied the secret policeman.

“I read it,” joked Stalin, “and I think it would have been enough to print just two: one for her and one for him.” Stalin was so pleased with this joke that he repeated it throughout the war.

The fun at Vasily’s orgies was often rather desperate. He was “permanently drunk” and often hit his wife Galina who had recently given birth to their son, Alexander. He was always drawing his revolver and firing at the chandeliers with his daredevil friends. Frustrated by Stalin’s ban on his active missions, reckless of his own safety and that of his companions, Vasily enjoyed flying planes drunk, an aerodynamic version of Russian roulette. When he wanted to show off to his sister’s pretty friend Martha Peshkova, he arrived drunk in Tashkent and insisted on flying her to see Svetlana in Kuibyshev. “He flew me, legless, and with a drunk crew,” she recalls. “Even though there was ice on the wings, they drank the spirit instead of using it for de-icing, so the plane would not keep its height. Finally we had to crash-land and glided into a haystack in a clearing.” Martha was terrified. Vasily hiked to the nearest collective farm from where he despatched a rescue mission and was fêted in the local Party Chairman’s house. He was so drunk that the Chairman’s wife locked Martha in her room to protect her. Even his friend Vladimir Mikoyan, killed at Stalingrad, complained of Vasily’s “drinking, wilfulness and outbursts of rudeness: what a cretin!”

Yet for the young heroes and artistic stars during the war, Zubalovo was “like Heaven,” says Vasily’s cousin Leonid Redens, “because it was piled high with all that food and drink and far away from the fighting!” The Crown Prince had his pick of the girls at Zubalovo but when he began an affair with Nina Karmen, he fell in love with her and moved her into the mansion. Even though his wife Galina and baby had long since returned from Kuibyshev, along with Svetlana, and were meant to be living at Zubalovo, he flaunted the affair which, says Redens, “went beyond all bounds.” No one could stop the Tsarevich except the Tsar himself, so the aggrieved husband wrote to Stalin who was outraged. When he ordered the NKGB to investigate Vasily’s set, he discovered something that was enough to provoke any Georgian father to reach for his shotgun.

Svetlana, sixteen, living between the sterile austerity of the Kremlin apartment and the vapid degeneracy of Zubalovo, felt “lonely” and unappreciated both by her busy father and her “unpleasant” brother. But this freckled redhead had matured early into a curvaceous, intelligent and sensitive girl who resembled Stalin’s mother and possessed much of her father’s obstinacy and toughness. Indeed her Redens cousins thought Vasily, for all his faults, was “much softer and gentler.” A voracious reader and with fluent English, Svetlana found a copy of the Illustrated London News, perhaps at Beria’s house, which she often visited, with the revelation about her mother’s suicide: “Something in me was destroyed,” she wrote. “I was no longer able to obey the word and will of my father . . . without question.”

At one of Vasily’s parties during Stalingrad, a handsome, worldly and famous screenwriter named Alexei Kapler arrived at Zubalovo. Kapler, nicknamed Lyusia, was a suave and mesmerizing raconteur and Casanova, though married: “Oh he could talk and had the gift of communication with any age group, he was like a child himself,” wrote Svetlana. Stalin himself was his patron, supervising his own portrayal in Kapler’s scripts for the films Lenin in October and Lenin in 1918. Kapler brought a film to watch: Greta Garbo in Queen Christina. He was immediately charmed by Svetlana, imagining their situation resembled the movie. “She was the great lady and I was poor Don Alphonso. She was bold and unpretentious. I was forty and someone of importance in cinema” yet “she was surrounded and oppressed in an atmosphere worthy of a god.” To the clever but brooding Svetlana, he was like a character out of one of her Dumas novels.

“Can you do the fox-trot?” he asked. Svetlana felt awkward in her flat shoes—but “Kapler assured me I was a good dancer . . . I was wearing my first good dress from a dressmaker” with “an old garnet brooch of my mother’s.” She trusted him.

“Why are you so unhappy today?” he asked. Svetlana explained that “it was ten years to the day since my mother’s death yet no one seemed to remember.” The two were “irresistibly drawn to one another”—it was wartime “and we reached out to each other.” He lent her “adult” books and poetry about love which helped overcome her fear of the vulgarity of sex about which Vasily constantly told her: “I was afraid of this part of life presented to me in an ugly way by Vasily’s dirty talk.”

Their relationship was passionate but never fully sexual: “A kiss, that’s all,” remembered Kapler. Yet it was thrilling for Svetlana: “Romantic and pure. I was brought up that sex was only for marriage,” she revealed later. “Father would not think to permit me anything outside of marriage.” But the war had changed everything: at any other time, Kapler might have thought the better of seducing Stalin’s only daughter but “I thought she really needed me.”

“To me,” said Svetlana, “Kapler was the cleverest, kindest, most wonderful person on earth. He radiated knowledge and all its fascination,” introducing the schoolgirl to the exciting wartime freedoms: he took her to the theatre, lent her an illegal translation of Hemingway’s For Whom the Bell Tolls. Vasily held wild parties at the Aragvi restaurant where they fox-trotted to a jazz orchestra. Svetlana breathlessly recounted her romance to Martha Peshkova at school every day: Kapler gave her an expensive brooch—a leaf with an insect on it.

This charismatic womanizer was moved by Svetlana’s plight but he also revelled in his new adventure, boasting to movie director Mikhail Romm that he was now close to Stalin. He was despatched to cover Stalingrad for Pravda, filing his “Letters of Lieutenant L from Stalingrad” in which he daringly paraded his affair with the words: “It’s probably snowing in Moscow. You can see the crenellated wall of the Kremlin from your window.” The cognoscenti were amazed at the folly of taunting a vindictive Georgian father on the front page of Pravda but to Svetlana, this was “staggering in its chivalry and recklessness. The moment I saw it, I froze” but “I sensed the whole thing might come to a terrible end.” At school, Svetlana showed Martha the article under the desk.

When Kapler returned, Svetlana begged him not to see her but, as he said, “I don’t remember who suggested the risk of that heart-rending farewell.”They met in an empty apartment near Kursk Station where Vasily’s pals had assignations. Her bodyguard Klimov sat anxiously next door.

Beria had already informed Stalin, who warned Svetlana “in a tone of extreme displeasure that I was behaving in a manner that could not be tolerated” but he blamed Vasily for corrupting her. Seething about Vasily’s debauchery, Stalin dismissed his son as air-force Inspector for conduct unbecoming, and ordered him to be locked up in the guardhouse for ten days, then posted to the North-Western Front. Vlasik, Stalin’s domestic panjandrum, suggested Kapler leave Moscow. Kapler told him to “go to hell” but arranged an assignment away from the city.

Meanwhile Merkulov handed Stalin the phone intercepts of Svetlana and Kapler’s conversations, a tool not usually available to the irate fathers of errant daughters. Stalin was enraged. On 2 March, Kapler was bundled into a car which was followed by a sinister black Packard “in which General Vlasik sat, looking very important.” At the Lubianka, Vlasik and Kobulov supervised his sentencing for “anti-Soviet opinions” to five years in Vorkuta.

The next day, already under pressure as Manstein’s counter-offensive retook Kharkov and threatened the success of Stalingrad, Stalin was so angry he got up hours earlier than usual. Svetlana was getting dressed for school with her nanny when Stalin “strode briskly into my bedroom, something he had never done before.” The look in his eyes was “enough to rivet my nurse to the floor.” Svetlana had “never seen my father look that way before.” Stalin, in a blazing Georgian temper, was “choking with anger and nearly speechless.”

“Where, where are they all?” he spluttered. “Where are all these letters from your ‘writer’? I know the whole story! I’ve got all your telephone conversations right here!” He tapped his tunic pocket. “All right! Hand them over! Your Kapler’s a British spy. He’s under arrest!” Svetlana surrendered Kapler’s letters and screenplays, but shouted: “But I love him!”

“Love!” shrieked Stalin “with hatred of the very word,” and, “for the first time in my life,” slapped her twice across the face. Then he turned to the nanny: “Just think, nurse, how low she’s sunk. Such a war going on and she’s busy fucking!”

“No, no, no,” the nanny tried to explain, fat hands flapping.

“What do you mean ‘no,’ ” Stalin asked more calmly, “when I know the whole story?” Then to Svetlana: “Take a look at yourself! Who’d want you? You fool! He’s got women all around him!” Stalin gathered up the letters and took them into the dining room where he sat at the table where Churchill had dined—and, ignoring the war altogether, started to read them. He did not appear at the Little Corner that day.

That afternoon, when Svetlana returned from school, Stalin was waiting for her in the dining room, tearing up Kapler’s letters and photographs. “Writer!” he sneered. “He can’t even write decent Russian! She couldn’t even find herself a Russian!” Kapler’s Jewishness especially riled him. She left the room and they did not speak again for many months: their loving relationship was shattered forever.

This is often presented as the height of Stalin’s brutality yet, even today, no parents would be delighted by the seduction (as he thought) of their schoolgirl daughters, especially by a married middle-aged playboy. Yet Stalin was a traditional Georgian steeped in nineteenth-century prudery and to this day, Georgian fathers are liable to resort to their shotguns at the least provocation. “Being a Georgian, he SHOULD have shot that ladies’ man,” says Vladimir Redens. Long after she wrote her memoirs, Svetlana understood that “my father over-reacted”: he thought he was “protecting his daughter from a dirty older man.”[14]

Days later, Vasily and his retinue flew up to the North-Western Front where he finally flew one or two combat missions, but his outrages continued. In May, he set off on a drunken fishing expedition in which the pilots caught fish by tossing aircraft rockets into a pond with delayed fuses. One of the rockets exploded, killing a Hero of the Soviet Union.

On 26 May, Stalin ordered air-force Commander Novikov to “1. dismiss Colonel VJ Stalin immediately from . . . command of air regiment; 2. announce to the regimental officers and VJ Stalin that Colonel Stalin is dismissed for hard drinking, debauchery and corrupting the regiment.” But it was impossible to keep a dictator’s son down: by the end of the year, the scapegrace had once again been promoted and he was soon driving his Rolls-Royce along the front, borrowing official planes whenever it suited him. One of his boon companions was alarmed when he insisted on trying to overtake an army lorry on the crowded roads of the Baltic front. When the lorry refused to give way, Vasily simply shot out the tyres.

As for Svetlana, she was soon in love with someone whose name was so dreaded that, in two published memoirs and many interviews over fifty years, she has still never revealed his identity.[15]

Not until March 1943, shortly after the Kapler affair, did Stalin finally contain Manstein’s counter-attack, leaving a swollen Soviet salient bulging into the German lines around Kursk. Hitler approved Operation Citadel to cut off the bulge while Stalin and his generals debated what to do. His instincts were always to attack, but Zhukov and Vasilevsky managed to persuade him to wait and break the Germans in a defensive position. This made Stalin even more agitated and nervous, but he had learned the great lesson of Stalingrad: he took their advice on what would become the world’s greatest tank battle, Kursk.

After a dinner with Stalin that lasted from 3 to 7 a.m., Zhukov and Vasilevsky rushed to the front to plan the battle. Malenkov supervised the generals, Mikoyan amassed the reserves, Beria provided 300,000 slave labourers to dig an unbreachable 3,000 miles of trenches. Over a million men and, including reserves, around 6,000 tanks waited.

The waiting was agony for the jittery Supremo who let off steam in a volcanic tantrum with his aircraft designer. Yakovlev arrived in the study to find Stalin and Vasilevsky examining fragments of the wing of his Yak-9 fighter.

Stalin pointed to the pieces . . . and asked: “Do you know anything about this?” He then exploded in a frenzied rant: “I had never seen Stalin in such a rage,” remembered Yakovlev. Stalin demanded to know when this fault had been discovered. When he heard that it had only been noticed “in the face of the enemy,” he “lost his composure even more.”

“Do you know that only the most cunning enemy could do such a thing—turn out planes in such a way that they would seem good at the plant and no good at the front. This is working for Hitler! Do you know what a service you’ve rendered Hitler? You Hitlerites!”

“It was difficult to imagine our condition at that moment . . . I was shivering,” admitted Yakovlev. The silence was “tomb-like” as Stalin paced the room until he asked: “What are we going to do?”

At dawn on 5 July, the Germans threw 900,000 men and 2,700 tanks into this colossal battle of machines in which fleets of metallic giants clashed, helm to helm, barrel to barrel. By the 9th, the Germans had reached their limit. On the 12th, Zhukov unleashed the costly but highly successful counter-attack. The Battle of Kursk was the climax of the Panzer era, the “mechanized equivalent of hand-to-hand combat,” which left a graveyard of 700 tanks and burnt flesh. Agreeing to cancel Citadel, Hitler had lost his last chance to win the war.

On the afternoon of 24 July, Stalin welcomed Antonov and Shtemenko to the Little Corner in a “joyously jubilant mood.” Stalin did not even want to hear their report—just tinkered cheerfully with the victory communiqué, adding the words: “Eternal glory to the heroes who fell on the battlefield in the struggle for the liberty and honour of our Motherland!”[16]

Stalin was not alone in finding it difficult to control his own children during wartime: Khrushchev and Mikoyan played stellar roles in the Kursk triumph, the former as Front Commissar, the latter as Supply maestro, but simultaneously they both found their children embroiled in dangerous crises. Stalin was both sympathetic and heartless in dealing with the tragedies of the Politburo families.

Leonid Khrushchev, Nikita’s eldest son from his first marriage, was already notorious as a ne’er-do-well. Now he became a Stalinist William Tell. Reprimanded by Komsomol for “drunkenness,” he had settled down, married Lyubov Kutuzova, with whom he had a little girl, Julia, and shown courage as a bomber pilot, though he remained a drunken brawler.[17] Leonid boasted boozily of his marksmanship and was challenged to balance a bottle on a pilot’s head. He shot off the neck of the bottle. This did not satisfy these daredevils. Leonid shot again, fatally wounding the officer in the forehead. He was court-martialled.

Khrushchev may have appealed to Stalin for clemency, citing the boy’s bravery. But Stalin who would not save Yakov, “did not want to pardon Khrushchev’s son,” as Molotov recalled. However, he was not condemned but allowed to retrain as a fighter pilot. On 11 March 1943, he was shot down during a dogfight with two FockeWulf 190s near Smolensk. He was never found. Rumours spread that he had turned traitor—which, in Stalin’s system, cast doubt on his widow, Lyubov, who had visited the theatre in Kuibyshev with an “amazingly attractive” French military attaché. Lyubov was probably denounced by Khrushchev’s chief bodyguard. She was arrested and interrogated by Abakumov himself, and condemned.

In another of those tragedies of Stalinist family life, little Julia was told her mother was dead. The memory of her parents was obliterated and she was adopted by her grandfather, Khrushchev himself, whom she called “Papa.”[18] The Khrushchevs were cold parents. Nikita himself seemed to believe the charges against Lyubov. “Stalin played this game,” recalls Julia, “and Khrushchev was playing for his life” but “Nikita never spoke about it and even as a pensioner, he spoke only in general terms. This was very humiliating and painful for him.” Perhaps, says Julia Khrushcheva, it contributed to his later decision to denounce Stalin.[19]

That summer, it was Mikoyan’s turn. Two of his sons were pilots. Stepan was wounded, then during Stalingrad, 18-year-old Vladimir was killed. So Stalin “expressly ordered” his son Vasily to take Stepan into his own division and “make sure not to lose any more Mikoyans.” On Vasily’s orders, Stepan’s engineer claimed the plane was not ready for him to fly whenever possible. This indulgence did not last.

Among all the other children in Kuibyshev, Mikoyan’s younger boys Vano, fifteen, and Sergo, fourteen, were friends with the unhinged son of Shakhurin, the Aircraft Production Commissar. Volodya Shakhurin played a silly but risky game in which he pretended to “appoint” a mock government with the teenage Mikoyans as ministers, all recorded in his exercise book. When they returned to Moscow, this Volodya Shakhurin fell in love with Nina, daughter of Ambassador Umansky who was just leaving for his next posting.

“I won’t let you go,” young Shakhurin told Nina. The schoolchildren were walking across the Kamennyi Most, close to the Kremlin, when Shakhurin borrowed Vano Mikoyan’s pistol which he had been lent by his father’s bodyguards. The boy ran ahead with Nina then, on the bridge, shot her dead and killed himself. A horrified Vano Mikoyan ran back to the Kremlin to tell his mother. The NKGB discovered the gun belonged to the young Mikoyans who were also “ministers” in the schoolboy “government,” which was obviously a conspiracy. Vano was arrested.

“Vano just disappeared,” remembers Sergo. “My mother was frantic and they called the police stations.” Mikoyan, working down the corridor from Stalin himself, rang Beria, then called his wife Ashken: “Don’t worry. Vano’s in the Lubianka.”

Mikoyan knew that this could only happen with Stalin’s permission. The shrewd Armenian decided not to appeal to Stalin “so as not to make things worse.” Ten days later, Sergo was also arrested at Zubalovo and taken to the Lubianka in his pyjamas: “I must tell Mama.”

“It’ll only take an hour,” they replied. Twenty-six schoolboys were arrested and imprisoned, including Stalin’s nephew, Leonid Redens, whose father had been shot in 1940.

The secret police reported the children’s innocence but Stalin replied: “They must be punished.” This was so vague that no one was quite sure what to do with the young prisoners. The boys were interrogated by Lieutenant-General Vlodzirmirsky, one of Beria’s cruellest torturers, “tall and handsome in his uniform,” who was, says Sergo, “very nasty. He shouted at us.” Sergo was placed in solitary for a week. In December, after six months in the Lubianka, the interrogations ceased and the children became really frightened. Sergo’s interrogator showed him a confession that he had been “a participant in an organization . . . to overthrow the existing government.”

“Just sign and you can see your mother again!”

“I won’t sign, it’s not true,” said Sergo.

“It doesn’t make any difference,” bellowed the general. “Sign—you go home. If not, back to your cell. Listen!” He could hear his mother’s voice in the next room. All the children signed their confessions. “Of course this could have been used against my father.” Sergo and Vano were driven with their mother back to the Kremlin. “I was very glad my father wasn’t there—I was afraid of his anger,” says Sergo.

Mikoyan told the elder boy: “If you’re guilty, I’d strangle you with my own hands. Go and rest.” He never mentioned it to the youngest. But the matter was not closed: after three days at home, the children had to go into exile. The Mikoyans spent a year in Stalinabad, cared for by their house-maid. Stalin never forgot the case and later considered using it against Mikoyan.[20]

 

 

41. Stalin’s Song Contest

At about 11 p.m. on 1 August 1943, Stalin and Beria arrived at Kuntsevo Station and boarded a special train, camouflaged with birch branches, armed with howitzers and packed with specially tested provisions. The train, which, with its theatrical shrubbery poking out of its guns, must have resembled a locomotive Birnam Wood, puffed westwards. The Kursk counter-attacks, Operations Rumiantsev, to the north, and Kutuzov, to the south, both named after Tsarist heroes, were so successful that Stalin felt safe to embark on this preposterously staged visit to the front.

Stalin slept at Gzhatsk, then headed towards Rzhev on the Kalinin Front. Transferring into his Packard, he set up his headquarters in a self-consciously humble wooden cottage with a picturesque veranda (still a museum today) in the hamlet of Khoroshevo where he received his generals. Knowing from Zhukov that Orel and Belgorod would fall imminently, Stalin ate “a cheerful supper” with his entourage.

The old lady who lived there was on hand to provide a touch of folksy authenticity until Stalin, who prided himself on his popular touch, unexpectedly insisted that he must pay her for his stay. He was unable to work out a sensible sum because he had not handled money since 1917 but, in any case, he had no cash on him. Stalin asked his flunkies for the money. Here was a classic moment in the farce of the workers’ State when, with much tapping of tunic pockets, jiggling of medals and rustling of gold braid, not one of the boozy, paunchy commissars could find a single kopeck to pay her. Stalin cursed the “spongers.” Since he could not pay in cash, he compensated the crone with his own provisions.

Then Stalin peered grumpily out at the village which he immediately noticed was teeming with ill-concealed Chekists: he asked how many there were, but the NKVD tried to conceal the real number. When Stalin exploded, they admitted there was an entire division. Indeed, the generals noticed that the village itself had been completely emptied: there was no one except the NKVD for miles around.

He slept on the old lady’s bed in his greatcoat. Yeremenko briefed him. Voronov was summoned, covering miles to make it to the mysterious meeting. “Finally we came to a beautiful grove where small wooden structures nestled among the trees.” Led into the cottage, Stalin stood in front of a “wretched wooden table that had been hastily dashed together” and two crude benches. A special telephone had been fixed to link Stalin to the fronts, with the wires going out of the window. Waiting to report to the Supremo, the generals were unimpressed with this mise-en-scène.

“Well, this is some situation!” whispered one general to Voronov who suddenly realized: “It’s intentional—to resemble the front.” Stalin cut off the briefing, contenting himself with giving some orders, then dismissed the generals who had to slog back to the real fray. Stalin asked if he could go further towards the fighting but Beria forbade him. He visited the hospital at Yukono, according to his bodyguards, and was depressed by so many amputees. Afterwards, he felt ill and his arthritis played up.[21] Stalin returned by road in his armoured Packard and a convoy of security cars.

Suddenly the cars stopped. “He needed to defecate,” wrote Mikoyan, who heard the story from someone who was there. Stalin got out of the car and asked “whether the bushes along the roadside were mined. Of course no one could give such a guarantee . . . Then the Supreme Commander-in-Chief pulled down his trousers in everyone’s presence.” In a metaphorical commentary on his treatment of the Soviet people, and his performance as military commander, he “shamed himself in front of his generals and officers . . . and did his business right there on the road.”

On his return, Stalin was immediately able to deploy his heroic journey in a letter to President Franklin D. Roosevelt, with whom he was discussing the venue for the first meeting of the three leaders of the Grand Alliance: “Having just returned from the front, I am only now able to reply to your letter . . .” He could not meet FDR and Churchill at Scapa Flow in Orkney—“I have to make personal visits to . . . the front more and more often.” He proposed they meet in a more convenient place—Teheran, the capital of Iran, occupied by British-Soviet forces.

Stalin’s courtiers knew the significance of this visit to the front. A month later, Yeremenko, his host, prodded by Beria and Malenkov, proposed that Stalin receive the Order of Suvorov First Class for Stalingrad, and for giving “such valuable orders that guaranteed victory on the Kalinin Front, . . . inspired by the visit to the front of the Supreme Commander-in-Chief . . .”

On 5 August, when Orel and Belgorod fell, Stalin jovially asked Antonov and Shtemenko: “Do you read military history?” Shtemenko admitted he was “confused, not knowing how to answer.” Stalin, who had been rereading Vipper’s History of Ancient Greece, went on: “In ancient times, when troops won victories, all the bells would be rung in honour of the commanders and their troops. It wouldn’t be a bad idea for us to signify victories more impressively . . . We”—and he nodded at his comrades, “we’re thinking of giving artillery salutes and arranging some kind of fireworks . . .” That day, the guns of the Kremlin fired the first victory salvo. Henceforth, Stalin punctiliously worked out the salutes to be given for each victory and the staff had to get every detail correct. Just before 11 p.m. the messages were rushed to the stentorian newsreader Levitan who telephoned Poskrebyshev for Stalin’s approval. Then the salvoes resounded across the Motherland.

“Let’s listen to it,” Stalin often suggested in the Little Corner. The generals now competed to be the first to give Stalin good news. On the 28th, Koniev phoned to announce he had taken Kharkov but was told that Stalin always slept in in the mornings. Koniev daringly phoned Kuntsevo directly. A delighted Stalin answered it himself. But when there was a mistake in the victory announcements, Stalin yelled: “Why did Levitan omit Koniev’s name? Let me see the message!” Shtemenko had left it out. Stalin was “dreadfully furious.” “What kind of anonymous message is this? What have you got on your shoulders? Stop that broadcast and read everything over again. You may go!”

The next time, he asked Shtemenko to bring the communiqué on his own, asking, “You didn’t leave out the name?” Shtemenko was forgiven.[22]

As he massed fifty-eight armies, from Finland to the Black Sea, to embark on a colossal wave of offensives, an elated Stalin, having closed down the Comintern and enlisted the support of the Church by appointing a Patriarch, decided to create a new national anthem to replace the Internationale. It was to catch Russia’s new euphoric confidence. Stalin decided the quickest way to find the tune and words was to hold a competition that resembled a dictatorial Eurovision Song Contest, with Molotov and Voroshilov contributing to the lyrics, and Shostakovich and Prokofiev to the music.

In one week in late October, while the Allied Foreign Ministers were in Moscow preparing for the Big Three meeting, the anthem was forged in the white-hot frenzy of musical Stakhanovitism to be ready for the 7th November celebrations. In late September, Stalin invited composers from all over the Soviet Union to put forward their offerings. In mid-October, fifty-four composers, including Uzbeks, Georgians and some singing Jews, in traditional costume, arrived in Moscow to perform round one in the Stalin song contest. Before the music was even decided, Stalin appointed the lyricists, Sergei Mikhalkov and El-Registan, whose notes in the archives tell this story. They handed in their first draft. At lunchtime on the 23rd, the lyricists were summoned from the Moskva Hotel, that colossal Stalinist pile, across to the Kremlin where Molotov and Voroshilov received them. “Come in,” they said. “He is reading the lyrics.” They did not need to ask who “he” was. Two minutes later, Stalin called. Voroshilov, who was “cheerful and smiling,” took El-Registan’s hands: “Comrade Stalin,” he announced, “has made some corrections.” These were words they would hear often during the next two weeks. Meanwhile the dour Molotov was suggesting changes of his own.

“You must add some thoughts about peace, I don’t know where, but it must be done.”

“We’ll give you a room,” said Voroshilov. “It has to be warm. Give ’em tea or they’ll start drinking! And don’t let them out until they’ve finished.” They worked for four hours.

“We need to think about this overnight,” said Mikhalkov.

“Think all you like,” snapped Molotov, “but we can’t wait.” As they left, they heard him order: “Send it to Stalin!”

At a quarter to midnight, Stalin tinkered with the new draft in his red pencil, changing the words of the verses, sending it to Molotov and Voroshilov: “Look at this. Do you agree?” On 26 October, Voroshilov, the Marshal demoted to song judge, was diligently listening to another thirty anthems in the Bolshoi’s Beethoven Hall, when suddenly “Stalin arrived and all was done very fast.” It was now a remarkable gathering, with Stalin, Voroshilov and Beria sitting down with Shostakovich and Prokofiev to discuss the composition. When the lyricists arrived, they found Stalin, “very grey and very energetic” in his new Marshal’s uniform. Walking around as he listened to the melodies, Stalin asked Shostakovich and Prokofiev which orchestra was best—should it be an ecclesiastical one? It was hard to choose without an orchestra. Stalin gave them five days to prepare some more anthems, said goodbye and left the hall.

At three the following morning, Poskrebyshev called the lyricists, putting through the Supreme Songwriter who said that he now liked the text, but it was too “thin” and short. They must add one verse, one rousing verse about the Red Army, power, “the defeat of the Fascist hordes.”[23]

Stalin celebrated the Allied conference with a banquet on 30 October and then returned to music. At 9 a.m. on 1 November, flanked by Molotov, Beria and Voroshilov, he arrived at the Beethoven Hall and listened to forty anthems in four hours. Over dinner afterwards, the magnates finally came to a decision: Voroshilov telephoned the two lyricists in the middle of the night to announce that they liked the anthem of A. V. Alexandrov. He then handed the phone to Stalin who was still tinkering.

“You can leave the verses,” he said, “but rewrite the refrains. ‘Country of Soviets’—if it’s not a problem, change it to ‘country of socialism.’ Status: secret!” The lyricists worked all night, now with Alexandrov’s music. Voroshilov sent it to Stalin and invited the composers to his dacha where he presided like “a very funny and cheerful uncle” over a sumptuous feast.

At nine the next evening, Stalin was ready. The composers arrived. Beria, Voroshilov and Malenkov sat round the table. Stalin formally shook their hands, that special sign of battles won and songs written.

“How’s everything?” he asked warmly, but had not yet finished his tinkering. He wanted to emphasize the role of “the Motherland! Motherland’s good!” The writers rushed off to type in the changes. Stalin wanted Shostakovich involved in the orchestration.

“All right. Done!” snapped Beria. Then Malenkov sensibly piped up that they should listen once to the entire anthem. Stalin assigned this to Voroshilov who, demonstrating his rambunctious disrespect that belonged in another era, retorted: “Let someone else do it—I’ve heard it a hundred times until I’m foaming at the mouth!”

The new Soviet national anthem, Stalin raved, “parts the sky and heaven like a boundless wave.” At its first playing at the Bolshoi Theatre, Stalin arrived to toast the composers who were invited up to the box and then to a dinner in the avant-loge. When Mikhalkov[24] and El-Registan downed their vodkas, Stalin bantered: “Why drain your glasses? You won’t be interesting to chat to!”[25]

The elation spread from the top down. As the national anthem was unveiled, Molotov presided over a 7 November party that few would ever forget. The élite emerged that night from the grimness of the thirties and the austerity of years of defeat. “The whole party,” noted the journalist Alexander Werth, “sparkled with jewels, furs, gold braid and celebrities . . . The party had something of that wild and irresponsible extravagance which one usually associates with pre-Revolution Moscow.” The dress was white tie and tails, which made Shostakovich look “like a college boy who had put it on for the first time.” Henceforth, Stalin’s court began to behave more like the rulers of an empire than dour Bolsheviks. Molotov sported the new diplomatic uniform that, like the gold braid, marked the new imperial era: it was “black, trimmed in gold, with a small dagger at the belt . . . much like Hitler’s élite SS,” thought the U.S. diplomat Chip Bohlen.

Molotov, Vyshinsky and Stalin’s old friend Sergo “Tojo” Kavtaradze greeted the guests in a receiving line. Kavtaradze’s companion was his beautiful daughter Maya, now eighteen and wearing the long flowing ball gown of the era. She caught the eye of Vyshinsky who “oiled his way across the floor” to ask her to open the dancing with him.

A “jovial” Molotov proceeded to become uproariously drunk, tottering up to Averell Harriman’s daughter Kathleen and slurringly asking why she alone had failed to compliment him on his gorgeous uniform. Didn’t she like it? She thought the Russians were as excited about their regalia “as a little boy all dressed up in his new Christmas-present fireman’s suit.” When he spotted the Swedish Ambassador, Molotov staggered up to him and declared that he did not like neutrals.

The Politburo members then each hit on a Western ambassador whom they tried to get as drunk as they were: Mikoyan, “famous for his ability to put any guy under the table” according to Kathleen Harriman, worked on her father along with Shcherbakov, himself in the later stages of alcoholism. Molotov, who “carried his liquor better than others,” managed to remain on his feet while Clark Kerr, the British Ambassador “fell flat on his face onto a table covered with bottles and wineglasses,” cutting his face. Maya Kavtaradze saw an American general arrive accompanied by two prostitutes. Later in the evening, she noticed that all the potentates had disappeared and went to look for her father. She found him in a red hall, the Bolshevik equivalent of the VIP room, with the dashing and exuberant Mikoyan who was serenading the hussies on one knee.

The next day, Roosevelt finally agreed to meet at Teheran twenty days later: “The whole world is watching for this meeting of the three of us . . .”[26]

 

 

42. Teheran: Roosevelt and Stalin

On 26 November 1943, Colonel-General Golovanov, the bomber commander who was to be Stalin’s pilot, drove out to Kuntsevo to begin their long voyage to Persia. When he arrived, he heard shouting and found Stalin “giving Beria a good dressing-down” while Molotov watched, perched on the window-sill. Beria sat in a chair “with his ears all red” as Stalin sneered at him: “Look at him Comrade Golovanov! He’s got snake’s eyes!”

Molotov had jokingly complained that he could not read Beria’s spidery handwriting. “Our Vyacheslav Mikhailovich can’t see very well. Beria keeps sending him messages and he insists on wearing his pince-nez with blank glasses!” This marked Stalin’s growing disdain for the dynamic Georgian.

Afterwards, they boarded their train that arrived in Baku at 8 a.m., driving straight to the aerodrome where four SI-47s were gathered under the command of Air Marshal Novikov. Stalin had never flown before—and did not like the sound of it. But there was no other way from Baku. As he approached his plane with Golovanov, he glanced at Beria’s plane standing next door with his pilot, Colonel Grachev, and decided to switch planes.

“Colonel-Generals don’t often pilot aircraft,” he said, “we’d better go with the Colonel,” reassuring Golovanov: “Don’t take it badly”—and he climbed into Beria’s own plane. Guarded by twenty-seven fighters, Stalin was terrified when the plane hit an air pocket.

A few hours later, Stalin arrived in warm, dusty Teheran (“very dirty place, great poverty,” wrote Roosevelt) where he was speeded the five miles to the Soviet Embassy which was separated from the British Legation by two walls and a narrow road. Only the American Legation was out of town.

Teheran was the cosiest of the Big Three meetings: Stalin himself travelled with a tiny delegation. There were only Molotov and Voroshilov, his official deputies in the negotiations, Beria as security overlord, Vlasik as head of personal security and his physician Professor Vinogradov. Stalin’s bodyguard of twelve Georgians was led by Tsereteli, whom Westerners found “good-looking, highly intelligent and courteous.” Nonetheless there was something appropriate about the master of this Eastern Empire being protected by a guard of his fellow countrymen led by a cut-throat Prince. Perhaps Churchill thought the same way for his bodyguard there was made up of turbaned Sikhs with tommy-guns.

The Soviet Embassy was an elegant estate, built for some Persian magnate, surrounded by a high wall. There were several cottages and villas in the grounds: Stalin lived in one house while Molotov and Voroshilov shared the two-storey ambassador’s residence. The advance guard of the NKVD had been frantically preparing the embassy for two weeks. “No one dared disobey” Beria, wrote Zoya Zarubina, a young NKGB officer in Teheran.[27]

As soon as Roosevelt arrived, Stalin invited him to move into the Soviet compound. The drive from the Soviet complex to the U.S. Legation along narrow Oriental streets was impossible to guard—and no doubt Beria was more concerned about Stalin’s security than Roosevelt’s. Soviet intelligence had allegedly uncovered a Nazi plot to assassinate the leaders. Stalin was also determined to separate the Westerners, whom he expected to gang up on him. It happened that this also suited Roosevelt’s strategy to engage Stalin directly, without the British, to prove his suspicions groundless. Harriman hurried over. Molotov explained their security worries. Molotov later ordered Zarubina to call and find out when FDR would be moving in. Admiral William Leahy, White House Chief of Staff, replied: “We’ll come tomorrow.”

When Zarubina reported this back to Molotov, he exploded: “What do you think you’re doing? Who the hell are you anyway? Who commanded you to do this job? Are you sure? What am I going to say to Stalin?”

Meanwhile, in one of those forgotten meetings between potentates who seem to belong to different epochs, Stalin called on the proud Mohammed Pahlavi, the 21-year-old Shah of an occupied Iran, whose father Reza Shah, a former Cossack officer and founder of the dynasty, had been deposed for pro-German leanings in 1941. Stalin believed he could charm this imperial boy, whose Empire had once embraced Georgia, into granting him an Iranian foothold. Molotov, already a master of the diplomatically possible, was sceptical. Beria advised against this excursion for security reasons. Stalin insisted. The King of Kings was pleasantly “surprised” by the feline Stalin who was “particularly polite and well-mannered and he seemed intent on making a good impression on me.” His offer of “a regiment of T-34 tanks and one of our fighter planes” impressed the Shah too. “I was most tempted,” he later wrote, but he sensed danger in this Georgian bearing gifts. Molotov grumbled that Stalin “did not understand the Shah and got into a bit of an awkward situation. Stalin thought he could impress him but it didn’t work.” The gifts were to come with Soviet officers. “I declined with thanks,” wrote the Shah.

Next morning, Beria personally patrolled the gates, waiting for Roosevelt who finally arrived at the Soviet Embassy with the Secret Service riding on the running boards and brandishing tommy guns in a gangsterish manner that the NKVD thought unprofessional. A jeep-load of Roosevelt’s Filipino mess-boys confused the NKVD but they finally admitted them too.

Stalin sent word that he would call on the President, a meeting he had prepared for carefully. Naturally Beria bugged the presidential suite. Beria’s handsome scientist son, Sergo, whom Stalin knew well, was among the Soviet eavesdroppers. Stalin summoned him: “How’s your mother?” he asked, Nina Beria being a favourite. Small talk out of the way, he ordered Sergo to undertake the “morally reprehensible and delicate” mission of briefing him every morning at 8 a.m. Stalin always quizzed him, even on Roosevelt’s tone: “Did he say that with conviction or without enthusiasm? How did Roosevelt react?” He was surprised at the naïvety of the Americans: “Do they know we are listening to them?”[28] Stalin rehearsed strategies with Molotov and Beria, even down to where he would sit.[29] He did the same for his meetings with Churchill, according to Beria’s son, saying, “You can expect absolutely anything from him.”

Just before three, on this “beautiful Iranian Sunday afternoon, gold and blue, mild and sunny,” Stalin, accompanied by Vlasik and Pavlov, his interpreter, and surrounded by his Georgian bodyguards, who walked ten metres ahead and behind, as they did in the Kremlin, strode “clumsily like a small bear” out of his residence in his Marshal’s mustard-coloured summer tunic, with the Order of Lenin on his chest, and across the compound, to call on Roosevelt in the mansion. A young U.S. officer met Stalin with a salute and led him into the President’s room but then found himself inside the meeting room with just the two leaders and their interpreters. The officer was about to panic until Bohlen, acting as interpreter, whispered that he should leave.

“Hello Marshal Stalin,” said Roosevelt as the men shook hands. His “round tubby figure,” with swarthy pock-marked face, grey hair, broken stained teeth and yellow Oriental eyes, was worlds away from the aristocratic blue-suited President sitting erect in his wheelchair: “If he’d dressed in Chinese robes,” wrote Bohlen, “he would be the perfect subject for a Chinese ancestor portrait.”

Stalin stressed his need for the Second Front before Roosevelt established a rapport by undermining the British Empire. India was ripe for a revolution “from the bottom,” like Russia, said FDR, who was as ill-informed about Leninism as he was about the untouchables. Stalin showed that he knew more about India, replying that the question of castes was more complicated. This short tour d’horizon established the unlikely partnership between the crippled New York Brahmin and the Georgian Bolshevik. Both of legendary charm when they wished to be, Stalin’s fondness for Roosevelt was as genuine a diplomatic friendship as he ever managed with any imperialist. Stalin left Roosevelt to rest.

At 4 p.m., the Big Three gathered around the specially constructed “wedding feast table” in a big hall decorated in heavy imperial style with striped silk armchairs and armrests: Stalin sat next to Molotov and Pavlov. Voroshilov often sat in a chair in the second row. Stalin and Churchill agreed that Roosevelt was to chair the meeting: “As the youngest!” joked the President.

“In our hands,” declaimed Churchill, “we have the future of mankind.” Stalin completed this declamatory triumvirate: “History has spoiled us,” he said. “She’s given us very great power and very great opportunities . . . Let’s begin our work.”

When they turned to the question of Operation Overlord, the invasion of France, Stalin complained that he had not expected to discuss military issues so he had no military staff. “I’ve only got Marshal Voroshilov,” he said rudely. “I hope he’ll do.” He then ignored Voroshilov and handled all military matters himself. A young British interpreter, Hugh Lunghi,[30] was shocked to see that Stalin treated Voroshilov “like a dog.” Stalin insisted on the earliest preference for Overlord, the cross-Channel invasion—and then quietly filled his pipe. Churchill was still unconvinced, preferring a preliminary Mediterranean operation, using troops already in the area. However, FDR was already committed to the Channel. As a flustered Churchill realized he was outvoted, Roosevelt winked at Stalin, the start of his gauche flirtation that greatly enhanced the Marshal’s position as arbiter of the Grand Alliance. Churchill handled Stalin much better by being himself.

Stalin was expansively charming to the foreigners but grumpy with his own delegates. When Bohlen approached him from behind, mid-session, Stalin snapped without turning, “For God’s sake, allow us to finish this work.” He was embarrassed when he found it was the young American. That night, Roosevelt held a dinner at his residence. His mess-boys prepared steaks and baked potatoes while the President shook up his cocktails of vermouth, gin and ice. Stalin sipped and winced: “Well, it’s all right but cold on the stomach.” Roosevelt suddenly turned “green and great drops of sweat began to bead off his face.” He was wheeled to his room. When Churchill said God was on the side of the Allies, Stalin chaffed, “And the Devil’s on my side. The Devil’s a Communist and God’s a good Conservative!”

On the 29th, Stalin and Roosevelt met again: the Supremo knew from his briefing from Sergo Beria that his charm had worked. “Roosevelt always expressed a high opinion of Stalin,” recalled Sergo, which allowed him to put pressure on Churchill. That morning, the President proposed the creation of an international organization that became the United Nations. Meanwhile the generals were meeting with Voroshilov who, according to Lunghi, absolutely refused to understand the amphibious challenge of an invasion of France, thinking it was like crossing a Russian river on a raft.

Before the next session, Churchill, the only British Prime Minister to sport military uniforms in office, arrived in a blue RAF uniform with pilot’s wings, to open a solemn ceremony to celebrate Stalingrad. At 3:30 p.m., all the delegations assembled in the hall of the embassy. Then the Big Three arrived. A guard of honour formed up of British infantry with bayonets and NKVD troops in blue uniforms, red tabs and slung tommy guns. An orchestra played their national anthems, in the Soviet case, the old one. The music stopped. There was silence. Then the officer of the British guard approached the large black box on the table and opened it. A gleaming sword lay on a bed of “claret-coloured velvet.” He handed it to Churchill, who, laying the sword across his hands, turned to Stalin: “I’ve been commanded by His Majesty King George VI to present to you . . . this sword of honour . . . The blade of the sword bears the inscription: ‘To the steel-hearted citizens of Stalingrad, a gift from King George VI as a token of the homage of the British People.’ ”

Churchill stepped forward and presented the sword to Stalin who held it reverently in his hands for a long moment and then, with tears in his eyes, raised it to his lips and kissed it. Stalin was moved.

“On behalf of the citizens of Stalingrad,” he answered in “a low husky voice,” “I wish to express my appreciation . . .” He walked round to Roosevelt to show him the sword. The American read out the inscription: “Truly they had hearts of steel.” Stalin handed the sword to Voroshilov. There was a crash as Voroshilov let the scabbard slip off the sword and on to his toes. The bungling cavalryman, who had charged waving his sabre many a time, had managed to introduce comedy in the most solemn moment of Stalin’s international career. His cherubic cheeks blushing a bright scarlet, Klim remastered the sword. The Supremo, noticed Lunghi, frowned with irritation then gave “a frosty, grim, forced-looking smile.” The NKVD lieutenant held the sword aloft and carried it away. Stalin must have snarled that Voroshilov should apologize because when he returned, he chased after Churchill, recruiting Lunghi to interpret. Flushed, he “stammered his apologies” but then suddenly wished Churchill “a happy birthday” for the following day. A special birthday banquet was being planned at the British Legation. “I wish you a hundred more years of life,” said the Marshal, “with the same spirit and vigour.” Churchill thanked him but whispered to Lunghi: “Isn’t he a bit premature? Must be angling for an invitation.”[31] Then the Big Three went outside for the famous photograph of the conference.

After a short interval, the delegations moved back to the round table for the next session. As ever, Stalin made sure that he always arrived last. When everyone was ready the Chekist Zoya Zarubina, on duty outside, was sent on an errand. She ran headlong down the steps and “hit someone on the shoulder.” To her horror, it was Stalin. “I stood frozen, stiff at attention . . .” she wrote. “I thought they’d surely shoot me on the spot.” Stalin did not react and walked on, followed by Molotov. But Voroshilov, always kind to the young and with more reason than most to indulge bunglers, “patted me on the hand and said, ‘It’s all right, kid, it’s all right.’ ”

Stalin, “always smoking and doodling wolf heads on a pad with his red pencil,” was never agitated, rarely gestured and seldom consulted Molotov and Voroshilov. But he kept up the pressure on Churchill for the Second Front: “Do the British really believe in Overlord or are you only saying so to reassure the Russians?”

When he heard that the Allies had not yet agreed on a commander, he growled: “Then nothing will come of these operations.” The Soviet Union had tried committee rule and found it had not worked. One man had to make the decisions. Finally, when Churchill would not give a date, Stalin suddenly got to his feet and turning to Molotov and Voroshilov, said, “Let’s not waste our time here. We’ve got plenty to do at the front.” Roosevelt managed to pour unction on troubled waters.

That night, it was Stalin’s turn to host a banquet in the usual Soviet style with an “unbelievable quantity of food.” A huge Russian “waiter” in a white coat stood behind the Supremo’s chair throughout the meal.[32] Stalin “drank little” but got his kicks by needling Churchill, exchanges in which Roosevelt seemed to take an undignified pleasure. Stalin sneered that he was glad Churchill was not a “liberal,” that most loathsome of creatures in the Bolshevik lexicon, but he then tested his severity by joking that 50,000 or perhaps 100,000 German officers should be executed. Churchill was furious: pushing his glass forward, knocking it over so brandy spread across the table, he growled: “Such an attitude is contrary to the British sense of justice. The British Parliament and public would never support the execution of honest men who had fought for their country.” Roosevelt quipped that he would like to compromise: only 49,000 should be shot. Elliott Roosevelt, the President’s ne’er-do-well son who was also present, jumped tipsily to his feet to josh: wouldn’t the 50,000 fall in battle anyway?

“To your health, Elliott!” Stalin clinked glasses with him. But Churchill snarled at Roosevelt fils.

“Are you interested in damaging relations between the Allies . . . How dare you!”[33] He headed for the door but as he reached it, “hands were clapped on my shoulders from behind, and there was Stalin, with Molotov at his side, both grinning broadly and eagerly declaring that they were only playing . . . Stalin has a very captivating manner when he chooses to use it.” Roosevelt’s deference to Stalin and shabbiness to Churchill were both unseemly and counterproductive but the heartiness was restored by Stalin tormenting Molotov: “Come here, Molotov, and tell us about your pact with Hitler.”

The finale was Churchill’s sixty-ninth birthday held in the dining hall of the British Legation which, Alan Brooke wrote in his diary, resembled “a Persian temple,” with the walls “covered in a mosaic of small pieces of looking glass” and “heavy deep red curtains. The Persian waiters were in blue and red livery” with oversized “white cotton gloves, the tips of the fingers of which hung limply and flapped about.” Sikhs guarded the doorways.

Beria, who was there incognito, insisted that the NKVD search the British Legation, which was supervised by him personally with that glossy ruffian Tsereteli. “There simply cannot be any doubt,” wrote a British security officer, Beria “was an extremely intelligent and shrewd man with tremendous willpower and ability to impress, command and lead other men.” He disdained anyone else’s opinion, becoming “very angry if anyone . . . opposed his proposals.” The other Russians “behaved like slaves in his presence.”

Once Beria had signed off, Stalin arrived, but when a valet tried to take his coat, a bodyguard overreacted by reaching for his pistol. Calm was quickly restored. A cake with sixty-nine candles stood on the main table. Stalin toasted “Churchill my fighting friend, if it is possible to consider Mr. Churchill my friend” and then walked round to clink glasses with the Englishman, putting his arm around his shoulders. Churchill answered: “To Stalin the Great!” When Churchill joked that Britain was “becoming pinker,” Stalin joked: “A sign of good health.”

At the climax, the chef of the Legation cuisine produced a creation that came closer to assassinating Stalin than all the German agents in all the souks of Persia. Stalin was making a toast when two mountainous ice-cream pyramids were wheeled in with “a base of ice one foot square and four inches deep,” a religious nightlight inside it and a tube rising ten inches out of the middle on which a plate supporting “a vast ice cream” had been secured with icing sugar. But as these creations approached Stalin, Brooke noticed that the lamp was melting the ice and “now looked more like the Tower of Pisa.” Suddenly the tilt assumed a more dangerous angle and the British Chief of Staff shouted to his neighbours to duck. “With the noise of an avalanche the whole wonderful construction slid over our heads and exploded in a clatter of plates.” Lunghi saw the nervous Persian waiter “stagger sideways at the last moment.” Pavlov in his new diplomatic uniform “came in for the full blast! . . . splashed from head to foot” but Brooke guessed “it was more than his life was worth to stop interpreting.” Stalin was unblemished.

“Missed the target,” whispered Air Marshal Sir Charles Portal.

At the final meetings next day, Roosevelt explained privately to Stalin that, since he had a presidential election coming up, he could not discuss Poland at this meeting. The subordination of the fate of the country for which the war was fought to American machine politics can only have encouraged Stalin’s plans for a tame Poland. At the last plenary meeting, it was a sign of the amateurism and immediacy of this intimate conference that Churchill and Stalin discussed Polish borders using a map torn out of The Times. The dangers of these meetings for Stalin’s entourage were underestimated by the Westerners until Churchill’s interpreter Birse presented his opposite number Pavlov with a set of Charles Dickens. Pavlov uneasily accepted the present.

“You’re getting VERY close to our Western friends,” smiled Stalin to Pavlov’s anxious discomfort.

On 2 December, Stalin, “satisfied” that the Allies had finally promised to launch Overlord in the spring, flew out of Teheran and changed out of his Marshal’s togs at Baku aerodrome, re-emerging in his old greatcoat, cap and boots. His train conveyed him to Stalingrad, his only post-battle visit to the city that had played such a decisive role in his life. He visited Paulus’s headquarters but his limousine drove too fast down the narrow streets strewn with heaps of German equipment. It collided with a woman driver who almost expired when she realized with whom she had crashed. She started crying: “It’s my fault.” Stalin got out and calmed her: “Don’t cry. It’s not your fault. Blame the war. Our car’s armoured and didn’t suffer. You can repair yours.” Afterwards he headed back to Moscow.[34]

Stalingrad, Kursk and Teheran restored Stalin’s zealous faith in his own infallible greatness. “When victory became obvious,” wrote Mikoyan, “Stalin got too big for his boots and became capricious.” The long boozy dinners started again: Stalin began to drink again, playing the ringmaster of a circus of uncouth hijinks, but in the mass of information he received from Beria, there was always much to worry him.

Beria arrested 931,544 persons in the liberated territory in 1943. As many as 250,000 people in Moscow attended Easter church services. He delivered the phone intercepts and informer reports to Stalin who read them carefully. Here the Supremo learned how Eisenstein was cutting his new movie, Ivan the Terrible, Part Two, because the Tsar’s murders reminded him of Yezhov’s Terror “which he couldn’t recall without shuddering . . .” The message was clear: liberalism and ill-discipline threatened the State. The cost of Stalin’s victories were vast: almost 26 million were dead, another 26 million homeless. There was a raging famine, treason among the Caucasian peoples, a Ukrainian nationalist civil war, and dangerous liberalism among the Russians themselves. All these had to be solved with the traditional Bolshevik solution, Terror.

Before they turned to terrorizing Russia proper, Beria and the local boss, Khrushchev, were running a new war in the Ukraine where three nationalist armies were fighting Soviet forces. Then there was the dubious loyalty of the Caucasus and Crimea.

In February 1944, Beria proposed the deportation of the Moslem Chechen and Ingush. There had been cases of treason but most had been loyal. Nonetheless Stalin and the GKO agreed—though Mikoyan claimed that he objected to it. On 20 February, Beria, Kobulov and the deportations expert, Serov, arrived in Grozny along with 19,000 Chekists and 100,000 NKVD troops. On 23 February, the locals were ordered to gather in their squares, then suddenly arrested and piled into trains bound for the East. By 7 March, Beria reported to Stalin that 500,000 innocents were on their way.

Other peoples, the Karachai and Kalmyks, joined the Volga Germans who had been deported in 1941. Beria constantly expanded the net: “The Balkars are bandits and . . . attacked the Red Army,” he wrote to Stalin on 25 February. “If you agree, before my return to Moscow, I can take necessary measures to resettle the Balkars. I ask your orders.” Over 300,000 of these people were deported, but where to dump them all? Like the Nazis with their Jews, Stalin’s men had to distribute this unwanted human flotsam throughout their empire. Molotov suggested 40,000 in Kazakhstan, 14,000 somewhere else. Kaganovich found the trains. Andreyev, now running Agriculture, dealt with their farming equipment. Everyone was involved. When an official noticed that there were 1300 Kalmyks still living in Rostov, Molotov replied that they must be deported at once. Mikoyan may have disapproved but the capital of the Karachais, Karachaevsk, was now renamed after him. In the dry language of these bureaucratic notes, we can only glimpse the tragedy and suffering of this monumental crime.

Then Beria reported the treason of Tatars in the Crimea and soon 160,000 were on their way eastwards in forty-five trains: he listed their food allowance to Stalin but given the thousands who died, it is unlikely that they received most of it. Throughout the year, Beria kept finding more pockets of these poor people: on 20 May, there were “still German supporters in the Kabardin Republic after resettlement of Balkars” and he asked if he could “remove” another 2,467 people: “Agreed. J. Stalin” is written at the bottom. By the time he had finished, a triumphant Beria had removed 1.5 million people. Stalin approved 413 medals for Beria’s Chekists. More than a quarter of the deportees died, according to the NKVD, but as many as 530,000 perished en route or on arrival at the camps. For each of these peoples, this was an apocalypse that approached the Holocaust.

While these cattle cars of human cargo trundled eastwards, famine was raging in Russia, Central Asia and the Ukraine. In a replay of collectivization, Stalin sensed weakness in his Politburo. There are hints of disturbing things in the archives: in November 1943, Andreyev reported to Malenkov from Saratov that “things are very bad here . . . Yesterday driving from Stalingrad . . . I saw terrible sights . . .” On 22 November 1944, Beria reported to Stalin another case of cannibalism in the Urals when two women kidnapped and ate four children. Mikoyan and Andreyev suggested giving the peasants seeds.

“To Molotov and Mikoyan,” Stalin scrawled on their note, “I vote against. Mikoyan’s behaviour is anti-state . . . he has absolutely corrupted Andreyev. Patronage over Narkomzag [Commissariat of Supply] should be taken away from Mikoyan and given to Malenkov . . .” This was the beginning of a growing iciness between Stalin and Mikoyan that was to become increasingly dangerous.[35]

On 20 May 1944, Stalin met his generals to coordinate the vast summer offensive that would finally toss the Germans off Soviet territory. Much of the Ukraine was already liberated and the Leningrad siege finally lifted. Stalin proposed a single thrust towards Bobruisk to Rokossovsky, who knew two thrusts were required to avoid senseless casualties. But Stalin was set on just one. Rokossovsky, the tall and graceful half-Polish general who was favoured by Stalin yet had been tortured just before the war, was brave enough to insist on his own view.

“Go out and think it over again,” said Stalin, who later summoned him back: “Have you thought it through, General?” asked Stalin again.

“Yes sir, Comrade Stalin.”

“Well then . . . a single thrust?”—and Stalin marked it on the map. There was silence until Rokossovsky replied: “Two thrusts are more advisable, Comrade Stalin.” Again silence fell.

“Go out and think it over again. Don’t be stubborn, Rokossovsky.” The general again sat next door until he realized he was not alone: Molotov and Malenkov loomed over him. Rokossovsky stood up.

“Don’t forget where you are and with whom you’re talking, General,” Malenkov threatened him. “You’re disagreeing with Comrade Stalin.”

“You’ll have to agree, Rokossovsky,” added Molotov. “Agree—that’s all there is to it!” The general was summoned back into the study: “So which is better?” asked Stalin.

“Two,” answered Rokossovsky. Silence descended until Stalin asked:

“Can it be that two blows are really better?” Stalin accepted Rokossovsky’s plan. On 23 June, the offensive shattered the German forces. Minsk and then Lvov were recaptured. On 8 July, Zhukov found Stalin at Kuntsevo in “great gaiety.” As he ordered the advance on the Vistula, Stalin was determined to impose his own government on Poland so that it would never again threaten Russia: on 22 July, he established a Polish Committee under Boleslaw Bierut to form the new government.

“Hitler’s like a gambler staking his last coin!” exulted Stalin.

“Germany will try to make peace with Churchill and Roosevelt,” said Molotov.

“Right,” said Stalin, “but Roosevelt and Churchill won’t agree.” Then [36]the Poles threw a spanner into the works of the Grand Alliance.3

The Red Army offensive ground to an exhausted halt on the Vistula just east of Warsaw when, on 1 August, General Tadeusz Bor-Komorowski and the 20,000 patriots of the Polish Home Army rose against the Germans in the Warsaw Rising. But the patriots, in the words of one distinguished historian, aimed “not to help the Soviet advance but to forestall it.” Hitler ordered that Warsaw be razed, deploying a ghoulish crew of SS fanatics, convicts and Russian renegades to slaughter 225,000 civilians in one merciless inferno.

The extermination of the Home Army completed the “black work” of Katyn Forest for Stalin who had no interest in coming to their rescue. Yet the rising and, more particularly, the Western sympathy for it, sent Stalin into a spin. If its success threatened his Polish plans, then Anglo-American fury about its failure threatened the Grand Alliance.

On 1 August, Zhukov and Rokossovsky arrived to find Stalin “agitated,” pacing up to the maps and then striding off again, even putting down his unlit pipe, always a storm petrel. Stalin pressured the generals— could their armies advance? Zhukov and Rokossovsky said they must rest. Stalin seemed angry. Beria and Molotov threatened them. Stalin sent the generals into the library next door where they nervously discussed their plight. Rokossovsky thought Beria was inciting Stalin. Things could end badly: “I know very well what Beria is capable of,” whispered Rokossovsky, ultra-cautious as the son of a Polish officer. “I’ve been in his prisons.” Twenty minutes later, Malenkov appeared and claimed he was supporting the generals. There would be no rescue of Warsaw.

Zhukov suspected the Supremo had set up this charade as an alibi. But Soviet forces were exhausted: as Rokossovsky told a Western journalist, “The rising would have made sense only if we were on the point of taking Warsaw. That point had not been reached at any stage . . . We were pushed back.” Meanwhile, as Churchill and Roosevelt exerted intense pressure on their ally to aid the Poles, Stalin coolly claimed that their account of the rising was “greatly exaggerated.” By the time his armies pushed into Poland, Hungary and Romania, it was much too late for the patriots of Warsaw.[37]

Seven days after the surrender of the Home Army, Churchill arrived in Moscow to divide up the spoils of Eastern Europe. Stalin had stated his real view to Molotov in 1942: “The question of borders will be decided by force.” At Stalin’s Kremlin flat, Churchill, who was this time staying in a town house, proposed a “naughty document” to list their interests in the small countries by percentage. The Soviet record in Stalin’s own archives showed that, just as Roosevelt had undermined Churchill at Teheran, so now the Englishman opened this conversation by saying that the “Americans including the President would be shocked by the division of Europe into spheres of influence.” In Romania, Russia had 90 percent, Britain 10 percent; in Greece, Britain had 90 percent, Russia 10 percent. Stalin ticked it.

“Might it not be thought cynical if it seemed we’d disposed of these issues, so fateful to millions of people, in such an offhand manner?” said Churchill, half guilty at, and half revelling in, the arrogance of the Great Powers.

“No, you keep it,” replied Stalin. The document was taken seriously enough for Eden and Molotov to negotiate for two more days about the percentage of Soviet influence in Bulgaria and Hungary, both raised to 80 percent, and Stalin did stick to his part of the deal on Greece but that was because it suited him. The percentages agreement was, from Stalin’s point of view, surely a bemusing attempt to negotiate what was already a fait accompli.

The climax of the visit was Stalin’s first public appearance at the Bolshoi since the war began, accompanied by Churchill, Molotov, Harriman and his daughter Kathleen. When they arrived at the theatre, the lights were already dimmed—Stalin usually slipped in after the play had started. When the lights went up and the audience saw Stalin and Churchill, there were “thunderous cheers and clapping.” Stalin withdrew modestly but Churchill sent Vyshinsky to bring him back. The two stood there together, beaming amid cheering so loud it was “like a cloudburst on a tin roof.” Stalin and Molotov then shepherded their guests into the avant-loge where a dinner for twelve was laid out. Quaffing champagne, Stalin performed like a roguish old satyr, charming and chilling his guests in equal parts. When Molotov raised his glass to the “great leader,” Stalin quipped: “I thought he was going to say something new about me.” Someone joked that the Big Three were like the Trinity.

“If that’s so,” said Stalin, “Churchill must be the Holy Ghost. He flies about so much.”[38] When Churchill finally left on 19 October, having made little progress over Poland, Stalin personally came to the airport to see him off, waving his handkerchief.[39]

Stalin was now enjoying the power of victory—and the bullying showman who emerged was not a pretty sight. His respectful gaiety with Churchill metamorphosed into threatening drunkenness with the less powerful such as Charles de Gaulle. In December, the Frenchman visited Moscow to sign a treaty of alliance and mutual assistance. In return, Stalin wanted French recognition of Bierut’s Polish government which de Gaulle refused to give. By the time of the banquet, the negotiations were stuck. This did not stop Stalin getting swaggeringly drunk, to the horror of the gloomy de Gaulle. Stalin complained to Harriman that de Gaulle was “an awkward and clumsy man,” but that did not matter because they “must drink more wine and then everything will straighten out.”

Stalin, swigging champagne, took over the toasts from Molotov. After praising Roosevelt and Churchill, while pointedly ignoring de Gaulle, Stalin embarked on a terrifying gallows tour of his entourage: he toasted Kaganovich, “a brave man. He knows that if the trains do not arrive on time”—he paused—“we shall shoot him!” Then: “Come here!” Kaganovich rose and they clinked glasses jovially. Then Stalin lauded Air Force Commander Novikov, this “good Marshal, let’s drink to him. And if he doesn’t do his job properly, we’ll hang him.” (Novikov would soon be arrested and tortured.) Then he spotted Khrulev: “He’d better do his best, or he’ll be hanged for it, that’s the custom in our country!” Again: “Come here!” Noticing the distaste on de Gaulle’s face, Stalin chuckled: “People call me a monster, but as you see, I make a joke of it. Maybe I’m not horrible after all.”

Molotov collared his French opposite number, Bidault, with whom he began arguing over the treaty. Stalin gestured at them, calling out to Bulganin: “Bring the machine guns. Let’s liquidate the diplomats.” Leading his guests out for coffee and movies, Stalin “kept hugging the French and lurching around,” noticed Khrushchev who was also present but had avoided a threatening toast. He was “completely drunk.” While the diplomats negotiated, Stalin drank more champagne. Finally in the early hours, when de Gaulle had gone to bed, the Russians suddenly agreed to sign the treaty without recognition of Bierut. De Gaulle was rushed back into the Kremlin where Stalin first asked him to sign the original treaty. When de Gaulle angrily retorted: “France has been insulted,” Stalin cheerfully called for the new draft which was then signed at 6:30 a.m.

As the fastidious Frenchman left, Stalin called for his interpreter and laughed: “You know too much. I’d better send you to Siberia!” De Gaulle looked back one last time: “I saw Stalin sitting alone at a table. He had started eating again.”

The same exuberant victor presided over a series of dinners and banquets for the visiting Yugoslavs that winter. Stalin was outraged that the Yugoslav Politburo member Milovan Djilas had complained about the rape and pillage of the Red Army. Stalin regarded any criticism of the army as an attack on himself. He drunkenly lectured the Yugoslavs about his army “which pushed its way across thousands of miles” only to be attacked “by none other than Djilas! Djilas whom I received so well!” In the absence of the man himself, Djilas’s wife, Mitra Mitrovic, one of the delegates, caught his eye and he “proposed toasts, joked, teased, wept” before kissing her repeatedly, jesting salaciously: “I’ll kiss you even if the Yugoslavs and Djilas accuse me of having raped you!”

When Stalin invited some American officials to the Kremlin cinema, he moved to sit between the leading Westerners but then he turned round to Kavtaradze: “Come on, boy, sit next to me!”

“How can I?” answered Kavtaradze. “You’ve guests.”

Stalin waved his hand, adding in Georgian: “Fuck them!”

That New Year’s Eve, Stalin and his magnates, along with General Khrulev, saw in 1945 with an all-night, singing and dancing Bacchanal.[40]

 

 

43. The Swaggering Conqueror: Yalta and Berlin

When Stalin eyed the great prize of Berlin, he decided to change the way he ran the war: there would be no more Stavka representatives in charge of fronts. Henceforth, the Supremo would command directly.

Zhukov was to command the First Belorussian Front that was to fight the five hundred miles to Berlin. Six million Soviet soldiers were massed for the Vistula–Oder offensive. Two weeks later, Koniev was plunging into the “gold” of industrial Silesia, Zhukov had expelled the Germans from central Poland, and Malinovsky was fighting frenziedly for Budapest. The Second and Third Belorussian Fronts broke into East Prussia, Germany itself, in a fiesta of vengeance: two million German women were to be raped in the coming months. Russian soldiers even raped Russian women newly liberated from Nazi camps. Stalin cared little about this, telling Djilas: “You have of course read Dostoevsky? Do you see what a complicated thing is man’s soul . . . ? Well then, imagine a man who has fought from Stalingrad to Belgrade—over thousands of kilometres of his own devastated land, across the dead bodies of his comrades and dearest ones? How can such a man react normally? And what is so awful about his having fun with a woman after such horrors?”

Roosevelt and Churchill had been discussing the next Big Three meeting ever since July 1944. Stalin was reluctant: when, in September, Harriman suggested a meeting in the Mediterranean, Stalin retorted that his doctors had told him “any change of climate would have a bad effect,” this from a man who distrusted doctors intensely. Molotov could go instead. Molotov politely insisted that he could never replace Marshal Stalin.

“You’re too modest,” said Stalin drily. They agreed on Yalta. By 29 January, Zhukov was on the Oder. As German forces counter-attacked the Soviet bridgeheads, Roosevelt and Churchill were being greeted on 3 February at Saki air-force base in the Crimea by Molotov, in stiff white collar, black coat and fur hat, and Vyshinsky, resplendent in his diplomatic uniform, who hosted a “magnificent luncheon” on their way to Yalta.[41]

Stalin himself had not yet left Moscow but he had approved Beria’s arrangements in a memorandum so secret that key names were left out and only filled in by hand. The conference would be guarded by four NKVD regiments and defended by arrays of AA guns and 160 fighter planes. Stalin’s security was described thus: “For the guarding of the chief of the Soviet delegation, besides the bodyguards under Comrade Vlasik, there are additionally 100 operative workers and a special detachment of 500 from NKVD regiments.” In other words, Stalin himself had a bodyguard of about 620 men but in addition, there were two circles of guards by day, three circles by night, and guard dogs. Five districts spanning twenty kilometres had been “purged of suspicious elements”—74,000 people had been checked and 835 arrested. With its towns deserted and ruined after the depredations of the Nazis and the deportation of the Tartars, it was no wonder Churchill dubbed Yalta “The Riviera of Hades.”

On Sunday morning, 4 February, Stalin boarded his green railway car, accompanied by Poskrebyshev and Vlasik, travelling south via Kharkov. His residence, the Yusupov Palace, once the home of the Croesian transvestite prince who had assassinated Rasputin, was ready for the Soviet delegation with its twenty rooms and its 77-square-foot hall. Everything had been brought down from Moscow including plates, cutlery and the trusty waiters of the Metropol and National hotels. Special bakeries made bread and special fishermen delivered fresh fish. “A special ‘Vch’ high frequency telephone and Baudot telegraph as well as an automatic telephone station of 20 numbers . . . possible to increase to 50” had been set up so that Stalin could “call Moscow, the fronts, and all towns.” He could avail himself of a bomb shelter that could withstand 500kg bombs.

Stalin immediately received his delegates in the study, Beria’s room being almost next door, while the younger diplomats stayed in the adjoining wing. Sudoplatov delivered psychological portraits of the Western leaders, Molotov evaluated intelligence and again, Sergo Beria claimed he was on bugging duty. This time, they even used positional directional microphones to listen to FDR as he was wheeled outside.

At 3 p.m., Stalin[42] called on Churchill at his residence, the fantastical palace of Prince Michael Vorontsov, an Anglophile who had created a unique architectural pot-pourri of Scottish baronial, neo-Gothic and Moorish Arabesque. He then drove to Roosevelt’s white granite Livadia Palace, built in 1911 as the summer home of the last Tsar.[43] At dinner that night, Roosevelt misjudged Stalin’s prickly self-image when he confided that his nickname was “Uncle Joe.” Stalin was offended, muttering, “When can I leave this table?”

He was assured it was a joke. At 4 p.m. next day, the conference opened in the Livadia’s ballroom. Sitting between Molotov and Maisky, chain-smoking cigarettes, Stalin greatly impressed the young Andrei Gromyko, his Ambassador to America who later became Brezhnev’s perennial Foreign Minister: he “missed nothing” and worked “with no papers, no notes,” using a “memory like a computer.” It was during these plenary meetings that Stalin delivered his most famous one-liner. As always with his jokes, he repeated it frequently and it entered the political vernacular as an expression of force over sentiment. They were discussing the Pope.

“Let’s make him our ally,” proposed Churchill.

“All right,” smiled Stalin, “but as you know, gentlemen, war is waged with soldiers, guns, tanks. How many divisions has the Pope? If he tells us . . . let him become our ally.”‡

In the evenings, Stalin held little parties to meet his entourage, where Gromyko noticed how he “exchanged a few words with each member,” and moved from group to group, making jokes, remembering all fifty-three delegates by name. There were meetings every morning and evening: he was often crushing to his advisers if they did not do their job. Hugh Lunghi, once again interpreting at the conference, heard him saying, “I don’t trust Vyshinsky but with him all things are possible. He’ll jump whichever way we tell him.” Vyshinsky reacted to Stalin “like a frightened hound.”

When Roosevelt was ill, Stalin, Molotov and Gromyko visited him for twenty minutes. Afterwards, coming down the stairs, “Stalin suddenly stopped, took the pipe out of his pocket, filled it unhurriedly and as if to himself said quietly, ‘Why did nature have to punish him so? Is he any worse than other people?’ ”[44]

He had always distrusted Churchill but Roosevelt seemed to fascinate him. “Tell me,” he asked Gromyko, “what do you think of Roosevelt? Is he clever?” Stalin did not hide his fondness for FDR from Gromyko which amazed the young diplomat because his character was so harsh that he “rarely bestowed his sympathy on anyone from another social system.” Only occasionally did he “give way to positive human emotions.”

The next day, 6 February, they met to discuss the painful subject of Poland and the world organization that would become the UN. Russia would take eastern slices of Poland in exchange for grants of German territory in the west. Stalin assented only to include a few Polish nationalists in his Communist-dominated government. When FDR said the Polish elections had to be “beyond question like Caesar’s wife,” Stalin quipped,

“They said that about her but she had her sins.” Stalin explained the Russian obsession with Poland: “Throughout history, Poland has served as a corridor for enemies coming to attack Russia”—hence he wanted a strong Poland. If Beria’s son can be believed, his father came into his room that day saying, “Joseph Vissarionovich has not moved an inch on Poland.” They approved the three zones of occupation in a demilitarized and de-Nazified Germany. The Americans were pleased by Stalin’s repeated promise to intervene against Japan, agreeing to his demands for Sakhalin and the Kurile Islands.

On the 8th, after another meeting, they dined with Stalin at the Yusupov Palace where their opening speeches became more and more emotional as the Big Three, all aged by the war, contemplated their victory. Stalin rose to the occasion, toasting Churchill, “a man who is born once in a hundred years, and who bravely held up the banner of Great Britain. I’ve said what I feel, what I have in my heart, and of what I’m conscious.” Stalin was “in the very best of form,” wrote Brooke, “and was full of fun and good humour.” Stalin, who fooled no one when he described himself as a “naïve . . . garrulous old man,” ominously toasted the generals “who are recognized only during a war and whose services after the war are quickly forgotten. After the war, their prestige goes down and the ladies turn their back on them.” The generals did not yet realize he meant to forget them himself.

This epic dinner boasted one unusual guest: Stalin invited a delighted Beria, who was beginning to find his secret role constricting. Roosevelt noticed him and asked Stalin: “Who’s that in the pince-nez opposite Ambassador Gromyko?”

“Ah, that one. That’s our Himmler,” replied Stalin with deliberate malice. “That’s Beria.” The secret policeman “said nothing, just smiled, showing his yellow teeth” but “it must have cut him to the quick,” wrote his son, who knew how he longed to step onto the world stage. Roosevelt was upset by this, observed Gromyko, especially since Beria heard it too. The Americans examined this mysterious figure with fascination: “He’s little and fat with thick lenses which give him a sinister look but quite genial,” said Kathleen Harriman while Bohlen thought him “plump, pale with pince-nez like a schoolmaster.” The sex-obsessed Beria was soon discussing the sex life of fishes with the boozy, womanizing Sir Archibald Clark Kerr. When he was thoroughly drunk, Sir Archibald stood up and toasted Beria—“the man who looks after our bodies,” a compliment that was not only inappropriate but bungled. Churchill considered Beria the wrong sort of friend for HM Ambassador: “No, Archie, none of that. Be careful,” he waved his finger.

On 10 February, at Churchill’s dinner, Stalin proposed George VI’s health with a proviso that he had always been against kings because he was on the side of the people. Churchill, somewhat irritated, suggested to Molotov that in future he should just propose a toast to the “three Heads of State.” With only twelve or so at dinner, they discussed the upcoming British elections, which Stalin was sure Churchill would win: “Who could be a better leader than he who won the victory?” Churchill explained there were two parties.

“One party is much better,” Stalin said. When they talked about Germany, Stalin regaled them with a story about the country’s “unreasonable sense of discipline” which he had told repeatedly to his own circle. When he arrived in Leipzig for a Communist conference, the Germans had arrived at the station but found no ticket collector so they waited for two hours on the platform until he arrived.

After a final dinner in the Tsar’s billiard room at Livadia, Molotov escorted Roosevelt back to Saki, getting onto the presidential plane, the Sacred Cow, to say goodbye.

Churchill spent the night on the Franconia in Sebastopol harbour, flying out next day. Stalin was already on his train to Moscow. Budapest fell two days later.[45]

Stalin had won virtually all he wanted from the Allies and this is usually blamed on Roosevelt’s illness and susceptibility to Stalinist charm. Both Westerners stand accused of “selling out Eastern Europe to Stalin.”[46] Roosevelt’s courtship of Stalin and discourtesy to Churchill were misguided. FDR was certainly ill and exhausted. But Stalin always believed that force would decide who ruled Eastern Europe which was occupied by 10 million Soviet soldiers. He himself told an anecdote after the war which reveals his view of Yalta. “Churchill, Roosevelt and Stalin went hunting,” Stalin said. “They finally killed their bear. Churchill said, ‘I’ll take the bearskin. Let Roosevelt and Stalin divide the meat.’ Roosevelt said, ‘No, I’ll take the skin. Let Churchill and Stalin divide the meat.’ Stalin remained silent so Churchill and Roosevelt asked him: ‘Mister Stalin, what do you say?’ Stalin simply replied, ‘The bear belongs to me— after all, I killed it.’ ” The bear is Hitler, the bearskin is Eastern Europe.[47]

On 8 March, amid operations to clean up Pomerania, Stalin summoned Zhukov to Kuntsevo for a strange meeting that marked the apotheosis of their close, touchy partnership. The Supremo was ill and “greatly over-exhausted.” He seemed depressed. “He had worked too much and slept too little,” thought Zhukov. The Battle for Berlin was his last great effort. Afterwards, he could no longer sustain that tempo of work. He was not alone: Roosevelt was dying; Hitler almost senile; Churchill often ill. Total war took a total toll on its warlords. The Stalin who emerged from the war was both more sentimental and also more deadly.

“Let’s stretch our legs a little, I feel sort of limp,” said Stalin. As they walked, Stalin talked about his childhood for an hour. “Let’s get back and have tea. I want to talk something over with you.” Encouraged by this surprising intimacy, Zhukov asked about Yakov: “Have you heard about his fate?”

Stalin did not answer. His son Yakov tormented him.

After about a hundred steps in silence, he answered in a “subdued voice”: “Yakov won’t be able to get out of captivity. They’ll shoot him, the killers. From what we know, they’re keeping him separately . . . and persuading him to betray his country.” Stalin was silent again, then he said, “No, Yakov would prefer any kind of death to betraying the Motherland.” He was proud of his son at last but did not know he had been dead for almost two years. Stalin did not eat but sat at table: “What a terrible war. How many lives of our people borne away. There’ll probably be few families who haven’t lost someone dear to them.” He talked about how he liked Roosevelt. Yalta had been a success.

Just then Poskrebyshev arrived with his bag of papers and Stalin turned to Berlin: “Go to Stavka and look at the calculations for the Berlin operation . . .” Three weeks later, on the morning of 1 April, Stalin held a conference with his two most aggressive marshals, Zhukov of the First Belorussian Front and Koniev of the First Ukrainian, at the Little Corner. “Well. Who’s going to take Berlin: we or the Allies?”

“It’s we who’ll take Berlin!” barked Koniev before Zhukov could even answer.

“So that’s the sort of man you are,” Stalin grinned approvingly. Zhukov was to assault Berlin from the Oder bridgeheads over the Seelow Heights; Koniev to push towards Leipzig and Dresden, with his northern flank thrusting towards southern Berlin parallel to Zhukov. The Supremo of ambiguity allowed them both to believe that they could take Berlin: “without saying a word,” Stalin drew the demarcation line between the fronts into Berlin—then stopped and erased the line to the south of Berlin. Koniev understood this allowed him to join in the storming of Berlin—if he could. “Whoever breaks in first,” Stalin teased them, “let him take Berlin.” That very day, in what one historian has described as “the greatest April Fool in modern history,” Stalin reassured Eisenhower that “Berlin has lost its former strategic importance.” Two days later, the two marshals actually raced to the airport, their planes taking off within two minutes of each other. Such, Koniev admitted, was “their passionate desire” to take the prize.

As they were marshalling their forces, Roosevelt died, the end of an era for Stalin. Their entente had won his paltry trust and roused his meagre human sympathy. Molotov “seemed deeply moved and disturbed.” Harriman had “never heard Molotov talk so earnestly.” Stalin, “deeply distressed,” received Harriman, holding his hand for thirty seconds. Years later, Stalin, on holiday at his New Athos dacha, judged “Roosevelt was a great statesman, a clever, educated, far-sighted and liberal leader who prolonged the life of capitalism . . .”

At 5 a.m. on 16 April, Zhukov unleashed a barrage of 14,600 guns against the Seelow Heights. The two marshals wielded 2.5 million men, 41,600 guns, 6,250 tanks and 7,500 aircraft, “the largest concentration of firepower ever assembled.” But the Heights were a well-defended obstacle. Zhukov’s losses were punishing. At midnight, he telephoned Stalin, who taunted him: “So you’ve underestimated the enemy on the Berlin axis? Things have started more successfully for Koniev.”

The Supremo then phoned Koniev: “Things are pretty hard with Zhukov. He’s still hammering at the defences.” Stalin stopped. Koniev, who understood the workings of the Supremo, kept silent until Stalin asked: “Is it possible to transfer Zhukov’s tank forces and send them to Berlin through the gap on your front?” Koniev replied excitedly that his own tank forces could turn on Berlin. Stalin checked the map. “I agree. Turn your tank armies on Berlin.” Zhukov was determined to take Berlin himself: ignoring tank lore, he stormed the Heights with tanks which became stuck in a churning swamp of pulverized earth and corpses. He lost 30,000 men. Stalin did not call him for three days.

On 20 April, Zhukov reached Berlin’s eastern suburbs. Both marshals fought, house by house, street by street, towards Hitler’s Chancellery. On the 25th, Koniev ordered an assault towards the Reichstag. Three hundred yards from the Reichstag building, Chuikov, who was leading Zhukov’s thrust, encountered Russian forces—Koniev’s tanks. Zhukov himself sped up and shouted at Rybalko, Koniev’s tank commander: “Why have you appeared here?”

Koniev, disappointed, swerved west, leaving the Reichstag to Zhukov, but Stalin offered another prize: “Who’s going to take Prague?”

Stalin waited at Kuntsevo, only appearing in the office for a couple of hours around midnight each day. On 28 April, in the Führerbunker, Hitler married Eva Braun, dictated his testament, and they drank champagne.[48] Two days later, as Zhukov pushed closer, Hitler tested cyanide ampoules on his Alsatian, Blondi. Around 3:15 p.m., to the distant buzz of partying upstairs, Hitler committed suicide, shooting himself in the head. Eva took poison. Goebbels and Bormann made a final Hitler salute before the pyre of Hitler’s body in the Chancellery garden. At 7:30 p.m., an unknowing Stalin arrived at the office to meet Malenkov and Vyshinsky for forty-five minutes before returning to Kuntsevo.[49]

In the early hours of May Day, the German Chief of Staff visited Chuikov, announcing Hitler’s death and requesting a cease-fire. Ironically, this was Hans Krebs, the tall German officer whom Stalin, seeing off the Japanese in April 1941, had told: “We shall remain friends.” Chuikov refused a cease-fire. Krebs left and committed suicide. In a reverse of 22 June 1941, Zhukov, eager to break this world-historical news, telephoned Kuntsevo. Once again, the security refused to help.

“Comrade Stalin’s just gone to bed,” replied General Vlasik.

“Please wake him,” retorted Zhukov. “The matter’s urgent and cannot wait until morning.”

Stalin picked up the phone and heard that Hitler was dead.

“So that’s the end of the bastard.”


[1] Stalin at war: sleeps in clothes, I. Orlov in Rybin, Stalin v Oktyabre 1941, p. 13. Shtemenko in Bialer (ed.), pp. 351–9. TsAMO 3.11.556.13.247–8. Stalin to Vasilevsky, 23 Aug. 1943. Vasilevsky, Jukes in Stalin’s Generals, pp. 279, 283. Zhdanov: RGASPI 558.11.492.86. Stalin and Molotov talk to Zhdanov 1 Dec. 1941. Antonov: green files: Shtemenko in Bialer (ed.), pp. 351–8. Antonov, “dark handsome lithe” Djilas, p. 109. Anteroom: Starinov in Bialer (ed.), pp. 456–7. I. V. Kovalev in Volkogonov, p. 419. Zhukov by Simonov in Volkogonov, p. 385. “Wise decision, Comrade Stalin,” Volkogonov, pp. 390–1. “Frank discussions, Stalin listened,” Mikoyan, pp. 463–5. Mikoyan in Kumanev (ed.), p. 70. “I don’t think so”: Golovanov quoted in MR, p. 306. Stalin style: Nikolai Baibakov. Voznesensky: Vasilevsky, in Kumanev (ed.), pp. 237–8. Bafflement: Belov in Bialer (ed.), p. 295. Kuznetsov in Bialer (ed.), p. 349, inc., “his associates never argued . . .” Zhukov in Bialer (ed.), pp. 259, 267, Belov (haggard, sallow) p. 295, Shtemenko, p. 352. “Bag of bones”—Khrushchev, Glasnost, p. 65. Pipes: RGASPI 558.11.775.110, Maisky to Stalin 18 Aug. 1943. Stalin as military expert: Mikoyan, pp. 463–5; KR I, p. 145; Zhukov (English ed.), pp. 281–4, Khrulev refuses railways: Khrulev in Kumanev (ed.), pp. 349–50. “Don’t lose any more Mikoyans”: Stepan M, p. 86. Stalin also ordered the writer Alexei Tolstoy to be kept away from the front: Brooks, Thank You C. Stalin, p. 185.

[2] Fear: Zhukov, Anfilov in Stalin’s Generals, p. 347. Golikov denounces Yeremenko: RGASPI 558.11.725.180–2. Golikov to Stalin, 12 Sept. 1942. Voronov in Bialer (ed.), pp. 457–9. Mekhlis, p. 99. Mikoyan, pp. 396–9. KR I, pp. 196, 214, 218, 226–7; during the Battle of Kiev, V. T. Sergienko repeatedly informed on Khrushchev to Stalin, p. 196. Rzheshevsky, Koniev in Stalin’s Generals, p. 94. Yaroslav: MR, p. 24. Khrulev: N. Antipenko. “Tyl Fronta,” Novy Mir, vol. 8.

[3] His commissars included Boris Vannikov and I.F. Tevosian, both arrested and released, and D. F. Ustinov who was just thirty-three and would rise to be the ultimate master of the Soviet military-industrial complex, becoming a CC Secretary, Marshal—and the Defence Minister who would order the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979.

[4] Magnates at war: Mikoyan, pp. 394, 400, 463–4. Stepan M, p. 110. On Zhdanov: 900 Days, p. 542. KR I, p. 155. Beria, pp. 111, 118: Lesser Terror, p. 73. Bugging: Sudoplatov, p. 328. Zhukov officers arrested: Spahr, Zhukov, p. 197: V. S. Golushkevich. Beria: Mikoyan, p. 424. For example of generals’ “coffee with Beria,” see The Times, 18 Jan. 2003, “Beria’s Terror Files are opened.” On sacking Kaganovich: Beria A fair: Andreyev’s speech, p. 154. Khrulev, Kumanev (ed.), pp. 349–50. Stalin admires Kaganovich: Mgeladze, pp. 203–4. Labour statistics: Anne Applebaum,GULAG, pp. 521–5.

[5] RGASPI 558.11.490.7–49: the Stalingrad press releases are nos. 34–49. Tobacco: Mgeladze, p. 40. When his former secretary wrote to him asking if he could come to Moscow, it was Stalin himself who replied: “You can come to Moscow. Stalin.” RGASPI 558.11.726.4–6, Dvinsky to Stalin 25 July 1942.

[6] Shtemenko in Bailer (ed.), pp. 350–7. Kaganovich sleepless nights: Kovalev, Volkogonov, p. 419. Rest time: Shtemenko in Bialer (ed.), pp. 352–3. Jukes, Vasilevsky in Stalin’s Generals, pp. 279–80. Marshal of Artillery Yakovlev story: Artyom Sergeev. Hours of work for Poskrebyshev: Natalya Poskrebysheva.

[7] Mikoyan, pp. 463–4. Dinners, Khrushchev, Glasnost, p. 66. Tea ritual: Kovalev in Volkogonov, pp. 419, 471.

[8] Zhukov II, pp. 307–42. Volkogonov, p. 469. S. S. Smirnov, Marshal Zhukov: kakim my ego pomnim, p. 245. Overy, pp. 177–85. Erickson, Berlin, 2, pp. 1–27. Beevor, Stalingrad, pp. 292–3, 300–1, 320–3. RGASPI 558.11.490.49, Stalin on Battle of Stalingrad, Sovinformburo.

[9] This confidence was immediately reflected in Stalin’s ungrateful treatment of his Western allies despite their gallantry in risking their lives to deliver aid to Russia: Mikoyan reported that the British had brought radio equipment on their Naval Mission in Murmansk “without documentation. Either we should ask them to take it back or give it to us. I ask directions.” Molotov simply wrote “Agreed.” But Stalin grumpily scribbled in his blue crayon: “Comrade Molotov agreed—while Mikoyan suggested nothing!” As for the Royal Navy’s radio: “I propose confiscate the equipment as contraband!”

[10] On 16 April 1943, Stalin once again split the huge NKVD into two separate agencies—the NKGB under Merkulov, containing the State Security police, and the NKVD under Beria that controlled the normal police and the huge slave labour camps. However, Beria remained curator or overlord of both “Organs.”

[11] Stalin treats British radio as contraband: RGASPI 558.11.765.105, Mikoyan to Stalin and Molotov 5 Jan. 1943; Stalin to Molotov, Beria, Malenkov and Mikoyan 21 Jan. 1943. Erickson, Berlin, pp. 38–41. Brooks, Thank You, p. 120. I.I. Kuznetsov, “Stalin’s Minister VI Abakumov,” Slavic Military Studies, vol. 12, no. 1, Mar. 1999, pp. 149–59. Beria, p. 125.

[12] Yakov’s daughter Gulia believes Stalin “did the right thing.” Svetlana Stalin compares his behaviour to Margaret Thatcher’s refusal to negotiate with the terrorists holding Terry Waite: “We don’t talk to those people.” Yakov was not the only one of Stalin’s family in encirclements: Artyom Sergeev was caught too—but he broke out and made it back to Moscow where he told his story to Mikoyan. He was sent to a Deputy Defence Commissar who told him: “You’re a Lieutenant and I’m Deputy Commissar. You mustn’t repeat this to anyone more senior. Forget it all. There are those who might not understand and this could ruin your life so write and sign here: ‘I was not there and I saw nothing.’ ”

[13] Yakov: MR, p. 209. Paulus swap and “I had to refuse . . . I would have stopped being Stalin,” Mgeladze, pp. 116, 198–9. Svetlana RR. Svetlana, Twenty Letters, pp. 168–77. Mikoyan, p. 362. Artyom Sergeev. On Stalin’s cursing: “The fool”— Vasily Stalin via Stepan Mikoyan. Arrest of Julia: Gulia Djugashvili, Ded, Otets, Mat i Drugie, pp. 28–9. Volkogonov, pp. 429, 609: TsAMO 7.11.250.39.37. Radzinsky, p. 457. One prisoner enough for me: Vasily Stalin via Vladimir Alliluyev (Redens).

[14] Their age difference was twenty-four years, not much more than that between Stalin and Nadya in 1918 but this was a parallel that may have intensified his anger. The two slaps are not Stalin’s greatest crimes. Kapler’s five years were cruel but he was fortunate not to be quietly shot. On his release in 1948, he returned against his parole to Moscow, was rearrested and sentenced to another five years in the mines. He returned after Stalin’s death, remarried and was then reunited with Svetlana with whom he finally enjoyed a passionate affair. He died in 1979.

[15] Vasily: Sudoplatov, p. 151. Stepan M, pp. 74–85 and interviews. Vasily: “short red-haired . . .” Zarubina, pp. 30–1. Svetlana: Crown Prince, Twenty Letters, pp. 176–8, 221–9. Good person who would give away last shirt: Sergo B, p. 154. Vasily’s wife-beating, drunken flight, Svetlana’s early maturity and love affair: Martha Peshkova. Full Colonel: Lesser Terror, p. 179. Protected from fighting; Zubalovo Heaven: Leonid Redens. Life at Kuibyshev: Svetlana, Twenty Letters, pp. 172–3. Galina Bourdonovskaya Stalin: pretty blonde: interview Yuri Soloviev. KGB school: Svetlana RR. Erickson, Berlin, pp. 49–51. Svetlana and Kapler: Kapler interviewed by Biagi, pp. 15–34. Vladimir Alliluyev. Leonid Redens. Yury Soloviev. Svetlana shows Kapler’s articles, Kapler playing, brooch, screenplay: Martha Peshkova. Kira Alliluyeva. Svetlana RR: Vasily’s dirty talk, Kapler could talk, sex outside marriage, the greatest teacher, my father overreacted. Kapler’s appeal, 27 Jan. 1944, in Volkogonov, p. 154. Vasily’s punishment Feb. 1943: Stepan M, pp. 83–6. Vasily after dismissal: Vasily, p. 108. Volkogonov, p. 468. Stepan M, pp. 89–90. TsAMO 132.2642.230.15, Stalin to Novikov 26 May 1943. On Vasily’s Rolls-Royce and shooting out the tyres: Yury Soloviev.

[16] Kursk: Erickson, Berlin, 2, pp. 65–72, 97, 99–120. Overy, pp. 198–211: “hand to hand combat” is Overy’s excellent phrase. Mikoyan, p. 452. Zhukov III, pp. 3–31, 43–57. Shtemenko in Bialer (ed.), pp. 361–7. Zhukov, “Na Kurskaya Duge,” VIZh, Aug. 1967, pp. 70–1. Slave labour: M. Parrish, review essay, Slavic Military Studies, vol. 11, no. 2, June 1998, pp. 172–8. Yakovlev in Bialer (ed.), pp. 381–2. Seaton, pp. 179–83. On tank numbers: M. Myagkov, in Miroviye voiny XX veka, bk. 3, pp. 159–61: Central and Voronezh Fronts had 1.3m men and 3,400 tanks but Steppe Front had a further 500,000 men and 1,400 tanks.

[17] In 1941, Leonid had shouted that Stalin was far from being “the greatest one and father of peoples”—he was a “damned scoundrel” and Kirov’s murderer!

[18] Her mother served five years in a Mordovia labour camp, followed by five years in exile. When she returned in 1954, Khrushchev refused to meet her. Julia only met her mother again in 1956. They were strangers—and remain so: the mother is still alive, living in Kiev. In 1995, a plane was discovered near Smolensk containing the skeleton of a pilot still in his goggles and helmet: it was probably Leonid.

[19] Leonid Khrushchev: Interviews with the following: Sergo and Stepan Mikoyan. Julia Khrushcheva: Khrushchev’s humiliation, never knew parents; Natalya Poskrebysheva. Artyom Sergeev. Igor Malenkov. Volya Malenkova. Martha Peshkova. Leonid Khrushchev denounces Stalin: N. Vashchenko, Za Grani Istorii. S. Khrushchev, Superpower, pp. 21–4. MR, p. 352: Stalin would not pardon LK. Lesser Terror, p. 178. Rybin, Oktyabre 1941; p. 3, repeats the rumour of Vlasovite. Stepan M, p. 76. Vasilieva, Kremlevskie Zheny, p. 387. Y. Izumov, “Why Khrushchev took revenge on Stalin,” Dosye Glasnost, no. 12, 2001. Taubman, Khrushchev, Man and Era, pp. 155–60.

[20] Mikoyan sons: Sergo Mikoyan. Stepan Mikoyan. Vano Mikoyan in Vasilieva, Kremlevskie Zheny, pp. 326–7. Stepan M, pp. 99–100. Leonid Redens was also exiled to Central Asia. Don’t lose any more Mikoyans: Vasily Stalin via Stepan M, p. 86.

[21] This scene resembles the moment when Hitler, in his train, found himself looking into a hospital train on its way back from the Eastern Front: he and the wounded stared at each other for a second before he ordered the blinds to be closed.

[22] Mikoyan, p. 563. Rybin, Ryadom, pp. 39–42, the greatcoat, supper, fall of Orel and Belgorod. Rybin, Oktyabre 1941, pp. 13–14. NKVD in village/money for lady: M. Smirtukov in Vlast, 2000, no. 25, p. 46. Voronov in Bialer (ed.), pp. 438–9. Erickson, Berlin, pp. 116–8. Medal: GARF 7523.149.5.1, Yeremenko to GKO cc Kalinin, Molotov, Makenkov, Beria 21 Sept. 1943. Overy, p. 211. Shtemenko in Bailer (ed.), pp. 361–7. Seaton, pp. 189–92. Volkogonov, p. 481.

[23] When they sang “the Fascist hordes were beaten, are beaten and will be beaten,” they started laughing because the words “are beaten” in Russian sounded like “are fucking us” when sung. Laughing, they quickly changed the words to “We’ll beat them to death and we’ll beat them.” Marshal Voroshilov returned from his meetings and “liked it very very much” so they told him about the problem with the “fucking” and the “defeating.” This of course greatly appealed to Voroshilov’s earthy cavalryman’s humour: “Wonderful for a village song but not so good for a national anthem!” he laughed and then they started remembering all the hilarities of the song contest. What about those four Jewish singers in traditional dress who sang their Jewish song looking right into the eyes of Voroshilov! The Marshal guffawed heartily: “Bring me some vodka! We must drink. From us in your honour! I present it to you!” In the late afternoon, they left the Kremlin exhausted.

[24] Sergei Mikhalkov remained a favoured Stalinist wordsmith: the archives contain his note to Stalin, “At the Bolshoi Theatre on 30 December 1943, I promised you and Comrade Molotov to write a poem for children. I’m sending you ‘A Fable for Children.’ ” Stalin liked it: “It’s a very good poem,” he scrawled to Molotov. “It must be published today in Pravda and some other edition for children . . .” Mikhalkov’s son Nikita is today Russia’s greatest film director, auteur of Burnt by the Sun and Barber of Siberia.

[25] RGASPI 558.1.3499.1–27 and RGASPI 558.1.3399. “My Byom ikh”—“we are beating them” sounds like “ebiom ikh”—“we are fucking them”—when sung fast. RGASPI 558.1.3399, Stalin’s corrections. The dates on El-Registan’s hastily written notes are problematic because he sometimes writes the 23rd when he means the 28th and November when he means October. I have tried to form some order from chaos. RGASPI 558.1.3499. 1–27. “Why drain your glasses?” Gromov, Stalin Vlast I Iskusstvo, p. 343. Diplomatic dinner: Berezhkov, pp. 206–33. Harriman-Abel, p. 239. Erickson, Berlin, 2, p. 131. Bohlen, pp. 130–1. RGASPI 558.1.3399; El-Registan’s notes say the final approval meeting on 4 November took place at 9 a.m. but it seems much more likely to be 9 p.m. given Stalin’s customs and El-Registan’s occasional confusion with dates and times. On Mikhalkov’s poem: RGASPI 558.11.775.112, S. Mikhalkov to Stalin and Stalin to Molotov 7 Feb. 1944. On their presence in Stalin’s office on 28 Oct. and 4 Nov. 1943: IA.

[26] Khrushchev, Glasnost, p. 66. Nov. 1943 reception: Maya Kavtaradze. Bohlen, p. 130. Harriman-Abel, pp. 242, 253–5. Alexander Werth, Russia at War 1941–5, p. 753.

[27] Beria personally ordered Zoya Zarubina, the stepdaughter of NKGB General Leonid Eitingon (who had arranged Trotsky’s assassination), to choose the furniture for the conference. There was no round table so it had to be made. Since the conference was a closely guarded secret, Beria told Zarubina to go into Teheran city and pretend to order a table to seat twenty-two “for a wedding.”

[28] Roosevelt presumed he was being bugged but hoped the results might fortify Stalin’s confidence in his honesty. Sergo Beria’s account suggests this worked.

[29] In a piece of interpreter mountebankism, the second Soviet interpreter Valentin Berezhkov described how Stalin rehearsed the meeting and how Roosevelt came to Stalin’s residence without an interpreter. In fact, Stalin went to Roosevelt’s rooms where Chip Bohlen interpreted for the Americans and Pavlov for the Soviets. Pavlov was Stalin and Molotov’s interpreter in English and German; Berezhkov occasionally worked for Molotov. The only part of this incident that holds together is Stalin rehearsing positions, which was typical of him. Perhaps Berezhkov did witness this scene.

[30] Major Hugh Lunghi, whose interview has greatly helped with this account, is probably the last man living to attend all the Plenary Big Three meetings at Teheran, Yalta and Potsdam.

[31] Hugh Lunghi typed up this farcical exchange and asked Churchill to sign it for him the next day. As interpreter for the British Chiefs of Staff, he also deputized for Churchill’s principal interpreter, Major Arthur Birse.

[32] The Americans thought he was the maitre d’ and at the end of the conference were going to present him with some cigarettes when they found him resplendent in the uniform of an NKVD Major-General.

[33] Stalin had specially invited Elliott to the dinner. Perhaps he sensed the similarity with his own scapegrace son, Vasily. Both were pilots, inadequate yet arrogant drunks who were intimidated and dominated by brilliant fathers. Both exploited the family name and embarrassed their fathers. Both failed in multiple marriages and abandoned their wives. Perhaps there is no sadder curse than the gift of a titanic father.

[34] Golovanov quoted in MR, p. 306; Shah surprised, p. 50. HIM Mohammed Reza Shah Pahlavi, Mission for My Country, p. 79. Beria and Tsereteli in Teheran: Beria, pp. 130–1 incl. descriptions of Tsereteli and Beria, search of British Embassy, by Nicholas Kviatashvili. Zarubina: the table, Molotov’s tantrum, Stalin’s residence, bumping Stalin, pp. 1–7. Harriman-Abel, pp. 263–4. Professor Vinogradov: Kostyrchenko, p. 264. Bohlen: clumsy bear, pp. 131, 135–43; Molotov’s pact with Hitler, p. 340. Berezhkov—Stalin’s walkout at Baku airport, pp. 254–92. Interview: Hugh Lunghi: Voroshilov, Pavlov present. Alanbrooke, pp. 482–9. This ice-cream episode combines Lunghi’s and Alanbrooke’s accounts. Erickson, Berlin, pp. 156–8. Overy, pp. 220–1. On German assassins: Sudoplatov, pp. 130, 230. Sergo B, pp. 92–5, on flight, bugging, morally reprehensible, timetable. Churchill, 5, pp. 302–60, on Stalingrad sword, security arrangements, Voroshilov doing his best, Stalin’s 50,000 executions joke, searching the British Legation, Alanbrooke insult, birthday dinner. Stalingrad visit: A. Kravchenkov in Rybin, Ryadom, p. 87. FDR diaries quoted in Ted Morgan, FDR, pp. 692–704: FDRL OF 200 3/N. See K. Sainsbury, The Turning Point.

[35] Mikoyan, pp. 465–6. MR, p. 210. Khrushchev, Glasnost , p. 66. Kavtaradze, Memoirs, p. 74. RGASPI, 73.2.44.26–7, Andreyev to Malenkov 6 Oct. 1943. GARF 9401.2.67.379–80, Beria to Stalin, Molotov and Malenkov 22 Nov. 1944. GARF 9401.2.64.60, Beria to Stalin and Molotov 19 Dec. 1944. GARF 9401.2.69.220, Beria to Stalin 21 Apr. 1944. Beria to Stalin, GARF 9401.2.69.346, Beria to Stalin and Molotov; Molotov’s reply: “I think this is right,” 25 June 1944. GARF 9401.2.64.13–62, Beria to Stalin and Stalin to Beria, 26 Jan. 1944, 8 Jan. 1944, 29 Jan. 1944. GARF 9401.2.64.9, Beria to Stalin 4 Jan. 1944. GARF 9401.2.64.8, 53,57,90, Beria to Stalin 5 Jan., 8 Jan., 12 Jan., 4 Feb. 1944. GARF 9401.2.67.283–92, Beria to Stalin 5 Nov. 1944. GARF 9401.2.64.291, Beria to Stalin and Molotov 17 Apr. 1944. On purging of Belorussia: GARF 9401.2.93.50, Beria to Stalin, Molotov, Malenkov 22 Feb. 1945. GARF 9401.2.64.157–63, Ukrainian nationalists: Beria to Stalin 3 Mar. 1944. Deportations: Overy, pp. 232–3. Library of Congress Manuscript Division, Volkogonov Reel, 18, Beria to Stalin 16 Aug. 1943. GARF 9401.2.64.1, Beria to Stalin and Molotov 3 Jan., 1944. GARF 9401.2.69.44–5, 121, Beria to Molotov and Molotov replies 29 Jan., 24 Feb. 1944, inc. requests for more trains from Kaganovich and Beria, Beria, pp. 126–7. Lesser Terror, pp. 103–5: Karachevsk renamed Mikoyan-Shakhar on 5 Oct. 1944. Overy, pp. 232–4. Mikoyan objects: Mikoyan, p. 514. GARF 9401.2.69.137–9, Beria to Molotov and Molotov replies 4 Mar. 1944. GARF 9401.2.64.213,258a, Beria to Stalin 31 Mar. 1944: “Pay attention to this.” The Tartars, food allowances, trains: GARF 9401.2.64.41–52, food 49, trains 115, totals 119 and 126. GARF 9401.2. 64.254–6. The law for these deportations was backdated and presented by Beria to Kalinin on 7 Apr. 1944. GARF 9401.2.64.121, Beria to Stalin and Stalin agrees 20 May 1944. GARF 9401.2.64.161–3, Beria to Stalin 29 May 1944: Beria lists total of 225,009 from Crimea including all the later deportations. GARF 9401.2.64.158, Beria to Stalin Mar.–Dec. 1944.

 

[36] Rokossovsky in Bialer, pp. 460–1. Erickson, Berlin, pp. 199–231. Overy, pp. 239–46. Zhukov III, pp. 145–50. Zhukov, Korotko o Staline.

[37] Erickson, Berlin, 2, pp. 199–231, 269–86. Overy, pp. 239–46: “not help . . . but forestall.” Overy, p. 247. Zhukov III, pp. 169–72. Simonov, “Zametki,” p. 59. Rokossovsky in Overy, p. 248. Harriman-Abel, pp. 314–39.

 

[38] Stalin made one joke about Maisky, the ex-ambassador to London, who was present, that was not translated. The Russians though laughed uproariously at it so Brooke asked him what was so funny. Maisky glumly explained, “The Marshal has referred to me as the Poet-Diplomat because I have written a few verses at times but our last poet-diplomat was liquidated—that is the joke.” The original Poet-Diplomat was the Russian Ambassador to Persia, Griboyedov, who was torn to pieces by the Teheran mob in 1829. Maisky was later arrested and tortured.

[39] Soviet record of “percentages” conversations: RGASPI 558.11.283.6–14, Zapis besedy Tov IV Stalina s Churchillem 9 Oktyabrya 1944 g v 22 chasa. Also: Istochnik, 4 (17), 1995. O. A. Rzheshevsky (ed.), War and Diplomacy: The Making of the Grand Alliance. Stalin flat: Berezhkov, pp. 369–70. Alanbrooke, pp. 601–11. Martin Gilbert, Churchill: A Life, pp. 796–801. Harriman-Abel, pp. 353–64, incl. Kathleen Harriman’s account. Churchill, 6, pp. 197–212. Geoffrey Roberts, “Beware Greek Gifts: The Churchill-Stalin Percentages Agreement of October 1944”: my account based on the shrewd analysis of Geoffrey Roberts. GARF 9401.2.93.255 Old satyr: Djilas, p. 102. Borders by force, 1942: Erickson, Berlin, 1, p. 398.

 

[40] Khrushchev, Glasnost, p. 99. Memoires de Guerre by Charles de Gaulle, 3, pp. 50–79, and Complete Memoirs, pp. 754–5. Harriman-Abel, pp. 375–9. Radzinsky, pp. 483–4. Djilas, p. 93. Djilas, Wartime, pp. 428–9. “Fuck them,” Sergo Kavtaradze, thanks to Maya Kavtaradze.

 

[41] Zhukov III, pp. 171–3. Simonov, “Zametki,” p. 59. Woff, Rokossovsky in Stalin’s Generals, p. 191. Overy, pp. 256–63. Erickson, Berlin, pp. 424–6. Shtemenko in Bialer (ed.), p. 479; Koniev, p. 481. Overy, pp. 256–63. Djilas, pp. 108–9. Rapes: Antony Beevor, Berlin, pp. 28–9 and (Malenkov) p. 108; offensive pp. 15–17. K. Rokossovsky, Soldatskii dolg, p. 286. Harriman-Abel, p. 353.

 

[42] A month later, the editor of Izvestiya prepared a special photographic album which he sent to Poskrebyshev: “Esteemed Alexander Nikolaievich, I send you the photographs of the Crimean conference for JV Stalin.” Its front was embossed in big letters to him. Stalin was a shabby sight next to the dapper Molotov: his Yalta photo album shows the poorly darned pockets of his beloved but rumpled old greatcoat. The porcine Vlasik was always just a step behind him, beaming affably, but Stalin’s security was as tight as ever. Once when Bohlen noticed Stalin visit the lavatory, two Soviet bodyguards ran around, yelling, “Where’s Stalin! Where’s he gone?” Bohlen pointed to the W.C.

[43] The President was exhausted and ailing. His suite had a living room, a dining room (the Tsar’s billiard room), bedroom and bathroom. His closest adviser Harry Hopkins was so ill that he spent most of the time in bed. According to Alan Brooke, General Marshall “is in the Tsarina’s bedroom” and Admiral King “in her boudoir with the special staircase for Rasputin to visit her!” ‡ Stalin told his version to Enver Hoxha, the Albanian leader.

[44] As the war went on, it became a symbol of his avuncular image in the West—Uncle Joe—and statesmen tended to send him pipes as presents. Maisky, Ambassador to London, for example, wrote to Stalin: “After Mr. Kerr [British Ambassador] gave you a pipe and it was reported in the press, I was presented with pipes for you from two firms . . . and I send herewith an example for you . . .”

 

[45] There is an intriguing note in the archives concerning Churchill: a General Gorbatov reports to Beria on 5 May that orders had been sent to the NKVD with Marshal Malinovsky’s army in Hungary to find a relative of Winston Churchill named Betsy Pongrantz and she had been found. The meaning is not precisely clear but none of the Churchills have heard of this “relative.” Sir Winston’s surviving daughter Lady Soames is unaware of the existence of this possibly Hungarian kinswoman: “Perhaps Mr. Beria and the NKVD had just got it wrong!” she suggests.

[46] If there was a sell-out, it had probably occurred much earlier at the Moscow Foreign Minister’s Conference in October 1943. Nonetheless, Stalin was surely delighted to leave Yalta with Foreign Secretary Eden’s signature on the agreement to return all “Soviet” ex-POWs, many of them White Cossack émigrés from the Civil War who had fought for the Nazis. Many were either shot or perished in Stalin’s Gulags.

[47] Yalta: GARF 9401ss.2.94, Beria to Stalin/Molotov 27 Jan. 1945. Churchill, 6, pp. 300–44. “My father ran Russia,” Natalya Poskrebysheva. Sudoplatov, p. 222. Sergo B, p. 104. Gromyko, Memoirs, pp. 77–114. GARF 9401c.3.321, Conference of Leaders of Three States in Crimea 1945, and also Stalin’s own album in RGASPI: L. Ilichev to Poskrebyshev 27 Mar. 1945. Sergo Kavtaradze was also at Yalta. N. G. Kuznetsov, “Memoirs,” Voprosy Istorii, vol. 4, 1965, pp. 122–5. Gromyko, Memoirs , pp. 87–99. Bohlen, pp. 173–96. Interview Hugh Lunghi. Alanbrooke, pp. 655–60. Overy, pp. 252–4. Vaksberg, Vyshinsky , p. 245. On Beria: Sergo B, pp. 104–6, 113. Harriman-Abel, pp. 383–408, 415. Bohlen, p. 355. A. Gromyko, Pamyatnoye, p. 241. Beria, p. 130. Nekrasov, Beria, pp. 221–2. How many divisions has the Pope: Stalin to Enver Hoxha in Halliday (ed.),Hoxha, p. 133. The bear: Mgeladze, p. 137. Palaces for Stalin: GARF 9401.2.93.219, Beria to Stalin 27 Feb. 1945 and Stalin/Chadaev/Sovnarkom order. Churchill relative: GARF 9401.2.93.255, Gen. Gorbatov to Beria 5 May 1945.

 

[48] In the higher levels of the Bunker, Hitler’s secretary discovered “an erotic fever seemed to take possession of everybody. Everywhere even on the dentist’s chair, I saw bodies interlocked in lascivious embraces. The women had discarded all modesty and were freely exposing their private parts.”

[49] Berlin: Overy, pp. 264–7. Erickson, Berlin, p. 522. Zhukov III, pp. 211–4, 219–24, 242–5; IV, pp. 125, 226. Zhukov in Bialer (ed.), pp. 512–3; Koniev, pp. 513–6, 527. I. S. Koniev, Sorok pyatyi, pp. 91–3. S. Shtemenko, Generalny shtab v gody voiny, pp. 328–31. Beevor, Berlin, pp. 146–7, 206, 244, 343, 358: “April Fool” and “largest firepower ever assembled.” Yakov: Mgeladze, pp. 198–9. Harriman-Abel, p. 440. FDR: Mgeladze, pp. 130, 137. Simonov, “Zametki,” p. 60. Koniev, pp. 116–7. IA, 1992:2.

 

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