STALIN: THE COURT OF THE RED TSAR

BY

SIMON SEBAG MONTEFIORE

PART SIX

THE GREAT GAME HITLER AND STALIN 1939–1941

 

 

28. The Carve-Up of Europe: Molotov, Ribbentrop and Stalin’s Jewish Question

When Stalin concentrated on diplomacy, he first aimed his guns at his own diplomats. On the night of 3 May 1939, NKVD troops surrounded the Foreign Commissariat, bringing home the urgency of the countdown to war and the coming revolution of alliances. Molotov, Beria and Malenkov arrived to inform Maxim “Papasha” Litvinov, the worldly rambunctious champion of European peace through “collective security,” that he had been sacked. This was not a surprise to Litvinov: Stalin would pat his Foreign Commissar and say, “You see, we can reach agreement.”

“Not for long,” Papasha Litvinov replied.

The new Foreign Commissar was Molotov, already the Premier. Stalin emerged from the Terror more paranoid and more confident, a state of mind that made him, if anything, less equipped to analyse the dangerous international situation. Mikoyan noticed this new Stalin “was an utterly changed person—absolutely suspicious, ruthless and boundlessly selfconfident, often speaking of himself in the third person. I think he went barmy.” Kaganovich recalled that he hardly ever called together the Politburo now, deciding most things informally. Stalin does not “know the West,” thought Litvinov. “If our opponents were a bunch of shahs and sheikhs, he’d outwit them.” Nor were his two main advisers, Molotov and Zhdanov, any better qualified. Stalin educated himself by reading history, particularly Bismarck’s memoirs, but he did not realize that the Iron Chancellor was a conventional statesman compared to Hitler. Henceforth Stalin quoted Talleyrand and Bismarck liberally.

Molotov always said that Bolshevik politics was the best training for diplomacy and regarded himself as a politician not a diplomat, but he was proud of his new career: “Everything was in Stalin’s fist, in my fist,” he said. But he worked in his tireless, methodical way under immense pressure, arguing ideas through with Stalin, while terrorizing his staff in “blind rages.” Yet in his letters to his wife Polina, he revealed the vainglory and passion within: “We live under constant pressure not to miss something . . . I so miss you and our daughter, I want to hold you in my arms, to my breast with all your sweetness and charm . . .” More direct and less intellectual than Stalin, he told Polina that he was starting to read not about Talleyrand but about Hitler. Apart from the smouldering desire for Polina, the most amusing part of these letters was the unabashed delight Molotov took in his new fame. “I can tell you, without boasting,” he boasted, “that our opposite numbers feel . . . they deal with people that know their stuff.”

Stalin and Molotov developed into an international double act of increasing subtlety, masters of the old “good cop, bad cop” routine. Stalin was always more radical and reckless, Molotov the stolid analyst of the possible, but neither saw any contradiction between imperial expansionism and their Marxist crusade: on the contrary, the former was the best way to empower the latter.

Europe in early 1939 was, in Stalin’s own words, a “poker game” with three players, in which each hoped to persuade the other two to destroy one another and leave the third to take the winnings. The three players were the Fascists of Adolf Hitler’s Nazi Germany, the Capitalists of Neville Chamberlain’s Britain allied with Daladier’s France—and the Bolsheviks. Though the Georgian admired the flamboyant brutality of the Austrian, he appreciated the danger of a resurgent Germany militarily, and the hostility of Fascism.

Stalin regarded the Western democracies as at least as dangerous as Germany. He had matured politically during their intervention during the Civil War. He instinctively felt he could work with Hitler. As soon as the “Austrian corporal” took power, Stalin began probing gently, advised by Karl Radek, his German expert, and using as personal emissaries Abel Yenukidze and David Kandelaki. The sensitivity of these discussions was absolute since Stalin was simultaneously shooting thousands as German agents, with the country in a frenzy of Prussophobic war preparations. The legates were shot.

Hitler kept Stalin at arm’s length as long as the democracies continued to appease him. But the Munich agreement convinced Stalin that the West was not serious about stopping Hitler. On the contrary, Stalin was sure that they were willing to let Hitler destroy Soviet Russia. Munich rendered Litvinov’s “collective security” bankrupt. Stalin warned the West that the Soviet Union would not be left to “pick their chestnuts out of the fire.” The way forward was a division of the world into “spheres.” This was an oblique signal to Germany that he would deal with whoever would deal with him. Berlin noted the change. Afterwards, at the Plenum, Stalin attacked Litvinov.

“Does that mean you regard me as an Enemy of the People?” asked plucky Litvinov. Stalin hesitated as he left the hall: “No, we don’t consider Papasha an Enemy. Papasha’s an honest revolutionary.”[1]

Meanwhile, Molotov and Beria were terrorizing a meeting of their worldly diplomats, many of them Jewish Bolsheviks at home in the great capitals of Europe. Beria glanced around at them.

“Nazarov,” he said. “Why did they arrest your father?”

“Lavrenti Pavlovich, you no doubt know better than I.”

“You and I will talk about that later,” laughed Beria.

The Foreign Commissariat was almost next door to the Lubianka and the two ministries were nicknamed “the Neighbours.” Molotov’s deputy, Vladimir Dekanozov, forty-one, another of Beria’s intelligent Caucasian henchmen, supervised the purge of diplomats. This red-haired midget, with a taste for English movies (he called his son Reginald) and teenage girls, was a failed medical student who had known Beria since university when they both joined the Cheka. He was a Russified Georgian. Molotov joked that he was an Armenian pretending to be Georgian to please Stalin, who nicknamed him “Slow Kartvelian” after his region of origin. At Kuntsevo, Stalin mocked his ugliness. When he appeared at the door, Stalin said sarcastically to general laughter:

“Such a handsome man! Look at him! I’ve never seen anything like it!”

The press officer of the Foreign Commissariat, Yevgeni Gnedin, himself a piece of revolutionary history as the son of Parvus, Lenin’s financier and middle man with Kaiserine Germany, was arrested by Dekanozov and taken to Beria’s office where he was ordered to confess to spying. When he refused, Beria ordered him to lie on the floor while the Caucasian “giant” Kobulov beat him on the skull with blackjacks. Gnedin was a “lucky stiff.” In July, Beria ordered Prince Tsereteli to kill the Soviet Ambassador to China, Bovkun-Luganets, and his wife, in cold blood in a faked car accident (the method of killing those too eminent to just disappear).[2]

Stalin’s diplomatic Terror was designed to appeal to Hitler: “Purge the ministry of Jews,” he said. “Clean out the ‘synagogue.’ ” “Thank God for these words,” Molotov (married to a Jewess) explained. “Jews formed an absolute majority and many ambassadors...”[3]

Stalin was an anti-Semite by most definitions but until after the war, it was more a Russian mannerism than a dangerous obsession. He was never a biological racist like the Nazis. However, he disliked any nationality that threatened loyalty to the multinational USSR. He embraced the Russian people not because he rejected his own Georgian origins but for precisely the same reason: the Russians were the foundations and cement of the Soviet Union. But after the war, the creation of Israel, the increased self-consciousness among Soviet Jews and the Cold War with America combined with his old prejudice to turn Stalin into a murderous anti-Semite.

Stalin and his Jewish comrades like Kaganovich were proudly internationalist. Stalin, however, openly enjoyed jokes about national stereotypes. He certainly carried all the traditional Georgian prejudices against the Moslem peoples of the Caucasus whom he was to deport. He also persecuted Germans. He enjoyed the Jewish jokes told by Pauker (himself a Jew) and Kobulov, and was amused when Beria called Kaganovich “the Israelite.” But he also enjoyed jokes about Armenians and Germans, and shared the Russian loathing for Poles: until the forties, Stalin was as Polonophobic as he was anti-Semitic.

He was always suspicious because the Jews lacked a homeland which made them “mystical, intangible, otherworldly.” Yet Kaganovich insisted that Stalin’s view was formed by the Jewishness of his enemies—Trotsky, Zinoviev and Kamenev. On the other hand, most of the women around him and many of his closest collaborators, from Yagoda to Mekhlis, were Jewish. The difference is obvious: he hated the intellectual Trotsky but had no problem with the cobbler Kaganovich.

Stalin was aware that his regime had to stand against anti-Semitism and we find in his own notes a reminder to give a speech about it: he called it “cannibalism,” made it a criminal offence, and regularly criticised anti-Semites. Stalin founded a Jewish homeland, Birobizhan, on the inhospitable Chinese border but boasted, “The Tsar gave the Jews no land, but we will.”

Yet nationality always mattered in Soviet politics, however internationalist the Party claimed to be. There were a high proportion of Jews, along with Georgians, Poles and Letts, in the Party because these were among the persecuted minorities of Tsarist Russia. In 1937, 5.7 percent of the Party were Jews yet they formed a majority in the government. Lenin himself (who was partly Jewish by ancestry) said that if the Commissar was Jewish, the deputy should be Russian: Stalin followed this rule.[4]

Yet Stalin was “sensitive” about Kaganovich’s Judaism. At Kuntsevo dinners, Beria tried to bully Kaganovich into drinking more but Stalin stopped him:

“Leave him alone . . . Jews don’t know how to drink.” Once, Stalin asked Kaganovich why he looked so miserable during Jewish jokes: “Take Mikoyan—we laugh at Armenians and Mikoyan laughs too.”

“You see, Comrade Stalin, suffering has affected the Jewish character so we’re like a mimosa flower. Touch it and it closes immediately.” It happened that the mimosa, that super-sensitive flower that flinches like an animal, was Stalin’s favourite. He never again allowed such jokes in front of Kaganovich.

Nonetheless, there was increasing anti-Semitism during the thirties: even in public, Stalin asked if a man was a “natsmen”—a euphemism for Jewish based on the fifth point on Soviet personnel forms which covered “nationality.” When Molotov remembered Kamenev, he said he “did not look like a Jew except when you looked into his eyes.”

The Jews at Stalin’s court felt they had to be more Russian than the Russians, more Bolshevik than the Bolsheviks. Kaganovich despised Yiddish culture, asking Solomon Mikhoels, the Yiddish actor: “Why do you disparage the people?” When the Politburo debated whether to blow up the Temple of the Saviour, one of the acts of vandalism in the creation of Stalinist Moscow, Stalin, Kirov and the others supported it but Kaganovich said, “The Black Hundreds [the anti-Semitic gangs of 1905] will blame it on me!” Similarly, Mekhlis reacted to Stalin’s swearing about Trotsky’s “Yids”: “I’m a Communist not a Jew.” More honestly, he explained his own rabidity: “You should realize that there is only one way of fighting [anti-Semitism]—to be brave; if you’re a Jew, to be the most honest, pure as crystal, a model person, especially in human dignity.”

Stalin realized that, while he had to be seen to oppose anti-Semitism, his Jews were one obstacle to rapprochement with Hitler, particularly Litvinov (born Wallach). Many Jewish Bolsheviks used Russian pseudonyms. As early as 1936, Stalin ordered Mekhlis atPravda to use these pseudonyms: “No need to excite Hitler!” This atmosphere sharpened at the Plenum in early 1939 when Yakovlev attacked Khrushchev for promoting a cult of personality using his full name and patronymic, a sign of respect. Khrushchev, himself anti-Semitic, replied that perhaps Yakovlev should use his real name, Epstein. Mekhlis intervened to support Khrushchev, explaining that Yakovlev, being a Jew, could not understand this.

The removal of the Jews was a signal to Hitler—but Stalin always sent double messages: Molotov appointed Solomon Lozovsky, a Jew, as one of his deputies.[5]

The European poker game was played out with swift moves, secret talks and cold hearts. The stakes were vast. The dictators proved much more adept at this fast-moving game than the democracies who had started to play in earnest much too late. As the fighting intensified against the Japanese, Hitler was raising the ante, having consumed Austria and Czechoslovakia, by turning his Panzers towards Poland. Belatedly, the Western democracies realized he had to be stopped: on 31 March, Britain and France guaranteed the Polish borders. They needed Russia to join them but failed to see things from Stalin’s angle and did not understand his sense of weakness and isolation. Ironically the Polish guarantee increased Stalin’s doubts about the depth of this British commitment: if Hitler invaded Poland, what was to stop “perfidious Albion” from using the guarantee as a mere bargaining chip to negotiate another Munich-style deal, leaving Hitler on his borders?

Stalin therefore required a contractual military alliance with the West if he was not to turn to Hitler. On 29 June, Zhdanov backed the German option in a Pravda article in which he stated his “personal opinion” that “I permit myself to express . . . although not all my friends share it . . . They still think that in beginning negotiations with the USSR, the English and French governments have serious intentions . . . I believe the English and French governments have no wish for a treaty of equality with the USSR . . .” The vulnerability of Leningrad made a free hand in the Baltic States necessary: that was the price of what Zhdanov called “equality.” Zhdanov’s son Yury remembers Stalin and his father reading a specially translated Mein Kampf and endlessly discussing the pros and cons of a German alliance. Stalin read in D’Abernon’s Ambassador of the World that if Germany and Russia were allies, “the dangerous power of the east” would overshadow Britain. “Yes!” Stalin noted approvingly in the margin.

Britain and France had despatched a hapless and ludicrously low-level delegation to Moscow by slow steamship to offer an alliance but no guarantee of Soviet frontiers and no freedom of action in the Baltics. When Admiral Sir Reginald Aylmer Ranfurly Plunkett-Ernle-Erle-Drax (author of a book called Handbook on Solar Heating) and General Joseph Doumenc arrived in Leningrad on the night of 9–10 August, the German–Russian flirtation was getting serious. The Admiral and the General took the train to Moscow and were taken to meet Voroshilov and Molotov.

Stalin was unimpressed with the quadruple-barrelled Admiral when he discussed the delegations with Molotov and Beria: “They’re not being serious. These people can’t have the proper authority. London and Paris are playing poker again . . .”

“Still the talks should go ahead,” said Molotov.

“Well if they must, they must.” This was now turning into an auction for Stalin’s favours but with only one serious bidder. In Germany, meanwhile, Hitler decided to invade Poland on 26 August: suddenly, the agreement with Stalin was desperately necessary. The meetings with the Western powers only got started on 12 August but the gap between what the West was willing to offer and the price Stalin demanded was unbridgeable. That day, the Russians signalled to the Germans that they were ready to start negotiations, even on the dismemberment of Poland. On the 14th, Hitler decided to send Ribbentrop, his Foreign Minister, to Moscow. On the 15th, the German Ambassador Count Friedrich Werner von der Schulenburg requested a meeting with Molotov, who, rushing to check with Stalin, reported that Russia was ready. When this news reached Ribbentrop, he hurried to tell Hitler at the Berghof. On the 17th, Voroshilov proposed a treaty of mutual military assistance to the British and French but added that there was no point in continuing the discussion until they had persuaded the Poles and Romanians to allow the passage of Soviet troops in the event of a German attack. But Drax had not yet received orders from London.

“Enough of these games!” Stalin told Molotov. “The English and French wanted us for farmhands and at no cost!” On the afternoon of Saturday the 19th, Molotov hurriedly summoned Schulenburg, handing him a draft non-aggression pact that was more formal than the German version but contained nothing objectionable. Having signed the trade treaty that Stalin had specified was necessary before the real business could begin, the Germans, whose deadline was fast approaching, waited with a gambler’s anticipation. Hitler shrewdly decided to cut the Gordian knot of mutual trust and prestige by personally addressing Stalin in a telegram dated 20 August: “Dear Mr. Stalin.” Stalin, Molotov and Voroshilov agreed to the reply:

To Chancellor of Germany A. Hitler. Thank you for your letter. I hope the German–Soviet agreement of non-aggression will be a turning point towards serious improvement of political relations between our countries . . . The Soviet government has instructed me to inform you that it agrees to Mr. Ribbentrop visiting Moscow on 23 August.

J. Stalin.

Far to the east, that Sunday the 20th, Georgi Zhukov, commander of the Soviet army on the Khalkin-Gol River, launched a formidable cannonade against the Japanese, then attacked across the front. By the 23rd, the Japanese were defeated with losses as high as 61,000 men, a bloody nose that was enough to dissuade them from attacking Russia again.

At 3 p.m. on Monday the 21st, Molotov received Schulenburg who passed on Hitler’s request for a meeting on the 23rd. Two hours later, he and Stalin confirmed the historic visit of Ribbentrop. Suddenly the two dictators were no longer holding back but hurtling towards one another, arms outstretched. At 7 p.m. the next day, Voroshilov dismissed the British and French: “Let’s wait until everything has been cleared up . . .”[6]

Stalin’s reply reached Hitler at eight-thirty that evening: “Marvellous! I congratulate you,” declaimed Hitler, adding, with the flashiness of the entertainer: “I have the world in my pocket.”

That night, Voroshilov was leading a vital delegation of the Soviet leadership on a duck-shooting expedition into the countryside. Khrushchev had just arrived from Kiev. Before setting off to shoot duck, Khrushchev dined with Stalin at the dacha. It was then that Stalin, “who smiled and watched me closely,” informed him that Ribbentrop was arriving imminently. Khrushchev, who knew nothing about the negotiations, was “dumbfounded. I stared back at him, thinking he was joking.”

“Why should Ribbentrop want to see us?” blurted out Khrushchev. “Is he defecting?” Then he remembered that he was going hunting with Voroshilov on the great day. Should he cancel?

“Go right ahead. There’ll be nothing for you to do . . . Molotov and I will meet Ribbentrop. When you return, I’ll let you know what Hitler has in mind . . .” After dinner, Khrushchev and Malenkov set off to meet Voroshilov at his hunting reserve while Stalin remained at the dacha to consider tomorrow. Unless he was in a very good mood, he thought “hunting was a waste of time.”[7] Perhaps it was that night that Stalin, reading Vipper’s History of Ancient Greece, marked the passage about the benefits of dictators working closely together.

On Tuesday, 22 August, all the magnates visited the Little Corner some time during the day. If the details were secret, the policy was not. Its architects were Stalin assisted by Molotov and Zhdanov but there was no party against it. Even Khrushchev and Mikoyan, in their memoirs designed to blacken Stalin wherever possible, admitted that there was no choice. These Leninists, as Kaganovich put it, understood this was a Brest-Litovsk in reverse.

That evening, as the duck-shooters set off into the marshes of Zavidovo, seventy miles north-west of Moscow, the tall, pompous, ex–champagne salesman Ribbentrop set off in Hitler’s Condor aeroplane, Immelman III, with a delegation of thirty. At 1 p.m. on 23 August, Ribbentrop arrived and descended from the Condor in a leather coat, black jacket and striped trousers, impressed to find the airport emblazoned with swastikas. An orchestra played the German national anthem. Ribbentrop was then guided into a bullet-proof black ZiS (a Soviet Buick) by Vlasik. They sped into town for a short stop at the German Embassy for caviar and champagne. At three, Ribbentrop, due to meet Molotov, was driven through the Spassky Gate to the Little Corner. Ribbentrop was greeted by Poskrebyshev in military uniform and led up the stairs through anterooms, into a long rectangular room where they found Stalin, in Party tunic and baggy trousers tucked into boots, and Molotov in a dark suit, standing together.

When they sat down at the table, the Russians, with their interpreter N. N. Pavlov on one side, the Germans on the other, Ribbentrop declared: “Germany demands nothing from Russia—only peace and trade.” Stalin offered Molotov the floor as Premier.

“No, no, Joseph Vissarionovich, you do the talking. I’m sure you’ll do a better job than I.” They swiftly agreed to the terms of their pact which was designed to divide Poland and eastern Europe into spheres of influence— Stalin got Eastern Poland, Latvia, Estonia, Finland and Bessarabia in Romania, though Hitler kept Lithuania.

But when Ribbentrop proposed a paean to German–Soviet friendship, Stalin snorted: “Don’t you think we have to pay a little more attention to public opinion in our two countries? For many years now, we have been pouring buckets of shit over each other’s heads and our propaganda boys could not do enough in that direction. Now all of a sudden, are we to make our peoples believe all is forgotten and forgiven? Things don’t work so fast.” With so much agreed so fast, Ribbentrop returned to the embassy to telegraph Hitler.

At 10 p.m., he arrived back at the Little Corner, accompanied by a much larger delegation and two photographers. When Ribbentrop announced that Hitler approved the terms, “a sudden tremor seemed to go through Stalin and he did not immediately grasp the hand proffered by his partner. It was as if he had first to overcome a moment of fear.”

Stalin ordered vodka and toasted: “I know how much the German nation loves its Führer. He’s a good chap. I’d like to drink to his health.” Molotov then toasted Ribbentrop who toasted Stalin. One of the young Germans, a six-foot SS officer named Richard Schulze, noticed Stalin was drinking his vodka from a special flask and managed to fill his glass from it, only to discover it contained water. Stalin smiled faintly as Schulze drank it, not the last guest to sample this little secret.

By 2 a.m. on 24 August, the treaty was ready. The photographers—the Germans with up-to-date equipment, the Russians with ancient wooden tripod and wood-and-brass camera—were escorted into the room. The Red Army Chief of Staff, the ailing Shaposhnikov, respected by Stalin, took notes in a small notebook. When it came to the photograph, Stalin noticed the towering SS man who had sampled his flask and beckoned him into the picture where he positioned him between Ribbentrop and Shaposhnikov. Molotov signed.

A maid brought in champagne and snacks. When one of the German photographers flashed as Stalin and Ribbentrop raised their glasses, the former shook his finger and told him he did not want such a photograph published. The photographer offered to hand over his film but Stalin said he could trust the word of a German. At 3 a.m., as the excited leaders parted, Stalin told Ribbentrop: “I can guarantee on my word of honour that the Soviet Union will not betray its partner.”

Stalin headed to Kuntsevo where the hunters awaited. Voroshilov, Khrushchev, Malenkov and Bulganin had already brought their ducks to be cooked in Stalin’s kitchen. When Stalin and Molotov arrived jubilantly with a copy of their treaty, Khrushchev boasted about out-shooting Voroshilov, the vaunted “First Marksman,” before the laughing Vozhd told them how they had signed the world-shattering Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact: “Stalin seemed very pleased with himself” but he was under no illusions about his new friendship. As they feasted on duck, Stalin boasted:

“Of course it’s all a game to see who can fool whom. I know what Hitler’s up to. He thinks he’s outsmarted me but actually it’s I who’s tricked him.” War, he explained, “would pass us by a little longer.”[8] Zhdanov mocked Ribbentrop’s pear-shaped figure: “He’s got the biggest and broadest pair of hips in all of Europe,” he announced as the magnates laughed about Ribbentrop’s preposterous girdle: “Those hips! Those hips!”

“The Great Game,” as Molotov called the tournament of nerves between Stalin and Hitler, had begun.[9]

At 2 a.m. on 1 September, Poskrebyshev handed Stalin a telegram from Berlin informing him that early that evening “Polish” troops (in fact German security forces in disguise) had attacked the German radio station in Gleiwitz. Stalin left for the dacha and went to bed. A few hours later, Poskrebyshev called again: Germany had invaded Poland. Stalin monitored the campaign as Britain and France declared war on Germany, honouring their guarantees. “We see nothing wrong in their having a good, hard fight and weakening each other,” he told Molotov and Zhdanov. Stalin planned the Soviet invasion of Poland with Voroshilov, Shaposhnikov and Kulik, who was to command the front along with Mekhlis, but waited until he had secured an end to the war with Japan first. At 2 a.m. on 17 September, Stalin, accompanied by Molotov and Voroshilov, told Schulenburg: “At 6 a.m., four hours from now, the Red Army will cross into Poland.” Premier Molotov took to the radio to announce the “sacred duty to proffer help to . . . Ukrainian and Belorussian brothers.” Mekhlis claimed to Stalin that the West Ukrainians welcomed the Soviet troops “like true liberators” with “apples, pies, drinking water . . . Many weep with joy.”

Khrushchev, Ukrainian First Secretary, donned a military uniform and, accompanied by his NKVD boss, Ivan Serov, joined the forces of Semyon Timoshenko, commander of the Kiev Military District. Timoshenko was a tough, shaven-headed veteran of the First Cavalry Army in Tsaritsyn; he was a competent officer, yet in the Terror, he had both denounced Budyonny and been denounced himself. Khrushchev claimed to have saved his life. Khrushchev’s advance into Poland was an adventure for him, but even more so for his wife Nina Petrovna who, also sporting a military uniform and a pistol, liberated her own parents who had remained in Poland since 1920. Khrushchev, ensconced in Lvov, celebrated at the sight of her and her parents but lost his temper when he saw her pistol.[10]

If the invasion was joyous for the Khrushchevs, it unleashed depredations on the Polish population every bit as cruel and tragic as those of the Nazis. Khrushchev ruthlessly suppressed any sections of the population who might oppose Soviet power: priests, officers, noblemen, intellectuals were kidnapped, murdered and deported to eliminate the very existence of Poland. By November 1940, one-tenth of the population or 1.17 million innocents had been deported. Thirty percent of them were dead by 1941; 60,000 were arrested and 50,000 shot. The Soviets behaved like conquerors. When some soldiers were arrested for stealing treasures from a Prince Radziwill, Vyshinsky consulted Stalin.

“If there’s no ill will,” he wrote on the note, “they can be pardoned. J.St.”⁴

At 5 p.m. on Wednesday 27 September, Ribbentrop flew back to negotiate the notorious protocols, so secret that Molotov was still denying their existence thirty years later. By 10 p.m., he was at the Kremlin in talks with Stalin and Molotov around the green baize table. Stalin wanted Lithuania. Ribbentrop telegraphed Hitler for his permission so the talks were delayed until 3 p.m. the next day. But Hitler’s message had not arrived by the time Ribbentrop returned to negotiate the cartographic details.

That night, while Stalin held a gala dinner for the Germans to celebrate the carve-up of Europe, the Russians were meeting the unfortunate Estonian Foreign Minister to force him to allow Soviet troops into his country, the first step to outright annexation. The Nazis were greeted at the door of the Great Kremlin Palace, led through the dull wooden Congress Hall which looked like a giant schoolroom, and then dazzled by the scarlet and gold reception room where Stalin, Molotov and the Politburo, including Jewish Kaganovich, awaited them. Stalin’s manner was “simple and unpretentious,” beaming with “paternal benevolence” that could turn to “icy coldness” as he “rapped out orders,” though he used a “jocular and kind manner with his junior assistants.” The Germans noticed how respectful the Russians were to Stalin: Commissar Tevosian, the “lucky stiff” who had narrowly avoided execution in 1938, rose “like a schoolboy” whenever Stalin addressed him. The fear surrounding Stalin had become intense since 1937. But he was cordial with Voroshilov, friendly with Beria and Mikoyan, matter-of-fact with Kaganovich, chatty with Malenkov. Only Molotov “would talk to his chief as one comrade to another.”

Their swagger was so raffish that Ribbentrop said he felt as at ease as he did among old Nazi comrades. While the guests were chatting, Stalin went into the sumptuous Andreevsky Hall to check the seating plan, which he enjoyed doing, even at Kuntsevo.[11] The twenty-two guests were dwarfed by the grandeur of the hall, the colossal flower arrangements, the imperial gold cutlery and, even more, by the twenty-four courses that included caviar, all manner of fishes and meats, and lashings of pepper vodka and Crimean champagne. The white-clad waiters were the same staff from the Metropol Hotel who would serve Churchill and Roosevelt at Yalta. Before anyone could eat, Molotov started to propose toasts to each guest. Stalin stalked over to clink glasses. It was an exhausting rigmarole that would become one of the diplomatic tribulations of the war. When Molotov had run through every guest, the Germans sighed with relief until he announced: “Now we’ll drink to all members of the delegations who couldn’t attend this dinner.”[12]

Stalin took over, joking: “Let us drink to the new anti-Comintern Stalin,” and he winked at Molotov. Then he toasted Kaganovich, “our People’s Commissar of Railways.” Stalin could have toasted the Jewish magnate across the table but he deliberately rose and circled the table to clink glasses so that Ribbentrop had to follow suit and drink to a Jew, an irony that amused Stalin. Forty years on, Kaganovich was still telling the story to his grandchildren.

When Molotov embarked on another toast to his Vozhd, Stalin chuckled: “If Molotov really wants to drink, no one objects but he really shouldn’t use me as an excuse.” Stalin himself drank almost nothing and when Ribbentrop noticed how well he was bearing the toasts, he cheerfully revealed that he was drinking white wine. But Beria, who had transformed the Georgian tradition of forced hospitality into a despotic trial of submission, delighted in making his guests drink. The German diplomat Hilger, who wrote vivid memoirs of the evening, refused another vodka. Beria insisted, drawing the attention of Stalin himself who was sitting opposite them.

“What’s the argument about?” he asked, adding, “Well if you don’t want to drink, no one can force you.”

“Not even the chief of the NKVD himself?” smiled the German.

“Here at this table,” replied Stalin, “even the NKVD chief has no more say than anyone else.” At the end of the dinner, Stalin and Molotov excused themselves as the Germans were despatched off to the Bolshoi to watch Swan Lake. As he left, Stalin whispered to Kaganovich, “We must win time.” They then walked upstairs where the Estonian Foreign Minister miserably waited for Stalin to emasculate his little Baltic nation. Molotov demanded a Soviet garrison of 35,000 troops, more than the entire Estonian army.

“Come on, Molotov, you’re rather harsh on our friends,” said Stalin, suggesting 25,000, but the effect was much the same. Having swallowed a country during the first act of Swan Lake, Stalin returned to the Germans at midnight for a final session during which Hitler telephoned his agreement to the Lithuanian concession.

“Hitler knows his business,” muttered Stalin. Ribbentrop was so excited that he declared the two countries must never fight again:

“This ought to be the case,” replied Stalin, shocking Ribbentrop who asked for it to be retranslated. When the German suggested Russia joining a military alliance against the West, Stalin just said, “I shall never allow Germany to become weak.” He obviously believed that Germany would be restrained in the West by Britain and France. When the maps were finally ready in the early hours, Stalin signed them in blue crayon, with a massive signature ten inches long, an inch high, and a tail eighteen inches long. “Is my signature clear enough for you?”

By 3 October, all three Baltic States had agreed to Soviet garrisons. Stalin and Molotov turned their guns and threats on the fourth Baltic country in their sphere of influence, Finland, which they expected to buckle like the others.[13]

 

29. The Murder of the Wives

As the world watched Stalin and Hitler carve up the East, the Vozhd was probing the submission of his comrades by investigating and sometimes killing their wives. His fragile trust in women was irreparably undermined by Nadya’s suicide but this had been exacerbated by his own destruction of the wives of Enemies. As Khrushchev said, he became interested in other men’s wives for the unusual reason that they were possible spies rather than mistresses.

Stalin had always shown a minute interest in the wives. When he received the 1939 census, he ticked the names of some magnates’ wives and children in red pen. The meaning of the ticks was a mystery but it is tempting to regard everything about him as sinister. Maybe he was just working out how many cars the family needed. Wives now sat apart from their husbands at Kremlin dinners. Stalin’s attitude to old favourites, Polina and Dora, had become malicious and suspicious, partly reflecting their relationship with Nadya. But he had always been obsessed with wives knowing too much. As early as 1930, he suggested to Molotov that some comrade’s wife “should be checked . . . she could not help but know about the outrageous goings-on at their house.” This burning suspicion of uxoriousness partly derived from Stalin’s dislike of anything that interfered with blind devotion to the Party and himself. “Stalin did not recognize personal relations,” said Kaganovich. “The love of one person for another did not exist.” He saw the wives as hostages for his comrades’ good behaviour and punishment for bad: “No one who contradicts Stalin,” Beria told Nina, “keeps his wife.” But the slaughter of wives coincided with Beria’s arrival.

Polina Molotova, the First Lady, was in danger. She was now Commissar of Fishing, a CC candidate member and mistress of her perfume empire. Yet Beria now started investigating her, discovering “vandals” and “saboteurs” secreted in her staff. She had “unknowingly facilitated their espionage.”[14] Stalin may have been sending another anti-Semitic signal to Hitler.

On 10 August, when Stalin and Molotov were plotting their diplomatic somersaults, the Politburo indicted Polina. Stalin proposed her expulsion from the Central Committee. Molotov bravely abstained, showing his ability to disagree with Stalin, confidence—and love of Polina. On 24 October, she was relieved of her Commissariat, reprimanded for “levity and hastiness” but declared innocent of “calumnies.” Promoted to run Soviet haberdashery, she returned to her accustomed magnificence: her daughter Svetlana was already notorious as the ultimate Soviet “princess” in her furs and French fashions but the family was constantly watched.[15] Stalin forgot neither Molotov’s defiance nor Polina’s sins, which would return to haunt her. Stalin and Beria had considered kidnapping and murdering her. She was lucky to be alive.

On 25 October 1938, Beria arrested President Kalinin’s wife. In a land where the Head of State’s wife was in prison, no one was safe from the Party. The ineffectual Kalinin, who had not dared resist Stalin since the warnings of 1930 and balletomanic romantic entanglements, though he seethed about his ill treatment, actually lived with another woman, his aristocratic housekeeper, Alexandra Gorchakova. His wife, a snub-nosed Estonian, Ekaterina Ivanovna, set off with a lady friend to arrange an anti-illiteracy campaign in the Far East. When she and this possibly Sapphic lady friend returned to Kalinin’s apartment, they were bugged grumbling about Stalin’s bloodlust. The lady friend was executed, Kalinina sent into exile, like Budyonny’s wife before her. When petitioners asked the President’s help, Kalinin used the same excuse as Stalin himself: “My dear chap, I’m in the same position! I can’t even help my own wife—there’s no way I can help yours!” Not everyone was as lucky as Molotova and Kalinina.[16]

In April 1937, Dr. Bronka Poskrebysheva, twenty-seven, pretty wife of the chef de cabinet, rang Stalin and asked to see him alone at Kuntsevo, putting on her best dress, perhaps the polka-dot which appears in all her family photographs. Her husband did not know about this appointment and would have been furious if he had. Vlasik alone knew of this secret meeting. She came to ask for the release of her arrested brother Metalikov, the Kremlin doctor, indirectly related through his wife to Trotsky. After Stalin’s death, Vlasik revealed it to the family and hinted, according to Poskrebyshev and Bronka’s daughter Natalya, that the two started an affair. This is unlikely since Stalin hated women pleading for relatives though one of the tragedies of Soviet life at this time was that women did beg potentates for the lives of their loved ones, offering anything they could, even their bodies. Bronka’s mission failed.[17] She was terrified of being tarred with the Trotskyite brush.

Before his promotion to Moscow, Beria had groped Bronka at Kuntsevo and she slapped him. “I won’t forget it,” he said. But Bronka did not give up. On 27 April 1939, she called Beria and asked if she could come to discuss her brother. She was never seen again.

Poskrebyshev waited until midnight, then called Beria at home, who revealed that she was in custody but would not discuss it. In the morning, without having slept at all, Poskrebyshev complained to Stalin who said, “It doesn’t depend on me. I can do nothing. Only the NKVD can sort it out,” a line that could not have convinced Poskrebyshev.

Stalin phoned Beria who reminded him of Bronka’s Trotskyite connections. The three met, possibly around midnight on 3 May, when Beria was next in the Little Corner. Beria produced a confession implicating Bronka. Poskrebyshev begged Stalin to release her, using the most un-Bolshevik argument which would have moved anyone but these flinthearts: “What am I to do with my girls? What will happen to them?” and then thinking of his wife’s child by her first marriage: “Will Galia go to an orphanage?”

“Don’t worry, we’ll find you another wife,” Stalin supposedly replied. This was typical Stalin, the man who had threatened Krupskaya that if she did not obey the Party, they would appoint someone else as Lenin’s widow. By the standards of the time, Poskrebyshev made a fuss but he could do no more. After two years, Bronka was shot, aged just thirty-one, as the Germans approached Moscow.[18]

Her daughter Natalya was told she had died naturally. Poskrebyshev brought up the girls himself with loving devotion. He kept photographs of Bronka around the house. When Natalya pointed at one of the photos and said “Mama,” Poskrebyshev burst into tears and ran out of the room. It was typical of the tragedies of the time that Natalya only discovered her mother had been shot when she was told at school by the daughter of Kozlovsky the singer. She sobbed in the lavatories. Poskrebyshev remarried.

Bronka’s destruction did not affect Poskrebyshev’s relationship with Stalin or Beria: the Party was just. Stalin took a solicitous interest in Bronka’s daughter: “How’s Natasha?” he often asked his chef de cabinet. “Is she plump and sweet?” Years later when she could not do her homework, she called her father to ask his help. Someone else answered.

“Can I speak to my father?” she asked.

“He’s not here,” replied Stalin. “What’s the problem?”—and he solved her mathematical questions. The only awkwardness in Poskrebyshev’s apparent friendship with Beria was when the latter hugged little Natalya and sighed: “You’re going to be as beautiful as your mother.”

Poskrebyshev “turned green,” struggled to control his emotions, and rasped: “Natalya, go and play.”[19]

Before he turned to wantonly kill another of his friend’s wives, Stalin capriciously saved two old friends from death. Sergo Kavtaradze was an Old Bolshevik Leftist who had known Stalin since the turn of the century. He was an intelligent cosmopolitan Georgian married to Princess Sofia Vachnadze, whose godmother had been Empress Maria Fyodorovna, Nicholas II’s mother. They were an unusual couple. Kavtaradze consistently joined the oppositions yet Stalin always forgave him. Arrested in the late twenties, Stalin brought him back and ordered Kaganovich to help him. He was arrested again in late 1936, appearing on Yezhov’s death lists. His wife was also arrested. His daughter Maya, then eleven, thought both parents were already dead but she courageously wrote to Stalin to beg for their lives, signing her letters: “Pioneer Maya Kavtaradze.” Both Kavtaradzes were tortured but because Stalin had put a dash next to his old friend’s name on the death list, their lives were spared. Now, in late 1939, “Pioneer Kavtaradze” ’s letters reminded Stalin to ask Beria if his old friend was still alive.

In the Lubianka, Kavtaradze was suddenly shaved by a barber, given a comfortable room, and a menu from which he could order any food he liked. Delivered to the Hotel Lux, he found his wife was there, a frail shadow of her former self—but alive. Their daughter arrived from Tiflis. Soon afterwards, Kavtaradze was called: “Comrade Stalin is waiting for you. If you’re ready, a car will pick you up in half an hour.” He was taken to Kuntsevo where Koba greeted him in the study: “Hello Sergo,” he said as if Kavtaradze had not been found guilty of involvement in a plot to kill him. “Where’ve you been?”

“Sitting [in prison].”

“Oh you found time to sit?” The Russian slang for being in prison is sidet—to sit—hence Stalin’s joke, a line he used frequently. After dinner, Stalin turned to him anxiously: “Nevertheless, you all wanted to kill me?”

“Do you really think so?” Kavtaradze replied. Stalin just grinned. Afterwards, when he got home, Kavtaradze whispered to his wife: “Stalin’s sick.” A few weeks later, the family received a bizarre and revealing visitation.[20]

The Kavtaradzes had some friends to dinner when the telephone rang at 11 p.m. Kavtaradze said he had to rush out and left without an explanation. His wife and their daughter Maya, fourteen, went to bed. At 6 a.m. Kavtaradze staggered into their three-room apartment on Gorky Street, still dizzy from drinking. “Where’ve you been?” his wife scolded him.

“We’ve guests,” he announced.

“You’re drunk!” Then she heard footsteps: Stalin and Beria tipsily walked in and sat down at the kitchen table. Vlasik stood guard at the front door. While Kavtaradze poured out drinks, his wife rushed into Maya’s room.

“Wake up!” she whispered.

“What’s wrong?” asked the schoolgirl. “They’ve come to arrest us at night?”

“No, Stalin’s come.”

“I won’t meet him,” retorted Maya who understandably hated him.

“You must,” replied her mother. “He’s a historical personage.” So Maya got dressed and came into the kitchen. As soon as she appeared, Stalin beamed.

“Ah, it’s you—‘Pioneer Kavtaradze.’ ” He recalled her letters appealing for her parents. “Sit on my lap.” She sat on Stalin’s knee. “Do you spoil her?”

Maya was charmed: “He was so kind, so gentle—he kissed me on the cheek and I looked into his honey-coloured, hazel, gleaming eyes,” she recalls, “but I was so anxious.”

“We’ve no food!” the little girl exclaimed.

“Don’t worry,” said Beria. Ten minutes later, Georgian food was delivered from the famous Aragvi restaurant. Stalin looked closely at Kavtaradze’s wife, the princess born at the imperial court. Her hair was white.

“We tortured you too much,” Stalin said.

“Whoever mentions the past, let him lose his eyes,” she answered shrewdly, using the proverb Stalin had used to Bukharin. He asked Beria about Kavtaradze’s brother, also arrested, but they were too late: he had already died, like so many others, en route to Magadan.

Kavtaradze started singing a Georgian song but he was out of tune.

“Don’t, Tojo,” said Stalin, who nicknamed Kavtaradze, with his Oriental eyes, after the Japanese General Tojo. He started to sing himself “in a sweet tenor.” Maya was “shocked—there he was short and pock-marked. Now he was singing!” Then he announced: “I want to see the apartment,” and inspected it carefully. The feast continued until 10 a.m. and Maya missed school that day.

Stalin appointed Kavtaradze to a publishing job that involved another prisoner, Shalva Nutsibidze, a celebrated Georgian philosopher. As a young man, Nutsibidze had once met Stalin. While in jail, Nutsibidze started translating the Georgian epic poem by Rustaveli, The Knight in the Panther Skin, into Russian. Every day, his work was taken from him and returned marked with the pen of an anonymous editor. Kobulov tortured him, tearing off his fingernails.

Then he suddenly became friendly, telling the prisoner that during a recent meeting, Stalin had asked Beria if he knew what kind of bird the thrush was: “Ever heard of a thrush singing in his cage?” Beria shook his head. “It’s the same with poets,” Stalin explained. “A poet can’t sing in a cell. If we wish to have Rustaveli perfectly translated, free the thrush.” Nutsibidze was released and, on 20 October 1940, Kavtaradze picked him up in a limousine and the two “lucky stiffs” drove to the Little Corner to report to Poskrebyshev on the Rustaveli translation.

When they were shown into the office, Stalin was smiling at them: “You’re Professor Nutsibidze?” he said. “You’ve been offended a bit but let’s not rake up the past,” and then he started to rave about the “magnificent translation of Rustaveli.” Sitting the two men down, Stalin handed the astounded professor a leather-bound draft of the translation, adding, “I’ve translated one couplet. Let’s see how you like it.” Stalin recited it. “If you really do like it, I give it to you as a present. Use it in your translation, but don’t mention my name. I take great pleasure in being your editor.” He then invited the two to dinner where they reminisced about the old days in Georgia.

After many horns of wine, Nutsibidze recalled the political meeting where he had first met Stalin, declaiming his speech from memory. Stalin was delighted: “Extraordinary talent goes hand in hand with extraordinary memory!”[21] He came round the table and kissed Nutsibidze on the forehead.[22]

They were particularly fortunate “stiffs” because after the Ribbentrop Pact, Stalin liquidated the backlog of Yezhov cases, including Blackberry himself who confessed to being an English, Japanese and Polish spy. But he also denounced his wife’s literary lovers. Thus the indelible mark of Yevgenia’s kisses proved fatal long after her own exit. Sholokhov was protected by the penumbra of Stalin himself but Isaac Babel was arrested, telling his young wife: “Please see our girl grows up happy.”

On 16 January 1940, Stalin signed 346 death sentences, a list of the tragic flotsam of Terror that combined monsters with innocents, including some of the outstanding talents of the arts, such as Babel, theatre director Meyerhold, and Yezhova’s lover, the journalist Koltsov (on whom Karpov in Hemingway’s For Whom the Bell Tolls is based), as well as Yezhov himself with his innocent brother, nephews and socialite mistress, Glikina, and the fallen magnate Eikhe. Most (though not Yezhov) were mercilessly tortured with the relish that Beria and Kobulov brought to their work at Sukhanov prison, Beria’s special realm which, ironically, had once been the St. Catherine’s Nunnery.

“The investigators began to use force on me, a sick sixty-five-year-old man,” Meyerhold wrote to Molotov. “I was made to lie face down and then beaten on the soles of my feet and my spine with a rubber strap. They sat me on a chair and beat my feet from above . . . For the next few days when those parts of my legs were covered with extensive internal haemorrhaging, they again beat the red, blue and yellow bruises and the pain was so intense it felt as if boiling water was poured on . . . I howled and wept from pain. They beat my back . . . punched my face, swinging their fists from a great height . . . The intolerable physical and emotional pain caused my eyes to weep unending streams of tears . . .”

Over the next few days, Stalin’s hanging judge Ulrikh sentenced all to “the highest measure of punishment” in perfunctory trials at Lefortovo prison before attending a Kremlin gala, starring the tenor Kozlovsky and the ballerina Lepeshinskaya. Babel was condemned as an “agent of French and Austrian intelligence . . . linked to the wife of Enemy of the People Yezhov.” At 1:30 a.m. on 27 January 1940, Babel was shot and cremated.

Eikhe was subjected to one last session of “French wrestling” at Sukhanov prison. Beria and Rodos “brutally beat Eikhe with rubber rods; he fell but they picked him up and went on beating him. Beria kept asking him, “Will you confess to being a spy?” Eikhe refused. “One of Eikhe’s eyes had been gouged out and blood was streaming out of it but he went on repeating ‘I won’t confess.’ When Beria had convinced himself he could not get a confession . . . he ordered them to lead him away to be shot.”

It was now Yezhov’s turn. On 1 February, Beria called his predecessor to his office at the Sukhanovka to propose that if he confessed at his trial, Stalin would spare him. To his meagre credit, Yezhov refused: “It’s better to leave this earth as an honourable man.”

On 2 February, Ulrikh tried him in Beria’s office. Yezhov read out his last statement to Stalin, dedicated to the sacred order of Bolshevik chivalry. He denied all charges of spying for what he called “Polish landowners . . . English lords and Japanese samurai” but “I do not deny I drank heavily but I worked like a horse. My fate is obvious,” but he asked “one thing: shoot me quietly, without putting me through any agony.” Then he requested that his mother be looked after, “my daughter taken care of” and his innocent nephews spared. He finished with the sort of flourish that one might expect to find from a knight to his king at the time of the Round Table: “Tell Stalin that I shall die with his name on my lips.”

He faced the Vishka less courageously than many of his victims. When Ulrikh pronounced the sentence, Yezhov toppled over but was caught by his guards, loaded into a Black Crow in the early hours of 3 February and driven to his special execution yard with the sloping floor and hosing facilities at Varsonofyevsky Lane. There Beria, the Deputy Procurator (N. P. Afanasev) and executioner, Blokhin, awaited him. Yezhov, according to Afanasev, hiccuped and wept. Finally his legs collapsed and they dragged him by the hands. That day, Stalin met Beria and Mikoyan for three hours, probably discussing economic matters, but there is no doubt that he would have wished to know the details of Blackberry’s conduct at the supreme moment.[23]

The ashes of these men, Yezhov the criminal, Babel the genius, were dumped into a pit marked “Common Grave Number One—unclaimed ashes 1930–42 inclusive” at old Donskoi Cemetery. Just twenty paces away there is a gravestone that reads: “Khayutina, Yevgenia Solomonovna 1904–1938.”⁴ Yezhov, Yevgenia and Babel lie close.[24]

Yezhov’s eminence was eradicated from the memories of the time. Henceforth he was portrayed as a blood-crazed renegade killing innocents against Stalin’s wishes. The era was named the Yezhovshchina, Yezhov’s time, a word that Stalin probably coined for he was soon using it himself. Yagoda and Yezhov were both “scum,” thought Stalin. Yezhov was “a rat who killed many innocent people,” Stalin told Yakovlev, the aircraft designer. “We had to shoot him,” he confided to Kavtaradze. But after the war, Stalin admitted: “One can’t believe a lot of the evidence from 1937. Yezhov couldn’t run the NKVD properly and anti-Soviet elements penetrated it. They destroyed some honest people, our best cadres.”

Looking back, he also questioned Beria’s Terror: “Beria runs too many cases and everyone confesses.” But Stalin was always aware that the NKVD invented evidence: he jested and grumbled about it but often he chose to believe it because he had already decided who was an Enemy. More often, he had created it himself. “Meyerhold was a huge talent,” Stalin reflected in 1950, but “our Chekists don’t understand artists who all have faults. The Chekists collect them and then destroy good people. I doubt Meyerhold was an Enemy of the People.” He protested too much. Stalin had carefully followed their careers. He disapproved of “frivolous” Babel and his Red Cavalry “of which he knows nothing”—and he signed the death lists: no ruler has supervised his secret police as intimately as he.

Now Beria, cleaning the Augean stables of Yezhov’s detritus, brought Stalin the death sentence for Blokhin the executioner himself. Stalin refused Beria’s request, saying that this “chernaya rabota”—black work— was a difficult job but very important for the Party. Blokhin was spared to kill thousands more. Stalin’s brother-in-law Stanislas Redens (implicated by Yezhov) was shot on 12 February 1940.[25] His wife Anna was still convinced he would return and often called Stalin and Beria to inquire. Finally Beria told her to forget her marriage. After all, it had never been registered . . .[26]

 

 

30. Molotov Cocktails: The Winter War and Kulik’s Wife

Stalin was in high spirits after the Ribbentrop Pact but he remained dangerously paranoid, especially about the wives of his friends. In November 1939, the phone rang at the dacha of Kulik, the bungling Deputy Defence Commissar who had commanded the Polish invasion. He and his long-legged, green-eyed wife, Kira Simonich, said to be the finest looking in Stalin’s circle, were holding his birthday party attended by an Almanac de Gotha of the élite, from Voroshilov and the worker-peasant-Count Alexei Tolstoy, to the omnipresent court singer, Kozlovsky, and a flurry of ballerinas. Kulik answered it.

“Quiet!” he hissed. “It’s Stalin!” He listened. “What am I doing? I’m celebrating my birthday with friends.”

“Wait for me,” replied Stalin who soon arrived with Vlasik and a case of wine. He greeted everyone and then sat at the table, where he drank his own wine while Kozlovsky sang Stalin’s favourite songs, particularly the Duke’s aria from Rigoletto.

Kira Kulik approached Stalin, chatting to him like an old friend. The most unlikely member of Stalin’s circle was born Kira Simonich, the daughter of a count of Serbian origins who had run Tsarist intelligence in Finland then been shot by the Cheka in 1919. After the Revolution she had married a Jewish merchant exiled to Siberia: she went with him and they then managed to settle in the south where she met Grigory Kulik, the stocky, “always half-drunk” bon vivant who had commanded Stalin’s artillery at Tsaritsyn, but whose knowledge of military technology was frozen in 1918. The Countess was his second wife: they fell in love on the spot, leaving their respective spouses—but she was trebly tainted, for she was an aristocrat with links to Tsarist intelligence and the ex-wife of an arrested Jewish merchant. Like Bronka, Kira Kulik chatted to Stalin informally and “shone at Kremlin parties,” recalled one lady who was often there herself. “She was very beautiful. Tukhachevsky, Voroshilov, Zhdanov, Yagoda, Yezhov, Beria all paid court to her.” Naturally there were rumours that Stalin himself had made her his mistress.

Now, by the piano at the party, Kira and other young women surrounded him: “We drink to your health, Joseph Vissarionovich,” said a famous ballerina, “and let me kiss you in the name of all women.” He kissed her in return, and toasted her. But then Kira Kulik made a mistake.

When she was alone by the piano with just Stalin, she asked him to free her brother, a former Tsarist officer, from the camps. Stalin listened affably, then put on the gramophone, playing his favourites. Everyone danced except Stalin.[27] Stalin gave Kulik a book inscribed “To my old friend. J Stalin,” but Kira’s approach, presuming on her familiarity and prettiness, set a mantrap in his suspicious mind.[28]

Days later, Kulik ordered the artillery barrage that commenced the Soviet invasion of Finland, the fourth country in their sphere of influence, which like the Baltic States had been part of the Russian Empire until 1918 and which now threatened Leningrad.

On 12 October, a Finnish delegation met Stalin and Molotov in the Kremlin to hear the Soviet demands for the cession of a naval base at Hango. The Finns refused the Soviet demands, much to Stalin’s surprise. “This cannot continue for long without the danger of accidents,” he said. The Finns replied that they needed a five-sixths majority in their Parliament. Stalin laughed: “You’re sure to get 99 percent!”

“And our votes into the bargain,” joked Molotov. Their last meeting ended with less humour: “We civilians,” threatened Molotov, “can see no further . . . Now it’s the turn of the military . . .”

During dinner with Beria and Khrushchev at his flat, Stalin sent Finland his ultimatum. Molotov and Zhdanov, who was in charge of Baltic policy, the navy, and the defence of Leningrad, backed him. Mikoyan told a German diplomat that he had warned the Finns: “You should be careful not to push the Russians too far. They have deep feelings in regard to this part of the world and . . . I can only tell you that we Caucasians in the Politburo are having a great deal of difficulty restraining the Russians.” When the ultimatum ran out, they were still drinking in the Kremlin. “Let’s get started today,” said Stalin, sending Kulik to command the bombardment. The very presence of Kulik at any military engagement seemed to guarantee disaster.[29]

On 30 November, five Soviet armies attacked along the 800-mile border. Their frontal assaults on the Mannerheim Line were foiled by the ingenious Finns, who, dressed like ghosts in white suits, were slaughtering the Russians. The forests were decorated with frozen pyramids of Soviet corpses. The Finns used 70,000 empty bottles, filled with gasoline, against the Russian tanks—the first “Molotov cocktails,” one part of his cult of personality that the vain Premier surely did not appreciate. By mid-December, Stalin had lost about 25,000 men. He amateurishly planned the Winter War like a local exercise, ignoring the Chief of Staff Shaposhnikov’s professional plan. When Kulik’s artillery deputy, Voronov, later a famous marshal, asked how much time was allotted for this operation, he was told, “Between ten and twelve days.” Voronov thought it would take two or three months. Kulik greeted this with “derisive gibes” and ordered him to work on a maximum of twelve days. Stalin and Zhdanov were so confident they created a crude puppet government of Finnish Communists. After 9 December, the Ninth Army was decimated around the destroyed village of Suomussalmi.

Stalin’s military amateurs reacted with spasms of executions and recriminations. “I regard a radical purge . . . as essential,” Voroshilov warned the 44th Division. The need for the reform of the Red Army was plain to the cabinets of Europe. Yet Stalin’s first solution was to despatch the “gloomy demon” Mekhlis, now at the height of his power, to the front:

“I’m so absorbed in the work that I don’t even notice the days pass. I sleep only 2–3 hours,” he told his wife. “Yesterday it was minus 35 degrees below freezing . . . I feel very well . . . I have only one dream—to destroy the White Guards of Finland. We’ll do it. Victory’s not far off.”[30] On the 26th, Stalin finally appointed Timoshenko to command the North-Western Front and restore order to his frayed forces who were now dying of hunger. Even Beria took a more humane stand, reporting to Voroshilov the lack of provisions: “139th Division’s in difficulties . . . no fodder at all . . . no fuel . . . Troops scattering.”

Stalin sensed the army was concealing the scale of the disaster. Trusting only Mekhlis, he wrote: “The White Finns published their operations report that claims ‘the annihilation of the 44th Division . . . 1,000 Red Army soldiers as prisoners, 102 guns, 1,170 horses and 43 tanks.’ Tell me first—is this true? Second—where is the Military Council and Chief of Staff of the 44th Division? How do they explain their shameful conduct? Why did they desert their division? Third, why does the Military Council of the 9th Army not inform us . . . ? We expect an answer. Stalin.”

Mekhlis arrived in Suomussalmi to find chaotic scenes which he made worse. He confirmed the losses and shot the whole command: “the trial of Vinogradov, Volkov and chief of Political Department took place in the open air in the presence of the division . . . The sentence of shooting was performed publicly . . . The exposure of traitors and cowards continues.” On 10 December, Mekhlis himself was almost killed when his car was ambushed, as he proudly recounted to Stalin: unlike many of Stalin’s commissars, Mekhlis was personally courageous, if not suicidally reckless, under fire, partly because, as a Jew, he wanted to be “purer than crystal.” Indeed, he took command of fleeing companies and led them at the enemy. Mekhlis and Kulik did not conceal the mess: “We lack bread in the army,” Mekhlis reported. Kulik agreed: “rigidity and bureaucracy are everywhere.” When Kulik rushed into a Politburo meeting to report yet more defeats, Stalin lectured him: “You’re lapsing into panic . . . The pagan Greek priests were intelligent . . . When they got disturbing reports, they’d adjourn to their bathhouses, take baths, wash themselves clean, and only afterwards assess events and take decisions . . .”

Yet Stalin was saddened by these disasters: “The snows are deep. Our troops are on the march . . . full of spirit . . . Suddenly there’s a burst of automatic fire and our men fall to the ground.” At times, he looked helplessly depressed. Khrushchev saw him lying on a couch, despondent, a rehearsal of his collapse in the early days of the Nazi invasion. The pressure made Stalin ill with his usual streptococcus and staphylococcus, a temperature of 38°C and an agonizing sore throat. On 1 February, his health improved as Timoshenko probed Finnish defences, launching his great offensive on the 11th. Soviet superiority finally took its toll on the plucky Finns. When the doctors re-examined Stalin, he showed them the maps: “We’ll take Vyborg today.” The Finns sued for peace. On 12 March, Zhdanov signed a treaty in which Finland ceded Hango, the Karelian Isthmus, and the north-eastern shore of Ladoga, 22,000 square miles, to insulate Leningrad. Finland lost around 48,000 soldiers, Stalin over 125,000.

“The Red Army was good for nothing,” Stalin later told Churchill and Roosevelt.[31] Stalin was incandescent and he was not alone: Khrushchev later blamed Voroshilov’s “criminal negligence,” sneering that he spent more time in the studio of Gerasimov, the court painter, than in the Defence Commissariat. At Kuntsevo, Stalin’s anger boiled over. He started shouting at Voroshilov, who gave as good as he got. Turning red as a turkey-cock, Voroshilov shrieked at Stalin, “You have yourself to blame for all of this. You’re the one who annihilated the old guard of our army, you had our best generals killed.”

Stalin rebuffed him, at which Voroshilov “picked up a platter of roast suckling pig and smashed it on the table.” Khrushchev admitted, “It was the only time in my life I witnessed such an outburst.” Voroshilov alone could have got away with it.

On 28 March 1940, Voroshilov, who became Stalin’s “whipping boy” for the Finnish disasters, confessed, at the Central Committee, “I have to say neither I nor General Staff . . . had any idea of the peculiarities and difficulties involved in this war.” Mekhlis, who hated Voroshilov and coveted his job, declared: he “cannot simply leave his post—he must be severely punished.” But Stalin could not afford to destroy Voroshilov.

“Mekhlis made a hysterical speech,” he said, restraining his creature. Instead he held a uniquely frank, sometimes comical, Supreme Military Council in mid-April. One commander admitted that the army had been surprised to find forests in Finland, at which Stalin sneered: “It’s time our army knew there were forests there . . . In Peter’s time, there were forests. Elizabeth . . . Catherine . . . Alexander found forests! And now! That’s four times!” (Laughter) He was even more indignant when Mekhlis revealed that the Finns often attacked during the Red Army’s afternoon nap. “Afternoon nap?!” spat Stalin.

“An hour’s nap,” confirmed Kulik.

“People have afternoon naps in rest homes!” growled Stalin, who went on to defend the campaign itself: “Could we have avoided the war? I think the war was inevitable . . . A delay of a couple of months would have meant a delay of twenty years.” He won more territory there than Peter the Great but he warned against the “cult of the traditions of the Civil War. It brings to mind the Red Indians who fought with clubs against rifles . . . and were all killed.” On 6 May, Voroshilov was sacked as Defence Commissar and succeeded by Timoshenko.[32] Shaposhnikov was sacked as Chief of Staff even though Stalin admitted he had been right in the first place, “but only we know that!” He raised military morale, restoring the rank of General and the single command by soldiers, whose tasks had been made incomparably harder by sharing control with interfering commissars. He freed 11,178 purged officers who officially returned “from a long and dangerous mission.” Stalin asked one of them, Konstantin Rokossovsky, perhaps noticing his lack of fingernails, “Were you tortured in prison?”

“Yes, Comrade Stalin.”

“There’re too many yes-men in this country,” sighed Stalin. But some did not come back: “Where’s your Serdich?” Stalin asked Budyonny about a mutual friend.

“Executed!” reported the Marshal.

“Pity! I wanted to make him Ambassador to Yugoslavia...”[33]

Stalin attacked his military “Red Indians” but then turned to his own tribe of primitive braves who remained obsessed with cavalry and oblivious to modern warfare. Budyonny and Kulik believed tanks could never replace horses. “You won’t convince me,” Budyonny had recently declared. “As soon as war comes, everyone will shout, ‘Send for the cavalry!’ ” Stalin and Voroshilov had abolished special tank corps. Fortunately, Timoshenko now persuaded the Vozhd to reverse his folly.[34]

Nonetheless, Mikoyan called the dominance of these incompetents “the triumph of the First Cavalry Army” since they were veterans of Stalin’s favoured Civil War unit. Despite the tossing of the suckling pig, Voroshilov was promoted to Deputy Premier for “cultural matters” which Mikoyan regarded as a joke, given the Marshal’s love of being painted.

Mekhlis, who also became Deputy Premier, fancied himself a great captain: he harassed Timoshenko to ask Stalin to reappoint him as Deputy Defence Commissar. Stalin mocked Timoshenko’s naïvety: “We want to help him but he doesn’t understand. He wants us to leave him Mekhlis. But after three months, Mekhlis will chuck him out. Mekhlis wants to be Defence Commissar himself.” Mekhlis enjoyed Stalin’s “unbounded confidence.” Kulik, the buffoonish artillery chief, who encouraged his subordinates by shrieking “Prison or medal,” was an ignorant Blimp. He despised anti-tank artillery: “What rubbish—no rumble, no shell holes . . .” He denounced the invaluable new Katyusha rockets: “What the hell do we need rocket artillery for? The main thing is the horse-drawn gun.” He delayed the production of the outstanding T-34 tank. Khrushchev, whom Stalin liked for his cheek, questioned Kulik’s credentials.

“You don’t even know Kulik,” roared Stalin. “I know him from the Civil War when he commanded the artillery in Tsaritsyn. He understands artillery.”

“But how many cannons did you have there? Two or three? And now he’s in charge of all the artillery in the land?” Stalin told Khrushchev to mind his own business. Higher than all of them, Zhdanov was now Stalin’s artillery and naval expert.[35] “There were competent people,” wrote Mikoyan, “but Stalin was increasingly distrustful of people so trust was more important than anything.” Stalin wavered, meandered and reversed his own decisions. It is remarkable any correct decisions were made at all.

In May, Stalin ordered the kidnapping of Kulik’s wife, Kira, at whose house he had been a guest in November. In the name of the Instantsiya, Beria commissioned “the Theoretician” Merkulov to arrange it. On 5 May, Kobulov, the prince-assassin Tsereteli and a favoured torturer Vladzimirsky trailed Kira on her way to the dentist, then bundled the beauty into a car and took her to the Lubianka. Stalin and Beria evidently shared a playful sadism and perverse taste for these depraved games. The reason for the kidnapping is a mystery because no charges were made against her, but Mekhlis built a file against the Kuliks which catalogues Kira’s nobility as well as Grigory’s drunken indiscretions, incompetence, anti-Semitism, Social Revolutionary past, complaints about the Terror, and connections with Trotskyites. Was she kidnapped for appealing to Stalin or was she denounced by her latest lover, another victim of prudery? The most suspicious mark against her in Stalin’s eyes may have been Kulik’s dangerous tendency to give “orders in front of” his various wives.[36]

Two days after Kira’s kidnapping, on 7 May, Stalin promoted her husband to Marshal, along with Timoshenko and Shaposhnikov, in what can only be called a stroke of ironical sadism. Next day, Kulik’s delight at his Marshalate was tempered by worry about his wife. He called Beria, who invited him to the Lubianka.

While Kulik sipped tea in his office, Beria called Stalin: “Marshal Kulik’s sitting in front of me. No, he doesn’t know any details. She left and that’s all. Certainly, Comrade Stalin, we’ll announce an all-Union search and do everything possible to find her.” They both knew that Kira was in the cells beneath Beria’s office. A month later, Countess Simonich-Kulik, mother of an eight-year-old daughter, was moved to Beria’s special prison, the Sukhanovka, where Blokhin murdered her in cold blood with a shot to the head. Kobulov complained that Blokhin killed her before he arrived. Stalin perhaps took comfort or pleasure in the promotion of cronies such as Kulik while knowing, as they did not, the fate of their beloveds.

The public search for Kira Kulik continued for twelve years but the Marshal himself had long since realized that her dubious connections had destroyed her. He soon married again.[37]

Meanwhile Stalin and his magnates debated the fate of the Polish officers, arrested or captured in September 1939 and held in three camps, one of which was close to Katyn Forest. When Stalin was undecided about an issue, there was surprisingly frank discussion. Kulik, commander of the Polish front, proposed freeing all the Poles. Voroshilov agreed but Mekhlis was adamant there were Enemies among them. Stalin stopped the release but Kulik persisted. Stalin compromised. The Poles were released—except for about 26,000 officers whose destiny was finally decided at the Politburo on 5 March 1940.

Beria’s son claimed that his father argued against a massacre, not out of philanthropy, but because the Poles might be useful later. There is no evidence for this, except that Beria often took a practical rather than ideological approach. If so, Beria lost the argument. He dutifully reported that the 14,700 officers, landowners and policemen and 11,000 “counter-Revolutionary” landowners were “spies and saboteurs . . . hardened . . . enemies of Soviet power” who should be “tried by . . . Comrades Merkulov, Kobulov and Bashtakov.” Stalin scrawled his signature first and underlined it, followed by Voroshilov, Molotov and Mikoyan. Kalinin and Kaganovich were canvassed by phone and voted “For.”

This massacre was a chunk of “black work” for the NKVD who were accustomed to the Vishka of a few victims at a time, but there was a man for the task: Blokhin travelled down to the Ostachkov camp where he and two other Chekists outfitted a hut with padded, soundproofed walls and decided on a Stakhanovite quota of 250 shootings a night. He brought a butcher’s leather apron and cap which he put on when he began one of the most prolific acts of mass murder by one individual, killing 7,000 in precisely twenty-eight nights, using a German Walther pistol to prevent future exposure.⁷ The bodies were buried in various places—but the 4,500 in the Kozelsk camp were interred in Katyn Forest.[38]

That June, the Führer unleashed his Blitzkrieg against the Low Countries and France. Stalin still had a profound respect for the power of France and Britain, whom he counted on holding up Hitler in the West. On 17 June 1940, France sued for peace, a shock that should have made Stalin reassess his alliance with Hitler though it was also now the only game in town. Molotov congratulated Schulenburg “warmly” but through gritted teeth, “on the splendid success of the German Wehrmacht .”

A rattled Stalin “cursed” the Allies: “Couldn’t they put up any resistance at all?” he asked Khrushchev. “Now Hitler’s going to beat our brains in!”[39]

Stalin rushed to consume the Baltic States and Bessarabia, part of Romania. As troops moved across the borders, Soviet bombers flew Stalin’s proconsuls to their fiefdoms: Dekanozov to Lithuania, Deputy Premier (the former “shoot the mad dogs” Procurator) Vyshinsky to Latvia, and Zhdanov to Estonia. Zhdanov drove through the Estonian capital, Tallinn, in an armoured car flanked by two tanks and then nominated a puppet “Prime Minister,” lecturing the Estonians “that everything will be done in accordance with democratic parliamentary rules ...We’re not Germans!” For some Baltic citizens, they were worse. A total of 34,250 Latvians, almost 60,000 Estonians and 75,000 Lithuanians were murdered or deported. “Comrade Beria,” said Stalin, “will take care of the accommodation of our Baltic guests.” The NKVD put icing on Stalin’s cake on 20 August, when Beria’s agent Ramon Mercader shattered Trotsky’s skull with an icepick. Trotsky might have undermined Stalin’s foreign policy but really his death simply closed the chapter of the Great Terror. Vengeance was Stalin’s.[40]

Stalin had seized a buffer zone from the Baltic to the Black Sea but he now started to receive intelligence of Hitler’s intention to attack the USSR. He redoubled his attentions to the Germans. Yet he also laughed at the Nazis with Zhdanov by putting on Wagner’sFlight of the Valkyries directed by the Jewish Eisenstein.

“And who’s singing Wotan?” Zhdanov joked with Stalin. “A Jewish singer.” These Hebraic Wagnerians did not restrain Hitler from gradually moving troops eastwards. Stalin instinctively distrusted the intelligence from the new chief of GRU, military intelligence, General Filip Golikov, an untried mediocrity, and from the NKVD under Beria and Merkulov. He regarded Golikov as “inexperienced, naïve. A spy should be like the devil; no one should trust him not even himself.” Merkulov, head of the NKVD Foreign Department, was “dextrous” but still scared in case “someone will be offended.” It was understandable they were afraid of offending “someone.” All their predecessors had been murdered.[41]

Stalin and Molotov’s suspicions of their own spies reflected their origins in the murky Bolshevik underground where many comrades (including the Vozhd himself ) were double or treble agents. They evaluated the motives of others by the standards of their own paranoid criminality: “I think one can never trust intelligence,” Molotov admitted years later. “One has to listen . . . but check on them . . . There are endless provocateurs on both sides.” This was ironic because Stalin possessed the world’s best intelligence network: his spies worked for Marx not Mammon. Yet the more he knew, the less he trusted: “his knowledge” writes one historian, “only added to his sorrow and isolation.” However insistent the facts of the German military build-up, the Soviet spymasters were under pressure to provide the information that Stalin wanted: “We never went out looking for information at random,” recalled one spy. “Orders to look for specific things would come from above.”

Stalin reacted to this uneasiness by aggressively pushing the traditional Russian interests in the Balkans which in itself alarmed Hitler, who was weighing up whether to attack his ally. He decided to invite Molotov to Berlin to sidetrack the Soviets into a push for the Indian Ocean. The night before Molotov left, he sat up late with Stalin and Beria, debating how to maintain the Pact. In his handwritten directive, Stalin instructed Molotov to insist on explanations for the presence of German troops in Romania and Finland, discover Hitler’s real interests and assert Russian interests in the Balkans and Dardanelles.[42] Molotov meanwhile told his wife, “my pleasure honey,” that he was studying Hitler: “I’ve been reading Rauschning’s Hitler Spoke to Me . . . Rauschning explains much that H is carrying out now . . . and in the future.”

 

 

31. Molotov Meets Hitler: Brinkmanship and Delusion

Molotov set off late on 10 November 1940 from the Belorussia Station with a pistol in his pocket and a delegation of sixty which included Beria’s two protégés, Dekanozov, Deputy Foreign Commissar, and Merkulov, sixteen secret policemen, three servants and a doctor. This was Molotov’s second trip to Europe. In 1922, he and Polina had visited Italy in the early days of Fascism. Now he was to observe Fascism at its apogee.

At 11:05 a.m., Molotov’s train pulled into Berlin’s Anhalter Station, which was festooned with flowers sinisterly illuminated with searchlights and Soviet flags hidden behind swastikas. Molotov dismounted in a dark coat with his grey Homburg hat and was greeted by Ribbentrop and Field Marshal Keitel. He spent longest shaking hands with Reichsführer-SS Himmler. The band deliberately played the Internationale at double time in case any ex-Communist passers-by joined in.

Molotov sped off in an open Mercedes with outriders to his luxurious hotel, the Schloss Bellevue, once an imperial palace, on the Tiergarten where the Soviets were dazzled by the “tapestries and paintings,” the “finest porcelain standing round exquisitely carved cabinets” and, above all, the “gold-braided livery” of the staff. Molotov’s entire delegation wore identical dark blue suits, grey ties, and cheap felt hats, obviously ordered in bulk. Since some wore the hats like berets, some on the back of their heads like cowboys and some low over the eyes like Mafiosi, it was clear that many had never worn Western headgear before. The tepidity of the visit became obvious when Molotov met Ribbentrop in Bismarck’s old office and gave little away. “A rather frosty smile glided over his intelligent, chess-player’s face,” noticed a German diplomat who was amused that, in the gilded Bismarckian chairs, little Dekanozov’s feet barely touched the floor. When Ribbentrop encouraged Russia to seek an outlet for her energies in warm oceans, Molotov asked: “Which sea are you talking about?”

After lunch at the Bellevue, the open Mercedes drove Molotov to the Chancellery, where he was led through bronze doors, guarded by heel-clicking SS men, into Hitler’s magnificent study. Two blond SS giants threw open the doors and formed an archway with impeccable Nazi salutes through which this plain, stalwart Russian marched towards Hitler’s gargantuan desk at the far end. Hitler hesitated, then walked jerkily to greet the Russians with “small, rapid steps.” He stopped and made a Nazi salute before shaking hands with Molotov and the others with a “cold and moist” palm, while his “feverish eyes” burned into them “like gimlets.” Hitler’s theatrical rigmarole to terrorize and impress his guests did not affect Molotov, who regarded himself as a Marxist-Leninist and therefore superior to everyone else, particularly Fascists: “There was nothing remarkable in his appearance.” Molotov and Hitler were exactly the same height— “medium” as the small Russian put it. But Hitler “was very smug . . . and vain. He was clever but narrow-minded and obtuse because of his egotism and the absurdity of his primordial idea.”

Hitler showed Molotov to a lounge area where he, Dekanozov and the interpreters sat on the sofa while Hitler occupied his usual armchair, whence he treated them to a long soliloquy about his defeat of Britain, generosity to Stalin, and disinterest in the Balkans, none of which were true. Molotov retorted with a series of polite but awkward questions on the relationship between the two powers, pinpointing precisely Finland, Romania, Bulgaria. “I kept pushing him for greater detail. ‘You’ve got to have a warm-water port. Iran, India—that’s your future.’ And I said, ‘Why that’s an interesting idea, how do you see it?’ ” Hitler ended the meeting without providing the answer.

That night, Ribbentrop hosted a reception for Molotov at the Kaiserhof Hotel attended by Reichsmarschall Göring, sporting a preposterous sartorial creation of silver thread and jewels, and Deputy Führer Hess. The Russian interpreter Berezhkov, observing Molotov talking to Göring, could not imagine two more different men. A telegram from Stalin awaited him, insisting again on the Balkans and Straits. The next morning, Molotov sent Stalin a telegram: “I’m leaving for lunch and talk with Hitler. I will press him on the Black Sea, the Straits and Bulgaria.” First he called on Göring at the Air Ministry where he asked Hitler’s “paladin” more embarrassing questions which the Reichsmarschall simply doused with his pinguid heartiness. He then visited Hess.

“Do you have a Party programme?” he asked the Deputy Führer, knowing the Nazis did not. “Do you have Party rules? And do you have a Constitution?” The Bolshevik ideologue was contemptuous: “How could it be a Party without a programme?”

At 2 p.m., Hitler received Molotov, Merkulov and Dekanozov for a dinner with Goebbels and Ribbentrop. The Russians were disappointed by Hitler’s austere menu that read simply: “Kraftbruhe, Fasan, Obstsalat”— beef tea, pheasant and fruit salad.

“The war is on so I don’t drink coffee,” Hitler explained, “because my people don’t drink coffee either. I don’t smoke, I don’t drink liquor.” Molotov added later: “It goes without saying that I was abstaining from nothing.”

Their second meeting, after the meal, lasted for a “bad-tempered” three hours. Molotov pressed Hitler for answers. Hitler accused Russia of greed. Nothing dented the stolid persistence of “Iron-Arse.” Molotov obeyed Stalin’s telegraphed instructions to explain that “all events from the Crimean War . . . to the landing of foreign troops during the Intervention [Civil War] mean Soviet security cannot be settled without . . . the Straits.”

Hitler almost lost his temper about his troops in Finland and Romania: “That’s a trifle!”

Molotov tartly commented that there was no need to speak roughly. But how could they agree on big issues when they failed to do so on small ones? Molotov noticed that Hitler “became agitated. I persisted. I wore him down.”

Hitler drew out his handkerchief, wiped the sweat off his upper lip and saw his guest to the door.

“I’m sure history will remember Stalin’s name forever,” he said.

“I don’t doubt it,” replied Molotov.

“So we should meet . . .” suggested Hitler vaguely, a meeting that never happened. “But I hope it will remember me too,” he added with mock-modesty, for he had just two days earlier signed his Directive No. 18 that moved the Soviet invasion to the top of his agenda, an enterprise that would guarantee his place in history.

“I don’t doubt it.”

Göring, Hess and Ribbentrop were the star guests at Molotov’s banquet, with caviar and vodka at the grand but faded Soviet Embassy, which was interrupted by the RAF.

“Our British friends are complaining they have not been invited to the party,” joked Ribbentrop as Göring stampeded like a bejewelled, scented bison through the crowd, out to his Mercedes. There was no air-raid shelter at the embassy so most of the Russians were driven back to the hotel. Several got lost and Molotov was shepherded to Ribbentrop’s private bunker. Here, to the music of the RAF bombs, and the cackle of AA-guns, the stuttering Russian sliced through the German’s florid promises. If, as Hitler said, Germany was waging a life-and-death struggle against England, Molotov suggested this must mean that Germany was fighting “for life” and England “for death.” Britain was “finished,” answered Ribbentrop.

“If that’s so, then why are we in this shelter and whose bombs are those falling?” Molotov responded.

Molotov departed next morning, having, as he told Stalin, achieved “nothing to boast of but . . . it does clarify the present mood of Hitler.”

Stalin congratulated Molotov on his defiance of Hitler: “How,” he asked, “did he put up with you telling him all this?” The answer was that Hitler did not: Molotov’s obstinate Balkan ambitions convinced Hitler that Stalin would soon challenge his European hegemony. Having wavered over attacking Russia, he now accelerated his plans. On 4 December, Operation Barbarossa was set for May 1941.

A few days later, Yakovlev, the aircraft designer, who had been with Molotov in Berlin, bumped into the Foreign Commissar in Stalin’s anteroom.

“Ah, here is the German!” joked Molotov. “We’ll both have to repent!”

“For what?” asked Yakovlev nervously.

“Well, did we dine with Hitler? We did. Did we shake hands with Goebbels? We did. We shall have to repent.” The Bolsheviks lived in a world of sin and repentance. When Stalin received Yakovlev, he ordered him to study Nazi planes: “Learn how to beat them.”[43]

On 29 December 1940, eleven days after Hitler signed Directive No. 21 on Operation Barbarossa, Stalin’s spies alerted him to its existence. Stalin knew the USSR would not be ready for war until 1943 and hoped to delay it by frantic rearming and aggressive brinkmanship in the Balkans—but without provoking Hitler. The Führer, on the other hand, realized the urgency of his enterprise and that he had to secure the Balkans before he could attack Russia.

Stalin’s panic to produce the best weapons and create the best strategy created a new Terror around him. The countdown to war redoubled the unreal miasma of fear and ignorance at the heart of the Soviet power. At a Kremlin lunch, the magnates were just standing to leave when Stalin suddenly tore into them, complaining of the symptoms of his own dictatorship: “I am the only one dealing with all these problems. None of you could be bothered with them. I am out there by myself. Look at me: I am capable of learning . . . every day.”

Kalinin alone dared reply: “Somehow there’s never enough time!”

Stalin retorted furiously: “People are thoughtless . . . They’ll hear me out and go on just as before. But I’ll show you, if I ever lose my patience. You know very well I can do that. I’ll hit the fatsos so hard you’ll hear the crack for miles around!” He addressed himself especially to Kaganovich and Beria, who knew “very well” how hard Stalin could hit “the fatsos.” By the end, there were “tears in Voroshilov’s eyes.”

The more Stalin realized the parlous condition of his military, the more he floundered, both convinced of his own infallibility and oblivious of his technical ignorance. He supervised every detail of every weapon. His meetings became ever more disturbing, his conduct, thought Mikoyan, ever more “unhinged.”

There was a clear etiquette: it was deadly to disagree too much but, amazingly, his managers and generals stubbornly defended their expertise. “I would have been more afraid if I’d known more,” said one commissar later. Silence was often a virtue and veterans advised neophytes on how to behave and survive.

When Stalin sent the Naval Commissar, Nikolai Kuznetsov, to inspect the Far East, the Admiral complained to Zhdanov, the naval overlord, that he was too busy with his new job.

“The papers can wait,” replied Zhdanov. “I advise you not to say a word about them to Comrade Stalin.”[44]

When a new official arrived who had never attended a Stalin meeting, he called out “Joseph Vissarionovich” when he wanted to speak. “Stalin looked in my direction and again I saw . . . an unfriendly expression on his face. Suddenly a whisper from the man sitting behind me explained everything: ‘Never call him by his name and patronymic. He only allows a very narrow circle of intimates to do that. To all of us, he is Stalin. Comrade Stalin.’ ” It was shrewder to keep silent. Kuznetsov was about to object to building a fleet of heavy cruisers when another official whispered kindly: “Watch your step! Don’t insist!”[45]

On 23 December 1940 Stalin called meetings of the high command which might have been a good idea had they not been paralysed with fear. Marshal Timoshenko and his most dynamic general, Georgi Zhukov, who commanded the Kiev Military District, criticized the glaring weaknesses of Soviet strategy and proposed a return to the forbidden “deep operations” devised by the visionary Tukhachevsky. The powerful Zhdanov, Stalin’s chief adviser on everything from howitzers to ships, Finland to culture, sat in on the meetings and reported back to Stalin, who next day summoned the generals. The insomniac Stalin, who was so accustomed to nocturnal life that he could only sleep after 4 a.m., confessed that he had not slept at all the night before. Timoshenko replied nervously that Stalin had approved his speech.

“You don’t really think I have time to read every paper which is tossed at me,” replied Stalin, who at least ordered new plans and urgent war games. However, these merely exposed Soviet weakness, which rattled Stalin so much that on 13 January 1941 he summoned the generals without giving them time to prepare. The Chief of Staff, Meretskov, stumbled as he tried to report until Stalin interrupted: “Well, who finally won?”

Meretskov was afraid to speak, which only enraged Stalin even more. “Here among ourselves . . . we have to talk in terms of our real capabilities.” Finally Stalin exploded: “The trouble is we don’t have a proper Chief of Staff.” He there and then dismissed Meretskov. The meeting deteriorated further when Kulik declared that tanks were overrated; horse-drawn guns were the future. It was staggering that after two Panzer Blitzkrieg and only six months before the Nazi invasion, the Soviets were even debating such a thing.

It was Stalin’s fault that Kulik had been over-promoted but, typically, he blamed someone else: “Comrade Timoshenko, as long as there’s such confusion . . . no mechanization of the army can take place at all.”

Timoshenko retorted that only Kulik was confused. Stalin turned on his friend: “Kulik comes out against the engine. It’s as if he had come out against the tractor and supported the wooden plough . . . Modern warfare will be a war of engines.”[46]

The next afternoon, General Zhukov, forty-five, was rushed to the Little Corner, where Stalin appointed him Chief of Staff. Zhukov tried to refuse. Stalin, impressed by Zhukov’s victory over the Japanese at Khalkin-Gol, insisted. The quintessential fighting general who would become the greatest captain of the Second World War was another Civil War cavalryman and a protégé of Budyonny since the late twenties. The son of an impoverished shoemaker, this convinced Communist had just managed to survive the Terror with Budyonny’s help. Short, squat, indefatigable, with blunt features and a prehensile jaw, Georgi Zhukov shared Stalin’s ruthless brutality, combining savage reprisals and Roman discipline with carelessness about losses. However, he lacked Stalin’s deviousness and sadism. He was emotional and brave, often daring to disagree with Stalin who, sensing his gifts, indulged him.⁴

A few days later, at Kuntsevo, Timoshenko and Zhukov tried to persuade Stalin to mobilize, convinced that Hitler would invade. Timoshenko advised him on handling Stalin: “He won’t listen to a long lecture . . . just ten minutes.” Stalin was dining with Molotov, Zhdanov and Voroshilov, along with Mekhlis and Kulik. Zhukov spoke up: should not they bolster defences along the Western frontier?

“Are you eager to fight the Germans?” Molotov asked harshly.

“Wait a minute,” Stalin calmed the stuttering Premier. He lectured Zhukov on the Germans: “They fear us. In secret, I will tell you that our ambassador had a serious conversation with Hitler personally and Hitler said to him, ‘Please don’t worry about the concentration of our forces in Poland. Our forces are retraining . . .’ ” The generals then joined the magnates for Ukrainian borscht soup, buckwheat porridge, then stewed meat, with stewed and fresh fruit for pudding, washed down with brandy and Georgian Khvanchkara wine.[47]

Kulik’s imbecilic advice unleashed another paroxysm of terror that would bring death to a Politburo family. On hearing that the Germans were increasing the thickness of their armour, he demanded stopping all production of conventional guns and switching to 107mm howitzers from World War I. The Armaments Commissar, Boris Vannikov, a formidable Jewish super-manager, who had studied at Baku Polytechnic with Beria, sensibly opposed Kulik but lacked his access to Stalin. Kulik won Zhdanov’s backing. On 1 March, Stalin summoned Vannikov: “What objections do you have? Comrade Kulik said you don’t agree with him.” Vannikov explained that it was unlikely the Germans had updated their armour as swiftly as Kulik suggested: the 76mm remained the best. Then Zhdanov entered the office.

“Look here,” Stalin said to him, “Vannikov doesn’t want to make the 107mm gun . . . But these guns are very good. I know them from the Civil War.”

“Vannikov,” replied Zhdanov, “always opposes everything. That’s his style of working.”

“You’re the main artillery expert we have,” Stalin commissioned Zhdanov to settle the question, “and the 107mm is a good gun.” Zhdanov called the meeting where Vannikov defied Kulik. Zhdanov accused him of “sabotage.” “The dead hold back the living,” he added ominously. Vannikov shouted back:

“You’re tolerating disarmament in the face of an approaching war.” Zhdanov stiffly “declared he was going to complain about me to Stalin.” Stalin accepted Kulik’s solution, which had to be reversed when the war began. Vannikov was arrested.[48]Only in Stalin’s realm could the country’s greatest armaments expert be imprisoned just weeks before a war. But Kulik’s motto, “Prison or a medal,” had triumphed again. As the poison spread, it reached Kaganovich’s brother. In the almost biblical sacrifice of a beloved sibling, Lazar’s steeliness was grievously tested.[49]

Vannikov was cruelly tortured about his recent post as deputy to Mikhail Kaganovich, Lazar’s eldest brother and Commissar for Aircraft Production. The air force was always the most accident-prone service. Not only did the planes crash with alarming regularity, reflecting the haste and sloppiness of Soviet manufacturing, but someone had to pay for these accidents. In one year, four Heroes of the Soviet Union were lost in crashes and Stalin himself questioned the air-force generals even down to the engineers working on each plane. “What kind of man is he?” Stalin asked about one technician. “Maybe he’s a bastard, a svoloch.” The crashes had to be the fault of “bastards.” Vannikov was forced to implicate Mikhail Kaganovich as the “bastard” in this case.

Meanwhile, Vasily Stalin, now a pilot avid to win paternal love, usually by denouncing his superiors to his father, played some part in this tragedy. He remained so nervous that, Svetlana recalled, when his father addressed him at dinner, he jumped and often could not even reply, stammering, “I didn’t hear what you said, Father...What?” In 1940, he fell in love with a pretty trumpet-playing blonde from an NKVD family, Galina Bourdonovskaya, and married her. Yet he was truculent, arrogant, drunken and, while often bighearted, more often dangerous. In this peculiar world, the “Crown Prince” became, according to Svetlana, “a menace.”[50]-[51]

“Hello dear Father,” he wrote on 4 March 1941. “How’s your health? Recently I was in Moscow on the orders of Rychagov [the Chief of the Main Directorate of the Air Force], I wanted to see you so much but they said you were busy . . . They won’t let me fly . . . Rychagov called me and abused me very much saying that instead of studying theory, I was starting to visit commanders proving to them I had to fly. He ordered me to inform you of this conversation.” Vasily had to fly in old planes “that are terrible to see” and even future officers could not train in the new planes: “Father, write me just a couple of words, if you have time, it’s the biggest joy for me because I miss you so much. Your Vasya.”

This subtle denunciation cannot have helped Pavel Rychagov, thirty-nine, a dashing pilot just promoted to the high command. He arrived drunk at a meeting to discuss the planes. When Stalin criticized the air force, Rychagov shouted that the death rate was so high “because you’re making us fly in coffins!” Silence fell but Stalin continued to walk around the room, the only sounds being the puffing of the pipe and the pad of soft boots.

“You shouldn’t have said that.” He walked round the deathly quiet table one more time and repeated: “You shouldn’t have said that.” Rychagov was arrested within the week along with several air-force top brass and General Shtern, Far Eastern commander, all later shot. They, like Vannikov, implicated Mikhail Kaganovich.[52]

“We received testimonies,” Stalin told Kaganovich. “Your brother’s implicated in the conspiracy.” The brother was accused of building the aircraft factories close to the Russian border to help Berlin. Stalin explained that Mikhail, a Jew, had been designated head of Hitler’s puppet government-in-waiting, an idea so preposterous that it was either the moronic solecism of an NKGB simpleton or, more likely, a joke between Stalin and Beria. Did they remember Ordzhonikidze’s fury on the arrest of his brother? Ordzhonikidze had been Kaganovich’s closest friend.

“It’s a lie,” Kaganovich claimed to have replied. “I know my brother. He’s a Bolshevik since 1905, devoted to the Central Committee.”

“How can it be a lie?” retorted Stalin. “I’ve got the testimonies.”

“It’s a lie. I demand a confrontation.” Decades later, Kaganovich denied that he had betrayed his own brother: “If my brother had been an Enemy I’d have been against him . . . I was sure he was right. I protected him. I protected him!” Kaganovich could afford to give an opinion but he also had to make clear that if the Party needed to destroy his brother, his brother must die. “Well, so what?” he added. “If necessary, arrest him.”

Stalin ordered Mikoyan and that sinister duo Beria and Malenkov to arrange a confrontation between Mikhail Kaganovich and his accuser, Vannikov, but “Iron Lazar” was not invited to attend.

“Don’t make him anxious, don’t bother him,” said Stalin.

Mikoyan held the “confrontation” in his office in the same building as the Little Corner where Mikhail defended himself “passionately” against Vannikov.

“Are you insane?” he asked his former deputy who had spent nights at his home during the Terror, afraid of arrest.

“No, you were part of the same organization with me,” replied Vannikov.

Beria and Malenkov told Mikhail to wait in the corridor while they interrogated Vannikov some more. Mikhail went into Mikoyan’s private lavatory (one of the perks of power). There was a shot.[53] The three of them found Kaganovich’s brother dead. By killing himself before his arrest, he saved his family. Lazar passed the test. A scapegoat for the aircraft blunders had been found.[54]

As these commissars travelled from Kremlin to torture chamber and back, the Germans surreptitiously deployed their legions along the Soviet frontier while Stalin channelled much of his energy into reasserting Russian influence in the Balkans. But by March, Hitler had managed to lure Bulgaria, Romania and Yugoslavia into his camp. Then, on 26 March, the pro-German government in Yugoslavia was overthrown, probably with the help of the NKGB and the British secret service. Hitler could not afford such a sore on his flank so the Germans prepared to invade Yugoslavia, which delayed Operation Barbarossa by a month.

On 4 April, Stalin threw himself into negotiations with the new Yugoslav government, hoping this glitch in Hitler’s plan would either drive Berlin back to the negotiating table or, at the very least, delay the invasion until 1942. When he signed a treaty with the Yugoslavs just as the Wehrmachtbegan to bombard Belgrade, Stalin cheerfully dismissed the threat: “Let them come. We’ve strong nerves.” But Yugoslavia was Hitler’s most successful Blitzkrieg of all: ten days later, Belgrade surrendered. Events were moving faster than the erosion of Stalin’s illusions.

That same day, Yosuke Matsuoka, the Japanese Foreign Minister, arrived in Moscow on his way back from Berlin. As the Wehrmacht crushed the Yugoslavs, Stalin realized that he required a fresh path back to Hitler. But he was also aware of the priceless benefit of a quiet Far Eastern front if Hitler invaded. Zhukov’s victory in the Far East had persuaded Tokyo that their destiny lay southwards in the juicier tidbits of the British Empire. On 14 April 1941, when Matsuoka signed a non-aggression pact with the Soviet Union, Stalin and Molotov reacted with almost febrile excitement, as if they had single-handedly changed the shape of Europe and saved Russia. Stalin exclaimed how rare it was “to find a diplomat who speaks openly what is on his mind. What Talleyrand told Napoleon was well known, ‘the tongue was given the diplomat so that he could conceal his thoughts.’ We Russians and Bolsheviks are different . . .” For once, Stalin unwound at the resulting Bacchanal, while Molotov tossed back the champagne until both were as drunk as Matsuoka.

“Stalin and I made him drink a lot,” boasted Molotov later. By 6 a.m., Matsuoka “almost had to be carried to the train. We could barely stand up.” Stalin, Molotov and Matsuoka burst into song, rendering that Russian favourite, “Shoumel Kamysh” that went: “The reeds were rustling, the trees are crackling in the wind, the night was very dark . . . And the lovers stayed awake all night,” to guffaws. At Yaroslavsky Station, the assembled diplomats were amazed to see an intoxicated Stalin, in his greatcoat, brownvizored cap and boots, accompanied by Matsuoka and Molotov who kept saluting and shouting: “I’m a Pioneer! I’m ready!”—the Soviet equivalent of the Boy Scout’s “Dib! Dib! Be prepared!” The Bulgarian Ambassador judged Molotov “the least drunk.” Stalin, who had never before seen any visitor off at the station, hugged the staggering Japanese but since neither could speak the other’s language, their new intimacy was expressed in embraces and grunts of “Ah! Ah!”

Stalin was so excited that he jovially punched the minuscule bald Japanese Ambassador-General on the shoulder so hard that he “staggered back three or four steps which caused Matsuoka to laugh in glee.” Then Stalin noticed the tall attaché Colonel Hans Krebs and, abandoning the Japanese, tapped him on the chest:

“German?” he asked. Krebs stiffened to attention, towering over Stalin who slapped him on the back, wrung his hand and said loudly, “We’ve been friends with you and we’ll remain friends with you.”

“I’m sure of that,” replied Krebs, though the Swedish Ambassador thought he “did not seem so convinced of it.”[55] Finally lumbering back to the Japanese, Stalin again embraced the much-hugged Matsuoka, exclaiming, “We’ll organize Europe and Asia!” Arm in arm, he led Matsuoka into his carriage and waited until the train departed. Japanese diplomats escorted Stalin to his armoured Packard while their Ambassador, “standing on a bench, waved his handkerchief and cried in a strident voice, ‘Thank you thank you!’ ”

The celebration was not over for Stalin and Molotov. As he got into the car, Stalin ordered Vlasik to call the dacha at Zubalovo and tell Svetlana, now fifteen, that she was to assemble the family for a party: “Stalin’s arriving any minute.”

Svetlana ran to tell her aunt, Anna Redens, who was there with her children and Gulia Djugashvili, aged three, Yakov’s daughter: “Father’s coming!”

Anna Redens had not seen Stalin since the row about her husband’s arrest and certainly not since his execution. All of them gathered on the steps. Minutes later, the tipsy, unusually cheerful Stalin arrived. Throwing open the car door, he hailed the twelve-year-old Leonid Redens: “Get in—let’s go for a drive!” The driver sped them round the flower bed. Then Stalin got out and hugged the apprehensive Anna Redens, who was holding her younger son Vladimir, now six. Stalin admired this angelic nephew: “For the sake of such a wonderful son, let’s make peace. I forgive you.” Little Gulia, Stalin’s first grandchild, was brought out to be admired but she waved her arms and screamed and was swiftly taken to her room. Stalin sat at the table where he had once presided with Nadya over their young family. Cakes and chocolates were brought. Stalin took Vladimir on to his lap and started opening the chocolates: the little boy noticed his “very beautiful long fingers.”

“You’re spoiling the children by buying them presents they don’t even want,” Stalin reprimanded the staff but, Vladimir says, “in his gentle way that made him very loved by them.”

After tea, Stalin went upstairs for a catnap. He had not slept the previous night. Then Molotov, Beria and Mikoyan arrived for dinner[56] at which “Stalin threw orange peel at everyone’s plates. Then he threw a cork right into the ice cream” which delighted Vladimir Alliluyev. The family could not know that Hitler’s imminent invasion, and Stalin’s exhaustion and paranoia, would make this the end of an era.[57]

This was an oasis of exhilaration in a darkening sky. Torn between the wishful thinking of his powerful will—and the mounting evidence— Stalin persisted in believing that a diplomatic breakthrough with Hitler was just round the corner, even though he now knew the date of Operation Barbarossa from his spymasters. When Stafford Cripps, the British Ambassador, delivered a letter from Winston Churchill warning of the invasion, it backfired, convincing Stalin that Britain was trying to entrap Russia: “We’re being threatened with the Germans, and the Germans with the Soviet Union,” Stalin told Zhukov. “They’re playing us off against each other.”[58]

Yet he was not completely oblivious: in the contest that Molotov called “the great game,” Stalin thought Russia might manage to stay out of the war until 1942. “Only by 1943 could we meet the Germans on an equal footing,” he told Molotov. As ever, Stalin was trying to read himself out of the problem, carefully studying a history of the German-French War of 1870. He and Zhdanov repeatedly quoted Bismarck’s sensible dictum that Germany should never face war on two fronts: Britain remained undefeated hence Hitler would not attack. “Hitler’s not such a fool,” Stalin said, “that he’s unable to understand the difference between the USSR and Poland or France, or even England, indeed all of them put together.” Yet his entire career was a triumph of will over reality.

He persisted in believing that Hitler, the reckless gambler and world-historical “sleepwalker,” was a rational Bismarckian Great Power statesman, like himself. After the war, talking to a small group that included Dekanozov, his Ambassador to Berlin in 1941, Stalin, thinking aloud about this time, obliquely explained his behaviour: “When you’re trying to make a decision, NEVER put yourself into the mind of the other person because if you do, you can make a terrible mistake.”[59]

Military measures were agonizingly slow. Zhdanov and Kulik proposed removing the old armaments from the Fortified Areas and putting them in the unfinished new ones. Zhukov objected: there was no time. Stalin backed his cronies, so the fortifications were unfinished when the onslaught came.

On 20 April, Ilya Ehrenburg, the Jewish novelist whom Stalin admired, learned that his anti-German novel, The Fall of Paris, had been refused by the censors who were still following Stalin’s orders not to offend Hitler. Four days later, Poskrebyshev called, telling him to dial a number: “Comrade Stalin wants to talk to you.” As soon as he got through, his dogs started barking; his wife had to drive them out of the room. Stalin told him he liked the book: did Ehrenburg intend to denounce Fascism? The novelist replied that it was hard to attack the Fascists since he was not allowed to use the word. “Just go on writing,” said Stalin jocularly, “you and I will try to push the third part through.” It was typical of this strangely literary dictator to think this would alarm the Germans: Hitler was beyond literary nuances.

Even Stalin’s inner circle could smell war now. It was so pervasive that Zhdanov suggested they cancel the May Day Parade in case it was too “provocative.” Stalin did not cancel it but he placed Dekanozov, the Ambassador to Germany, right next to him on the Mausoleum to signal his warmth towards Berlin.[60]

On 4 May, he sent another signal to Hitler that he was ready to talk: Stalin replaced Molotov as Premier, promoting Zhdanov’s protégé, Nikolai Voznesensky, the brash economic maestro, as his deputy on the inner Buro. At thirty-eight, Voznesensky’s rise had been meteoric and this angered the others: Mikoyan, who was particularly sore, thought he was “economically educated but a professor-type without practical experience.” This good-looking, intelligent but arrogant Leningrader was “naïvely happy with his appointment,” but Beria and Malenkov already resented the acerbic technocrat: Stalin’s “promoting a teacher to give us lessons,” Malenkov whispered to Beria. Henceforth, Stalin ruled as Premier through his deputies as Lenin had, balancing the rivalry between Beria and Malenkov, on the one hand, and Zhdanov and Voznesensky, on the other. Stalin expressed his emergence on the world stage sartorially, discarding his baggy trousers and boots. He “started wearing well-ironed, untucked ones with lace-up bootkins.”[61]

Finally, Stalin prepared the military for the possibility of war. On 5 May, he saw only one visitor: Zhdanov, just promoted to Stalin’s Party Deputy, visited him for twenty-five minutes. At 6 p.m., the two men walked from the Little Corner to the Great Kremlin Palace where two thousand officers awaited them: Stalin entered with Zhdanov, Timoshenko and Zhukov. President Kalinin introduced a “severe” Stalin who praised the modern mechanization of his “new army.” Then he eccentrically attributed the French defeat to amorous disappointment: the French were “so dizzy with self-satisfaction” that they disdained their own warriors to the extent that “girls wouldn’t even marry soldiers.” Was the German army unbeatable? “There are no invincible armies in the world” but war was coming. “If VM Molotov . . . can delay the start of war for 2–3 months, this’ll be our good fortune.” At the dinner, he toasted: “Long live the dynamic offensive policy of the Soviet State,” adding, “anyone who doesn’t recognize this is a Philistine and a fool.” This was a relief to the military: Stalin was not living in cloud cuckoo land.[62] The State was ready to fight, or was it? The State was not sure.[63]

The magnates tried to steer a path between Stalin’s infallibility and Hitler’s reality: the absurdity of explaining how the army had to be ready to fight an offensive war which was definitely not going to happen, while claiming this was not a change of policy, was so ridiculous that they tied themselves in knots of Stalinist sophistry and Neroesque folly. “We need a new type of propaganda,” declared Zhdanov at the Supreme Military Council. “There is only one step between war and peace. So our propaganda can’t be peaceful.”

“We ourselves designed the propaganda this way,” Budyonny exploded, so they had to explain why it was changing.

“We’re only altering the slogan,” claimed Zhdanov.

“As if we were going to war tomorrow!” sneered the pusillanimous Malenkov, eighteen days before the invasion.[64]

On 7 May, Schulenburg, secretly opposed to Hitler’s invasion, breakfasted with the Soviet Ambassador to Berlin, Dekanozov, whom he ambiguously tried to warn. They met thrice but “he did not warn,” said Molotov later, “he hinted and pushed for diplomatic negotiations.” Dekanozov informed Stalin who was becoming ever more bad-tempered and nervous. “So, disinformation has now reached ambassadorial level,” he growled. Dekanozov disagreed.

“How could you allow yourself to argue with Comrade Stalin! He knows more and can see further than all of us!” Voroshilov threatened Dekanozov during a recess.[65]

On 10 May, Stalin learned of Deputy Führer Hess’s quixotic peace flight to Scotland. His magnates, remembered Khrushchev who was in the office that day, were all understandably convinced that Hess’s mission was aimed at Moscow. But Stalin was finally willing to prepare for war, admittedly in a manner so timid that it was barely effective. On 12 May, Stalin allowed the generals to strengthen the borders, calling up 500,000 reserves, but was terrified of offending the Germans. When Timoshenko reported German reconnaissance flights, Stalin mused, “I’m not sure Hitler knows about those flights.” On the 24th, he refused to take any further measures.

The paralysis struck again. Stalin never apologized but he very indirectly acknowledged his mistakes when he later thanked the Russian people for their “patience.” But he blamed most of his blunders on others, admitting that he “trusted too much in cavalrymen.” Zhukov confessed his own failures: “Possibly I did not have enough influence.” This was not the real reason for his quiescence. If he had demanded mobilization, Stalin would have asked: “On what basis? Well, Beria, take him to your dungeons!” Kulik caught the attitude of most soldiers: “This is high politics. It’s not our business.”[66]

The intelligence was now flooding in. Earlier it had been presented in an ambiguous way but now it was surely clear that something ominous was darkening the Western border. Merkulov daily reported to Stalin who was now defying an avalanche of information from all manner of sources. On 9 June, when Timoshenko and Zhukov mentioned the array of intelligence, Stalin tossed their papers at them and snarled, “And I have different documents.” He mocked Richard Sorge, the masterspy in Tokyo who used his amorous and sybaritic appetites to conceal his peerless intelligence gathering: “There’s this bastard who’s set up factories and brothels in Japan and even deigned to report the date of the German attack as 22 June. Are you suggesting I should believe him too?”

 

 

32. The Countdown: 22 June 1941

On 13 June, Timoshenko and Zhukov, themselves depressed and baffled, alerted Stalin to further border activities. “We’ll think it over,” snapped Stalin who next day lost his temper with Zhukov’s proposal of mobilization: “That means war. Do you two understand that or not?” Then he asked how many divisions there were in the border areas.

Zhukov told him there were 149.

“Well, isn’t that enough? The Germans don’t have so many . . .” But the Germans were on a war footing, replied Zhukov. “You can’t believe everything in intelligence reports,” said Stalin.

On the 16th, Merkulov confirmed the final decision to attack, which came from agent “Starshina” in Luftwa fe headquarters.[67] “Tell the ‘source’ in the Staff of the German Air Force to fuck his mother!” he scrawled to Merkulov. “This is no source but a disinformer. J.St.” Even Molotov struggled to convince himself: “They’d be fools to attack us,” he told Admiral Kuznetsov.

Two days later, at a three-hour meeting described by Timoshenko, he and Zhukov beseeched Stalin for a full alert, with the Vozhd fidgeting and tapping his pipe on the table, and the magnates agreeing with Stalin’s maniacal delusions or else brooding in sullen silence, the only way of protesting they possessed. Stalin suddenly leapt to his feet and shouted at Zhukov: “Have you come to scare us with war, or do you want a war because you’re not sufficiently decorated or your rank isn’t high enough?”

Zhukov paled and sat down but Timoshenko warned Stalin again, which aroused a frenzy: “It’s all Timoshenko’s work, he’s preparing everyone for war. He ought to have been shot, but I’ve known him as a good soldier since the Civil War.”

Timoshenko replied he was only repeating Stalin’s own speech that war was inevitable.

“So you see,” Stalin retorted to the Politburo. “Timoshenko’s a fine man with a big head but apparently a small brain,” and he held up his thumb. “I said it for the people, we have to raise their alertness, while you have to realize that Germany will never fight Russia on her own. You must understand this.” Stalin stormed out leaving an excruciating silence but then he “opened the door and stuck his pock-marked face round it and uttered in a loud voice: ‘If you’re going to provoke the Germans on the frontier by moving troops there without our permission, then heads will roll, mark my words’—and he slammed the door.”

Stalin summoned Khrushchev, who should have been monitoring the Ukrainian border, to Moscow and would not let him leave: “Stalin kept ordering me to postpone my departure: ‘Wait,’ he said, ‘Don’t be in such a hurry. There’s no need to rush back.’ ” Khrushchev held a special place in Stalin’s affections: perhaps his irrepressible optimism, sycophantic devotion—and practical cunning made him a useful companion at such a moment. Stalin was in a “state of confusion, anxiety, demoralization, even paralysis,” according to Khrushchev, soothing his anxiety with sleepless nights and heavy drinking at endless Kuntsevo dinners. “You could feel the static,” said Khrushchev, “the discharge of tension.” On Friday the 20th, Khrushchev finally said, “I have to go. The war is about to break out. It may catch me here in Moscow or on the way back to the Ukraine.”

“Right,” said Stalin. “Just go.”[68]

On the 19th, Zhdanov, who was running the country with Stalin and Molotov, left for one and a half months’ holiday. Suffering from asthma, and Stalin’s boa constrictor–like friendship, he was exhausted. “But I have a bad foreboding the Germans could invade,” Zhdanov told Stalin.

“The Germans have already missed the best moment,” replied Stalin. “Apparently they’ll attack in 1942. Go on holiday.”[69] Mikoyan thought he was naïve to go but Molotov shrugged: “A sick man has to rest.” So “we went on holiday,” remembers Zhdanov’s son Yury. “We arrived in Sochi on Saturday 21 June.”

On 20 June, Dekanozov, back in Berlin, warned Beria firmly that the attack was imminent. Beria threatened his protégé while Stalin muttered that “Slow Kartvelian” “wasn’t clever enough to work it out.” Beria forwarded the “disinformation” to Stalin with the sycophantic but slightly mocking note: “My people and I, Joseph Vissarionovich, firmly remember your wise prediction: Hitler will not attack us in 1941!”

At about 7:30 p.m., Mikoyan, the Deputy Premier in charge of the merchant navy, was called by the harbourmaster of Riga: twenty-five German ships were setting sail, even though many had not yet unloaded. He rushed along to Stalin’s office where some of the leaders were gathered.

“That’ll be a provocation,” Stalin angrily told Mikoyan. “Let them leave.” The Politburo were alarmed—but of course said nothing. Molotov was deeply worried: “The situation is unclear, a great game is being played,” he confided to the Bulgarian Communist Dmitrov, on Saturday 21 June. “Not everything depends on us.” General Golikov brought Stalin further evidence: “This information,” Stalin wrote on it, “is an English provocation. Find out who the author is and punish him.” The fire brigade reported that the German Embassy was burning documents. The British government and even Mao Tse-tung (a surprising source, via the Comintern) sent warnings.

Stalin telephoned Khrushchev to warn him the war might begin the next day and asked Tiulenev, the commander of Moscow: “How do things stand with the anti-aircraft defence of Moscow? Note the situation’s tense . . . Bring the troops of Moscow’s anti-aircraft defence to 75 percent of combat readiness.”[70]

Saturday the 21st was a warm and uneasy day in Moscow. The schools had broken up for the holidays. Dynamo Moscow, the football team, lost its game. The theatres were showing Rigoletto, La Traviata and Chekhov’s Three Sisters. Stalin and the Politburo sat all day, coming and going. By early evening, Stalin was deeply disturbed by the persistently ominous reports that even his Terror could not disperse. Molotov joined him again around 6:30.

Outside the Little Corner, Poskrebyshev sat by the open window, sipping Narzan water: he called Chadaev, the young Sovnarkom assistant. “Something important?” whispered Chadaev.

“I’d say so,” replied Poskrebyshev. “The Boss talked to Timoshenko, he was very agitated . . . They’re waiting for . . . you know . . . the German attack . . .”

At about seven, Stalin ordered Molotov to summon Schulenburg to protest about the German reconnaissance flights—and find out what he could. The Count sped into the Kremlin. Molotov hurried along to his office in the same building. Meanwhile[71]Timoshenko telephoned to report that a German deserter had revealed the German invasion plan for dawn. Stalin swung between the force of reality and the self-delusion of his infallibility.

In Molotov’s office, Schulenburg was relieved to see that the Foreign Commissar was still oblivious to the enormity of his country’s plight. The Russian asked him why Germany seemed dissatisfied with their Soviet allies. And why had the women and children of the German Embassy left Moscow?

“Not ALL the women,” said Schulenburg. “My wife is still in town.” Molotov gave what the Ambassador’s aide, Hilger, called a “resigned shrug of the shoulders” and returned to Stalin’s office.

Timoshenko then arrived, along with most of the magnates: Voroshilov, Beria, Malenkov and the powerful young Deputy Premier Voznesensky. At 8:15 p.m., Timoshenko returned to the Defence Commissariat whence he informed Stalin that a second deserter had warned that war would begin at 4 a.m. Stalin called him back. Timoshenko arrived at 8:50 with Zhukov and Budyonny, Deputy Defence Commissar, who knew Stalin much better than they did and was less frightened of the Vozhd. Budyonny admitted that he did not know what was happening at the frontier since he was only in command of the home front. The outspoken Budyonny had played an ambiguous role in the Terror but even then he was willing to speak his mind, a rare quality in those circles. Stalin appointed him commander of the Reserve Army. Then Mekhlis, newly restored to his old job—head of the army’s Political Department, Stalin’s military enforcer, joined this funereal vigil.

“Well what now?” the pacing Stalin asked them. There was silence. The Politburo sat like dummies. Timoshenko raised his voice: “All troops in frontier districts” must be placed on “full battle alert!”

“Didn’t they send the deserter on purpose to provoke us?” said Stalin, but then he ordered Zhukov: “Read this out.” When Zhukov reached his order of High Alert, Stalin interrupted, “It would be premature to issue that order now. It might still be possible to settle the situation by peaceful means.” They had to avoid any provocations. Zhukov obeyed his instructions exactly—he knew the alternative: “Beria’s dungeon!”

The magnates now spoke up diffidently, agreeing with the generals that the troops had to be put on alert “just in case.” Stalin nodded at the generals who hurried next door to Poskrebyshev’s office to redraft the order. When they returned, the obsessive editor watered it down even more. The generals rushed back to the Defence Commissariat to transmit the order to the military districts: “A surprise attack by the Germans is possible during 22–23 June...The task of our forces is to refrain from any kind of provocative action . . .” This was only completed just after midnight on Sunday 22 June.

Stalin told Budyonny that the war would probably start tomorrow. Budyonny left at ten, while Timoshenko, Zhukov and Mekhlis left later. Stalin kept pacing. Beria left, presumably to check the latest intelligence reports, and reported back at ten-forty. At eleven, the leaders moved upstairs to Stalin’s apartment where they sat in the dining room. “Stalin kept reassuring us that Hitler would not begin the war,” claimed Mikoyan.

“I think Hitler’s trying to provoke us,” said Stalin, according to Mikoyan. “He surely hasn’t decided to make war?”

Zhukov phoned again at twelve-thirty: a third deserter, a Communist labourer from Berlin named Alfred Liskov, had swum the Pruth to report that the order to invade had been read to his unit. Stalin checked that the High Alert order was being transmitted, then commanded that Liskov should be shot “for his disinformation.” Even on such a night, it was impossible to break the Stalinist routine of brutality—and entertainment: the Politburo headed out through the Borovitsky Gate to Kuntsevo in a convoy of limousines, speeding through the empty streets with their NKGB escorts. The generals, watched by Mekhlis, remained tensely in the Defence Commissariat. But elsewhere in the city, the weary commissars, guards and typists who waited every night (even Saturdays) until Stalin left the Kremlin, could stagger home to sleep. By Stalin’s standards, it was early.

Molotov drove to the Foreign Commissariat to send a final telegram to Dekanozov in Berlin, who was already trying to get through to Ribbentrop, to put the questions Schulenburg had failed to answer. Molotov then joined the others at Kuntsevo: “we might even have watched a film,” he said. At around 2 a.m., after an hour or so of dining, drinking and talking (the memories of Zhukov, Molotov and Mikoyan are confused about that night), they headed back to their Kremlin apartments.[72]

Far away, all along the Soviet border, Luftwafe bombers were heading for their targets. On the same day that Napoleon’s Grand Army had invaded Russia 129 years earlier, Hitler’s over three million soldiers—Germans, Croats, Finns, Romanians, Hungarians, Italians and even Spaniards backed by 3,600 tanks, 600,000 motorized vehicles, 7,000 artillery pieces, 2,500 aircraft and about 625,000 horses, were crossing the border to engage the Soviet forces of almost equal strength, as many as 14,000 tanks (2,000 of them modern), 34,000 guns and over 8,000 planes. The greatest war of all time was about to begin in the duel between those two brutal and reckless egomaniacs. And both were probably still asleep.[73]

---

[1] This sort of courage counted for something with Stalin. Litvinov, who was three years older than Stalin, could never curb his tongue. That cosmopolitan curmudgeon complained to his friends of Stalin’s “narrow-mindedness, smugness, ambitions and rigidity” while he called Molotov “a halfwit,” Beria “a careerist” and Malenkov “shortsighted.” Molotov said that Litvinov remained “among the living only by chance” yet Stalin always just preserved him, despite Molotov’s hatred for the much more impressive diplomat, because he was so respected in the West that he might be useful again. There was a story that Litvinov had saved Stalin from being beaten up by dockers in London in 1907: “I haven’t forgotten that time in London,” Stalin used to say.

[2] They planned to do the same to Litvinov but his English wife, Ivy, was terrified of imminent arrest and when she confided this to some American friends, the letter ended up on Stalin’s desk. He phoned Papasha: “You’ve an extremely courageous and outspoken wife. You should tell her to calm herself. She’s not threatened.”

[3] This analysis is based on the outstanding books on Soviet foreign policy, and on the lead-up to the German invasion: Zubok and Pleshakov, Inside the Kremlin’s Cold War, and Gabriel Gorodetsky, Grand Delusion: Stalin and the German Invasion of Russia. Litvinov sacked, foreign-policy change: Beria, pp. 100–1. Soloviev quoted in Zubok, pp. 20–88. Fake Georgian and Molotov; slow Kartvelian and Stalin: Nadya Dekanozova. Stalin mocks Dekanozov’s ugliness: Maya Kavtaradze. Erickson, Soviet High Command, pp. 513–25. Ehrenburg, Eve of War, p. 276. Tucker, Power, p. 614. Carswell, pp. 145–9. Medvedev, p. 309. Stalin ordered Yezhov to arrest Kandelaki on 2 April 1937—he tops the handwritten “to do” list, RGASPI 558.11.27.129, Stalin note to discuss with Yezhov 2 Apr. 1937. Gnedin in Beria, p. 101. Larina, p. 200. Parrish, “Yezhov,” p. 91. Litvinov car accident: KR I, p. 282. Sergo B, pp. 47–8. Vaksberg, Stalin Against Jews, pp. 34–5. New diplomats: Gromyko, Memoirs, p. 24. Kaganovich, pp. 64, 154. Mikoyan in Kumanev (ed.), p. 22. Litvinov on Stalin the diplomat, Stalin quotes Talleyrand and Bismarck: Gorodetsky, pp. 1–9, 316; Bismarck reading on Franco-German War of 1870: von Moltke, German-French War of 1870, RGASPI 558.3.224. Bismarck: R. Medvedev, Neizvestnyi Stalin: chapter “Stalin’s Personal Archive.” Molotov’s letters to Polina: We live under constant pressure . . . your sweetness and charm: RGASPI 82.2.1592.40–5, NYC, 20 Nov. 1945. Knowing our stuff: RGASPI 82.2.1592.19–20, 8 July 1946 from Paris. Reading on Hitler: RGASPI 82.21592.1, 13 Aug. 1940. I was the focus of attention: RGASPI 82.2.1592.40–5, NYC, 20 Nov. 1945? Revolutionary-imperial paradigm, Zubok, pp. 1–5; Molotov the diplomat, pp. 80–98. Stalin on poker: “They’re playing poker again” in Volkogonov, p. 349.

[4] The first three Soviet Premiers were Russians. On Lenin’s death, Rykov succeeded him as PredSovnarkom even though Kamenev, a Jew, usually chaired the meetings. In 1930, Rykov was succeeded by Molotov. But Stalin refused the Premiership as much for political as for racial reasons.

[5] Stalin and the Jews: Clear out the synagogue and number of Jews in leadership, Lenin, MR, p. 120; Kaganovich, pp. 47–8, 100, 105, 128–9, 175. Statistics, Lesser Terror, p. 137. Stalin’s Marxism and the National Question quoted in Vaksberg, Stalin Against Jews, p. 4. Bazhanov: Mekhlis and Yids, p. 59. Stalin Enemies all Jews: Kaganovich, p. 128. Kaganovich Israelite: KR I, pp. 122, 283. RGVA 4.18.62.1/357, use of “natsman” Stalin to Red Army, 3 and 4 Aug. 1937. Jews cannot drink: Kaganovich, p. 106. Jews like mimosa: Kaganovich, p. 191. Stalin’s favourite flower mimosa: Mgeladze, pp. 95–7. Mekhlis: Jews pure as crystal in Simonov diary RGALI Notebook, 1 Apr. 1945. Anti-Semitism: lists of things to do: RGASPI 558.11.27.32. Cannibalism speech, 23 Dec. 1930. Birobidzhan: the Tsar, J. Rubenstein and V. P. Naumov, Stalin’s Secret Pogrom, pp. 34 and 511. Stalin criticizes others for anti-Semitism: K. Simonov, “Glazami cheloveka, moego pokoleniya,” Znamya, 5, 1988, p. 85. No need to excite Hitler: Brooks, Thank You C. Stalin, p. 171. Y. Yakovlev and Jewish names: KR I, pp. 119–20. Kaganovich and Mikhoels: Rubenstein and Naumov, pp. 293, 399. Birobidzhan Kaganovich theatre: Kostyrchenko, pp. 42, 144. The Black Hundreds and the Cathedral of the Saviour in Moscow: Kaganovich, p. 47. Thanks to Robert Service for his valuable ideas on this subject.

[6] The comedy of these negotiations was neatly encapsulated in the question of the Order of the Bath. Drax had arrived without the relevant credentials, a mistake that told Stalin all he needed to know about Western commitment. At the very moment the credentials finally arrived, they had become utterly irrelevant. When Sir Reginald proudly read out his official titles and arrived at this noble order, the Soviet interpreter declaimed: “Order of the Bathtub.” Marshal Voroshilov, displaying both his overwhelming characteristics—childlike naïvety and heroic bungling capacity—interrupted to ask: “Bathtub?” “In the reign of our early kings,” Drax droned, “our knights used to travel round Europe on horseback, slaying dragons and rescuing maidens in distress. They would return home travel-stained and grimy and report . . . to the King [who] would sometimes offer a knight a luxury . . . A bath in the royal bathroom.” The Western democracies could not deliver the “price” of a Soviet alliance, namely to back up the Polish guarantee and deliver the Baltic States into Stalin’s sphere of influence. Perhaps they were right since this would still not guarantee stopping Hitler, while there seemed little point in saving Poland from the Huns to deliver her to the Tatars.

[7] Khrushchev’s memoirs have left a confusing impression about the Politburo and the Pact. Molotov, Premier and Foreign Minister, was the front man in this diplomatic game and Stalin was clearly the engine behind it. It is usually stated that the Politburo, including Voroshilov, knew nothing about the negotiations until Ribbentrop’s arrival was imminent but Politburo papers had always been confined to the Five or the “Seven”—and not distributed to regional leaders such as the Ukrainian First Secretary. The messages between Stalin and Hitler were

[8] Across Europe at the Berghof, Hitler had heard the news at dinner, calling for silence and announcing it to his guests whom he then led out onto the balcony, whence they watched with awe as the northern lights illuminated the sky and the Unterberg mountains in an unnatural bath of blood-red light, dyeing the faces of the spectators incarnadine. “Looks like a great deal of blood,” said Hitler to an adjutant. “This time we won’t bring it off without violence.”

[9] This account of the negotiations between USSR, Germany, France and UK is based on Gorodetsky, Grand Delusion; Richard Overy, Russia’s War; Anthony Read and David Fisher, The Deadly Embrace: Hitler, Stalin and the Nazi-Soviet Pact 1939–1941, Molotov Remembers, Khrushchev Remembers and G. Hilger and A. Mayer, Incompatible Allies: A Memoir History of German-Soviet Relations. Gorodetsky, pp. 5–9; Raanan, pp. 15–18. Yury Zhdanov. Overy, pp. 34–53. Michael Bloch, Ribbentrop, pp. 239, 245; Volkogonov, pp. 255, 349; Andrew Roberts, The Holy Fox: A Biography of Lord Halifax, p. 166; Erickson, Soviet High Command, p. 525. Read-Fisher, pp. 128–30, 230–2 and Dmitrov diary. “Farmhands . . .”: Dmitrov diary, 7 Sept. 1939. Far East: Zhukov, Vospominaniya (henceforth Zhukov) I, pp. 242–3, 273. Simonov, Zametki k biografii Gk Zukkova in VIZh, no. 6, pp. 50–3. Spahr, p. 209. D’Abernon: RGASPI 558.3,25,32. Revolutionary-imperial paradigm: Zubok, pp. 1–5; Molotov the diplomat, pp. 80–98. Stalin on poker: “They’re playing poker again” in Volkogonov, p. 349. KR I, pp. 125–9, 149. Kaganovich, pp. 58, 90. Yury Zhdanov. Sergo B, pp. 49–52. Bloch, p. 245. RGASPI 558.3.36. Vipper’s History of Greece. The account of the signing of the Pact is based on MR, pp. 9–11. Hilger-Mayer, pp. 290–2. Read-Fisher, pp. 251–9. Dinner after signing: Dmitrov diary, 21 June 1941. Yury Zhdanov on Zhdanov’s joke. Great Game: MR, p. 31, and also Molotov to Dmitrov, in Dmitrov diary, 21 June 1941: “A great game is being played.”

[10] There was a priceless moment when Nina’s parents arrived in Khrushchev’s apartment and marvelled at the running water: “Hey Mother, look at this,” shouted the father. “The water comes out of a pipe.” When the parents saw the impressive, lantern-jawed Timoshenko beside the small fat Khrushchev, they asked if the former was their son-in-law.

[11] Stalin was filmed checking places at Kuntsevo by Vlasik. Hitler too was a punctilious checker of dinner placement. Both men appreciated the importance of personal pride in matters of State.

[12] Polish invasion: Hilger-Mayer, p. 312. Volkogonov, pp. 358–9. “We see nothing wrong . . .”: Dmitrov diary, 7 Sept. 1939. Khrushchevs: S. Khrushchev, Superpower, p. 5. Vasilieva, Kremlin Wives, pp. 182–3. Looting Poland: RGASPI 588.2.155.168, Vyshinsky to Stalin and Stalin reply 21–31 Oct. 1939. Statistics: Overy, pp. 51–2. Burleigh, p. 435. Khrushchev’s role; Taubman, p. 23. Parrish estimates 1–2 million deported, Lesser Terror, p. 47. KR I, p. 160. By June 1941, Deputy NKVD Chernyshev reported to Stalin that 494,310 former Polish citizens had arrived in USSR and that 389,382 were in prisons, camps and places of exile. Volkogonov, p. 360. Serov’s role: “The Last Relic”: Serov, Slavic Military Studies, vol. 10, no. 3, 1997, pp. 107–10. Sudoplatov, pp. 110–11.

[13] Hilger-Mayer, pp. 301–2, 312–3. MR, pp. 9–11. Kaganovich, pp. 58, 90. Kaganovich grandson recalling K’s telling of story: Joseph Minervin. Read-Fisher, p. 357. The Estonian Foreign Minister: Bohlen, p. 91.

[14] Polina had an Achilles heel: not only was she Jewish but her brother Karp was a successful businessman in the U.S.A. Indeed, in the mid-thirties, Stalin had even encouraged the U.S. Ambassador Davies to do business in Moscow using Karp, a rare example of his nepotism.

[15] Take the case of Molotov’s fitness instructor, a role that reveals a whole new side of the Foreign Commissar. A few months later, Vlasik, who did nothing without Stalin’s knowledge, wrote to Molotov to inform him that Olga Rostovtseva, the fitness lady, was boasting about her closeness to the family: “We know of cases not only where she talks about her sports instruction . . . but also about your family and apartments . . .”

[16] Conquest, Stalin: Breaker of Nations, p. 216. Lesser Terror, p. 33. Vasilieva, Kremlin Wives, pp. 103–11. Census: Volkogonov, p. 516. Molotov Letters, 23 Aug. 1930, p. 203. Kaganovich , p. 150. “Extra-curious about other leaders’ wives. Not that he was attracted to them as women”: KR II, p. 177. No one who contradicts Stalin keeps his wife: Sergo B, p. 148. Stalin’s Jewish mistresses: Sergo B, p. 211. Kalinina: Kremlin Wives, pp. 119–23. Larina, p. 231. Kollontai letters: RGASPI 558.11.749.14–15, 23, A. Kollontai to Stalin. Polina: Andreyev, Malenkov and Zhdanov were charged to find her another job: in November, she was appointed to run the Textiles-Haberdashery Administration of RSFR’s Light Industry Commissariat. On Abakumov and the 1939 case as well as the 1949 case, when the same characters were arrested again, against Zhemchuzhina: GARF 8131.32.3289.144, Rudenko speech at Beria’s trial. Khlevniuk, Circle, 257–8. Kostyrchenko, pp. 119–20. Mikoyan, pp. 298–9. Fitness instructor: RGASPI 82.2.904.80–1, Vlasik to Molotov 7 Feb. 1940.

 

[17] In a story that is criss-crossed with emotional distortions, perhaps the strangest cut of all is that Natalya Poskrebysheva, who was born nine months after her mother’s visit to Stalin, believes she may be Stalin’s daughter not only because of Vlasik’s story but also because she once met the daughter of Mikhail Suslov, the ideological boss for most of Brezhnev’s reign, who said: “Everyone knows your real father is lying in the Mausoleum next to Lenin.” This was when Stalin still rested in the Mausoleum. “Do I look like somebody?” Miss Poskrebysheva asked the author. “Like Svetlana Stalin?” It is ironic that she believes her mother’s murderer, Stalin, was her father because she in fact looks the image of Poskrebyshev.

[18] Her body was buried in a mass grave near Moscow while her brother is in one of the pits at the Donskoi Cemetery along with many others. Dr. Metalikov’s daughter raised a monument to them in the Novodevichy Cemetery.

[19] Natalya Poskrebysheva. Galya Poskrebysheva in Volkogonov, p. 165.

[20] This is often mentioned in Stalin biographies but never with the testimony of any of the five people present. The following is based on the author’s interview with Maya Kavtaradze, the last of those five still alive whose story has never before been published. Now seventy-six and living in her father’s huge, antique-filled apartment in Tbilisi, she has generously allowed the author to use her father’s unpublished memoirs which are an invaluable source. In 1940, Kavtaradze was appointed to the State Publishing House and then as Deputy Foreign Commissar in charge of the Near East for the whole war. Since the Foreign Commissariat was just next door to the Lubianka, Kavtaradze used to joke: “I crossed the road.” Kavtaradze was Soviet Ambassador to Romania after the war and died in 1971.

[21] For the rest of his career, whenever Nutsibidze was challenged, he would point to his forehead and say, “Stalin kissed me here.” The Rustaveli edition was expensively published and Stalin’s name was never mentioned. Stalin ensured that Nutsibidze was allowed to live for the rest of his life in a large mansion in Tiflis still owned by the family. The author is most grateful to the Professor’s stepson Zakro Megrelishvili for the extracts from his mother’s autobiography.

[22] Kavtaradze and Nutsibidze: Nutsibidze, vol. 2, pp. 96–100. Interview Maya Kavtaradze and Prof. Zakro Megrelishvili (son of Ketevan Nutsibidze): my thanks to both of them. “You all wanted to kill me”: Literaturnaya Rossiya, 12, 1989, pp. 17–20: interview Sergo Kavtaradze. Stalin orders Kaganovich to help Kavtaradze: Kaganovich Perepiska, p. 246. Medvedev, p. 311. Larina on release of Sofia Kavtaradze: pp. 234. Beria, p. 247.

 

[23] KGB Lit. Archive, pp. 22–48 including Beria’s report on Babel to Zhdanov. On French wrestling: GARF 8131.32.3289.117–18. The investigations by Rudenko into methods of interrogators Vlodzirmirski, Rodos, Shvartsman, Goglidze etc., 22 Mar. 1955. Jansen-Petrov, pp. 185–6. Pirozhkova, pp. 110–13. “Yezhov.” Parrish, pp. 94–8. Polianski, pp. 211–8, 244, 259–61. Eikhe: Testimony of Leonid Bashtakov in 1955 quoted in Vaksberg, Vyshinsky, pp. 167, 197–8, 350. Babel’s trial 26 Jan. 1940. Jansen-Petrov, p. 191. Ulrikh sentenced them on 1/2 Feb. The gala: 2 Feb. 1940. Marshal Yegorov shot on Red Army Day, 23 Feb. Spahr, p. 177. Yezhov’s sentencing: Moskovskie Novosti, no. 5, 30 Jan. 1994. Statement before Military Collegium, 3 Jan. 1940. Polianski, pp. 304–5. Jansen-Petrov, p. 188. Getty, pp. 560–2. Execution of Yezhov quoting N. P. Afanasev: Jansen-Petrov, pp. 188–9. Ushakov and Stukakov, pp. 74–5. Death certificate 4 February 1940 signed by a Lieut. Krivitsky but it is likely that Blokhin performed this important work himself. Thanks to Nikita Petrov.

[24] In the nineties, a monument was raised there that reads: “Here lie buried the remains of the innocent, tortured and executed victims of political repressions. May they never be forgotten.” Antonina Babel did not find out that her husband had been executed until 1954 when he was rehabilitated. She spent many years living in America. Her heart-rending memoirs stand with those of Nadezhda Mandelstam and Anna Larina as classics.

[25] There was one strange mercy: Redens’s widow and children did not share the tragedy of the families of other Enemies though they later suffered too. For the moment, they spent their weekends at Zubalovo with Svetlana and their life carried on as if nothing had happened. Indeed, Anna continued to ring Stalin and berate him about Svetlana’s clothes or Vasily’s drinking. Soon they were even reconciled.

[26] Rat: Yakovlev, Tsel zhizhni, p. 509. Stalin coins Yezhovschina ? Mgeladze, pp. 170–1; “scum,” p. 211; unbelievable evidence, p. 167; everyone confesses, pp. 168–73, 210–11. Stalin and Kaganovich on Babel: Kaganovich Perepiska, pp. 49, 189, 198. Black work and Blokhin: Nikita Petrov. Redens: Svetlana, Twenty Letters, p. 66. Beria, p. 90. Leonid Redens.

[27] Kozlovsky always sang the same songs at all Kremlin receptions. When he put some other songs into the repertoire, he arrived at the Kremlin to find the same programme as usual. “Comrade Stalin likes this repertoire. He likes to hear the same things as usual.”

[28] Karpov, Rastrelyanniye Marshaly, pp. 325–6, 343. Kira Alliluyeva: Svetlana’s knees and Stalin’s note. OOY, p. 318. Volga kiss: Kenez, p. 166. “Stalin Molotov i Zhdanov o vtoroy serii Ivan Grozny,” Moskovskie Novosti, vol. 37, 7 Aug. 1988, p. 8. Galina, p. 96. Kozlovsky quoted in Karpov, p. 337.

[29] Finland: Erickson, Soviet High Command, pp. 541–8. Raanan, p. 14. Overy, pp. 55–7. K. A. Meretskov, Na sluzhbe narodu, pp. 171–7. Mikoyan: Bohlen, p. 93. KR I, p. 152. Voronov in Bialer (ed.), pp. 131–3. Spahr, 220–7. Voroshilov purge: Volkogonov in Harold Shukman (ed.), Stalin’s Generals, p. 317. Harold Shukman (ed.), Stalin and the Soviet-Finnish War, pp. xxi–xxvi, 29. (Stalin’s comment on forests is from the meeting of the Supreme Military Council, 14–17 Apr. 1940.) Also: RGVA 4.19.73.19–23, NKVD Maj. Bochkov Special Section of GUGB to Narkom Voroshilov and his reply 1 Feb. 1940. RGVA 4.19.75.1.12, Bochkov to Beria 28 Dec. 1939: Mekhlis’s letters to wife: p. 130. TsAMO RF 5.176705.1, Stalin to Mekhlis 9 Jan. 1940. RGVA 9.29.554.111, Mekhlis to Stalin 9 Jan. 1940. RGVA 9.29.554.76, Mekhlis to Stalin 9 Jan. RGVA 9.29.554.59, Mekhlis to Stalin 11 Jan. 1940. RGVA 9.29.554.62: the next day, Mekhlis reported the execution of a wounded officer, an NKVD commissar. RGVA 9.29.554.228, Mekhlis to Stalin and Voroshilov 12 Dec. 1939. Mekhlis’s courage: Gen. A. F. Khrenov and Adm. Kuznetsov inMekhlis, pp. 132–3. RGVA 9.29.554.55, Mekhlis to Stavka, 12 Jan. 1940. RGVA 9.32.85.80, Kulik to Kuznetsov (deputy chief Police Dept.) 19 Dec. 1939. “Lapsing into panic . . .”: Dmitrov diary, 21 Jan. 1940. KR I, p. 154. Stalin birthday party: Dmitrov diary, 21 Dec. 1939. Valedinsky, “Vospominaniya,” p. 124. Pavel Aptekov and Olga Dudorova, “Peace and statistics of losses, Unheeded Warning and the Winter War,” Slavic Military Studies, vol. 10, no. 1, Mar. 1997, pp. 200–9. Read-Fisher, pp. 401–17. Red Army good for nothing: Bohlen, p. 60. Losses: statistics from Russian sources, O. A. Rzheshevsky and O. Vechvilayninen, Zimnaya voyna, 1939–40, vol. 1: Finland 48,243 killed; 43,000 wounded; 1,000 POWs; USSR 87,506 killed, 39,369 missing, 5,000 POWs. Thanks to Dr. M. Mjakov for this information.

[30] Bowing before the imperial status of his leader, Mekhlis was obsessed too with delivering a victory for Stalin on his birthday on 21 December 1939: “I want to celebrate it with full defeat of Finnish White Guards!” When the great day arrived Mekhlis told his family: “I’m saluting you. 60th birthday of JV. Celebrate it in the family!” Back at the Kremlin that night, Stalin celebrated his birthday with his courtiers, partying until 8 a.m.: “An unforgettable night!” Dmitrov recorded in his diary.

[31] Whipping boy Voroshilov’s argument with Stalin: KR I, pp. 154, 185. Hysterical speech: Khrulev’s memoirs in Mekhlis, p. 135, Shukman, Stalin and Soviet-Finnish War, pp. xxi–xxvi, and Supreme Military Council, 14/17 Apr. 1940, pp. 29, 250, 252, 269. Volkogonov in Shukman, Stalin’s Generals (henceforth Stalin’s Generals), pp. 243, 365–6, and Rzheshevsky, p. 225. Voroshilov arts supremo: Mikoyan, p. 386. Mekhlis State Control Commissar: Khrulev, memoirs in Mekhlis, p. 140. Promotion of marshals: Erickson, Soviet High Command, p. 552. Timoshenko, youth and rise, dual command: Victor Anfilov in Stalin’s Generals , pp. 239–42. Savitsky in Babel, “My First Goose,” Collected Stories, p. 119. Brave peasant: Mikoyan, p. 386. Zhdanov’s role: Volkogonov, p. 368. Roskossovsky: Sovershenno Sekretno, 2000, 3. Also: Harrison Salisbury, 900 Days (henceforth 900 Days), p. 111. Marshal Golovanov quoted in MR, pp. 265–95. Budyonny Notes on request to Stalin about Serdich. Spahr, p. 230. Also: military purges, see Stalin’s Generals, p. 361. On 20 June, for example, Timoshenko appealed to Stalin on behalf of K. P. Podlas, one of the generals in the Far East; “From my side, I ask for his release.” Stalin agreed. RGVA 4.19.71.243, Timoshenko to Stalin 20 June 1940 and Stalin’s reply. Freed officers: RGVA 9.29.482.11–13.

[32] A muscular paragon of peasant masculinity, typical of Stalin’s cavalrymen, Timoshenko had been a divisional commander in the Polish War of 1920: he appears as the “captivating Savitsky” in the Red Cavalry stories of Isaac Babel who praises the “beauty of his giant’s body,” the power of his decorated chest “cleaving the hut as a standard cleaves the sky” and his long cavalryman’s legs which were “like girls sheathed to the neck of shining jackboots.” The less poetical Mikoyan simply calls him a “brave peasant.”

[33] RGVA 4.18.54.1–499, Supreme Military Soviet of NKO, 21–7 Nov. 1937.

[34] Triumph of Tsaritsyn group and economic management meanderings: Mikoyan, pp. 339–44 and Kumanev (ed.), p. 22. Kulik’s saying: Voronov in Bialer (ed.), p 159. Kulik and Mekhlis’s power: 4 KR I, pp. 188, 200. V. E. Korol, A. I. Sliusarenko, I. U. Nikorenko, “Tragic 1941 and Ukraine: New Aspect of Problems,” Slavic Military Studies, vol. 11, no. 1, Mar. 1998, pp. 147–64.

 

[35] Parrish, “Yezhov,” p. 87. Karpov, Rastrelyanniye Marshaly, pp. 316–7, 324–5, 335–9, 340–4, 360–3. Kira Kulik was said to be having an affair with recently arrested director of the Bolshoi, Mordvinov. Mekhlis report “kompromat materials” July 1941, RGVA 9.39.105.412–17.

[36] No papers of formal charges were ever filed so the kidnapping was illegal even by Bolshevik standards. When Beria was arrested after Stalin’s death, this kidnapping and murder was one of the crimes on the indictment.

[37] Katyn Forest: RFE/RL Research Report, vol. 2, no. 4, 22 Jan. 1993, p. 22. Beria was at first one of the “troika” in charge of the liquidation but Stalin crossed out his name and put in Kobulov, probably because Beria was busy enough. It is certainly not evidence that Beria was opposed to the massacre since “the Theoretician” and “the Samovar” were his closest associates. Overy, p. 53. Stepan M., p. 197. Lesser Terror, p. 57; Parrish, “Yezhov,” pp. 83–5; “Serov,” Slavic Military Studies, vol. 10 Sept. 1997, p. 110. Sergo B, pp. 55, 320.

[38] In November 1941, the Polish Ambassador Stanislaw Kot quizzed Stalin on the whereabouts of these men. Stalin made a show of setting up a phone call to Beria and changed the subject. In December 1941, he told General Anders they had escaped to Mongolia. As we have seen, these sort of sniggering acts of concern were part of his game with Beria. Mikoyan’s son Stepan wrote graciously that his father’s signature on this order was “the heaviest burden for our family.”

[39] KR I, p. 157.

[40] Baltics and Bessarabia: the very day of the French collapse, Timoshenko produced plans to move into the Baltics. RGVA 4.19.71.238, Timoshenko to Stalin and Molotov 17 June 1940. Beria, p. 104. Zhukov I, pp. 275–6: Zhukov commanded the liberation of Bessarabia. Parrish, “Serov,” p. 107. Burleigh, p. 535. Gorodetsky, pp. 34–5. (By the time of Stalin’s death, 175,000 Estonians, 170,000 Letts and 175,000 Lithuanians had been deported.) Stalin’s ostensible wish for Germany to beat England: Sovershenno Sekretno, 2000, 3.

[41] At the Eighteenth Party Conference in February 1941, Stalin divided Beria’s NKVD into two commissariats. Beria retained the NKVD while State Security (NKGB) was hived off under his protégé Merkulov. This was not yet a direct demotion for Beria: he was promoted to Deputy Premier and remained overlord or curator of both Organs.

[42] Wagner: Yury Zhdanov. Spies: Gorodetsky, pp. 39, 50; on Golikov/Merkulov, pp. 53–4. Dmitrov diary, 20 Feb. 1941. Stalin’s knowledge adding to sorrow: Zubok, p. 24; never went looking, Modin, p. 24. Molotov quoted in Gorodetsky, p. 53.

[43] RGASPI 82.2.1592, Molotov to Polina 13 Aug. 1940. This account of Molotov’s trip to Berlin is based on Berezhkov, pp. 24–42, inc. Hitler’s hint about meeting Stalin; MR, pp. 15–20, 145; Hilger-Mayer, pp. 321–7; Yakovlev in Bialer (ed.), pp. 117–22; Gorodetsky for Stalin-Molotov instructions and cables, pp. 58, 74, 76, 81, 83; Volkogonov, pp. 372–82; Beria, pp. 102–3; Zubok, p. 92; Read-Fisher, pp. 510–33. Merkulov/Himmler: Lesser Terror, p. 61.

[44] When Admiral Kuznetsov got to know him on their trip to the Far East, Zhdanov chatted about how much he enjoyed working with the navy. “I’d love to go [on a cruiser]. But it’s not always so easy to get away,” he said, adding with a smile, “I am more a river man than a seaman. A freshwater sailor as they say. But I love ships.” Kuznetsov admired Zhdanov who “did a great deal for the Navy.” But he was less helpful to the other services.

[45] Meetings up to the war: “More afraid if I’d known”: Nikolai Baibakov. “Never call him by his name”: Emelianov, in Bialer (ed.), p. 113; Kuznetsov, pp. 95–7, 173; Yakovlev, p. 100. Dmitrov diary, 7 Nov. 1940.

 

[46] Gorodetsky, pp. 125–31. Also: Kazakov in Bialer (ed.), pp. 139–45; Yeremenko, pp. 146–51. 900 Days, pp. 55–7. Insomnia: Stalin to Churchill, Record of private talk between Prime Minister and Generalissimo Stalin after Plenary Session, July 17, 1945, Potsdam, PREM 3/430/7, Churchill and Stalin, FCO Historians, March 2002. Korol, Sliusarenko and Nikolarenko, pp. 147–64.

[47] Experiences in Civil War: Zhukov I, pp. 95–115, 148; on purges: Zhukov I, 137–40, 180–2.

[48] This was far from the only such madness: on other occasions, Stalin commissioned a tank based on a crazy principle that “in being destroyed, it protects.”

[49] Gorodetsky, p. 228. Zhukov I, pp. 305–73.

[50] Khlevniuk, Circle, pp. 265–7. Volkogonov, p. 374. Beria, p. 106. Medvedev, Stalin’s Men, p. 132. Medvedev, p. 310. MR, pp. 228–9. Kaganovich, pp. 29, 77–8. Kaganovich’s beads—Strakhov in Bialer (ed.), p. 443.

[51] Gorodetsky, pp. 146–51, 193, 197–9. Zubok, p. 83. MR, p. 21. Sudoplatov, pp. 118–9. Party: Leonid Redens and his brother Vladimir Alliluyev Redens. Svetlana/Stalin note: RGASPI 558.1.5164.

[52] Kulik, Zhdanov and Howitzers: Vannikov in Bialer (ed.), pp. 153–9. Mad tanks and planes: Emelianov in Bialer (ed.), p. 109; Yakovlev, p. 101.

[53] Aircraft crashes: RGVA 4.19.14.1–74. Supreme Military Council, 16 May 1939. Stalin received complaint about the poor parts in aeroplanes: RGASPI 45.1.803, N. Sbytov to Stalin 14 Sept. 1940. This was only one of many others: but he was also informed closer to home. Vasily, p. 66: Vasily Stalin to Stalin 13 Nov. 1939. On Vasily and marriage to Galina: Svetlana RR. Vasily, pp. 81–3: Vasily Stalin to Stalin 4 Mar. 1941. Spahr, p. 230. Shukman, Stalin’s Generals, Ghosts, p. 366. Simonov, “Glazami,” p. 73.Lesser Terror, p. 30.

[54] Kaganovich was despised for not saving his brother but he buried him with honour as a Central Committee member in the Novodevichy Cemetery, not far from Nadya Stalin. Vannikov survived but remained in prison.

[55] Krebs was Chief of Staff of the Wehrmacht during the last hours of the Third Reich in April 1945.

[56] On 13 May 1941, Svetlana wrote to her father, “My dear little Secretary! Why have you recently been coming home so late? . . . Nevermind, I wouldn’t make my respected Secretaries miserable with my strictness. Eat as much as you like. You can drink too. I only ask you not to put vegetables or other food on the chairs in the hope that someone will sit on it. It will damage the chairs . . .” This was an early hint of the brutish games that characterised Stalin’s dinners after the war. “We obey,” replied Stalin. “Kisses to my little sparrow. Your little Secretary, Stalin.”

[57] Gorodetsky, p. 166. Zhukov thought Stalin believed Hitler was wrapped around his finger—hence his mysterious trust in the Führer. Simonov, “Zametki,” pp. 50–3.

[58] Felix Chuev (ed.), Sto Sorok Besed s Molotovym, p. 31. Meretskov, p. 202. Reginald Dekanozov, Some Episodes of the History of Soviet/German Relations Before the War. Nadya Dekanozova. Zhukov I, 321–36. Gorodetsky, pp. 207–34. Ehrenburg, Eve of War, pp. 275. Dekanozov stood between Stalin and Voroshilov—photo collection of Nadya Dekanozova. V. A. Nevezhin, “Stalin’s 5th May Address: The Experience of Interpretation,” Slavic Military Studies, vol. 11, no. 1, Mar. 1998, pp. 116–46.

[59] Dekanozov repeatedly told this story to his young son, Reginald, who recorded it in his Notes before his own recent death. It has never been published. The author is most grateful to Nadya Dekanozova of Tbilisi, Georgia, for making this source available.

[60] Khlevniuk, Circle, pp. 265–9, 274. Mikoyan, p. 344. Chadaev on Voznesensky, Beria and Malenkov, in Kumanev (ed.), pp. 383–442. Development of Zhdanov/Malenkov feud: see Jonathan Harris, “The Origins of the Conflict between Malenkov and Zhdanov 1939–1941,” Slavic Review, vol. 35, no. 2 (1976). Zhdanov was officially raised to Stalin’s Deputy in the Party Secretariat, the position held by Kaganovich during the early thirties. On 7 May, Stalin became the chief of the inner Buro of the Council of Commissars with Voznesensky, his Deputy, alongside Molotov, Mikoyan, Beria, Kaganovich, Mekhlis and Andreyev. Voroshilov, Zhdanov and Malenkov joined in the next few days. Beria supervised the security Organs as well as various industries. Stalin’s new clothes: Charkviani, p. 37.

[61] Dekanozov repeatedly told this story to his young son, Reginald, who recorded it in his Notes before his own recent death. It has never been published. The author is most grateful to Nadya Dekanozova of Tbilisi, Georgia, for making this source available.

[62] Nevezhin, pp. 116–46. Suvorov debate: Klaus Schmider, Slavic Military Studies, vol. 10, no. 2, June 1997, pp. 183–94; RUSI Journal 130, 2, June 1985, pp. 183–94; Victor Suvorov, “Who was planning to attack whom in June 1941?” B. V. Sokolov, “Did Stalin intend to attack Hitler?” Slavic Military Studies, vol. 11, no. 2, June 1998, pp. 113–41. Also on Vasilevsky: Spahr, p. 237. Gorodetsky, p. 207.

[63] But the speeches have spawned a grand debate about whether Stalin was planning a preemptive strike against Hitler: the so-called Suvorov Debate following Victor Suvorov’s article in June 1985. Suvorov argued that Stalin was about to attack Hitler because of the partial mobilization and build-up on Western borders, the proximity of airfields, and because General Zhukov produced such a plan of attack. His view is now discredited. It now seems that the real view of the General Staff, including General Vasilevsky, was that they would have to retreat much deeper into their territory—hence Vasilevsky’s proposal to move airfields and infrastructure back to the Volga, a proposal attacked as “defeatist” by Kulik and Mekhlis. However, Stalin always kept an offensive war as a real possibility as well as an ideological necessity. As for the speeches, they were designed purely to raise the morale of the army and display a measure of realism about the Soviet situation.

[64] Supreme Military Council 4 June 1941: Zhdanov, Malenkov and Budyonny discuss new propaganda documents, TsAMO RF 32.11302.20.84–6.

[65] Mikoyan, p. 377; Gorodetsky, pp. 212–16. Dekanozov, Episodes. Nadya Dekanozova.

[66] Hess: Mikoyan, p. 377, KR I, p. 155. Gorodetsky, pp. 234–8, 241–3. May paralysis: Zhukov I, pp. 341–6. Stalin to Koniev: Simonov in Brooks, Thank You C. Stalin, p. 251. Beria’s dungeons: N. G. Pavlenko, “G. K. Zhukov: Iz neopublikovanykh vospominanii,” Kommunist, 14, Sept. 1986, p. 99. Kulik—Voronov in Bialer (ed.), p. 209. Simonov, “Zametki,” pp. 51–3.

[67] On 14 June, Hitler held his last military conference before the beginning of Barbarossa, with the generals arriving at the Chancellery at different times so as not to raise suspicion. On the 16th, he summoned Goebbels to brief him.

[68] Last days: Zubok, p. 24. G. Kumanev, “22-go na rassvete,” Pravda, 22 June 1989. Account of meeting with Stalin threatening to shoot Timoshenko: Timoshenko in Kumanev (ed.), pp. 270–1. Zhukov I, pp. 332–69. Merkulov often reported with P. M. Fitin, Head of the NKGB’s Foreign Directorate. Izvestiya TsK KPSS, 4, 1990, p. 221, Merkulov to Stalin, 16 June 1941. Sudoplatov, pp. 120–1. Gorodetsky, pp. 296–8. Lesser Terror, pp. 260–3. Slavic Military Studies, June 1999, pp. 234. Molotov worried: Kuznetsov in Kumanev (ed.), p. 294. Khrushchev, Glasnost, p. 56.

[69] Perhaps Stalin had encouraged Zhdanov to bolster his own wavering confidence: when Dmitrov passed on an Austrian warning, Stalin replied that there could not be anything to worry about if Zhdanov, who ran the Leningrad Military District and the navy, had gone on holiday.

[70] Yury Zhdanov. MR, p. 25. Mikoyan, pp. 377–81. Lesser Terror, pp. 260–5. Vaksberg, Vyshinksy, p. 219. Nekrasov, Beria, p. 399. See also: Vestnik, 10, 1989. Dmitrov diary, 21 June 1941. Gorodetsky, pp. 306–15. Overy, pp. 71–4. L. Trepper, Bolshaya igra, p. 125. Djilas, p. 123. Tiulenev in Bialer (ed.), p. 202. VP Naumov, 1941 god, Bk 2, p. 416. Medvedev, Neizvestnyi Stalin, chapter “Stalin and the War.” Mao Tse-tung warning from Chou En-lai, who heard it from Chiang Kai-shek: Dmitrov diary, 21 June 1941.

[71] This account is based on the memoirs of Molotov, Mikoyan, Zhukov, Timoshenko, Hilger and others but the times are based on the Kremlin Logbook which is clearly incomplete but since the fear, uncertainty and chaos of that night ensured that everyone gave different times for their meetings, it at least provides a framework. Zhukov is not shown as attending the first meeting at 7:05 and Vatutin, who was deputy Chief of Staff and appears in Zhukov’s account, is not mentioned at all. Nor is Mikoyan. That does not mean they were not there: in the manic comings and goings, even Poskrebyshev could be forgiven a few mistakes.

[72] At roughly the same time, Hitler decided to snatch an hour’s sleep before the invasion started: “The fortune of war must now decide.” Earlier, an overtired and anxious Hitler had been pacing up and down the office with Goebbels working out the proclamation to be read to the German people the next day. “This cancerous growth has to be burned out,” Hitler told Goebbels. “Stalin will fall.” Liskov, the German defector, was still being interrogated two and a half hours later when the invasion began: he was not shot. The events of that night were so dramatic that the participants all recall different times: Molotov thought he had left Stalin at midnight, Mikoyan at 3 a.m. Molotov claimed Zhukov, who is used as a source by most historians, placed events later to amplify his own role. At least some of the confusion is due to the hour difference between German and Russian times: this account is based on Russian time. But it is easier to pace events according to the Teutonic efficiency of the German invasion that started at 3:30 a.m. German summertime (4:30 a.m. Russian time) and the arrival of Schulenburg’s instructions from Berlin. It is clear from the three memoirs that the group moved from Stalin’s office to the apartment to Kuntsevo in the course of the hours between 9 p.m. and 3 a.m.

[73] See note 1, chapter 35.