STALIN: THE COURT OF THE RED TSAR

BY

SIMON SEBAG MONTEFIORE

PART SEVEN

WAR: THE BUNGLING GENIUS 1941–1942

 

33. Optimism and Breakdown

Stalin had retired when Zhukov called Kuntsevo. “Who’s calling?” the sleepy voice of the NKGB general answered.

“Zhukov. Chief of Staff. Please connect me to Comrade Stalin. It’s urgent.”

“What, right now? Comrade Stalin’s sleeping.”

“Wake him immediately,” Zhukov told the duty officer. “The Germans are bombing our cities.”

There was a silence. Zhukov waited for what seemed like an eternity. He was not the only one trying to report the invasion to Stalin, but the generals remained as petrified of their own leader as they were of the Germans. At 4:17 a.m. (Russian time) the Black Sea command called Zhukov at the Defence Commissariat to report a swarm of bombers. At 4:30 a.m. the Western Front was on the line, at 4:40, the Baltic was under attack. Around the same time, Admiral Kuznetsov was telephoned by his Sebastopol commander: the German bombing had started. Kuznetsov immediately phoned the Kremlin where he encountered the bureaucratic narrow-mindedness that is so characteristic of tyrannies. It was meant to be a secret that Stalin lived at Kuntsevo, so the officer replied:

“Comrade Stalin is not here and I don’t know where he is.”

“I have an exceedingly important message which I must immediately relay to Comrade Stalin personally . . .”

“I can’t help you in any way,” he replied and hung up, so Kuznetsov called Timoshenko who, deluged with such calls, was afraid to inform Stalin. Kuznetsov tried all the numbers he had for Stalin but to no avail, so he called the Kremlin again.

“I request you to inform Comrade Stalin that German planes are bombing Sebastopol. This is war!”

“I shall report it to the proper person.” A few minutes later, the Admiral discovered who “the proper person” was: flabby, quiet-spoken Malenkov called, asking in “a dissatisfied, irritated voice”: “Do you understand what you’re reporting?”

Even as German bombers strafed Kiev and Sebastopol and as their troops crossed the borders, Stalin’s courtiers were still trying to bully away reality. Malenkov rang off and called Sebastopol to check the story.

Timoshenko was not alone in his office: Mekhlis, “the Shark,” spent the night with the generals. Like Malenkov, he was determined that there would be no invasion that night. When the head of anti-aircraft artillery, Voronov, hurried in to report, Timoshenko was so nervous that he handed him a notebook and absurdly “told me to present my report in writing” so that if they were all arrested for treason, he would be responsible for his crimes. Mekhlis sidled up behind him and read over his shoulder to check that he was writing exactly what he had said. Then Mekhlis made him sign it. Timoshenko ordered anti-aircraft forces not to respond: Voronov realized “he did not believe the war had begun.”

Timoshenko was called by the Deputy Commander of the Western Special Military District, Boldin, who frantically reported that the Germans were advancing. Timoshenko ordered him not to react.

“What do you mean?” shouted Boldin. “Our troops are retreating, towns are in flames, people are dying . . .”

“Joseph Vissarionovich believes this could be a provocation by some German generals.” Timoshenko’s instinct was to persuade someone else to break the news to Stalin. He asked Budyonny: “The Germans are bombing Sebastopol. Should I or shouldn’t I tell Stalin?”

“Inform him immediately!”

“You call him,” beseeched Timoshenko. “I’m afraid.”

“No, you call him,” retorted Budyonny. “You’re Defence Commissar!” Finally, Budyonny agreed and started calling Kuntsevo. Timoshenko, who could not spread this task widely enough, ordered Zhukov to telephone Stalin too.

Zhukov was still waiting on the line to Kuntsevo as Stalin was roused. Three minutes later, he came to the phone. Zhukov reported and asked permission to counter-attack. There was silence. He could just hear Stalin breathing.

“Did you understand me?” asked Zhukov. “Comrade Stalin?” He could still only hear heavy breathing. Then Stalin spoke: “Bring Timoshenko to the Kremlin. Tell Poskrebyshev to summon the Politburo.” Mikoyan and the Politburo were already being rung:

“It’s war!” Now Budyonny reached Stalin at the dacha and added that Riga was being bombed as well. Stalin called Poskrebyshev, who was sleeping in his study: “The bombing’s started.”[1]

Stalin sped into town: he had banned the Politburo from staying in their dachas so they were already there. Stalin rode up in the lift to the second floor, hurried along the red-carpeted corridors with their wooden panelling and snapped at Poskrebyshev as he walked into his office: “Get the others here now.” Zhukov claimed the Politburo assembled at 4:30 a.m. but Molotov thought it was earlier. However, Stalin’s office logbook shows the meeting started at 5:45 a.m. just over an hour after the full German attack. Molotov, who lived in the same building, not far from Stalin’s flat, arrived first, swiftly joined by Beria, Timoshenko, Zhukov and Mekhlis.

Stalin did not collapse: Mikoyan thought he was “subdued.” Zhukov noticed he was “pale” and “bewildered” sitting at the green baize table, “a pipe in his hand.” Voronov thought him “depressed and nervy,” but he was in command of his office at least. Outside the fronts were in anarchy. But here, Chadaev, the Sovnarkom assistant, remembered that Stalin “spoke slowly, choosing his words carefully, occasionally his voice broke down. When he had finished, everybody was silent for some time and so was he.” But amazingly, he still persisted in the idea that the war might be “a provocation by the German officers,” convinced that Hitler might have a Tukhachevsky among the high command of the Wehrmacht. “Hitler simply does not know about it.” Stalin would not order resistance until he had heard from Berlin.

“That scoundrel Ribbentrop tricked us,” he said to Mikoyan several times, still not blaming Hitler. Stalin ordered Molotov: “We have to call the German Embassy immediately.” Molotov called from Stalin’s desk, laden with telephones, and stammered, “Tell him to come.” Schulenburg had already contacted Molotov’s office, asking to see the Foreign Commissar. “I started from Stalin’s office upstairs to my own office” which took about three minutes. Schulenburg, accompanied by Hilger, arrived in the office overlooking Ivan the Terrible’s church for the second time that night—and the last time in his career. The summery Kremlin was bathed in the first light and fragrant with the acacias and roses of the Alexandrovsky Gardens.[2]

Schulenburg read out the telegram that had arrived at 3 a.m. Berlin time: the concentrations of Soviet forces had forced the Reich to take military “counter measures.” He finished. Molotov’s face twitched with disbelief and anger. Finally, he stammered: “Is this supposed to be a declaration of war?” Schulenburg could not speak either: he shrugged sadly.

Molotov’s anger overcame his shock: “The message I have just been given couldn’t mean anything but a declaration of war since German troops have already crossed the border and Soviet cities like Odessa, Kiev and Minsk have been bombed by German aircraft for an hour and a half.” Molotov was shouting now. This was “a breach of confidence unprecedented in history.” Now Germany had unleashed a terrible war. “Surely we haven’t deserved that.” There was nothing more to say: Count von der Schulenburg, who would be executed by Hitler for his part in the July 1944 plot, shook hands and departed, passing limousines rolling into the Kremlin bearing generals. Molotov rushed to Stalin’s office where he announced: “Germany’s declared war on us.”

Stalin subsided into his chair, “lost in thought.” The silence was “long and pregnant.” Stalin “looked tired, worn out,” recalled Chadaev. “His pock-marked face was drawn and haggard.” This, recalled Zhukov, “was the only time I saw Stalin depressed.” Then he roused himself with a wildly optimistic slogan: “The enemy will be beaten all along the line”— and he turned to the generals: “What do you recommend?”

Zhukov suggested that the frontier districts must “hold up” the Germans—

“Annihilate,” interrupted Timoshenko, “not ‘hold up.’ ”

“Issue a directive,” said Stalin, still under the spell of his grand delusion. “Do not cross the border.” Timoshenko, not Stalin, signed the series of directives that were issued throughout the morning. Chadaev noticed the mood improve: “on that first day of war, everyone was . . . quite optimistic.”

Yet despite everything, Stalin persisted in clinging on to shards of his shattered illusion: he said he hoped to settle things diplomatically. No one dared contradict this absurdity except Molotov, his comrade since 1912 who was one of the last who could openly argue with him.

“No!” replied Molotov emphatically. It was war and “nothing could be done about it.” The scale of the invasion and Molotov’s stark insistence managed to shake the reality into Stalin.

When Dmitrov, the Comintern leader, arrived, the outer office was a hive of activity, with Poskrebyshev, Mekhlis (in uniform again), Marshal Timoshenko, and Admiral Kuznetsov at work—and Beria “giving orders on the phone.” Inside, he noticed Stalin’s “striking calmness, resoluteness, confidence...” “They fell on us, without making any claims, making a vile attack like bandits,” Stalin told Dmitrov. The “bandits” had the advantage of total surprise. The Soviet front line had been overwhelmed. Stalin’s armies were strongest in the south. However, while the Germans thrust towards Leningrad and the Ukraine, Hitler’s strongest army group was meant to take Moscow. Army Group Centre’s two pincers shattered the Soviet Western Front, under Colonel-General Pavlov whose counter-attack was tossed aside as the Panzers charged towards Minsk and the road to Moscow.

Stalin reacted with a steady stream of orders that admittedly bore little relation to the disaster at the front: nonetheless, Beria, Malenkov, Mikoyan, Kaganovich and Voroshilov came, went and returned to the Little Corner throughout the morning so that by midday, all of them had been there at least twice, Beria thrice. Mekhlis was one of the first to arrive, Kulik came later. The Vozhd ordered Kaganovich to prepare the trains to remove factories and 20 million people from the front— nothing was to fall into German hands. Mikoyan was to supply the armies.

Stalin retained minute control over everything, from the size and shape of bayonets to the Pravda headlines and who wrote the articles, losing neither his jealousy of others’ glory nor his flawless instinct for self-preservation. When General Koniev received several mentions in the newspapers during the first week, Stalin found the time to telephone the editor and snap: “You’ve printed enough on Koniev.” When the same editor asked if he could publish one writer whom Stalin had savagely denounced before the war, he replied: “You may print. Comrade Adveenko has atoned.” Meanwhile he himself deliberately disappeared from the public eye. His appearances on the front page of Pravda fell dramatically. Amazingly, the USSR possessed no Supreme Command: at nine that morning, Stalin created an early version, the Stavka. Naturally, the decree named Stalin as Commander-in-Chief but he crossed it out and put Timoshenko’s name instead.

Everyone agreed that the government had to announce the war. Mikoyan and the others proposed Stalin should do it but he refused: “Let Molotov speak.” After all, Molotov had signed the treaty with Ribbentrop. The entourage disagreed—surely the people would not understand why they were not hearing from the Premier. Stalin insisted that he would speak another time. “He didn’t want to be first to speak,” said Molotov. “He needed a clear picture . . . He couldn’t respond like an automaton to everything . . . He was a human being after all.”

Molotov, who still regarded himself as a political journalist, immediately set to work on the announcement but Stalin dominated the drafting for he possessed the gift of distilling complex ideas into the simple and stirring phrases that henceforth characterized his war speeches. At midday, Molotov drove to the Central Telegraph Office on Gorky Street, just up from the Kremlin. He mastered his stammer and delivered the famous speech in his flat but quavering voice: “Our cause is just. The enemy will be crushed. Victory will be ours.”

When Molotov returned, Stalin walked up to his office to congratulate him: “Well, you sounded a bit flustered but the speech went well.” Molotov needed praise: he was much vainer than he looked. Just then the vertushka rang: it was Timoshenko reporting on the chaos of the frontier where the commanders, especially Pavlov on the vital Western Front that covered Minsk and the road to Moscow, had lost contact with their troops. Stalin fulminated about how “unexpected attack is very important in war. It gives the initiative to the attackers . . . You must strictly prevent . . . any panic. Call the commanders, clear the situation and report . . . How long will you need? Two hours, well not more . . . How is the situation with Pavlov?” But Pavlov, bearing the brunt of the German attack, “has no connection with the staff of his armies . . .”

Attended by Molotov, Malenkov and Beria, the threesome who were to spend most of the war in the Little Corner, Stalin gradually learned of the startling German successes and the Soviet collapse. During that first week, Beria, master of the Special Department, the Osobyi Otdel, the secret police in every military unit responsible for hunting down traitors, met Stalin fifteen times while Mekhlis, political boss of the army, virtually resided in the Little Corner: terror was Stalin’s solution to defeat. But these two, along with Civil War cronies like Voroshilov and Kulik, were little comfort when Timoshenko reported that almost a thousand planes had been eliminated on the ground by the end of the day.

“Surely the German air force didn’t manage to reach every single airfield?” Stalin asked pathetically.

“Unfortunately it did.” But it was the disaster of Pavlov’s Western Front that reduced Stalin to wild, if impotent, fury: “This is a monstrous crime. Those responsible must lose their heads.”

Stalin abruptly ordered his most trusted cronies to travel to the fronts and find out what was happening. When they hesitated, Stalin shouted: “Immediately.” Chief of Staff Zhukov headed for the South-Western Front but asked who would run things in his absence.

“Don’t waste time,” scoffed Stalin. “We’ll manage somehow.” Malenkov and Budyonny, a strange coupling, the bloodless bureaucrat and the swashbuckling Cossack, flew to Briansk; Kulik to the Western Front.

The whirlwind almost consumed them: in a series of semi-farcical fiascos, all were lucky to escape with their lives. Meanwhile, in the Little Corner, Stalin’s hours were as inconsistent as the performance of his armies. Stalin and Beria were the last two to leave at 4:45 that afternoon, having been up since dawn. They still believed their counter-offensives would throw the battle onto enemy territory. They must have grabbed some sleep but Stalin was back in the office at 3:20 on the morning of 23 June to meet Molotov, Mekhlis and Beria until the early hours. By the 25th, faced with the free fall of the fronts, Stalin was spending the whole night, from 1:00 to 5:50 a.m., in the office in a state of rising outrage as one by one his special envoys disappeared into the cataclysm.

“That good-for-nothing Kulik needs a kick in the arse,” he said.[3]

Only Zhukov, brutal, courageous and energetic, managed to counter-attack on the South-Western Front, brandishing the Stalinist ruthlessness that distinguished him throughout the war: “Arrest immediately,” reads one of his typical orders to the Special Departments about retreating officers. “And bring them to trial urgently as traitors and cowards.”[4]

The boozy buffoon Marshal Kulik, whose war was to be a chronicle of tragicomical blunders, outfitted himself in a pilot’s fetching leathers, cap and goggles and arrived on the Western Front like a Stalinist Biggles on the evening of 23 June. Bewildered by the rout of the Tenth Army, he was cut off, surrounded and almost captured. He had to escape in fancy dress. “The behaviour of Marshal Kulik was incomprehensible,” the regimental Commissar denounced Kulik to Mekhlis. “He ordered everyone to take off their regalia, throw out documents and then change into peasant garb,” a disguise he was more than capable of carrying off. Burning his marshal’s uniform (and his Biggles outfit), “he proposed to throw away our arms and he told me personally to throw away my medals and documents . . . Kulik rode on a horse-drawn cart along the very road just taken by German tanks...”[5] The Western Front itself was disintegrating. Ailing Marshal Shaposhnikov collapsed from the strain. Headquarters lost him too.

Like a game of hide-and-seek, in which more and more children are sent to find the ones hiding, Stalin sent Voroshilov to find Kulik and Shaposhnikov. On 26 June, the “First Marshal” arrived in Mogilev on a special train but was unable to find either the Western Front or the two marshals. Eventually his adjutant came upon a pitiful sight that looked more like a “gypsy encampment” than a headquarters and espied Shaposhnikov on the ground covered by a coat, looking very dead. Then he saw Pavlov, the commander, lying alone beneath a tree eating kasha out of a mess-tin in the pouring rain which he did not seem to have noticed. Shaposhnikov stirred. The adjutant realized he was alive and introduced himself. Shaposhnikov, wincing with pain, thanked God that Voroshilov had come and started to shave. Pavlov, who had now finished his kasha, was dazed and desperate: “I’m done for!”

Voroshilov descended on the camp with an explosion of threats, while sending his adjutant to hunt for Kulik. Then the two marshals retired to the special train to decide what to do about poor Pavlov. Voroshilov ordered dinner: a cook brought in ham, bread and tea, a repast that evidently disappointed the Marshal because he became furious, screaming for his cook, Comrade Franz, who emerged and stood to attention. Voroshilov demanded to know how he dared serve such a meal for two marshals.

“Why’ve you sliced the ham? Do people cut ham this way? In a god-damn inn, they serve better ham!” Voroshilov summoned Pavlov, berating him for his failures. In another of those moments that reveal the importance of personal vendetta, he reminded Pavlov that he had once complained to Stalin about him. Pavlov fell to his knees, begged for forgiveness and kissed the Marshal’s boots. Voroshilov returned to Moscow.[6]

At dawn on 4 July, Mekhlis arrested Pavlov for treason: “We ask you to confirm arrest and prosecution,” Mekhlis reported. Stalin welcomed it “as one of the true ways to improve the health of the Front.” Under torture, Pavlov implicated General Meretskov who was immediately arrested too. Before Pavlov’s “trial,” Poskrebyshev brought Stalin the “[Draft] Sentence.” Seeing that it contained the traditional inventions, Stalin told Poskrebyshev: “I approve the sentence but tell Ulrikh to get rid of all that rubbish about ‘conspiratorial activity.’ The case shouldn’t drag out. No appeal. And then inform the fronts so that they know that defeatists will be punished without mercy.” Mikoyan (and presumably the rest of the Politburo) approved of the sentence and still did so thirty years later when he wrote his memoirs: “It was a pity to lose him but it was justified.” On 22 July, the four commanding officers of the Western Front were shot. So many telegrams flooded in asking permission to shoot traitors, they blocked up the wires in Mekhlis’s office. That day, he told them to sentence and shoot their own traitors.[7]

Stalin was absorbing the scale of the catastrophe. The fronts were out of control: the Nazis were approaching Minsk, the air force decimated, thirty divisions shattered. On the 26th, Stalin urgently recalled Zhukov from the South-Western Front: the Chief of Staff found Timoshenko and General Vatutin standing to attention before Stalin, their “eyes red from lack of sleep.” Stalin ordered: “Put your heads together and tell me what can be done.”[8] He gave them forty minutes to propose new lines of defence.[9]

Yet even in these frantic times, Stalin remembered his own family. On 25 June, Stalin was meeting with Timoshenko to discuss a “situation that was extremely serious on all fronts” when the Defence Commissar plucked up the courage to ask if Yakov Djugashvili, the Leader’s oldest son by his first marriage who had always disappointed him and whom he had treated callously, should be sent to the front, as he requested. Stifling his anger, Stalin replied, “Some, to put it mildly, inordinately zealous officials are always trying too hard to please their superiors. I don’t include you in that number but I advise you never to ask me questions like that again.” Stalin said nothing else about it but later, he checked that the boys, Yakov and Artyom, both artillerymen, were to be sent to the front line. After Vasily threw a goodbye party, Yakov’s wife, Julia, saw off her beloved Yasha in her red dress, which she later believed was cursed.

One night during the first ten days of the war, Stalin called Zhenya Alliluyeva whom he had cut ever since her remarriage. Visiting Kuntsevo, she had “never seen Joseph so crushed.” He asked her to take Svetlana and the children to the dacha in Sochi and then gave her a stunningly honest précis of the war situation that shocked her since the propaganda was still claiming that the heroic Red Army was about to crush the Fascist invader: “The war will be long. Lots of blood will be shed . . . Please take Svetlana southwards.” It was a mark of Zhenya’s force of personality, the very thing that made her so attractive and irritating, that she refused. She must accompany her husband. Stalin was “upset and angry.” He never saw Zhenya again.

Instead Anna Redens shepherded Svetlana, Alexandra Nakashidze, Vasily’s wife Galina, Yakov’s daughter Gulia as well as her own sons to the dacha in Sochi where they remained until the front approached there.[10]

On 28 June, the Germans, who had penetrated three hundred miles into Soviet territory, closed the net on the encirclement of 400,000 troops— and took the capital of Belorussia, Minsk. As scraps of this information reached the Little Corner during a long session from mid-afternoon until 2:40 a.m., Stalin was beside himself. After a few hours’ sleep, he visited the Defence Commissariat to find out more, probably accompanied by Molotov, Malenkov and Budyonny. The fall of Minsk would open the road to Smolensk and Moscow, but such was the rout that Timoshenko again lost contact with the armies. This infuriated Stalin who arrived back at the Little Corner at 7:35 p.m. While Timoshenko and Zhukov came and went with worsening news, Beria and Mikoyan arrived to join their comrades in an emergency Politburo. After midnight, Stalin called Timoshenko for some concrete news from Belorussia: there was none. This was the final straw[11]. Stalin stormed out of the office. Poskrebyshev and Chadaev watched Stalin, Molotov and Beria getting into their Packard outside.

“The Germans have obviously taken Minsk,” said Poskrebyshev.

Minutes later, the Five pulled up at the Defence Commissariat. Stalin led his men into Timoshenko’s office and announced that he wanted to acquaint himself personally with the reports from the front. Zhukov was about to leave but Timoshenko gestured for him to stay. The Five gathered around the operations map.

“What’s happening at Minsk?” asked Stalin.

“I’m not yet able to report on that,” replied Timoshenko.

“It’s your duty to have the facts clearly before you at all times and keep us up to date,” said Stalin. “At present, you’re simply afraid to tell us the truth.” At this, the fearless Zhukov interjected rudely: “Comrade Stalin, have we permission to get on with our work?”

“Are we perhaps in your way?” sneered Beria, who must have been shocked to see Stalin addressed in such a way. The meeting now degenerated into a row between Zhukov and Beria, with a bristling Stalin standing in the middle.

“You know that the situation on all fronts is critical. The front commanders await instructions and it’s better if we do it ourselves,” replied Zhukov.

“We too are capable of giving orders,” shouted Beria.

“If you think you can, do it!” retorted Zhukov.

“If the Party tells us to, we will.”

“So wait until it tells you to. As things are, we’ve been told to do the job.” Zhukov appealed to Stalin: “Excuse my outspokenness, Comrade Stalin, we shall certainly get it worked out. Then we’ll come to the Kremlin and report.” Zhukov was implying that the generals might be more competent than the Politburo.

Stalin, who had been quiet up to this point, could no longer contain his fury: “You’re making a crass mistake trying to draw a line between yourselves and us . . . We must all be thinking how to help the fronts.” Stalin, in Mikoyan’s words, now “erupted”: “What is General Headquarters? What sort of Chief of Staff is it who since the first day of the war has no connection with his troops, represents nobody, and commands nobody?”

The granite-faced Zhukov collapsed under this barrage and burst into tears, “sobbing like a woman” and “ran out into another room.” Molotov followed him. One of the harshest Bolsheviks comforted one of the most severe soldiers of that bloody century: did Molotov offer a handkerchief or put a hand on Zhukov’s shoulder? Five minutes later, that incongruous duo returned. Zhukov was “quiet but his eyes were moist.”

“We were all depressed,” admitted Mikoyan. Stalin suggested that Voroshilov or someone else be despatched to make contact with the Belorussian front. “Stalin was very depressed.” Then he looked at his comrades.

“There we are then,” said Stalin. “Let them get it sorted out themselves first. Let’s go, comrades.” Stalin led the way out of the office. As they climbed into the cars outside, Stalin uttered his first words of truth since the war began: “Everything’s lost. I give up. Lenin founded our state and we’ve fucked it up.” Stalin cursed all the way to Kuntsevo. “Lenin left us a great heritage and we his successors have shitted it all up . . .” Even when they had arrived at the house, Molotov remembered him swearing, “ ‘We fucked it up!’ The ‘we’ was meant to include all of us!” Stalin said he could no longer be the Leader. He resigned. At Kuntsevo, Molotov “tried to cheer him up.” They left the broken Stalin sulking at the dacha.[12]

Mikoyan was not impressed with this performance. On the way home, he discussed it with Molotov, whom he disliked but trusted: they knew Stalin as well as anyone. “We were struck by this statement of Stalin’s. What now, is everything irrevocably lost? We thought he said it for effect.” They were right that Stalin was partly performing but “he was a human being too,” in Molotov’s words. The fall of Minsk jolted Stalin, who lost face in front of his comrades and generals. This was the gravest crisis of his career.

The next day, they discovered it was not merely “for effect.” At midday, when Stalin usually arrived at the Kremlin, he did not come. He did not appear later in the day. The vacuum of power was palpable: the titan who, in fourteen-hour marathons, decided every tiny detail left a gaping hole. When Stalin’s phone rang, Poskrebyshev responded.

“Comrade Stalin’s not here and I don’t know when he will be.” When Mekhlis tried to ring Stalin at Kuntsevo, there was no reply. “I don’t understand it,” sighed Poskrebyshev. By the end of the day, Stalin’s chef de cabinet was saying: “Comrade Stalin is not here and is unlikely to be here.”

“Has he gone to the front?” asked young Chadaev.

“Why do you keep bothering me? I’ve told you he isn’t here and won’t be here.”

Stalin “had shut himself away from everybody, was receiving nobody and was not answering the phone.” Molotov told Mikoyan and the others that “Stalin had been in such a state of prostration for the last two days that he was not interested in anything, didn’t show any initiative and was in a bad way.” Stalin could not sleep. He did not even bother to undress but simply wandered around the dacha. At one point, he opened the door of the guardhouse where Vlasik’s deputy, Major-General Rumiantsev, leapt to attention, but Stalin did not say a word and just returned to his room. He later told Poskrebyshev, he had the taste of wormwood in his mouth. Yet Stalin had read his history: he knew that Ivan the Terrible, his “teacher,” had also withdrawn from power to test the loyalty of hisboyars.

The Soviet boyars were alarmed but the experienced ones sensed danger. Molotov was careful not to sign any documents. As the Germans advanced, the government was paralysed for two long days.

“You’ve no idea what it’s like here,” Malenkov told Khrushchev.

On the evening of the 30th, Chadaev returned to the office to get Stalin’s signature as Premier but there was still no sign of him: “He wasn’t here yesterday either.”

“No, he wasn’t here yesterday either,” Poskrebyshev replied, without a trace of sarcasm. But something had to be done. The new boy, Voznesensky, appeared at Poskrebyshev’s desk like all the others. When Chadaev asked him to sign the documents, he refused and called Stalin himself but “No reply from the dacha.” So he called upstairs to Molotov who suggested meeting later but gave no clue that he was already closeted with Beria, Malenkov and Voroshilov, arranging what to do. Now the dynamic Beria devised a new super-war cabinet, an ultra-Politburo with a tiny membership and sweeping powers, chaired by Stalin, if he would accept it, and containing Molotov, Voroshilov, Malenkov and himself: three Old Bolsheviks and two ascendant meteors. The exclusion of many of the magnates was a triumph for Beria and Malenkov, who were not even full Politburo members.

Once this was fixed, Molotov called Mikoyan, who was talking to Voznesensky, and the Politburo gathered. The magnates had never been so powerful: these manoeuvres most resembled the intrigues just after Stalin’s stroke twelve years later, for this was the only real opportunity they had to overthrow Stalin since the revelation of Lenin’s damning Testament almost twenty years earlier. Molotov told them about Stalin’s breakdown but Mikoyan replied that even if the Vozhd was incapacitated, “the very name Stalin was a great force for rousing the morale of the people.” But bumptious Voznesensky made what ultimately proved to be a fatal mistake: “Vyacheslav!” he hailed Molotov. “You go ahead and we’ll follow you!” Molotov must have blanched at this deadly suggestion and turned to Beria[13] who proposed his State Defence Committee. They decided to go out to Kuntsevo.

When they arrived, they cautiously stepped into the gloomy, dark-green house, shrouded in pinewoods, and were shown into the little dining room. There, sitting nervously in an armchair, was a “thinner...haggard... gloomy” Stalin. When he saw the seven or so Politburo members entering, Stalin “turned to stone.” In one account, Stalin greeted them with more depressed ramblings: “Great Lenin’s no more . . . If only he could see us now. See those to whom he entrusted the fate of his country . . . I am inundated with letters from Soviet people, rightly rebuking us . . . Maybe some among you wouldn’t mind putting the blame on me.” Then, he looked at them searchingly and asked: “Why’ve you come?”

Stalin “looked alert, somewhat strange,” recalled Mikoyan, “and his question was no less strange. Actually he should have summoned us himself. I had no doubt: he decided we had arrived to arrest him.” Beria watched Stalin’s face carefully. “It was obvious,” he later told his wife, “Stalin expected anything could happen, even the worst.”

The magnates were frightened too: Beria later teased Mikoyan for hiding behind the others. Molotov, who was the most senior and therefore the most exposed to Stalin’s vengeance, stepped forward.

“Thank you for your frankness,” said Molotov, according to a possibly secondary source, “but I tell you here and now that if some idiot tried to turn me against you, I’d see him damned. We’re asking you to come back to work . . .”

“Yes but think about it,” answered Stalin. “Can I live up to people’s hopes anymore? Can I lead the country to final victory? There may be more deserving candidates.”

“I believe I shall be voicing the unanimous opinion,” interjected Voroshilov. “There’s none more worthy.”

“Pravilno! Right!” repeated the magnates. Molotov told Stalin that Malenkov and Beria proposed to form a State Defence Committee.

“With whom at its head?” Stalin asked.

“You, Comrade Stalin.” Stalin’s relief was palpable: “the tension left his face”—but he did not say anything for a while, then: “Well . . .”

Beria took a step and said: “You, Comrade Stalin, will be the head” and he listed the members.

Stalin noted Mikoyan and Voznesensky had been excluded but Beria suggested they should run the government. The pragmatic Mikoyan, knowing that his responsibilities for army supply were relevant, asked to be a special representative. Stalin assigned industries—Malenkov took over aeroplanes; Molotov, tanks; Voznesensky, armaments. Stalin was back in power.

So had Stalin really suffered a nervous breakdown or was this simply a performance? Nothing was ever straightforward with this adept political actor. The breakdown was real enough: he was depressed and exhausted. It was not out of character: he had suffered similar moments on Nadya’s death and during the Finnish War. His collapse was an understandable reaction to his failure to read Hitler, a mistake which could not be hidden from his courtiers who had repeatedly heard him insist there would be no invasion in 1941. But that was only the first part of this disaster: the military collapse had revealed the damage that Stalin had done and his ineptitude as commander. The Emperor had no clothes. Only a dictator who had killed any possible challengers could have survived it. In any other system, this would have brought about a change of government but no such change was available here.

Yet Molotov and Mikoyan were right: it was also “for effect.” The withdrawal from power was a well-tried pose, successfully employed from Achilles and Alexander the Great to Ivan. Stalin’s retreat allowed him to be effectively re-elected by the Politburo, with the added benefit of drawing a line under the bungles up to that point. These had been forgiven: “Stalin enjoyed our support again,” Mikoyan wrote pointedly. So it was both a breakdown and a political restoration.

“We were witnesses to Stalin’s moments of weakness,” said Beria afterwards. “Joseph Vissarionovich will never forgive that move of ours.” Mikoyan had been right to hide.

Next afternoon, Stalin reappeared in the office, “a new man” committed to play the role of warlord for which he believed himself specially qualified. On 1 July, the newspapers announced that Stalin was the Chairman of the State Defence Committee, the GKO. Soon afterwards he sent Timoshenko to command the Western Front defending Moscow: on 19 July, Stalin became Commissar of Defence and, on 8 August, Supreme Commander-in-Chief: henceforth, the generals called him Verkhovnyi, Supremo. On 16 July, he restored the dual command of political commissars that the army so hated, abolished after Finland: the commissars, led by Mekhlis, were to conduct “ceaseless struggles against cowards, panic-mongers and deserters” but these overweening amateurs often took actual command, like their master. “The Defence Commissariat,” said Khrushchev, “was like a kennel of mad dogs with Kulik and Mekhlis.”[14] Meanwhile Stalin reunited the security forces, the NKVD and NKGB, under Beria. On 3 July, Stalin spoke to the people in a new voice, as a Russian national leader.

“Comrades, citizens,” he began conventionally, his voice low, his breathing audible across the radio waves of the Imperium, along with his sips of water and the clink of his glass. “Brothers and sisters! Warriors of the army and the fleet! I call upon you, my friends.” This was a patriotic war but patriotism stiffened by terror: “Cowards, deserters, panic-mongers” would be crushed in a “merciless struggle.”[15] A couple of nights later, Stalin and Kalinin walked out of the Kremlin at 2 a.m. under heavy guard, commanded by Vlasik, and entered Lenin’s Mausoleum to bid goodbye to the mummy of their late leader before it set off by secret sealed train to Siberia.[16]

Stalin’s new resolve hardly improved the plight of the fronts. Within three weeks of war, Russia had lost around 2,000,000 men, 3,500 tanks, and over 6,000 aircraft. On 10 July, the German Panzers renewed their advance on the gateway to Moscow, Smolensk, which fell six days later. The Germans broke through to take another 300,000 Red Army prisoners and capture 3,000 guns and 3,000 tanks—but Timoshenko’s hard fighting temporarily sapped their momentum. Hitler ordered Army Group Centre to regroup at the end of July. As he pressed his advance, in the south towards Kiev, and in the north towards Leningrad, Hitler had won astounding victories, yet none of Barbarossa’s objectives—Moscow, Leningrad and the Donets Basin—had fallen. The Soviet army had not been obliterated. While German generals begged him to throw their Panzers against Moscow, Hitler, perhaps recalling Napoleon’s empty conquest, wanted to seize the oil and grain of the south. Instead he compromised with a new strategy, “Moscow and Ukraine.”

The new Stalin even took some lip from the Politburo. Just after the fall of Smolensk, Stalin summoned Zhukov and Timoshenko to the dacha, where they found him wearing an old tunic, pacing, pipe unlit, always a sign of trouble, accompanied by some of the Politburo. “The Politburo has discussed dismissing Timoshenko...What do you think of that?” Timoshenko said nothing but Zhukov objected.

“I rather think he’s right,” said old Kalinin who had barely disagreed with Stalin since 1930. Stalin “unhurriedly lit the pipe and eyed the Politburo.”

“What if we agree with Comrade Zhukov?” he asked.

“You’re right, Comrade Stalin,” they replied in one voice. But Zhukov did not always get his way.[17]

Faced with the threat of more giant encirclements in the south, Stalin devised draconian measures to terrorize his men into fighting. In the first week, he approved NKGB Order No. 246 that stipulated the destruction of the families of men who were captured, and now he made this public in his notorious Order No. 270. He ordered it to be signed by Molotov, Budyonny, Voroshilov and Zhukov, even though some of them were not present, but it was, after all, a traditional method of Bolshevik rule.[18]These measures ruined the lives of millions of innocent soldiers and their families, including Stalin’s own.[19]

On 16 July, in one of the encirclements, this one at Vitebsk, an artillery lieutenant of the 14th Howitzer Regiment of the 14th Armoured Division, found himself overrun by German forces. Feeling himself special, he did not withdraw: “I am Stalin’s son and I won’t allow my battery to retreat,” but nor did he honourably commit suicide. On 19 July, Berlin announced that, among the teeming mass of Soviet prisoners, was Yakov Djugashvili. Zhdanov sent Stalin a sealed package that contained a photograph of Yakov that his father examined closely, tormented by the thought of his weak son breaking and betraying him. For the second time in Yakov’s life, Stalin cursed that his own son could not kill himself: “The fool—he couldn’t even shoot himself!” he muttered to Vasily. Stalin was immediately suspicious of Yakov’s wife Julia. “Don’t say anything to Yasha’s wife for the time being,” Stalin told Svetlana. Soon afterwards, under Order No. 270, Julia was arrested. Her three-year-old daughter Gulia did not see her mother for two years. Yet we now know how Stalin fretted about Yakov’s fate and how he mulled over it for the rest of his life.

He quickly banned Vasily from flying on active missions: “One prisoner’s more than enough for me!” But he was irritated when the “Crown Prince” (as Svetlana called Vasily) phoned to ask for more pocket money for a new uniform and more food:

“1. As far as I know [wrote Stalin] the rations in the air force are quite sufficient. 2. A special uniform for Stalin’s son is not on the agenda.”[20]

Around the time of Yakov’s capture, Stalin made his first approach to Hitler. He and Molotov ordered Beria to sound out the Bulgarian Ambassador, Ivan Stamenov. Beria gave the job to the assassination/intelligence specialist Sudoplatov, who told the story in his semi-reliable memoirs: his instructions were to ask why Germany had violated the Pact, on what conditions Hitler would end the war, and whether he would be satisfied with the Ukraine, Belorussia, Moldova and the Baltics, a second Brest-Litovsk? Beria told Sudoplatov this was to win time. Sudoplatov met Stamenov at Beria’s favourite Georgian restaurant, Aragvi, on 25 July but the Bulgarian never passed on the message to Berlin, saying:

“Even if you retreat to the Urals, you’ll still win in the end.”[21]

Meanwhile the German advance in the south was inexorable: the Panzer pincers of Army Group South, under Guderian and Kleist, swung round Kiev to encircle General Kirponos’s South-Western Front with hundreds of thousands more men. It was obvious that Kiev would have to be abandoned but on 29 July, Stalin summoned Zhukov to discuss all fronts. Poskrebyshev ominously said the meeting would not begin until Mekhlis had arrived. When “the gloomy demon” appeared with Beria and Malenkov, the Chief of Staff predicted, under the Medusan glare of this grim trio, that the Germans would crush the South-Western Front before turning back to Moscow. Mekhlis interrupted to ask, threateningly, how Zhukov knew so much about the German plans.

“What about Kiev?” asked Stalin. Zhukov proposed abandoning it.

“Why talk nonsense?” bawled Stalin.

“If you think the Chief of Staff talks nonsense, then I request you relieve me of my post and send me to the front,” Zhukov shouted back.

“Who gave you the right to speak to Comrade Stalin like that?” snarled Mekhlis.

“Don’t get heated,” said Stalin to Zhukov, but “since you mentioned it, we’ll get by without you.” Zhukov gathered his maps and left the room, only to be summoned back forty minutes later to be told that he was relieved as Chief of Staff, a blessing in disguise, which allowed this fighting general to return to his natural habitat. Stalin soothed him: “Calm down, calm down.” Shaposhnikov was recalled as Chief of Staff. Stalin knew he was ailing but “we’ll help him.” Zhukov asked to leave but Stalin invited him for tea: Stalin was drawn to Zhukov. The unfolding disaster around Kiev soon proved the wisdom of his “nonsense.”[22]

The Panzer claws were closing around the South-Western Axis, commanded by Marshal Budyonny and Khrushchev who begged to be allowed to withdraw. Stalin was informed by the NKVD that Khrushchev was going to surrender Kiev and rang to threaten him. “You should be ashamed of yourself ! . . . What’s the matter with you? [You have] given up half of Ukraine. You’re ready to give up the other half too . . . Do whatever it takes. If not . . . we’ll make short work of you!” In the alternation of roaring panic and becalmed anxiety that are the moods of a rout, Khrushchev found Budyonny drinking brandy with the front’s Operations chief, Bagramian, and affectionately telling him he should be shot.

On 11 September, with time running out, Budyonny, who was both braver and more competent than most of the “cavalrymen,” knew he might be dismissed or even arrested but he now insisted to Stalin that “delay [will] lead to losses in men and a huge quantity of equipment.” Stalin dismissed him next day. Appointing Timoshenko to the front, Stalin gave him a quaint gift of two pipes marked with a deer to symbolize his transfer from north to south, a rare gesture.

“You take command,” Budyonny told Timoshenko at the front. “But let’s call Stalin together and tell him to retreat from Kiev. We’re real Marshals and they’ll believe us.”

“I don’t want to put my head in the noose,” replied Timoshenko. Two days later, Kleist and Guderian’s Panzer Groups One and Two linked up at 18:20 hours a hundred miles east of Kiev, sealing five entire Soviet armies in a giant encirclement, the rotten fruit of Stalin’s obstinacy: 452,720 men were captured. By the 18th, Kiev had fallen. Stalin’s nerves held: “Plug the hole,” he ordered Shaposhnikov. “Quickly!”[23]

Stalin and Beria stepped up both the repression and the redemption. More “lucky stiffs” were released to help the war effort. “There aren’t any people on whom one can rely,” Stalin murmured during one meeting on air defence at which the aircraft designer Yakovlev spoke up: “Comrade Stalin, it’s already more than a month since Balandin, our Deputy People’s Commissar, was arrested. We don’t know what he was arrested for but we can’t conceive he was an Enemy. He is needed . . . We ask you to examine his case.”

“Yes,” replied Stalin, “he’s already been in prison for forty days but he’s confessed nothing. Perhaps he’s not guilty of anything.” The next day, Balandin, “with hollow cheeks and shaven head” appeared for work “as though nothing had happened.” Beria and Mikoyan requested the freeing of Vannikov, arrested for arguing about artillery with Kulik. He was brought straight from his cell to Stalin who apologized, admitting that Vannikov had been right, and then promoted him to high office.

There was a certain awkwardness when the “lucky stiffs” met their torturers. Broad-faced, fair-haired General Meretskov, arrested during the first weeks of the war, had been horribly tortured by the debonair Merkulov, “the Theoretician,” with whom he had been friends before his arrest. As one of his interrogators later testified: “Brutal continuous torture was applied to Meretskov by high-ranking officials . . . he was beaten with rubber rods” until he was covered in blood. Now he was cleaned up and brought to Merkulov but Meretskov told his torturer that they could no longer be friends, a conversation unique to this strange time: “Vsevolod Nikolaievich, we used to meet on informal terms but I’m afraid of you now.” Merkulov smiled. Minutes later, in full uniform, General Meretskov reported for his next assignment to Stalin:

“Hello, Comrade Meretskov? How are you feeling?”

Beria also redoubled the Terror.[24] As the NKVD retreated, the prisoners were not all released—even though Stalin had every opportunity to do so. Those “German spies” who had been so close to Stalin, Maria and Alyosha Svanidze, had been in prison since December 1937. Stalin remembered Alyosha who, as he himself told Mikoyan, “was sentenced to death. I ordered Merkulov to tell him before execution that if he asks the Central Committee for forgiveness, he will be pardoned.” But Svanidze proudly replied that he was innocent so “I can’t ask for pardon.” He spat in Merkulov’s face: “That’s my answer to him,” he cried. On 20 August 1941, he was shot. A few days later, at Kuntsevo, Stalin turned to Mikoyan: “Want to hear about Alyosha?”

“What?” Mikoyan, who had adored Svanidze, hoped he would be released. But Stalin matter-of-factly announced his death.

“He wouldn’t apologize. Such noble pride!” mused Stalin.

“When was this?” asked Mikoyan.

“He was shot just recently.” Maria Svanidze, who had so worshipped Stalin, was, with Alyosha’s sister, Mariko,[25] shot the following year.[26]

 

 

34. “Ferocious as a Dog”: Zhdanov and the Siege of Leningrad

While Molotov sat beside Stalin in the Little Corner, Zhdanov ruled beleaguered Leningrad like a mini-Stalin. But Stalin now turned his fury onto the commanders of the city of Lenin.[27] By 21 August 1941, a German north-easterly thrust almost cut off Leningrad’s link with the rest of Russia. Voroshilov, now sixty, took command alongside Zhdanov. Both men had much to prove but as Leningrad was gradually enveloped, they struggled to keep Stalin’s confidence.

Day by day, the Germans tightened their grip and Stalin smelt defeatism. In a stream of dictated anxiety, he accused them of failing to grasp “this fatal danger. Stavka cannot agree with the mood of doom, and impossibility of taking strong measures and conversations about how everything possible has been done and it’s impossible to do any more...”[28] Then Stalin heard that Voroshilov, replaying his glory days of Tsaritsyn in 1918, was planning to raise morale by electing officers—but this time the outraged War Commissar was not Trotsky.

“Immediately stop the elections because it will paralyse the army and elect impotent leaders,” ordered Stalin, together with Molotov and Mikoyan. “We need all-powerful leaders. It will spread like a disease. This isn’t Vologda—this is the second city of the country!” He added: “We ask Voroshilov and Zhdanov to inform us about operations. They have not done so yet. That’s a pity.”

“All’s clear,” replied Leningrad. “Goodbye Comrade Stalin. That helps. Great gratitude!”[29]

Zhdanov took control of every facet of Leningrad life, declaring famously: “the enemy is at the gates.” Now plump, asthmatic and exhausted, always chain-smoking his Belomor cigarettes, clad in an olive-green belted tunic, pistol in holster, Zhdanov ran the front from the third floor of the right wing of the Smolny Institute from an office hung with pictures of Stalin, Marx and Engels. His long table was covered in red baize just as Stalin’s was in green. His desk was set with Urals stone, a present from some Leningrad factory. He drank tea, like Stalin, from a glass held in a silver holder, chewing sugar lumps and, like him, slept on his office divan. He wrote the newspaper editorials, personally allocated every volt of electricity, threatened “panic-mongers” with instant death, and shared command of the front.[30]

Voroshilov meanwhile displayed the admirable courage that he had shown at Tsaritsyn. When he appeared at the front at Ivanovskoye, the soldiers watched as the First Marshal pranced around under heavy shellfire:

“That’s him! Voroshilov! Klim!” gasped the soldiers. “Look how he stands as if he grew out of the earth!” A few miles away, the Marshal came upon some troops who had broken under a German attack. He stopped his staff car, pulled out his pistol and led the troops against the Germans to the shout of “Hurrah!” The old cavalryman could buckle his swash but was unable to stabilize the front.[31]

Stalin was unmoved by the heroic ineptitude of this beau sabreur . His warmth towards Zhdanov was cooling fast. When the Leningraders referred respectfully to their boss as “Andrei Alexandrovich,” Stalin answered icily: “Andrei Alexandrovich? Now which Andrei Alexandrovich do you mean?” The terrified agreement to his own orders did not help matters: “If you don’t agree,” he told Zhdanov, “say it straight.” But he also showed his sarcastic irritation, scribbling in his red pencil: “You didn’t answer the proposal. You didn’t answer? Why not? . . . Is it understood? When do you begin the attack? We demand an immediate answer in two words: “Yes” will mean a positive answer and swift implementation and “No” will mean a negative. Answer yes or no. Stalin.” Nonetheless he resisted any attempt to dismiss Zhdanov even though he was staggering under the burden of Leningrad’s plight.[32]

On the 21st, Stalin, realizing the desperate situation, ordered Molotov and Malenkov, armed with his full authority, to descend on Leningrad and designate a scapegoat, marking Zhdanov’s fall from grace. “To Voroshilov, Malenkov, Zhdanov . . . Leningrad Front thinks of only one thing: any way to retreat . . . Isn’t it time you got rid of these heroes of retreat?”[33] But they also had a bigger unspoken mission: should Leningrad be abandoned?

Their journey itself was an adventure: they flew to Cherepovets where they took a special train westward but suddenly the train could go no further and stopped at the little station of Mga, twenty-five miles east of the city. The magnates could see a German bombing raid up ahead but they did not realize this was the beginning of the German advance that would encircle Leningrad only two days later: Mga had been the last way in. Molotov and Malenkov were unsure what to do. They walked along the tracks towards Leningrad until they found a suburban trolleybus which they boarded like commuters. They were met further up the line by an armoured train.

They found Zhdanov just about holding things together, but comforting himself with drink and struggling against his asthma. Zhdanov was never the strongest of Stalin’s men: “a bit spineless,” thought Molotov. Alcohol became the one flaw in this perfect Stalinist. He was now close to collapse, admitting openly to Stalin that he had at one point lost his nerve, panicked during the bombardment and hidden, drinking, in the Smolny bunker. But the very confession helped keep Stalin’s favour. He worked like a man possessed but his health never recovered.

Malenkov enjoyed spreading the story of Zhdanov’s alcoholic cowardice while boasting that he never reported it to Stalin, which is hard to believe. Zhdanov got on well with Molotov but had despised Malenkov since the late thirties. It was he who had coined the nickname for that fat, eunuch-like bureaucrat: “Malanya.” The mutual hatred of these two noble scions of the provincial intelligentsia would seethe until it ended in a massacre. Malenkov probably proposed Zhdanov’s arrest but Beria, knowing Stalin’s fondness for “the Pianist,” said this was no time for courtmartialling Politburo members. Molotov agreed: “Zhdanov was a good comrade” but he was “very dejected.”

Apart from hunting scapegoats, Stalin’s plenipotentiaries hardly improved matters: “I fear,” Stalin wrote hysterically to Molotov and Malenkov, “Leningrad will be lost through imbecilic folly, and all Leningrad risks encirclement. What are Popov [front commander] and Voroshilov doing? They don’t even tell us of the measures they’re taking against the danger. They’re busy looking for new lines of retreat. As far as I can see, this is their only purpose . . . This is pure peasant fatalism ... What people! I can’t understand anything. Don’t you think someone’s opening the road to the Germans in this important direction? On purpose? What’s this man Popov? What’s Voroshilov doing? How’s he helping Leningrad? I write about this because I’m disturbed by the lack of activity of Leningrad’s commander . . . return to Moscow. Don’t be late. Stalin.”[34]

On their return, the emissaries advised Stalin to scrap Voroshilov’s North-Western Axis and sack the First Marshal who spent “all his time in the trenches.” Meanwhile Schlüsselberg, the fortress on the Neva, and Mga, fell. Voroshilov did not tell Moscow, and when Stalin discovered these prevarications, he was outraged.

“We’re so indignant about your conduct,” he told Voroshilov and Zhdanov. “You tell us only of losses but no word of measures to save towns . . . and the loss of Schlüsselberg? What’ll be the end of our losses? Have you decided to surrender Leningrad?”[35]

On 8 September, Stalin summoned Zhukov to his flat where he was dining with his usual companions—Molotov, Malenkov and the Moscow boss, Alexander Shcherbakov.[36]

“Where will you be off to now?” Stalin asked casually.

“Back to the front,” replied Zhukov.

“Which front?”

“The one you consider most necessary.”

“Then go to Leningrad at once . . . The situation is almost hopeless there . . .” and he handed Zhukov a note to Voroshilov that read: “Hand over command to Zhukov and fly to Moscow immediately.” Stalin scrawled to Zhdanov: “Today Voroshilov’s recalled!” [37]

Zhukov took command at Leningrad’s Smolny headquarters, combining professionalism with draconian ruthlessness, shouting at the staff: “Don’t you understand that if Antonov’s division doesn’t occupy the line . . . the Germans’ll break into the city? And then I’ll have you shot in front of the Smolny as a traitor.” Zhdanov, standing beside his new partner in command, frowned: he disapproved of swearing.

The crestfallen Voroshilov addressed his staff: “Goodbye comrades,” he said. “Stavka’s recalled me back.” He paused. “That’s what an old man like me deserves. This isn’t the Civil War. Now we have to fight differently . . . But don’t doubt for a minute that we’ll smash the Fascist scum!”[38]

Back in Moscow, Stalin admitted, “We might have to abandon ‘Peter.’ ” But Zhukov stiffened resistance to the German attack and then counter-attacked[39]. Zhdanov, working closely with Zhukov, now showed his steel, complaining that his “tribunals are being inactive against spreaders of false and provocative rumours . . . The Special Departments should arrange trials of provocateurs and rumour-mongers. The public should know how we regard these bastards.”[40] Whatever Stalin suggested was put into action.[41] On 13 November, Stalin told him that the Germans were constructing strongholds in the cellars of ordinary homes: “People’s Commissar of Defence Comrade Stalin gives the following instructions,” wrote Zhdanov. “When moving forward don’t try to capture one or other point but . . . burn to ashes these populated areas. So the German staffs and units will be buried . . . Toss away any sentiment and destroy all populated areas you meet on your way!”[42]

Zhukov and Zhdanov succeeded in making the storming of Leningrad very costly for the Germans. Hitler hesitated, cancelled the assault and ordered instead that Leningrad be starved into submission and then razed to the ground: the 900-day siege of the city had begun. Zhdanov had not lost the habit of writing Stalin personal letters with a fine ink pen: “The main cause of our failure was the weak performance of our infantry . . . We remembered what you told us during the Finnish War” but “our people have a bad habit of not finishing things and analysing them—and then running in different directions . . . Today we’re working strongly to change our style of attack . . . The worst is that the hunger is spreading.”[43]

There were 2.2 million people trapped in Leningrad. That December alone, 53,000 died and there would be many more to follow. People dropped dead in the streets, in their beds, whole families died one by one. There were too many bodies and everyone was too weak to bury them. Cannibalism flourished: it was not rare to find a body lying in the hall of an apartment block with thighs and breasts carved off. Between the start of the siege and July 1942, it is estimated that a million people died in Leningrad.

Zhdanov, assisted by his respected Second Secretary, Alexei Kuznetsov, won back Stalin’s respect and that of the Leningraders. They gradually became heroes as they shared the plight of their citizens, personally living on a full military ration of a pound of bread a day plus a bowl of meat or fish soup and some kasha. While hundreds of thousands were dying in the streets, the leaders worked day and night. Kuznetsov, a tall, gangly young man with a long handsome face, kept Leningrad together during Zhdanov’s moments of weakness, touring the trenches accompanied by his little son. Stalin himself praised Kuznetsov: “The Motherland won’t forget you!” he wrote.

In November, they ordered the building of the “Road of Life” across the ice of Lake Ladoga which became the city’s only channel for the supply of food. During the famine, Zhdanov assigned food supplies in such detail that, at one point, he was the only man allowed to replace a lost ration card. He sometimes displayed flashes of human decency: when dysentery broke out in a school, he suspected the staff of stealing the children’s food and sent in a general who reported that the children were taking the food in jars to their families—but he did not stop them.

“I’d have done the same thing,” Zhdanov admitted and ordered the evacuation of the children. After the war, Zhdanov was quoted as saying that “people died like flies” but “history would never have forgiven me had I given up Leningrad.”[44]

Still Stalin became furious when Zhdanov showed dangerous independence: “Do you imagine Leningrad under Zhdanov is not situated in the USSR but is somewhere on an island in the middle of the Pacific?”

“We admit our mistake,” replied Zhdanov, who then reported a problem with the operations on Lake Ladoga which he blamed on the “cowardice and betrayal” of the commanders of the 80th Division. “We send a demand to let us . . . shoot the chief of 80th Frolov and his commissar Ivanov . . . The Council needs to fight panic and cowardice even among officers.”

“Frolov and Ivanov should be shot and tell the media,” replied Stalin.

“Understood. All will be done.”

“Don’t waste time,” said Stalin. “Every moment’s dear. The enemy concentrates power against Moscow. All other fronts have the chance to counter-attack. Seize the moment!”[45]

Zhdanov ended his handwritten reply: “We’re waiting the start of the German defeat outside Moscow. Be healthy!” Then he added this: “PS: I’ve become as ferocious as a dog!”[46]-[47]

Hitler switched his Panzers to Operation Typhoon, the grand offensive against Moscow, designed to deliver the knockout blow to Soviet Russia. Guderian’s Panzers surprised and then outflanked the Briansk Front just as Stalin welcomed Lord Beaverbrook, the puckish Canadian press baron and member of the British War Cabinet, and Averell Harriman, the handsome lantern-jawed railway heir and American envoy, who had come to negotiate military aid to keep Russia in the war.

The two plutocrats observed Stalin play the gracious host while facing catastrophe. “Stalin was very restless, walking about and smoking continuously and appeared to both of us to be under an intense strain,” recalled Beaverbrook. As always, Stalin swung between rudeness and charm, sketching wolves on his notepad one moment, and then tossing aside an unopened letter from Churchill to exclaim: “The paucity of your offers clearly shows you want to see the Soviet Union defeated.” He was “sallow, tired, pock-marked . . . almost emaciated.”

By 1 October, the Moscow front was collapsing just as Stalin laid on a lavish banquet in the Great Kremlin Palace. At 7:30 p.m., the hundred guests chattered loudly in the eighteenth-century Catherine Hall, with its chairs and divans covered in the monograms of Catherine the Great, green silk wallpaper, and the old portraits in their golden frames. Just before eight, the Russian guests began to glance anxiously at the high, gilded door and on the hour, silence fell as Stalin, in a tunic that “seemed to hang off his wasted frame,” walked slowly down the line.

At dinner, he placed himself between the tycoons, with Molotov in his accustomed seat opposite him and, down the table, Voroshilov and Mikoyan, who henceforth negotiated the Western aid.[48] As the waiters unleashed upon the guests a barrage of hors d’oeuvres, caviar, soup, and fish, suckling pig, chicken and game, ice cream and cakes, washed down with champagne, vodka, wine and Armenian brandy, Stalin toasted victory before Molotov took up the baton. There were thirty-two toasts before the night was done. When Stalin enjoyed a toast, he would clap his hands before drinking to it but he happily talked on while others were speaking. He “drank continuously from a small glass (liqueur),” wrote Beaverbrook, who recorded everything with the avidity of one of hisDaily Express columnists. “He ate well and even heartily,” nibbling caviar off his knife, without bread and butter. Stalin and Beaverbrook, two mercurial rogues, jousted mischievously. Pointing at President Kalinin, Beaverbrook, who had heard about his taste for ballerinas, asked if the old man had a mistress. “He’s too old,” chuckled Stalin. “Do you?”

Stalin then led the way, with hands behind his back, to the cinema where he intently watched two movies, drinking champagne and laughing. Even though it was already 1:30 a.m., the omnipotent insomniac suggested a third movie but Beaverbrook was too tired. As the Westerners departed, the Germans broke through towards Moscow.[49]

On 3 October, Guderian took Orel, 125 miles behind the supposed Russian front line. Yeremenko’s Briansk and Budyonny’s Reserve Fronts were smashed: 665,000 Russians surrounded. On the 4th, Stalin lost contact with the shattered Western Front under Koniev, leaving a twelve-mile hole in Moscow’s defences. Early on the 5th, the Moscow air commander, Sbytov, reported the almost incredible news that a long column of German tanks was heading for Moscow along the Ukhnovo highway, 100 kilometres from the Kremlin. A second reconnaissance plane confirmed the same sight. “Very well,” Stalin told the Moscow Commissar Telegin. “Act decisively and energetically . . . mobilize every available resource to hold the enemy . . .”

Simultaneously, Stalin’s entourage tried to crush this news as they had tried to deny the German invasion. “Look,” Beria threatened Telegin, “do you take every bit of nonsense as the truth? You’ve evidently received information from panic-mongers and provocateurs!” Minutes later, poor Colonel Sbytov ran into Telegin’s office, “pale and trembling.” Beria had ordered him to report at once to the feared chief of the Special Department, Victor Abakumov, who threatened Sbytov and his pilots with arrest for “cowardice and panic-mongering.” When a third plane confirmed that all three fronts had collapsed, the hyenas were called off.[50]

Stalin telephoned Zhukov in Leningrad: “I’ve only got one request. Can you get on a plane and come to Moscow?”

“I request to fly at dawn.”

“We await you in Moscow.”

“I’ll be there.”

“All the best,” said Stalin. Meanwhile he sent Voroshilov to find the fronts and learn what he could.[51]

At dusk on 7 October, Vlasik sped Zhukov straight to the Kremlin flat where Stalin, suffering from flu, was chatting to Beria. Probably “unaware of my arrival,” in Zhukov’s words, Stalin was ordering Beria to “use his ‘Organ’ to sound out the possibilities of making a separate peace with Germany, given the critical situation . . .” Stalin was probing German resolve but there was no moment when Hitler was less likely to make peace than when Moscow seemed to be falling.[52] Beria is said to have arranged a second probe, either using a Bulgarian “banker” or the Ambassador again but with no results.

Without a wisp of small talk, Stalin ordered Zhukov to fly to Koniev’s and Budyonny’s fronts. Stalin needed a scapegoat, wondering if Koniev was a “traitor.”[53] Heading into the whirlwind, Zhukov found the dazed commanders of the Western Front, the tough, shaven-headed Koniev and the Commissar, Bulganin, in a desolate room barely lit by candles. Bulganin had just spoken to Stalin but could not tell him anything “because we ourselves don’t know.” At 2:30 a.m. on the 8th, Zhukov called Stalin, who was still ill: “The main danger now is that the roads into Moscow are virtually undefended.” And the reserves? Stalin asked.

“Encircled.”

“What do you intend to do?”

“I will go to Budyonny . . .”

“And do you know where his headquarters are?” Stalin inquired.

“No . . . I’ll look for him . . .”

Stalin despatched Molotov and Malenkov into this cauldron to take control—and assign blame. Such was the havoc that Zhukov could not find Budyonny. At Maloyaroslavets, he found a small town completely deserted except for a chauffeur asleep in a jeep who turned out to be Budyonny’s driver. The Marshal was inside the district Soviet, trying to find his own armies on his map. The two cavalrymen embraced warmly. Budyonny had saved Zhukov from arrest during the Terror, but now he was confused and exhausted. The next morning, Stalin ordered Zhukov to return to the Western Front headquarters north of Mozhaisk and take command.

There he found Molotov, Malenkov, Voroshilov and Bulganin indulging in an ugly hunt for the scapegoat: a stand-up row broke out between Koniev and Voroshilov about who had ordered what withdrawal. Koniev’s life hung in the balance when Voroshilov shrieked that he was “a traitor.” He was supported by Nikolai Bulganin, that blond and goatee-bearded ex-Chekist who had been Mayor of Moscow and boss of the State Bank. This apparently affable womanizer, who cultivated an aristocratic elegance but was nicknamed “the Plumber” by Beria because of his work on the Moscow sewers, was deftly ambitious and suavely ruthless: he wanted Koniev shot, perhaps to save his own skin.

Stalin phoned to order Koniev’s arrest but Zhukov persuaded the Supremo that he needed Koniev as his deputy: “If Moscow falls,” Stalin threatened, “both your heads’ll roll . . . Organize the Western Front quickly and act!” Two days later, Molotov telephoned and threatened to shoot Zhukov if he did not stop the retreat. If Molotov could do any better, he was welcome to try, retorted Zhukov. Molotov hung up.

Zhukov stiffened the resistance though he possessed only 90,000 men to defend Moscow. He fought for time, with the fray reaching unprecedented frenzies of savagery. By the 18th, Kalinin had fallen to the north and Kaluga to the south and there were Panzers on the battlefield of Borodino. Snow fell, then thawed, stirring up a boggy quagmire which temporarily halted the Germans. Both sides fought heroically, tank helm to tank helm, like two giants wrestling in a sea of mud.[54]

 

 

35. “Can You Hold Moscow?”

Stalin controlled every aspect of the battle, keeping a list of men and tanks in his little leather notebook. “Are they hiding guns from me again?” he asked Voronov. As early as 3 August, he had secretly ordered the creation of a special tank reserve for Moscow: these tanks were “to be given to nobody,” he specified. But visitors were amazed “by Zhukov’s tone”: he spoke to Stalin “in sharp commanding tones as if he was the superior officer and Stalin accepted this.”[55]

Again and again, he raised the intensity of cruelty. It was perhaps now that he marked the passage in d’Abernon that claimed that the Germans were more afraid of their officers than of the enemy. First he unleashed his “scorched earth” policy “to destroy and burn to ashes all populated areas in the German rear to a depth of 40–60 kms from the front line.” Beria, Mekhlis and the rising head of the Special Departments, Abakumov, reported every week on the arrests and shootings of Soviet troops: for example, Beria wrote to Mekhlis during the Battle of Moscow to report that 638,112 men had been detained in the rear since the start of the war, with 82,865 arrested, while Abakumov reported to Stalin that in one week, his Special Departments arrested 1,189 and shot 505 deserters. Now on the front near Moscow, Bulganin’s “interceptor battalions,” set up to terrorise cowards, arrested 23,064 “deserters” in just three days.[56] There is a myth that the only time Stalin ceased the war against his own people was during 1941 and 1942; but during that period, 994,000 servicemen were condemned, and 157,000 shot, more than fifteen divisions.[57]

Beria was also liquidating old prisoners: on 13 October, Poskrebyshev’s wife, the once effervescent Bronka, was shot, an event, like the murder of the Svanidzes, that could only have happened on Stalin’s order. As they moved back, the NKVD tossed grenades into their own prisons or transferred prisoners to the interior. On 3 October, Beria liquidated 157 “celebrity” prisoners such as Kameneva, Trotsky’s sister and Kamenev’s widow, in Medvedev Forest near Orel. On the 28th, Beria ordered the shooting of another twenty-five, including the ex–air-force commander, Rychagov, who had answered back to Stalin about the “flying coffins.” The 4,905 unfortunates on death row were despatched within eight days.[58]

On the streets of Moscow, the chains of Stalinist control were snapped by the fear of the German armies. Law broke down. By 14 October, food shops were being looted; empty apartments burgled. Refugees clogged the streets, harassed by gangs of desperadoes. The smoke of bonfires hung over the city as officials burned papers. At Kursk Station, “a crush of women, children and old people filled the square. The cold was piercing. Children were weeping” but the masses waited “patiently and submissively.” A hundred soldiers joined arms to hold back the mob. Some commissariats and the families of most officials were evacuated to Kuibyshev. AA guns illuminated the sky while the half-deserted Kremlin was blacked out and weirdly camouflaged: a huge canvas painted with the façades of a row of houses, a veritable Potemkin village, had been hoisted up over the walls facing the river.

Beria, Malenkov and Kaganovich, according to Stalin’s bodyguards, “lost their self-control,” encouraging the popular flight. “We shall be shot down like partridges,” Beria told one meeting, advocating the swift abandonment of Moscow. These magnates advised Stalin to evacuate to Kuibyshev. Beria summoned Sudoplatov, his expert on “Special Tasks,” to his Lubianka office where he was sitting with Malenkov, and ordered him to dynamite all the main buildings, from the Kaganovich Metro to the football stadium. On the night of the 15th, Beria made things worse, calling a meeting of the local Party leaders in his office in the bomb-proof basement at 2 Dzerzhinsky Street, and announcing: “The connection with the front is broken.” He ordered them to “evacuate everyone who’s unable to defend Moscow. Distribute food to the inhabitants.” There were riots at factories because the workers could not get in since the buildings were mined. Molotov told ambassadors that they would be immediately evacuated.[59]

Stalin himself presented an air of solitary inscrutability, revealing his plans to no one, while the magnates prepared for evacuation. As the air raids on Moscow intensified, Stalin climbed up onto the sunroof at Kuntsevo and watched the dogfights. Once some shrapnel fell near him as he watched from his garden and Vlasik handed him the warm fragments. Vasily Stalin arrived one night to visit his father. When a German plane passed over the house, the guards did not open fire since they did not want to draw attention to Stalin’s residence.

“Cowards!” shouted Vasily, firing the guns himself.

Stalin came out: “Did he hit anything?” he asked.

“No, he didn’t.”

“Winner of the Voroshilov Marksman Prize,” he said drily. But the stress was telling on him: no one could believe how much he had aged. Stalin was now a “short man with a tired haggard face . . . his eyes had lost their old steadiness, his voice lacked assurance.” Khrushchev was appalled to see this “bag of bones.” When Andreyev and his daughter Natasha walked around the freezing Kremlin, they saw Stalin strolling up and down beside the battlements, quite alone and, as usual, under-dressed, with no gloves on and his face blue with the chill. In his spare moments, he kept reading history: it was now that he scribbled on a new biography of Ivan the Terrible: “teacher teacher” and then: “We shall overcome!” His moods swung between Spartan grit and hysterical rantings. Koniev was amazed to receive a call in which Stalin cried:

“Comrade Stalin’s not a traitor. Comrade Stalin’s an honourable man; his only mistake was that he trusted too much in cavalrymen.” He was harassed by constant “sightings” of Nazi parachutists landing in the middle of Moscow: “Parachutist? How many? A company?” Stalin was barking into the phone when one general arrived to report. “And who saw them? Did you see them? And where did they land? You’re insane . . . I tell you I don’t believe it. The next thing you’ll be telling me is that they have already landed on your office!” He slammed down the phone. “For several hours now they’ve been tormenting me with wails about German parachutists. They won’t let me work. Blabbermouths!”[60]

Stalin’s staff prepared for his departure, without actually checking with him. The dachas were dynamited. A special train was prepared, standing in a hidden siding, packed with belongings from his houses such as his beloved library. Four American Douglas DC-3 aeroplanes stood ready.

At the end of 15 October, Stalin ordered his guards to drive him out to Kuntsevo, which had been closed down and mined. The commandant told him he could not go in but Stalin ordered: “Clear the mines in two or three hours, stoke the stove in the little house and I’ll work there.”

The next morning, he headed into the Kremlin earlier than usual. On the way, this worshipper of order was amazed to see mobs looting the shops along his route. His guards claimed that he ordered the car to stop on Smolensk Square, where he was surrounded by a crowd who asked rather pertinent questions such as: “When will the Soviet Army stop the enemy?”

“That day’s near,” he replied before driving on to the Kremlin.[61]

At 8 a.m., Mikoyan, who had been working as usual until six in the morning, was woken up and summoned. At nine, the magnates gathered in Stalin’s flat to debate the great decision of the war. Stalin proposed to evacuate the whole government to Kuibyshev, to order the army to defend the capital and keep the Germans fighting until he could throw in his reserves. Molotov and Mikoyan were ordered to manage the evacuation, with Kaganovich providing the trains. Stalin proposed that all the Politburo leave that day and, he added sensationally, “I will leave tomorrow morning.”

“Why do we have to leave today if you’re leaving tomorrow?” Mikoyan indignantly asked Stalin. “We can also go tomorrow. Shcherbakov and Beria shouldn’t leave until they’ve organized the underground resistance. I’m staying and I’ll go tomorrow with you.” Stalin agreed. Molotov and Mikoyan began to brief the commissars: the Foreign Commissariat was called at 11 a.m. and ordered to report to Kazan Station at once. In the lift from Stalin’s office, Kaganovich said to Mikoyan: “Listen, when you leave, please tell me so I don’t get left behind.” As the leaders rushed in and out of Stalin’s office, their families were given just an hour’s notice to evacuate the city.[62]

At 7 p.m. the next day, Ashken Mikoyan and the three younger Mikoyanchiks, along with President Kalinin and other top families, boarded the CC train. In the heavily guarded station, women in fur coats stood chatting with their well-dressed children amid the steam of the trains while soldiers carefully loaded crates marked “handle with care— crystal.” Poskrebyshev sobbed as he put three-year-old Natasha on the train with her nanny, unaware that her mother, Bronka, had been executed three days earlier. He promised to visit his daughter as soon as possible— and hurried back to Stalin. As he waited, Valentin Berezhkov, Molotov’s interpreter, noticed that the puddles of melted snow were freezing. The German Panzers could advance again.

Zhukov resolved to hold the line. But he could sense the panic at the top. He was convinced he could save Moscow, he told a visiting editor, “but are THEY, there?” he asked, meaning Stalin in the Kremlin.[63]

That evening, the leaders arrived in an eerily deserted Kremlin. As one commissar entered his apartment, Stalin appeared from his bedroom, smoking and pacing, in his old tunic and baggy, booted trousers. They noticed that the bookcases were empty, books all loaded onto the train. No one sat down. Then Stalin stopped pacing. “What’s the situation like in Moscow?” The magnates remained silent but a junior commissar spoke up: the Metro was not running, the bakeries were closed. The factories thought the government had fled. Half of them had not been paid. Workers believed the boss of the State Bank had run off with the money.

“Well, it’s not so bad. I thought it would be worse.” Stalin ordered the money be flown back from Gorky. Shcherbakov and Pronin, Moscow’s Party chief and Mayor, must restore order and broadcast the fact that Moscow would be held to the last drop of blood: Stalin remained in the Kremlin. The leaders headed out into the town: Mikoyan appeared before five thousand restless, unpaid workers at the Stalin Automobile Works. But the panic continued: stragglers and thieves patrolled the streets. Even the British Embassy across the Moskva from the Kremlin was looted, its guards having fled. Demolition units mined Moscow’s sixteen bridges.[64]

Stalin hesitated for two long days. No one knows his exact movements but he no longer appeared in his office. At the height of the legendary struggle for Moscow, the Supremo actually dossed down in his greatcoat on a mattress in the subterranean halls of the Metro, not unlike an omnipotent tramp. Stalin’s working arrangements reveal the dire lack of preparation for war. There were frequent air raids but there were no bunkers at either the Kremlin or Kuntsevo. While Kaganovich supervised the urgent construction of bunkers precisely modelled on Stalin’s study, the Supremo moved to work in the only proper command post available, the air defence HQ in the town house at 33 Kirov Street (Myasnitskaya Street), where he had a bedroom. During air raids, he descended by elevator to work in the Kirov Metro Station (now Chistye Prudy) until, on 28 October, a bomb fell in the courtyard of the house. Then Stalin started to work permanently in the station, where he also slept.

In the Metro, he bunked in a specially constructed compartment that was sealed off from the running trains by plywood panels. Many of his staff slept on ordinary subway trains parked in the station, while the General Staff worked in the Belorusski Metro Station. Offices, desks and sleeping compartments divided up this subterranean headquarters deep under Kirov Street. Passing trains caused pages to fly so they were pinned to desks. After working all day in his subterranean offices, Stalin would finally stagger over to his sleeping compartment in the early hours. Vlasik and his bodyguards stood on guard around this flimsy refuge and probably slept across the doors like squires guarding a medieval king. A staff colonel, Sergei Shtemenko, an efficient, charismatic Cossack of thirty-four, with a lush black moustache, worked closely with Stalin and sometimes they simply “bunked together,” sleeping in their greatcoats on mattresses in the office. It is hard to imagine any of the other warlords living in such a way but Stalin was accustomed to dossing down like the young revolutionary he once was.[65]

On 17 October Shcherbakov made his radio broadcast to restore morale in Moscow. It had little effect as the streets were clogged with gangs of deserters and refugees piling their belongings onto carts. Stalin was still debating whether to leave Moscow but the moment finally arrived, probably late on the evening of the 18th, when he had to make this decision. Air Force General Golovanov remembered seeing Stalin depressed and undecided. “What shall we do?” he kept repeating. “What shall we do?”

At the most world-shattering moment of his career, Stalin discussed the decision with generals and commissars, bodyguards and servants, and of course he read his history. He was reading the biography, published in 1941, of Kutuzov—who had abandoned Moscow. “Until the last minute,” he underlined heavily, “no one knew what Kutuzov intended to do.” Back in Stalin’s apartment, Valechka in her white apron was cheerfully serving him and the magnates their dinner. When some of them seemed to lean towards evacuation, Stalin’s eyes fell on his “ever-smiling” mistress.

“Valentina Vasilevna,” Stalin asked her suddenly. “Are you preparing to leave Moscow?”

“Comrade Stalin,” she replied in peasant idiom, “Moscow is our Mother, our home. It should be defended.”

“That’s how Muscovites talk!” Stalin told the Politburo.

Svetlana also seemed to discourage the abandonment of Moscow when she wrote from Kuibyshev: “Dear Papa, my precious joy, hello . . . Papa, why do the Germans keep creeping nearer all the time? When are they going to get it in the neck as they deserve? After all, we can’t go on surrendering all our industrial towns to them.”

Stalin called Zhukov and asked him: “Are we certain we can hold Moscow? I ask you this with pain in my heart. Speak the truth, like a Bolshevik.”[66] Zhukov replied that it could be held. “It’s encouraging you’re so certain.”[67]

Stalin ordered the guards to take him out to his “faraway” dacha at Semyonovskoe, which was further from the fighting than Kuntsevo. Beria replied in Georgian that this too was dynamited. But Stalin angrily insisted on going. Once he was there, he found the commandant packing up the last belongings.

“What sort of removals are going on here?” he asked gruffly.

“We’re preparing, Comrade Stalin, for the evacuation to Kuibyshev.” Stalin may also have ordered his driver to take him to the special train that was parked under close guard at the Abelmanovsky junction, normally used for storing wooden sleepers. One source in Stalin’s office recounted how he walked alongside the train. Mikoyan and Molotov do not mention it, and even a hint of Stalin near a train would have caused panic, but it was the sort of melodramatic scene that Stalin would have relished. If it happened, the image of this tiny, thin figure “with his tired haggard face” in its tattered army greatcoat and boots, strolling along the almost deserted but heavily guarded siding through the steam of the ever-ready locomotive is as emotionally potent as it was to be historically decisive. For Stalin ordered the commandants of his dacha to stop loading: “No evacuation. We’ll stay here until victory,” he ordered, “calmly but firmly.”

When he got back to the Kremlin, he gathered his guards and told them: “I’m not leaving Moscow. You’ll stay here with me.” He ordered Kaganovich to cancel the special train.[68] The Stalinist system allowed the magnates, who swung between defeatism and defiance, to pursue their own policies until Stalin himself spoke. Then his word was law. On the “damp dank” evening of the 18 October, the team in charge of defending the city were gathered at Beria’s office where the Georgian “tried to convince us that Moscow must be abandoned. He considered,” wrote one of those present, “that we have to withdraw behind the Volga. With what are we going to defend Moscow? We have nothing . . . They’ll smother us all here.” Malenkov agreed with him. Molotov, to his credit, “muttered objections.” The others “remained silent.” Beria was said to be the main advocate of withdrawal though he became the scapegoat for everything unsavoury that happened under Stalin. The alcoholic Moscow boss Shcherbakov wanted to withdraw too and it seems that he lost his composure: afterwards, “in a state of terror,” he asked Beria what would happen if Stalin found out.

On the 19th at 3:40 in the afternoon, Stalin summoned his magnates and generals to the Little Corner. Stalin “stepped up to the table and said: ‘The situation is known to all of you. Should we defend Moscow?’ ” No one answered. The silence was “gloomy.” Stalin waited, then said: “If you don’t want to speak, I shall ask each of you to give his opinion.”

He started with Molotov, who stuck to his opinion: “We must defend Moscow.” Everyone, including Beria and Malenkov, gave the same answer. Beria had converted to Stalin’s view, as his son admitted: “My father would never have acted as he did if he had not known . . . [and] anticipated [Stalin’s] reactions.”

“If you go, Moscow will be lost,” Beria declared. Shcherbakov was one of those who sounded doubtful.

“Your attitude can be explained in two ways,” said Stalin. “Either you’re good-for-nothings and traitors or idiots. I prefer to regard you as idiots.” Then he expressed his opinion and asked Poskrebyshev to bring in the generals. When Telegin and the commander of Moscow, NKVD General Artemev, arrived, Stalin was pacing tensely up and down the narrow carpet, smoking his pipe. “The faces of those present,” recalled Commissar Telegin, “revealed that a stormy discussion had just taken place and that feeling was still running high. Turning to us without a greeting,” Stalin asked: “What’s the situation in Moscow?”

“Alarming,” reported Artemev.

“What do you suggest?” snapped Stalin.

“A state of siege” should be declared in Moscow, answered Artemev.

“Correct!” and Stalin ordered his “best clerk,” Malenkov, to draft it. When Malenkov read out his verbose decree, Stalin became so irritated that he rushed up and “literally snatched the sheets of paper from him.” Then he briskly dictated his decree to Shcherbakov, ordering “the shooting on the spot” of suspected offenders.

Stalin brought up the divisions to defend Moscow, naming many of them from memory, then calling their commanders directly. The NKVD was unleashed onto the streets, executing deserters and even concierges who had tried to leave. The decision to stay and fight had been made. The presence of Stalin in Moscow, said the Comintern leader Dmitrov, was “worth a good-sized army.” Stalin was refreshed by the end of the uncertainty: when a commissar phoned in from the front to discuss evacuation eastwards, Stalin interrupted him: “Find out, do your comrades have spades?”

“What, Comrade Stalin?”

“Do they have spades?” The Commissar asked in the background if they had spades.

“What kind of spades, Comrade Stalin—ordinary ones or digging tools?”

“It doesn’t matter.”

“Yes, we’ve got spades! What shall we do with them?”

“Tell your comrades,” replied Stalin calmly, “to take their spades and dig their own graves. We won’t leave Moscow. They won’t leave either . . .”

Even now Stalin’s courtiers bickered among themselves: Stalin ordered Molotov to travel down to Kuibyshev to check on Voznesensky, who was running the government there.

“Let Mikoyan come with me,” said Molotov.

“I’m not your tail,” Mikoyan shouted, “am I?”

“Why don’t you go too?” suggested Stalin. Five days later Stalin recalled them.[69]

The Panzers were still advancing on the frozen snow and threatening to encircle Moscow. Zhukov had no reserves left. Having lost three million of his soldiers since June, Stalin’s notebook was virtually empty. Like a despotic shopkeeper, assisted by his fat accountant son, Stalin jealously guarded his secret reserves while Malenkov sat beside him, keeping tally. When Stalin asked one general what would save the capital, he replied, “Reserves.”

“Any idiot,” snapped Stalin, “could defend the city with reserves.” Stalin generously gave him fifteen tanks, at which Malenkov observed that this was all they had left. Amazingly, in just a few months, the vast military resources of this endless empire had been reduced to fifteen tanks in a notebook. In Berlin, the Reich Press Office declared that “Russia was finished,” but Stalin’s iron husbandry of his reserves, coupled with Zhukov’s brilliant and brutal fighting, was telling on the Germans whose machines were beginning to suffer from the mud and ice while their men were freezing and exhausted. They again halted to prepare for a final push, convinced that Stalin’s resources were exhausted. But there was a page in the notebook that they had forgotten.

Stalin’s Far Eastern Army, 700,000 strong, guarded against Japan, but in late September, Richard Sorge, the spy Stalin called a brothel-keeper, reported that Japan would not attack Russia. On 12 October, Stalin discussed this with his Far Eastern satraps who then confirmed Tokyo’s lack of hostile intentions from local intelligence. Kaganovich arranged non-stop trains that, within days and hours, rushed 400,000 fresh troops, 1,000 tanks and 1,000 planes across the Eurasian wastes, in one of the most decisive logistical miracles of the war. The last train left on the 17th and these secret legions began to mass behind Moscow.[70]

Stalin moved into his new Kremlin bunker, an exact replica of the Little Corner, even down to the wood panelling, though its long corridors resembled nothing so much as a “railway sleeping car. To the right was a row of doors” with “a heavy security guard.” The officers waited in “one of the sleeping compartments to the left” until Poskrebyshev appeared and led them into a “spacious brightly lit room with a big desk in the corner” where they came up on the pacing Stalin, usually accompanied by his Chief of Staff, the ailing gentleman officer, Marshal Shaposhnikov.

Just younger than Stalin, with his thinning hair centre-parted and a tired, yellow face with Tartar cheekbones, Shaposhnikov seemed “propelled by some special act of Voodooism as he looked quite dead (at least 3 months gone) and must, even when alive, have been very very old,” according to a British diplomat. Shaposhnikov called everyone golubchik, dear fellow, and Stalin was charmed by the gentility of this Tsarist colonel. When some generals had not reported one day, Stalin angrily asked Shaposhnikov if he had punished them. Oh yes, retorted Shaposhnikov: he had given them a “severe reprimand.”

This did not impress Stalin: “For a soldier that’s no punishment!” But Shaposhnikov patiently explained “the old military tradition that if the Chief of Staff reprimands [an officer], the guilty party must offer his resignation.” Stalin could only chuckle at this old-worldliness. But Shaposhnikov was a survivor: he had attacked Tukhachevsky in the twenties, served as his judge in 1937 and even denounced a cook saboteur for over-salting the meat. He never signed anything without checking first. In Stalin’s presence, he was “without an opinion.” While he never renounced his views, he never objected to being overruled. He was the only general Stalin called by his name and patronymic, the only one allowed to smoke[71] in his office.[72]

The war had truly reached the Kremlin, which was now peppered by bomb craters. Mikoyan was knocked down by a bomb. On 28 October, Malenkov was working at Old Square when Stalin called him to the Kremlin: he had no sooner left than a German bomb destroyed the building. “I saved your life,” Stalin told him.

One day, Stalin insisted that he wanted to witness an artillery barrage against German positions. Beria, in attendance, was very anxious that he would be blamed if something went wrong. Stalin’s car and bodyguards set off down the Volokolamsk highway towards the front but as they were approaching the fighting, Vlasik refused to let them proceed any further. Stalin had to watch the explosions from a distance. Then a tank splashed his limousine, which sent his bodyguards into palpitations. Beria forced Stalin to change cars and go home. Yet Stalin had regained some spirit: he even let Svetlana visit him for a couple of days but then gruffly ignored her in the bunker, cursing the privileges of the “damned caste” of the élite in Kuibyshev. More importantly, the great actor-manager now devised a scene of reckless but inspired showmanship.[73]

On 30 October, Stalin suddenly asked General Artemev: “How are we going to have the military parade?”

There could be no parade, answered Artemev. The Germans were less than fifty miles away. Molotov and Beria thought he was joking. But Stalin calmly ignored them: “A parade will be held on 7th November . . . I’ll see to it personally. If there’s an air raid during the parade and there are dead and wounded, they must be quickly removed and the parade allowed to go on. A newsreel should be made and distributed throughout the country. I’ll make a speech . . . What do you think?”

“But what about the risk?” mused Molotov. “Though I admit the political response . . . would be enormous.”

“So it’s decided!”

Artemev asked when the parade should begin. “See to it that no one knows, not even I,” said Stalin, “until the last hour.” A week later, German spies might have glimpsed the odd sight of Muscovites, supervised by Chekists, collecting chairs from the Bolshoi Theatre and carrying them down the stairs to the Mayakovsky Metro. That evening, the magnates caught the elevator down into Mayakovsky Station where they found a train parked on one side, with its doors open. There were tables inside with sandwiches and soft drinks. After these refreshments, they took their seats on those theatrical chairs. Then, in a slightly vaudevillian touch, Stalin, accompanied by Molotov, Mikoyan, Beria, Kaganovich and Malenkov, assembled at the next station, and caught the subway to Mayakovsky. They took their places on the Politburo rostrum to wild applause. Levitan the newsreader broadcast the programme from a radio-station carriage. The NKVD Ensemble played the songs of Dunaevsky and Alexandrov. Kozlovsky sang. Stalin spoke for half an hour in a tone of inspiring calm, warning: “If they want a war of extermination, they shall have one.” Afterwards, General Artemev approached Stalin: the parade was set for 8 a.m. Even the officers involved were not to know the full details until 2 a.m.

Just before eight o’clock, in a snowstorm and with biting winds that preserved them from German air attack, Stalin led the Politburo up the steps to the Mausoleum, just like old times—except it was earlier and everyone was extremely nervous. Beria and Malenkov ordered their wizard of Special Tasks, Sudoplatov, to report to them on the Mausoleum if the Germans attacked. The public favourite at parades, Budyonny, sabre drawn on a white stallion, rode out from the Spassky Gate, saluted and then mounted to review the parade. The tanks, including the T34s, the outstanding machine of the war, and troops paraded in columns, U-turned at St. Basil’s, then headed up Gorky Street to the front.

There was a tense moment when a heavy Kliment Voroshilov tank stopped abruptly and turned in the wrong direction, followed by another. Since they were all fully armed, and since Stalin was watching this blunder carefully, Artemev ordered his subordinates to investigate at once. Having caught up with the tanks, their crews were interrogated and innocently revealed that the first tank had simply received a message that another tank was in trouble; following their training the other tanks had gone to its aid. When Artemev reported this on the Mausoleum, the potentates were so relieved that they laughed: no one was punished. Stalin spoke shortly about the patriotic struggle of the Russia of Suvorov, Kutuzov and Alexander Nevsky. The Motherland was in peril but defiant. Appropriately, that very night, the Russian freeze really set in.[74]

On 13 November, Stalin called Zhukov to plan the counter-attacks to put the German attacks off balance. Zhukov and Commissar Bulganin felt that their resources were so low they could not attack but Stalin insisted. “What forces are we to use?” asked Zhukov.

“Consider it settled!” Stalin rang off but immediately telephoned Bulganin: “You and Zhukov’re giving yourselves airs. But we’ll put a stop to that.”

Afterwards Bulganin ran into Zhukov’s office: “Well, I got it really hard this time!” he said.

The counter-attacks were subsumed in the grinding German offensive of 15 November, the last push to take Moscow. The Germans broke through. Again Stalin asked Zhukov: could he hold Moscow?

“We’ll hold Moscow without doubt. But we’ve got to have at least two more armies and no fewer than two hundred tanks.” Stalin delivered the armies “but for the time being, we don’t have any tanks.” Zhukov fought the Germans to a standstill on 5 December, having lost 155,000 men in twenty days. Effectively, Hitler’s Blitzkrieg had failed. On 6 December, Stalin delivered three new armies to Zhukov and ordered a grand counter-offensive on the four nearest fronts.[75] The next day, Japan attacked America at Pearl Harbor.[76]

Zhukov drove the Germans back two hundred miles. Yet even in such a desperate battle, the generals never forgot Stalin’s imperial vanity: just as Mekhlis had tried to win victory on Stalin’s birthday in Finland, so now Zhukov and Bulganin ordered Golubev, commander of the Tenth Army: “Tomorrow will be the birthday of Stalin. Try to mark this day by the capture of Balabanovo. To include this message in our report to Stalin, inform us of its fulfillment not later than 7 p.m. 21 December.” The Battle of Moscow was Stalin’s first victory, but a limited one. However, he was immediately dangerously over-optimistic, telling the visiting British Foreign Secretary, Anthony Eden: “The Russians have already been in Berlin twice and will be a third time.”[77] It would take millions more dead and almost four years to reach Berlin. Zhukov was so exhausted that, even when Stalin telephoned, his adjutants had to tell him: “Zhukov is asleep and we can’t wake him.”

“Don’t wake him up until he wakes himself,” answered the Supremo benevolently. “Let him sleep.”[78]

On 5 January, the over-confident Supremo gathered Zhukov and the generals to hear the plan for a massive offensive from Leningrad to the Black Sea to capitalize on the German defeat before Moscow.

“Who wishes to speak?” asked Stalin. Zhukov criticised the offensive, saying the army needed more men and tanks. Voznesensky was against it too, saying he could not supply the necessary tanks. Stalin insisted on the offensive, at which Malenkov and Beria attacked Voznesensky for “always finding insuperable and unforeseen” objections. “On that,” said Stalin, “we’ll conclude the meeting.” In Stalin’s anteroom, old Shaposhnikov tried to console Zhukov: “You argued in vain. These issues had been decided beforehand by the Supremo . . .”

“Then why was our opinion solicited?”

“I don’t know, dear fellow.”[79]

The intelligent and indefatigable Beria, now forty-three, proved a voracious empire-builder in running the war, but he delivered the tanks and guns Stalin needed. Beria was keen to win points off Voznesensky, whom he loathed, and he soon outstripped Molotov and the older generation. No industry was too complex or too vast for Beria to master: he was in many ways not only the Himmler of Stalin’s entourage but also the Speer, another architect. He used the most colourful threats he could muster, asking his subordinates: “Do you care about seeing the sun rise and fall every day? Be careful!”

In early January 1942, at his flat, Stalin consulted this top industrial troika, Beria, Malenkov and Mikoyan, about the armaments shortage.

“What’s the problem?” exclaimed Stalin. Beria produced a diagram that showed how Voznesensky was failing to produce enough guns. “And what should be done?”

“I don’t know, Comrade Stalin,” replied Beria artfully. Stalin immediately gave him control of this vital industry.

“Comrade Stalin, I don’t know whether I can manage it . . . I’m inexperienced in this sort of thing . . .”

“It’s not experience that’s needed here but a strong organizer . . . Use prisoners for labour.”

The railways remained impossible to run, even by the energetic and bellowing Kaganovich. When one commissar, Baibakov, reported to Kaganovich, “the Locomotive” jumped up and shook him by the lapels. Beria reported Kaganovich’s table-thumping tempers to Stalin: “The railways deteriorate because [Kaganovich] won’t listen to advice . . . he just answers with hysterics.” Kaganovich was criticised for mismanaging the evacuations of industry and, twice, sacked “for being unable to cope with work under wartime conditions” but he was soon back.

Molotov fared no better at running tank production. “How’s [Molotov] managing?” Stalin asked Beria, again accompanied by Malenkov and Mikoyan.

“He has no communication with the factories, doesn’t manage them properly . . . and holds endless meetings . . .” replied Beria, who added tanks to his empire. Molotov lost the tanks but gained the world.[80]

 

 

36. Molotov in London, Mekhlis in the Crimea, Khrushchev in Collapse

On 8 May, the Foreign Commissar took off in a four-engine bomber for London. Stalin instructed him to win a promise of a Second Front—and to clinch recognition of the Soviet borders of 1941, including the Baltics.

He personally charged his favourite air-force general, Golovanov, to plan the route. “Stalin was a great conspirator,” recalled Golovanov. “The journey was planned in total secrecy. I had to hide a map of the route in my desk even when my assistant entered my office. Stalin . . . told me ‘Only the three of us know about this—you, Molotov and me.’ ”

“Mr. Brown,” Molotov’s code name, landed in Scotland and was greeted by Eden with whom he took a train from Glasgow to London. When he learned the Second Front was out of the question, Molotov refused to discuss Eden’s proposal of a treaty that did not mention the Soviet borders. Molotov immediately reported this to Stalin: “We consider the treaty unacceptable . . . an empty declaration,” but the Supremo changed his mind:

“1. We don’t consider it an empty declaration but regard it as important . . . Not bad perhaps. It gives us a free hand. The question of borders will be decided by force. 2. It is desirable to sign the treaty as soon as possible and fly to America.”

Meanwhile Molotov also got a taste of English country-house life: he had requested to be lodged outside London, perhaps for security reasons, so Churchill handed over Chequers, his official country mansion. “Mr. Brown” was unimpressed by its Tudor elegance. “Not a fancy old building,” he mused. “Some sort of small garden. Apparently some nobleman[81] had given it to the government.” Stalin and Molotov were infinitely snobbish about the superiority of Russian grandeur: after all, they lived and worked in Catherine the Great’s palaces. However, Molotov had an eye for bathrooms: he remembered the lavatories long after he had forgotten the negotiations. “There was a bathroom,” he complained, “but no shower.” As soon as he arrived, his guards asked “for the keys to all the bedrooms” and he locked himself in every night. “When the staff at Chequers succeeded in getting in to make the beds,” wrote Churchill, “they were disturbed to find pistols under the pillows. At night, a revolver was laid out beside his dressing gown and his despatch cases.” When Molotov was out, his “maids” guarded his bedroom like Cerberus.

After signing the treaty on 26 May, Molotov flew to Washington to meet President Roosevelt who presented him with a signed photograph, framed in green silk, that read: “To my friend Vyacheslav Molotov from Franklin Roosevelt 30 May 1942.” Finding FDR “sociable and pleasant,” he was more impressed by the White House than Chequers, especially in the bathroom department: “Everything there was as it should be,” he said. “It had a bathroom with a shower too.”

On 9 June, he stopped in London on his way home. Before he left on his dangerous return journey, there was a moment of sentiment when Churchill stood talking with the iron-arsed Russian at the garden gate of 10 Downing Street: “I gripped his arm,” wrote Churchill, “and we looked each other in the face. Suddenly he appeared deeply moved. Inside the image, there appeared the man. He responded with equal pressure. Silently we wrung each other’s hands . . . We were all together and it was life or death for the lot.”

Molotov admitted to getting on well with Churchill: “Yes, we drank a glass or two,” he reminisced. “We talked the whole night long.” But he could never forget that Churchill was “an Imperialist, the strongest, the cleverest among them . . . 100% Imperialist. So I came to be friends with the bourgeoisie.” He returned with the vague promise of a Second Front, an invaluable Lend-Lease treaty with America, and an alliance with Britain: “My journey and its results were a great victory for us.” On the flight back to Moscow, Molotov’s plane was attacked by enemy fighters and then by Russian ones.[82]

As Molotov set off for the West, Stalin was launching a wave of counter-attacks along the entire front. He quite reasonably presumed that Hitler would again attack Moscow but the Führer actually planned a powerful summer offensive to seize the grain of the Ukraine and, more importantly, the oil of the Caucasus. But Stalin’s real fault lay in his raging overconfidence: he lacked the resources for this vast enterprise which, instead of capitalizing on his Moscow victory, handed Hitler the constellation of stunning victories that led to the ultimate crisis of Stalingrad.

He certainly did not help matters by granting draconian powers to his crew of military amateurs. Apart from Stalin himself, no one contributed more to these defeats than the brave, indefatigable and blood-thirsty Mekhlis, now at the height of his power. “The Shark” could never resist showing off his privileged access: “When he arrived in the anteroom to Stalin’s office,” remembered one commissar, Mekhlis “didn’t even wait for an invitation to go in, he crossed the waiting room and went straight in.” But “he never hid anything from Stalin . . . who knew this and trusted him.” This gave him the power to get things done: “If Mekhlis wrote to the Supremo, the measures were very quick.” Yet his antics were always uneasily suspended between the farcical and the diabolical: once when Stalin asked which front needed supplies, the generals were silent except for Mekhlis who piped up to criticize the quartermaster Khrulev. Stalin angrily looked up and asked who was complaining.

“Mekhlis most likely,” replied Khrulev to peals of laughter. Stalin asked Mekhlis to list his needs. “We lack vinegar, pepper and mustard,” retorted Mekhlis. Even Stalin laughed.

When Mekhlis learned that an arsenal of German pornography had been captured, he immediately launched a new front against Nazi erotica, writing a leaflet called “How Hitler Corrupts His Army.” His advisers suggested that pornography was natural in a bourgeois army and their nocturnal reading habits were not dictated by Hitler personally, but Mekhlis ignored them and printed eleven million copies of this much mocked document.[83]

He started the year with a visit to the Volkhov Front which had been ordered to relieve the Siege of Leningrad. It was in no shape to launch an offensive which predictably ended in disaster. Mekhlis arrived to investigate, arrest and shoot the culprits. Stalin then offered the front to Voroshilov who courageously, having finally realized his limits, refused it. This outraged Stalin who dictated a sarcastic denunciation of Klim’s “bankruptcy of leadership.” The conclusion was humiliating but not fatal: “That Comrade Voroshilov be posted . . . to the rear.”[84] By the end of June, none of these murderous amateurs could save the Volkhov Front: the army was lost along with its talented young General Vlasov. Exhausted and sickened by Stalin’s blunders, he turned traitor. Stalin raged about the betrayal to Beria and Molotov, who asked revealingly:

“How did we miss him before the war?” Stalin tried to blame Khrushchev for Vlasov but the Ukrainian boss argued back “that Stalin had put him in charge of the Moscow counter-offensive.” Stalin, who reacted well to courageous defiance, let the matter drop.[85]

Voroshilov had finally been discredited but Mekhlis and Kulik, despite the latter’s string of disasters, still rode high. In October 1941, Kulik had failed to relieve Leningrad; in November at the opposite end of the front, he had been sent to save the city of Kerch in the Crimea. Kulik arrived late and Kerch was temporarily lost to Manstein, one of Hitler’s finest captains. Now Stalin considered shooting Kulik and scribbled a note: “Today. Kulik to Siberia?” but finally settled for demoting him to Major-General and sending Mekhlis to investigate Kulik’s late arrival.

“The Gloomy Demon” exposed Kulik’s hedonistic junket involving his own DC-3 plane, barrels of wine and vodka, a missing 85,898 roubles and the Marshal’s new teenage wife. Kulik had soon recovered from the disappearance of his last wife and swiftly romanced this friend of his daughter, a misalliance that Stalin mocked as cradle-snatching. He sacked Kulik as Deputy Commissar yet Zhukov interceded for him. This primitive but popular martinet was reprieved again and, amazingly, promoted. However, his old friendship with Stalin would not end well.[86]

That March, Stalin ordered an assault from Kerch towards the centre of the Crimea to relieve the besieged Sebastopol. Mekhlis, who like his amateur Supremo believed himself a true soldier, gleefully took over the command of these 250,000 men, terrorizing their general, Kozlov, and ignoring the front commander, Budyonny. In this sensitive and complicated battle, Stalin had exchanged an inept and corrupt drunkard for an inept and incorruptible maniac. As Stalin pressured Mekhlis to launch the offensive on time, “the Shark” replied that his ammunition was low but “I’ll arrest [the officer] if he doesn’t straighten out the situation in two days . . . We’re organizing the big music for the Germans!”

On 2 March, Mekhlis launched his “big music” in a fiasco that proved to be the insane apogee of terror applied to military science. He banned the digging of trenches “so that the offensive spirit of the soldiers would not be undermined” and insisted that anyone who took “elementary security measures” was a “panic-monger.” All were “mashed into a bloody porridge.” He bombarded Stalin with demands for more terror: “Comrade Beria,” Stalin wrote on one of Mekhlis’s notes. “Right! In Novorossisk, make sure that not one scum, not one scoundrel is breathing.”

Mekhlis himself, speeding around the front in his jeep waving a pistol trying to stop the retreat, displayed “irreproachable personal courage and did nothing for his own glory” yet the “stupid tyranny and wildly arbitrary ways of this military illiterate,” in the words of the poet Konstantin Simonov, a witness, proved disastrous.

On 7 May, Manstein’s counter-attack drove Mekhlis off the Crimea altogether, capturing an awesome bag of 176,000 men, 400 planes and 347 tanks. Mekhlis lashed about him, blaming Kozlov and begging Stalin for a great general, a Hindenburg.

Stalin was beside himself: “You take the strange attitude of an outside observer not responsible for the Crimean Front,” he castigated Mekhlis. “It’s a very comfortable position—but it absolutely stinks! You’re not an outsider but the representative of Stavka . . . You demand the replacement of Kozlov by someone like Hindenburg. But . . . we don’t have any Hindenburgs . . . If you had used aviation against tanks and enemy soldiers and not for sideshows, the enemy would not have broken the front . . . You don’t have to be Hindenburg to understand this simple thing . . .” It was a mark of the obsolete standards of Stalin’s court that Hindenburg, the German hero of 1914, was still their paragon in 1942: they needed Guderians not Hindenburgs.

On 28 May, a haggard Mekhlis was waiting in Stalin’s anteroom where one could always see the Supremo reflected in the attitudes of his assistants. Poskrebyshev ignored him, then said: “The Boss’s very busy today. Dammit, there are many troubles.”

“Probably something’s gone wrong at the front?” asked Mekhlis disingenuously.

“You’d know,” replied Poskrebyshev.

“Yes, I want to report our unfortunate business to Comrade Stalin.”

“Apparently,” said Poskrebyshev, “the running of the operation wasn’t equal to the task. Comrade Stalin’s very unhappy . . .”

Mekhlis blushed. Young Chadaev joined in: “I suppose you think the defeat was caused by circumstances?”

“What did you say?” Mekhlis turned on the whippersnapper. “You’re not a soldier! I’m a real soldier. How dare you . . .” Then Stalin emerged from his office.

“Hello Comrade Stalin, may I report . . .” said Mekhlis.

“Go to hell!” snarled Stalin, slamming his door. Mekhlis, according to Poskrebyshev, later “almost threw himself at Stalin’s feet.” He was court-martialled, demoted, sacked as Deputy Defence Commissar.

“It’s all over!” sobbed Mekhlis but Stalin remained amazingly loyal: twenty-four days later, he was appointed a Front Commissar and later promoted to Colonel-General.[87]

As if Stalin, Kulik and Mekhlis had not wrought enough defeat, the worst was befalling the South-Western Front where Timoshenko and Khrushchev were launching their offensive from a Soviet salient to retake Kharkov, oblivious of Hitler’s imminent attack. Zhukov and Shaposhnikov wisely warned against it but Timoshenko, Stalin’s favourite fighting general, insisted on proceeding and the Supremo agreed.

On 12 May, Timoshenko and Khrushchev, both uneducated, crude and energetic, successfully attacked and pushed back the Germans. If Stalin was delighted, Hitler could not believe his luck. Five days later, his Panzers smashed through Timoshenko’s flanks, enveloping Soviet forces in steel pincers so that the Russians were no longer advancing but simply burrowing deeper into a trap. The Staff begged Stalin to call off the operation and he warned Timoshenko of the German forces on his flank, but the Marshal jovially reassured him that all was well. By the 18th, 250,000 men were almost encircled when Timoshenko and Khrushchev finally realized their plight.

Around midnight, Timoshenko, the “brave peasant” terrified of Stalin, persuaded Khrushchev to beg the Supremo to cancel their offensive. At Kuntsevo, Stalin asked Malenkov to answer the phone. Khrushchev asked to speak to Stalin.

“Tell ME!” said Malenkov.

“Who’s calling?” Stalin called out.

“Khrushchev,” replied Malenkov.

“Ask him what he wants!”

“Comrade Stalin repeats that you should tell me,” said Malenkov. Then, “He says the advance on Kharkov should be called off . . .”

“Put down the receiver,” yelled Stalin. “As if he knows what he’s talking about! Military orders must be obeyed . . . Khrushchev’s poking his nose into other people’s business . . . My military advisers know better.” Mikoyan was shocked that Khrushchev “was calling him from the front line in battle with people dying around him” and Stalin “would not walk ten steps across the room.”

The trap snapped shut on a quarter of a million men and 1,200 tanks. The next day, Stalin called off the offensive but it was too late. The exhilarated Germans pushed on towards the Volga and the Caucasus: the road to Stalingrad was open.[88]

Timoshenko and Khrushchev feared they would be shot. The two friends soon fell out in the scramble to save their careers and lives. There is a story that Khrushchev suffered a nervous breakdown after the encirclement, flying to Baku where he stayed with Bagirov, Beria’s ally, who naturally reported Khrushchev’s arrival. An unstable Khrushchev started vehemently denouncing Timoshenko, who repaid him in kind.

“Comrade Stalin,” wrote Timoshenko by hand, “I must add something to our report. The increasingly nervous state of Comrade Khrushchev influences our work. Comrade Khrushchev has no faith in anything—one can’t make decisions in doubt . . . The whole Council think this is the reason for our fall!” He seems to confirm that Khrushchev did have a mental breakdown: “It’s difficult to discuss—Comrade Khrushchev is very ill . . . We gave our report without saying who was guilty. Comrade Khrushchev wants to blame only me.”

Stalin played with the idea of appointing Bulganin to investigate the situation. Bulganin, sensing Stalin’s reluctance and, perhaps, guilt, begged to be excused for the un-Bolshevik reason that he and Khrushchev were such friends. Stalin did not insist but reflected mildly on Khrushchev’s simplicity: “He doesn’t understand statistics,” said Stalin, “but we have to put up with him” since only he, Kalinin and Andreyev were “real proletarians.” Instead Stalin summoned Khrushchev for a threatening history lesson: “You know in World War One, after our army fell into German encirclement, the general was court-martialled by the Tsar—hanged.” But Stalin forgave him and sent him back to the front. Khrushchev was still terrified since “I knew of many cases when Stalin reassured people by letting them leave his office with good news and then had them picked up.”

Stalin was also astonishingly tolerant when Timoshenko asked for more men, having squandered so many: “Maybe the time has come for you to wage war by losing less blood, as the Germans are doing? Wage war not by quantity but by skill. If you won’t learn how to fight better, all the armaments produced in our whole country won’t be enough for you . . .” This was highly ironic from the most wasteful Supremo in history. Even as they retreated, Stalin remained sarcastically mild to Timoshenko: “Don’t be afraid of Germans—Hitler’s not as bad as they say.”

Khrushchev thought they were spared because Mikoyan and Malenkov had witnessed his call to Kuntsevo but it was perhaps simpler: life and death was Stalin’s prerogative, and he liked[89] Khrushchev and Timoshenko. Either way, this was Khrushchev’s greatest crisis until, as Stalin’s successor, he blundered into the Cuban Missile Crisis twenty years later. Later, Stalin humiliatingly emptied his pipe on Khrushchev’s head: “That’s in accordance with Roman tradition,” he said. “When a Roman commander lost a battle, he poured ashes on his own head . . . the greatest disgrace a commander could endure.”[90]

On 19 June, a Luftwa fe aircraft crashed beyond German lines, containing a briefcase bearing the plans for Hitler’s summer offensive to exploit the Kharkov disaster and push towards Stalingrad and the North Caucasus. But Stalin decided that the information was either incomplete or a plant. A week later, the Germans attacked exactly as the plans warned, smashing a hole between the Briansk and South-Western Fronts, heading towards Voronezh and then Stalingrad. But it was the oil fields that Hitler really coveted. When he flew into headquarters at Poltava, he told Field Marshal von Bock: “If we don’t take Maikop and Grozny, then I must put an end to the war.”

Timoshenko and Khrushchev fell back towards Stalingrad. When Timoshenko asked for more divisions, Stalin replied sharply: “If they sold divisions in the market, I’d buy you one or two but unfortunately they don’t.” Once again, Timoshenko’s front was in free fall. On 4 July, Stalin sarcastically quizzed the Marshal: “So is it a fact that the 301st and 227th Divisions are now encircled and you’re surrendering to the enemy?”

“The 227th is retreating,” replied Timoshenko pathetically, “but the 301st—we can’t find it . . .”

“Your guesses sound like lies. If you continue to lose divisions like this, you’ll soon be commander of nothing. Divisions aren’t needles and it’s a very complicated matter to lose them.”[91]

Dizzy with over-confidence, Hitler divided his forces into two: one pushed across the Don to Stalingrad while the other headed southwards towards those Caucasian oil fields. When Rostov-on-Don fell, Stalin drafted another savage order: “Not One Step Backwards,” decreeing that “panic-mongers and cowards must be liquidated on the spot” and “blocking units” must be formed behind the lines to kill waverers. Nonetheless, Hitler’s southern Army Group A broke into the Caucasus. On 4 and 5 August, Stalin, Beria and Molotov spent most of the nights in the office as the Germans took Voroshilovsk (Stravropol), racing towards Grozny and Ordzhonikidze (Vladikavkaz) in the Caucasus and, on the Volga, approached Stalingrad. Paulus’s Sixth Army was poised to take the city and split Russia in two.[92]

On 12 August, amid the calamitous stirrings of the decisive battle of the entire war, Winston Churchill arrived in Moscow to tell Stalin that there would be no Second Front soon, a mission he compared to “carrying a lump of ice to the North Pole.” Molotov met him at the airport and then escorted him to the residence he had been assigned. On the way, Churchill noticed that the Packard’s windows were over two inches thick.

“It’s more prudent,” said Molotov. Stalin and Beria took Churchill’s visit very seriously, assigning him a bodyguard of 120. The defences around the Kremlin were redoubled. Stalin gave up his own house, Kuntsevo, dacha No. 7. It is a mark of Soviet obscurity that the British were never told and it has taken sixty years to emerge. Perhaps Stalin was repaying Churchill in kind for lending his dacha, Chequers, to Molotov.

 

 

37. Churchill Visits Stalin: Marlborough vs. Wellington

Astrapping aide-de-camp of a princely family, according to Churchill, acted as his host at Kuntsevo. Churchill was shown into Stalin’s dining room, where the long table was laden with “every delicacy and stimulant that supreme power can command.” The British curiously explored[93]. Without realizing it, Churchill described Stalin’s home: surrounded by a stockade, fifteen feet high, guarded on both sides, it was a “fine large house standing in its own extensive lawns and gardens in a fir wood of about twenty acres. There were agreeable walks . . . fountains . . . and a large glass tank with . . . goldfish. I was conducted through a spacious reception room to a bedroom and bathroom[94] of almost equal size. Blazing almost dazzling electric lights displayed the spotless cleanliness.”

Within three hours, Churchill, Harriman, and the British Ambassador Sir Archibald Clark Kerr were driven into the Kremlin to meet with Stalin, Molotov and Voroshilov who, banned from front-line commands, now became the Vozhd’s diplomatic gimp, a comedic sideshow to Stalin’s diplomatic double act with Molotov. Churchill decided to declare the bad news first: no Second Front that year. Stalin, faced with a fight for his life on the Volga, reacted sarcastically: “You can’t win wars without taking risks,” he said and later: “You mustn’t be so afraid of the Germans.”

Churchill growled that Britain had fought alone in 1940. Having got the worst bit out of the way, Churchill revealed that the British and Americans were about to launch Operation Torch to seize North Africa, which he illustrated with the drawing of a soft-bellied crocodile and the big globe that stood in the room adjacent to Stalin’s office. In an impressive demonstration of his geopolitical instincts, Stalin immediately rattled off the reasons that this operation made sense. This, wrote Churchill, “showed the Russian Dictator’s swift and complete mastery” of military strategy. Then Stalin surprised them more: “Let God help the success of this enterprise!”[95]

The next morning, Churchill met that “urbane, rigid diplomatist” Molotov alone to warn him: “Stalin will make a great mistake to treat us roughly when we have come so far.”

“Stalin’s a very wise man,” Molotov replied. “You may be sure that, however he argues, he understands all.”

At eleven, Stalin and Molotov, accompanied by the usual interpreter Pavlov, received Churchill in the Little Corner where the Vozhd handed his guest a memorandum attacking the West for not launching a Second Front, and again mocked British cowardice.

“I pardon that remark only on account of the bravery of Russian troops,” replied the Prime Minister, who then launched into a magnificent Churchillian soliloquy on the Western commitment to the war. When Churchill poked his unsatisfactory interpreter Dunlop: “Did you tell him this? Did you tell him that?” Stalin finally smiled: “Your words are of no importance. What’s important is your spirit.” But the conviviality was ice-thin: Stalin’s insults infuriated Churchill, who afterwards stalked Kuntsevo, no stranger to gloom and malice, threatening to go home.[96]

Still angry and sullen, Churchill had to appear at the Catherine Hall for the Bacchanalian banquet Stalin held in his honour. Stalin sat in the centre with Churchill on his right, Harriman on his left, then an interpreter followed by General Alan Brooke, Chief of Imperial General Staff, and Voroshilov. Molotov kept the toasts coming for over three hours as nineteen courses were piled onto the table, which was “groaning with every description of hors d’oeuvre and fish etc.,” wrote Brooke, “a complete orgy . . . Among the many fish dishes was a small suckling pig . . . He was never eaten and, as the evening slipped by, his black eye remained fixed on me, and the orange peel mouth developed a sardonic smile!”

Stalin was at his most charming, making it clear that “he wanted to make amends,” thought Clark Kerr, “but the PM . . . cold-shouldered him.”

Stalin tried backhanded flattery: “Some years ago, we had a visit from Lady Astor,” Stalin recounted mischievously. When she suggested inviting Lloyd George to Russia, Stalin had replied: “Why should we invite . . . the head of the Intervention?” Lady Astor corrected him: “That’s not true . . . It was Churchill.” Stalin told Astor: “If a great crisis comes, the English . . . might turn to the old warhorse.” Besides, he added, “we like a downright enemy better than a false friend.”

“Have you forgiven me?” asked Churchill.

“All that is in the past,” replied the ex-seminarian, “and the past belongs to God. History will judge us.” There was then a crash as Churchill’s bodyguard, Commander Thompson, slumped backwards knocking the ice cream out of a waiter’s hand, which then narrowly missed Stalin himself.

“Then,” recorded the Soviet interpreter Pavlov portentously in his notes, “Stalin spoke.” During the Supremo’s toasts, Voroshilov, whom Brooke thought “a fine hearty old soul, willing to talk about anything with great vivacity” though with the military expertise of a “child,” spotted the Ulsterman was drinking water instead of vodka. Voroshilov ordered yellow pepper vodka, with an ominous chilli floating in it, with which he filled both their glasses: “No heel taps,” he said—but Brooke managed to sip his glass. Voroshilov then downed two glasses of this firewater: “The result did not take long to show itself. His forehead broke out in beads of perspiration which soon started to flow down his face. He became sullen and quiet sitting with a fixed stare straight to his front and I wondered whether the moment had arrived for him to slip under the table. No, he retained his seat . . .” But just as this cherubic inebriate subsided into peppery oblivion, Stalin, who noticed everything, “descended straight on him” with a toast the irony of which was missed by the Westerners.

“One of the main organizers of the Red Army was Marshal Voroshilov and he, Stalin, would like to raise a toast to Marshal Voroshilov.” Stalin grinned roguishly like a wicked old satyr because, as Molotov and the others knew well, it was only three months since he had denounced Voroshilov’s “bankruptcy.” Voroshilov struggled to his feet, holding on tightly to the table with both hands, “swaying gently backwards and forwards with a distant and vacant look in his eyes.” When Stalin raised his toast, Voroshilov tried to focus and then lurched forward, just managing to clink glasses. As Stalin swaggered off to toast Shaposhnikov, “Voroshilov, with a deep sigh, sank back onto his chair.”

After dinner, Stalin invited Churchill to watch a film— The German Rout before Moscow—but Churchill was too angry and tired. He said goodbye and was halfway across the crowded room before Stalin hurried after him and accompanied him to his car.[97]

Churchill awoke as sulky as “a spoilt child” according to Clark Kerr who arrived at the dacha to discover that “the PM had decided to pack up and go.” Sporting “a preposterous ten-gallon hat,” surely the most bizarre headgear ever seen at Kuntsevo, Churchill stomped into the garden and turned his back on Clark Kerr who found himself addressing “a pink and swollen neck.” The Ambassador explained that Churchill “was an aristocrat and a man of the world and he expected these people to be like him. They weren’t. They were straight from the plough or the lathe.”

“This man has insulted me,” retorted Churchill. “From now on, he can fight his battles alone.” Finally he stopped: “Well, and what do you want me to do?”

Within the hour, Churchill’s entourage was calling the Kremlin to ask for a tête-à-tête with Stalin. The only response was that “Stalin was out walking,” surely a diplomatic promenade since Churchill’s tantrum coincided with momentous events that would lead directly to the Battle of Stalingrad: at 4:30 that morning, the German Sixth Army had attacked and smashed the Fourth Tank Army in the loop of the Don River, a more immediate crisis than a pinguid Englishman fulminating in a “ten-gallon hat.”

At 6 p.m., Stalin agreed to meet. Churchill bade Stalin goodbye in the Little Corner. When he was about to leave, Stalin “seemed embarrassed” and then asked when they would meet again: “Why don’t you come to my house and have a little drink?”

“I replied,” wrote Churchill, “that I was in principle always in favour of such a policy.” So Stalin led Churchill and his interpreter, Major Birse, “through many passages and rooms till we came out into a still roadway within the Kremlin and in a couple of hundred yards gained the apartment where he lived.” Stalin showed the Englishman round his “simple, dignified” four-room apartment with its empty bookshelves: the library was in Kuibyshev. A housekeeper, not Valechka, since Churchill described her as “ancient,” started to lay up dinner in the dining room. Stalin had planned this dinner: that afternoon, Alexandra Nakashidze called Zubalovo and announced that Stalin had ordered Svetlana to be ready that evening “to be shown off to Churchill.” Stalin brought the conversation round to daughters. Churchill said his daughter Sarah was a redhead. So is mine, said Stalin who had his cue: he asked the housekeeper to get Svetlana.

A “handsome red-haired girl” arrived and kissed her father, who rather ostentatiously presented her with a little present. He patted her on the head: “She’s a redhead,” he smiled. Churchill said he had been a redhead as a young man.

“My father,” wrote Svetlana, “was in one of those amiable and hospitable moods when he could charm anyone.” She helped lay the table while Stalin uncorked the wine. Svetlana hoped to stay for dinner but when the conversation returned to “guns and howitzers,” Stalin kissed her and “told me to go about my business.” She was disappointed but dutifully disappeared.

“Why shouldn’t we have Molotov?” Stalin asked. “He’s worrying about the communiqué. We could settle it here. There’s one thing about Molotov—he can drink.” When Molotov joined them, followed by a parade of heavy dishes, culminating in the inevitable suckling pig, Stalin started to tease his Foreign Commissar “unmercifully.”

Churchill joined in: “Was Mr. Stalin aware that his Foreign Secretary on his recent visit to Washington had said he was determined to pay a visit to New York entirely by himself and that the delay in his return was not due to any defect in the aeroplane but because he was off on his own?”

Molotov frowned, Churchill noticed, not realizing he may have been sowing the seeds of mistrust that almost cost Molotov his life. But Stalin’s face lit with merriment: “It was not to New York he went. He went to Chicago where the other gangsters live.”

“Have the stresses of this war been as bad to you personally as carrying through the policy of collective farms?” Churchill asked.

“Oh no,” replied Stalin revealingly. That had been “a terrible struggle.”

Churchill invited Stalin to London and the Vozhd recalled his visit in 1907 with Lenin, Gorky and Trotsky. On the subject of great historical figures, Churchill praised his ancestor the Duke of Marlborough as an inspiration for he, “in this time, put an end to the danger to European freedom during the War of Spanish Succession.” Churchill got “carried away” praising Marlborough’s military brilliance. But a roguish “smile loomed on Stalin’s face”: “I think Britain had a more talented military leader,” teased Stalin, “in the person of Wellington who crushed Napoleon who presented the greatest danger in History.”

By 1:30 a.m., they had not yet started eating but Stalin popped out, probably to hear the latest dire news from the Caucasus. When Sir Alexander Cadogan, Permanent Under-Secretary at the Foreign Office, arrived with a draft of the press release, Stalin offered him the suckling pig. “When my friend excused himself,” wrote Churchill, “our host fell upon the victim single-handedly.” The dinner finally ended around 3 a.m. Churchill begged Molotov not to see him off at dawn for he “was clearly tired out.”

“Do you really think I would fail to be there?” replied Molotov urbanely.

Back at Kuntsevo, Churchill lay full length on Stalin’s sofa, “started to chuckle and to stick a pair of gay legs in the air: Stalin had been splendid . . . What a pleasure it was to work with ‘that great man.’ ” As Churchill, undressed to reveal a “skimpy crumpled vest” whence “a pair of wrinkled creamy buttocks protruded,” he continued to rave, as he finally climbed into a bath, “Stalin this, Stalin that.” It was already dawn; the alliance was saved; Molotov arrived to take him to the airport.[98]

 

 

38. Stalingrad and the Caucasus: Beria and Kaganovich at War

Stalin recuperated from his Churchillian carousal at home but at 11:30 p.m., he arrived at the office to face the deteriorating crisis in the North Caucasus where the Germans were approaching Ordzhonikidze and Grozny. Budyonny, commander of the North Caucasus Front, had just been joined by Kaganovich who had demanded the right to redeem himself at the front after being sacked as railway boss. Stalin agreed, saying he “knows the North Caucasus well and got on well with Budyonny in the Civil War.” The bow-legged Cossack and the Jewish Iron Commissar struggled to stop the Germans. Budyonny lost none of “his dash and sense of irony,” refusing to go into his shelter during raids: “Never mind: let them bomb!” but “the Locomotive” at war was not a pretty sight.

Surrounded by a “suite of officers from his personal bodyguard and consultants from Moscow . . . toadies, wranglers and intriguers,” working all night in a permanent state of bellowing hysteria, always playing with his trademark worry beads or a key chain, Kaganovich fancied himself “a great strategist . . . issuing orders all on his own” and insisted on interfering in every military plan, setting impossible deadlines, shouting, “Report personally . . . on the fulfillment of the order—or else!” When some trucks blocked the path of his limousine, “Lazarus,” as his officers nicknamed him, went berserk, bellowing: “Demote! Arrest! Court martial! Shoot!” But these bawlings did not stop the Germans.

“What’s the good of a defence ridge if it isn’t defended?” Stalin reprimanded Kaganovich. “And it seems you have not managed to turn the situation around even where there is no panic and the troops fight quite well.”

Kaganovich however came closer to war than many others. He was hit by shrapnel in the hand, a badge of honour of which he was deeply proud. He was the only Politburo member to be wounded.[99] When Kaganovich flew back to Moscow for meetings, Stalin, whom he regarded as “our father,” tenderly inquired about his health and then toasted his wound. However, he was also incensed that one of his closest comrades had risked his life in this way.[100]

As the Germans pushed southwards, Stalin feared the Transcaucasus Front would collapse, yielding the oil fields, possibly bringing Turkey into the war, and tempting the restless Caucasian peoples to rebel. Four days after Churchill’s departure, Stalin turned to Beria: “Lavrenti Pavlovich,” he respectfully addressed him. “Take with you whoever you like and all the armaments you think necessary, but please stop the Germans.”

As the Germans took Mount Elbrus, Beria and Merkulov recruited Stalin’s staff officer, Shtemenko, ordered Sudoplatov to bring 150 Georgian Alpinists, assembled his flashy entourage, as well as his son Sergo, aged eighteen—and all flew down in a fleet of American C-47s stopping in Tiflis on the way. The generals were contemplating a strategic abandonment of Ordzhonikidze but on the 22nd, Beria, accompanied by his posse, arrived there to terrorize the Transcaucasus commanders. Charkviani, the Georgian boss, was in the room when Beria “peered coldly round the table with a piercing stare” and told them: “I’ll break your back if you mention a word of this retreat again. You WILL defend the town!”

When one general suggested placing 20,000 NKVD troops in the front line, Beria exploded into “foul abuse and threatened to break my back if I ever mentioned it again.” Though Charkviani (no great admirer of Beria) thought the NKVD chief saved the day, the generals, all writing after his downfall, complained that his progress along the front was simply “showiness and noise” which seriously disrupted their work.

Beria also had to destroy any oil that might fall into Nazi hands. Back in Moscow, Stalin summoned Nikolai Baibakov, thirty, Deputy Commissar of Oil Production, to his office. He was alone: “Comrade Baibakov, you know Hitler wants the oil of the Caucasus. That’s why I’m sending you there—you’re responsible on the pain of losing your head for ensuring no oil is left behind.” But he would also “lose his head” if he DID destroy the oil too early. As he left, with his head spinning, Stalin added: “Do you know that Hitler has declared that without oil, he’ll lose the war?”

Beria added more gruesome threats. “I was just weighed down by the great responsibility,” says Baibakov who was not afraid but perhaps should have been. “I underestimated the danger of my personal position.” The correct oil fields were dynamited with minutes to spare. Baibakov kept his head.[101]

Beria’s other mission was to stamp out the embers of treason among the ethnic groups in the North Caucasus. Hence he set up his own NKVD command. As a Georgian Mingrel brought up among non-Georgian Abkhazians, Beria possessed all the prejudices of one tiny Caucasian people for another. The Georgians had always been particularly suspicious of Moslem peoples like the Chechens: in Grozny, Beria investigated the reports that some Chechens had greeted the Germans with open arms. Sergo Beria, who accompanied his father, wrote that they sent delegations to show their support for Moscow, promising to fight like their national hero, Shamyl. Since Shamyl had defied Russia for thirty years, this analogy did their cause no good at all. Beria’s cheerfulness with the Chechens concealed his distrust.

Beria descended on Kaganovich and Budyonny in Novorossisk but was not impressed by their demeanour: “These two idiots disorganized everything,” wrote Sergo Beria, exaggerating somewhat. They found Budyonny “dead drunk” and in “a deep torpor” while Kaganovich was “sober” but “trembled like a leaf and crawled on his knees before my father.”

“Don’t make such an exhibition of yourself,” Beria told Kaganovich.

The German advance ebbed outside Ordzhonikidze and Grozny, undermined by the Soviet resistance at Stalingrad. Beria returned triumphant to Moscow where Stalin, who was viciously jealous of anyone else’s military glory, overheard him boasting to Malenkov of his exploits.

“Now Beria’s going to imagine he’s a military leader,” Stalin growled to Shaposhnikov. Beria recommended the sacking of Budyonny, who returned to Moscow from his last active command to be placed in charge of the cavalry. But he appealed to Stalin: “My soul longs to be in battle. Let me go to Stalingrad!”[102] Stalingrad was indeed about to become the battle of battles, the focus of the world.

The Germans attacked by land and devastated Stalin’s city from the sky, destroying that industrial leviathan in an infernal bombardment that converted its stark Stalinist factories into a primeval landscape of caves and canyons. Stalin, in the office in the early hours, was beside himself, berating his envoys to Stalingrad, Malenkov and Chief of Staff Vasilevsky: “The enemy broke through . . . with small forces. You have enough forces to annihilate the enemy . . . Mobilize armoured trains . . . Use smoke screens . . . Fight day and night . . . The most important thing now is— don’t panic, don’t fear the impudent enemy and keep up your confidence in our success.”[103]

The gravity of Stalingrad finally concentrated Stalin’s mind and brought about a revolution in his conduct of the war. Now he realized that the road to survival and glory lay with professional generals instead of his own impatient amateurism and his bungling cavalrymen. On 27 August, he ordered Zhukov to rush to Stalingrad and promoted him to Deputy Supreme Commander. Zhukov refused the promotion: “My character wouldn’t let us work together.”

“Disaster threatens the country,” replied Stalin. “We must save the Motherland by every possible means, no matter the sacrifice. What of our characters? Let’s subordinate them to the interests of the Motherland. When will you leave?”

“I need a day.”

“Well, that’s fine. But aren’t you hungry? It wouldn’t hurt to have a little refreshment.” Tea and cakes were brought in to celebrate the beginning of the war’s most successful partnership.

Zhukov met up with Vasilevsky in Stalingrad where he found the Germans creeping into the city. Stalin demanded counter-attacks but his forces were not yet up to it. Stalin was so anxious that he now slept on a couch in his office with Poskrebyshev waking him every two hours. He was so pale, tired and skinny that Poskrebyshev let him sleep an extra half-hour because he had not the heart to wake him: “A philanthropist all of a sudden. Get Vasilevsky on the line. Quick! The bald philanthropist!”

Stalin yelled at Vasilevsky: “What’s the matter with them? Don’t they understand if we surrender Stalingrad, the south of the country’ll be cut off from the centre and we’ll probably not be able to defend it? Don’t they realize that this isn’t only a catastrophe for Stalingrad? We’d lose our main waterway and soon our oil too!” But its importance was no longer merely strategic: Stalingrad bore his name because it had played a formative part in his life. There, at Tsaritsyn in 1918, he had gained his confidence as a man of action, learned how to govern by terror, won Lenin’s trust and Trotsky’s hatred. At the “Red Verdun,” he had met his cronies, from Voroshilov to Budyonny, and embarked on his marriage with Nadya.

“I think there’s still a chance we won’t lose the city,” replied Vasilevsky carefully. Stalin rang Zhukov and ordered the attack: “Delay’s equivalent to a crime.” When Zhukov reported that there would be a delay, Stalin sneered: “Do you think the enemy’s going to wait until you bestir yourselves?”

At dawn the Russians attacked again—but made limited gains. The Germans had almost taken the city but one force stood in their way: the 62nd Army under General Vasily Chuikov, spiky-haired, snub-nosed, gold-fanged, clung on to the Volga’s west bank, commanding from dugouts and fighting in the skeletal ruins of an apocalyptic industrial landscape, supplied only by ferryboats that crossed the burning Volga in which the destiny of Russia was reflected. The valour, nobility, despair and brutality is best described in Vasily Grossman’s epic Life and Fate. They fought with modern weapons and ancient ones, sniper rifles and grenades, spades, pipes and fingers, dying to win time: “Blood,” said Chuikov, “is time.”

The attention of virtually every minute of Stalin’s day was concentrated on one of the most intense battles ever fought: Chuikov’s direct commanders were General Andrei Yeremenko and Commissar Khrushchev, now back in favour, but it was much too important to be left to them. Stalin himself supervised the front with Zhukov and Vasilevsky in active command while Malenkov acted as his personal spy. They would appear in Yeremenko’s dugout. “I’d notice Vasilevsky and Malenkov whispering,” said Khrushchev, “preparing to denounce someone.” Malenkov summoned officers to be dressed down. They arrived in the dugout to find a “short man with a soft puffy face in a tunic” alongside ruffians like Zhukov and Yeremenko. During one dressing-down, Malenkov found himself addressing Vasily Stalin who, though banned from flying active missions himself, was commanding a division.

“Colonel Stalin!” Malenkov said, “the combat performance of your flyers is revolting . . .” Then he turned to another officer: “And you, the general in the skullcap? Did you intend to fight or simply play around?” After Malenkov had gone, Khrushchev and Yeremenko would be left alone again in their dugout “in an eerie silence . . . like a forest after a storm.” It was Khrushchev’s finest hour,[104] living in his dugout building the friendships with generals that were to be so useful after Stalin’s death.[105]

On 12 September, the rival commanders of Stalingrad flew simultaneously to see their respective Supremos with a neat dictatorial symmetry. As Paulus met the Führer at his Werwolf headquarters, a stockade of wooden cabins and bunkers at Vinnitsa, Zhukov and Vasilevsky were on their way to see their Vozhd. As Hitler ordered Paulus to “capture as quickly as possible the whole of Stalingrad,” Zhukov and Malenkov, the rough-hewn soldier and the silky-palmed courtier, presented a report for Stalin proposing further offensives “to grind down the enemy . . . and simultaneously to prepare . . . a more powerful blow.” But what? Stalin looked at his own map and studied it quietly, ignoring the soldiers for a long moment, lost in his thoughts.

Zhukov and Vasilevsky retreated from the green baize table, talking to one another in low voices. There might be “some other solution.”

“And what does ‘another solution’ mean?” asked Stalin, suddenly raising his head. “I never thought he had such a keen ear,” noted Zhukov. Before the generals could answer, Stalin added: “Go over to the General Staff and think over carefully what must be done . . . We’ll meet here at nine tomorrow night.” Victory has many fathers and many claimed paternity for Stalingrad but it was really the child of the unique collaboration between Stalin, Vasilevsky and Zhukov, all gifted in their own ways.

At 10 p.m. on 13 September, Stalin welcomed Zhukov and Vasilevsky to his study with an unusual gesture—a handshake: “Well, what are your views? What have you come up with? Who’s making the report?”

“Either of us,” Vasilevsky replied. They handed over their map which showed their basic plan to launch a massive offensive against the German flanks, held by the weaker Romanian forces, smashing into their rear and linking up to encircle them: Operation Uranus. Just at this moment, the German attack, ordered by Hitler at Vinnitsa earlier that day, descended on the embattled 62nd Army. Poskrebyshev entered the room—Yeremenko was on the line from Stalingrad. Chuikov was just maintaining his bare-knuckle grip on the west bank of the Volga while Stavka prepared the operation. Sending both generals straight back to Stalingrad to reconnoitre Uranus, Stalin said portentously: “No one else knows what we three have discussed here. No one beyond the three of us is to know about it for the time being.”

On 9 October, Stalin restored the unitary command of the armies to the generals. He again celebrated by shaking hands with Zhukov and Vasilevsky, whom he used as special representatives at the fronts: he did not like them “sitting around” in Moscow. Chief of Staff since May, Alexander Vasilevsky, aged forty-seven, was the third of the extraordinary Stalingrad team. In many ways, he was closer to Stalin even than Zhukov.

Broad-shouldered and barrel-chested but with a sensitive expression and a gentle, courtly charm, Vasilevsky had been groomed by Shaposhnikov. This outstanding staff officer was his successor not only professionally but also as the sole gentleman among cut-throats, and as Stalin’s special confidant. His decency puzzled, impressed and amused Stalin who so lacked it himself: “You command so many armies,” he reflected, “yet you wouldn’t hurt a fly.”

Vasilevsky also hailed from a vanished world that fascinated Stalin: his father had been a prosperous village priest on the Volga and he was educated for the priesthood but became a captain in the Tsar’s army. When he joined the Red Army, he had had to forsake his priest-father and cut off relations. After meetings, Stalin frequently asked Vasilevsky to stay behind to discuss whether he was tempted by the priesthood: “Well, well, I didn’t want you to be,” laughed Stalin. “That’s clear. But Mikoyan and I wanted to be priests but were rejected. Until now, I can’t understand why!” Then: “Did your religious education do anything for you?”

“No knowledge is entirely wasted,” Vasilevsky replied cautiously: “Some of it turned out to be useful in military life.”

“The thing priests teach best is how to understand people,” mused Stalin, who once said his father was a priest. Perhaps he sometimes thought about his own paternity, for around this time, he told Vasilevsky: “One shouldn’t forget one’s parents.” On a later occasion he asked him: “When did you last see your parents?”

“I’ve forsaken them,” replied the General, worried that this was a test. “My father’s a priest, Comrade Stalin.”

“But is he a counter-revolutionary?”

“No, Comrade Stalin, he believes in God as a priest but he’s not a counter-revolutionary.”

“When the war’s quieter, I think you should take a plane, visit your parents and ask for their forgiveness.” Stalin did not forget Vasilevsky’s father: “Did you ever fly and see your parents and ask their blessing?” he asked later.

“Yes, Comrade Stalin,” replied Vasilevsky.

“It’ll be a long time before you pay off your debt to me.” Stalin then opened his safe and showed him some papers. They were money orders in Stalin’s own name that had been sent to Vasilevsky’s father throughout the war. The son, amazed and somewhat moved, thanked Stalin profusely. Now, Vasilevsky’s special responsibility was Stalingrad.[106]

The two messianic tyrants almost simultaneously prepared their peoples for victory. “There will be a holiday on our street too,” Stalin hinted in his 7 November speech.

The next day, Hitler boasted to his people: “I wanted to reach the Volga . . . at a particular city. By chance it bore the name of Stalin himself . . . I wanted to capture it and . . . we have as good as got it!”

The Little Corner was now a-quiver with tension. Stalin agonized that the Germans would guess what was afoot. On the 11th he was worrying that he did not have enough aircraft. On the 13th, as Paulus launched a last attempt to dislodge Chuikov, now holding a ruined splinter of territory only fifty yards deep, Zhukov and Vasilevsky flew into Moscow for a final briefing. “By the way Stalin smoked his pipe, smoothed his moustache and never interrupted once, we could see he was pleased,” wrote Zhukov. Afterwards, Vasilevsky returned to Stalingrad.

On the 18th, Stalin, accompanied by Beria, Molotov, Malenkov, and Zhukov, who remained to command Operation Mars[107] before Moscow, worked in the Little Corner until 11:50 p.m. Three hours before the attack, the three fronts facing Stalingrad, under Generals Yeremenko, Rokossovsky and Vatutin, were informed they were to attack imminently. Presumably Stalin and his comrades then went to dinner or watched a movie to pass the time. Stalin rarely slept before 4 a.m.—“the need just passed,” he later told Churchill—so he surely stayed up to hear that the troops had gone in. At 7:20 on the misty morning of 19 November, the 3,500 guns on the northern sector opened up. When this Jupiterian thunderclap was unleashed, the earth shook thirty miles away. A million men, 13,541 guns, 1,400 tanks and 1,115 planes smashed into Hitler’s forces.[108]

---

[1] The telephone was ringing in Zhdanov’s dacha in Sochi that morning too: “My mother came into my room first thing,” recalled Yury Zhdanov, “and she said, ‘It’s war!’ and we headed back to Moscow with my father.”

[2] Simultaneously, in Berlin, Soviet Ambassador Dekanozov was summoned to the Foreign Ministry. As he arrived, he noticed that the German press was present to record the moment. Adopting his most “freezing manner,” Ribbentrop received him in the office of Prince Bismarck, the statesman who had warned Germany against a war on two fronts and who had been quoted to this effect so often by Stalin and Zhdanov. Apparently drunk, “purple-faced” and “swaying a little,” Ribbentrop read his statement. “I deeply regret this . . .” replied Dekanozov. He departed without shaking hands. But as he was leaving, Ribbentrop trotted after him, whispering that he had tried to stop Hitler from launching this war but he would not listen to anyone. “Tell Moscow I was against the attack,” he hissed. Ribbentrop sensed the Soviet Pact had been the climax of his career.

[3] The account of the Great Patriotic War in the two “War” sections is based on John Erickson’s two masterpieces, The Road to Stalingrad and The Road to Berlin; on Richard Overy’s outstanding narrative history, Russia’s War, on Harold Shukman’s excellentStalin’s Generals, on memoirs such as those of Molotov, Mikoyan, Kaganovich, Khrushchev, Sergo Beria, Svetlana, Zhukov and other soldiers; on Budyonny’s Notes; on the Dmitrov diary; on the author’s research in the archives of RGASPI, RGVA, TsAMO, GARF; interviews with witnesses, and recent Russian histories such as Rubtsov’s biography of Mekhlis, Alter Ego Stalina. Last hours: Read-Fisher, pp. 612–42. Budyonny Notes. Anfilov on Budyonny, Stalin’s Generals, p. 62. Zhukov I, 2, 1–14, 369–71. Pavlenko, “Zhukov,” p. 99. Stalin’s logbook: IA, 1998. Hilger-Meyer, pp. 335–6. MR, pp. 34–7. Mikoyan, p. 388. Volkogonov, pp. 401–7. Bloch, p. 333. Gorodetsky, pp. 309–15. Mikoyan in Kumanev (ed.), pp. 24–5, Chadaev, pp. 409–12. Nina Budyonny. Yury Zhdanov. Mekhlis, p. 151. Ian Kershaw, Hitler: Nemesis, p. 394. Burleigh, p. 489. Kuznetsov in Bialer (ed.), pp. 195–6. Voronov quoted in Mekhlis, p. 153. Anfilov on Timoshenko, Stalin’s Generals, pp. 246–7. Natalya Poskrebyshev: Poskrebyshev told her Stalin called him to say the bombing had begun. Berezhkov in Bialer (ed.), pp. 216–8. Number of Soviet forces: 3 million refers to Western districts. The Soviet soldiers were inferior in numbers to the Germans but superior in equipment. Total number of Soviet soldiers: 5 million. Y. Kulikov, “Napadeniye Germanii na SSSR” in Mirovye voiny XX veka, bk. 3, pp. 133-86. Molotov says no and trains/supplies: Kaganovich, p. 88. Mikoyan, pp. 388–9. MR, p. 39. Press, Koniev: Brooks, Thank You C. Stalin, pp. 166, 168. Erickson, Stalingrad: pp. 101, 136–8. Chadaev in Kumanev (ed.), p. 42. Budyonny Notes, p. 49. Zhukov II, pp. 12–13. IA, 1998:4, 22, 23, 24 June 1941. Spahr, on Kulik, p. 265. Beria on phone / Stalin’s confidence: Dmitrov diary, 22 June 1941.

[4] RGVA 9.39.100.252, Bolotin, Chief of 4th Unit of Dept. of Special Units NKVD, to Zhukov 21 July 1941, and Mekhlis and Zhukov’s reply. Zhukov II, p. 14.

 

[5] RGVA 9.39.99.329–39, Mikheev, Chief of 3rd Dept. NKO, to Mekhlis on Kulik, 15 July 1941. Report of Regimental Commissar Boldin in 900 Days, p. 29. Spahr on Kulik, p. 265.

[6] Mamsurova, 1988, pp. 12–13, quoted in Spahr, pp. 255–8.

 

[7] TsAMO RF 215.1184.48, 30. Mekhlis to all fronts, 22 July 1941. Mekhlis, pp. 179–83. KVS, 1991, nos. 14 and 65. Mikoyan, p. 541. Volkogonov, pp. 421–2. Erickson, Stalingrad, pp. 137–78.

[8] Sometime that day, the Politburo secretly ordered Lenin’s body to be removed from the Mausoleum and despatched to Tyumen in Siberia.

[9] Spahr, p. 251.

 

 

[10] On Yakov, Chadaev in Radzinsky, p. 451. On red dress: Gulia Djugashvili, Ded, Otets, Mat i Drugie, p. 25. Artyom Sergeev. MR, pp. 210–11. Vasily, pp. 92–3. Zhenya Alliluyeva; interviews Kira Alliluyeva, Vladimir and Leonid Redens; Svetlana RR; OOY, p. 322. Svetlana places this call in August 1941 but Zhenya’s daughter Kira places it in the “first ten days.”

[11] Now that we have access to so many different sources on this remarkable episode, from Molotov’s and Mikoyan’s memoirs to those of Chadaev, the Sovnarkom assistant, who recorded Deputy Chief of Staff Vatutin’s account, we can reconstruct this heretofore obscure story. Mikoyan dates the scene at the Defence Commissariat 29 and Chadaev 27 June, an indication of the chaos of those days. In fact, it was the 28th since we know from his logbook that Stalin was in his office throughout the 28th but did not appear on the 29th or 30th. Zhukov says that Stalin visited the Commissariat twice that day but it is likely that the showdown was in the evening, as Mikoyan recalled it.

[12]Chadaev in Radzinsky, pp. 450–5. Chadaev based his account on conversations with Deputy Chief of Staff Vatutin. KR II, p. 7. Khrushchev, Memuary, pt. 6, p. 682, quoted in Beria, p. 255. Zhuykov II, pp. 33–40. Mikoyan, pp. 390–2. MR, p. 39. Stalin afraid: Mikoyan, p. 389. Stalin’s surprise at exclusion of Mikoyan: Mikoyan, pp. 391–2. Mikoyan in Kumanev (ed.), pp. 31–3. Chadaev in Radzinsky, pp. 453–5. Molotov quoted in Mikoyan, p. 390. MR, pp. 238–9. Sergo B, p. 324. Volkogonov, pp. 411, 424. On Mikoyan’s hiding, Stalin expected the worst; tension left Stalin’s face: Sergo B, p. 71. Chadaev in Radzinsky, p. 455, is based on the account of Bulganin who was probably not present. He was not a candidate Politburo member until 1946 though he was a member of the newly formed Sovnarkom Commission, to run daily government, with Voznesensky and Mikoyan so he may have joined the group. Neither Mikoyan nor Molotov mentions him. Stalin enjoyed our support again: Mikoyan, p. 392. Erickson,Stalingrad, pp. 171–82; Soviet High Command, p. 601. Beria, p. 111. KR I, p. 182.

 

[13] The versions used here are Molotov’s: “We fucked it up”; Mikoyan’s: “Lenin left us a great heritage and we his successors have shitted it all up”; Beria’s (via Khrushchev who was himself not in Moscow): “Everything’s lost. I give up. Lenin left us a proletarian state and now we’ve been caught with our pants down and let the whole thing go to shit”; and Chadaev’s: “Lenin founded our state and we’ve fucked it up.”

[14] Beria’s son Sergo, whose memoirs are reliable on personal anecdotes and unreliable on political matters, claims it was Alexander Shcherbakov, the Moscow Party leader, who made this mistake and used to ask Beria if he would ever betray him to Stalin. Mikoyan, who was actually there, is much more trustworthy but Shcherbakov may have lost his nerve on another occasion, the threat to Moscow in October.

[15] The see-saw between traditional “single command” by a general and “dual command” by generals and Party Commissars charted the progress of the Party: the Commissars were introduced three times—in 1918, 1937 and 1941—and abolished three times when the prestige of the soldiers needed to be raised—in 1925, 1940 and 1942.

[16] Zbarsky and S. Hutchinson, Lenin’s Embalmers, pp. 119–20. Rybin, Kto Otravil Stalina?, p. 38.

[17] Zhukov II, pp. 64–5. Erickson, Stalingrad, pp. 180–5. Overy, pp. 81–8.

[18] Volkogonov, p. 427. Simonov, “Zametki,” p. 56. FSB 66.1.6.314–43: NKGB Order No. 246 “On Procedures for Bringing to Justice Traitors to the Motherland and Members of their Families 28 June 1941” in Yakovlev, Century, p. 172.

[19] Order No. 270 is written very much in Stalin’s personal style: “I order that (1) anyone who removes his insignia . . . and surrenders should be regarded as a malicious deserter whose family is to be arrested as a family of a breaker of the oath and betrayer of the Motherland. Such deserters are to be shot on the spot. (2) Those falling into encirclement are to fight to the last . . . those who prefer to surrender are to be destroyed by any available means while their families are to be deprived of all assistance.”

[20] MR, p. 209. Volkogonov, pp. 429, 609. Radzinsky, p. 457. Svetlana RR. Svetlana, Twenty Letters, p. 177. Mikoyan, p. 362. Artyom Sergeev. On Stalin’s cursing: “The fool” Stepan M. Arrest of Julia: Gulia Djugashvili, Ded, Otets, Mat i Drugie, pp. 28–9. “I’d have stopped being Stalin”: Mgeladze, pp. 198–9. One prisoner enough for me: Vasily Stalin to Vladimir Alliluyev (Redens).

[21] TsKhSD Party Control Commission 13/76, vol. 1, p. 30. Sudoplatov’s testimony on 11 Oct. 1960: Sudoplatov, pp. 146–7.

 

 

[22] Zhukov II, pp. 119–22. Erickson, Stalingrad, pp. 178–9. Mekhlis as “gloomy demon”: S. P. Ivanov quoted in Spahr, p. 59. Simonov “Zametki,” pp. 55–6.

[23] KR I, pp. 196, 201–2. Stalin to Khrushchev: Dmitrov diary, 16 Aug. 1941. On Budyonny and Timoshenko: Nina Budyonny. Budyonny Notes. On military situation: Erickson, Stalingrad, pp. 204–9. On Stalin and Timoshenko: Anfilov in Stalin’s Generals, pp. 248–9.

 

 

[24] Balandin: Yakovlev in Bialer (ed.), p. 301. Meretskov: Vaksberg, pp. 221–3. Beria had been a student with Vannikov at the Baku Technical School, a connection that may have saved his life. Mikoyan, pp. 425–6. Lesser Terror, p. 73. Sudoplatov, p. 127.

 

[25] Mariko Svanidze had been Yenukidze’s secretary and was arrested soon after her boss. Their other sister, Sashiko, had died of cancer in the late 1930s.

[26] Mikoyan, pp. 359–60. Overy, pp. 82–3.

[27] The opening of Stalin’s and Zhdanov’s papers allows us for the first time to listen in on their frantic efforts to save Leningrad.

[28] This account of the Siege of Leningrad is based on Harrison Salisbury’s 900 Days, John Erickson’s Road to Stalingrad, pp. 83, 120, 143, 145–8, 181–95 , 262–3, Richard Overy’s Russia’s War, pp. 99–112, and the author’s research in RGASPI and TsAMO. RGASPI 558.11.492, Stalin to Voroshilov and Zhdanov 17 Aug. 1941. Mikoyan, p. 393. 900 Days, p. 218.

[29] RGASPI 558.11.492.6, Stalin, Molotov and Mikoyan to Voroshilov, Zhdanov, Popov etc., 23 Aug. 1941.

[30] 900 Days, pp. 208–9, 304, 402.

[31] 900 Days, pp. 181–7.

[32] RGASPI 558.11.492.57, Stalin to Zhdanov and A. A. Kuznetsov 4 Oct. 1941. Andrei Alexandrovich: 900 Days, p. 542. Yes or no! RGASPI 558.11.492.63, Stalin, Molotov to Zhdanov, Kuznetsov 18 Oct. 1941. Say it straight: RGASPI 558.11.492.66, Stalin to Zhdanov on telephone, 8 Nov. 1941.

[33] Voroshilov: Volkogonov, in Stalin’s Generals, p. 317.

 

[34] Kuznetsov in Kumanev (ed.), p. 294. Malenkov vs. Zhdanov: Sukhanov, Memoirs, Library of Congress, Volkogonov Collection, Reel 8. 900 Days, pp. 260–1. Beria vs. Zhdanov in Raanan, pp. 171–2; Beria, p. 263. Yury Zhdanov. Volya Malenkova—her father told the family about Zhdanov’s drunken cowardice but added that he had not reported this to Stalin. Sergo B, p. 75, heard from his father that Malenkov proposed Zhdanov’s court martial and Beria vetoed it. Zhdanov’s confession of cowardice to Stalin: Mikoyan, p. 562. Stalin now spoke to Molotov and Malenkov as well as Zhdanov in his daily calls. RGASPI 558.11.492.29–33, Stalin to Kuznetsov, Voroshilov, Zhdanov, Popov and Molotov 27 Aug. 1941, and reply from Voroshilov, Zhdanov, Popov, Kuznetsov, Molotov and Malenkov 28 Aug. 1941. On return to Moscow, Malenkov often spoke to Zhdanov on Stalin’s behalf: “On Comrade Stalin’s order, I ask the following . . . Are tanks taking part—how many and what kind . . .” he would begin his calls. RGASPI 558.11.492.73–8 and 79 (16 Nov.) and 90 (2 Dec.), Malenkov to Zhdanov 13 Nov. 1941. MR, p. 40. Mikoyan, p. 562. Erickson, Stalingrad, pp. 188–9. 900 Days, pp. 208–9, 304, 402.

[35] RGASPI 558.11.492.35–8, Stalin to Kuznetsov, Molotov, Malenkov 29 Aug. 1941.

[36] RGASPI 558.11.492.49, Stalin, Molotov, Malenkov, Beria to Voroshilov and Zhdanov 9 Sept. 1941. Zhukov and Stalin: 900 Days, pp. 265–6.

[37] RGASPI 558.11.492.50 and 51, Stalin and Molotov to Voroshilov and to Zhukov and Zhdanov, both 13 Sept. 1941. 900 Days, pp. 265–6. Erickson, Stalingrad, p. 189. Simonov, “Zametki,” p. 48.

[38] Shcherbakov was one of those New Men who had risen over the bodies of the dead of the thirties. “With his impassive Buddha face, with thick horn-rimmed glasses resting on the tiny turned-up button of a nose,” Shcherbakov, who was Zhdanov’s brother-in-law, another example of the intermarriage of the élite, had made his name managing cultural questions, then succeeded Khrushchev as Moscow First Secretary, becoming a candidate member of the Politburo in 1941 with Malenkov and Voznesensky. A coarse alcoholic anti-Semite, Shcherbakov was described by Khrushchev as “a snake . . . one of the worst.”

[39] Bychevsky in Bialer (ed.), pp. 435–8. Kuznetsov in Kumanev (ed.), p. 294. 900 Days, pp. 267, 344, 346. Simonov, “Zametki,” p. 48.

[40] TsAMO RF 217.1258.14.16, Zhdanov to Leningrad Front, 27 Sept. 1941.

[41] When, on 31 October, Stalin heard that the Nazis were using “delegations” of Russian men and women as human shields, he ordered Zhdanov: “It’s said that among the Leningrad Bolsheviks there are those who thought it impossible to use arms against these ‘delegates.’ If there are such people . . . they must be liquidated first of all because they are more dangerous than German soldiers. My advice—no sentiment . . . Destroy the Germans and their delegates!”

[42] TsAMO RF 217.1258.11.18, Khozin, Zhdanov, Kuznetsov to Military Councils of 8th and 55th Armies, 13 Nov. 1941.

[43] RGASPI 558.11.191–3, Zhdanov to Stalin, 5 Dec. 1941.

[44] Erickson, Stalingrad, pp. 194–5. 900 Days, pp. 351, 403, 415, 451; starvation figures, p. 515. Zhdanov quoted in 900 Days, p. 518. Overy, pp. 111–12: over a million dead. Zhdanov’s visit to Moscow: 900 Days, p. 416. IA, 1998:3.

[45] RGASPI 558.11.492.86, Stalin and Molotov talk to Zhdanov 1 Dec. 1941.

[46] RGASPI 558.11.191–3, Zhdanov to Stalin 5 Dec. 1941.

[47] Perhaps as a reward for his ferocity, on 11 December, Zhdanov, who had not seen Stalin since 24 June, flew to Moscow and began to climb back to the top.

 

[48] Even Stalin admitted how this Western assistance decisively aided his war effort. Mikoyan reported to him in detail as the aid arrived, whether trucks via Persia or weapons via Archangel. Such was the urgency that in November 1941, Stalin totted up the number of planes (432) in his red pen on Mikoyan’s notes.

[49] This account is based on Beaverbrook’s Moscow Narrative in BBK/D/96/98/ 99/100 in Anne Chisholm and Michael Davie, Beaverbrook: A Life, pp. 406–20. Berezhkov, pp. 138–50. A. J. P. Taylor, Beaverbrook, pp. 487–91. Harriman, pp. 86–101. Erickson,Stalingrad, pp. 210–15. Mikoyan, pp. 408–15. Molotov chaired the Soviet delegation on Western aid; Mikoyan negotiated the details. Western aid: Mikoyan reports to Stalin who tots up planes: RGASPI 558.11.765.80–104, Mikoyan to Stalin July 1941–Dec. 1942.

 

[50] This account of the Battle of Moscow is based on Erickson, Overy and the memoirs of Zhukov, Molotov and Mikoyan Lesser Terror, p. 113. Erickson, Stalingrad, p. 217. Telegin in Bialer (ed.), pp. 274–6.

[51] RGASPI 558.11.492.59, Stalin to Zhukov 5 Oct. 1941.

[52] In 1966, when Zhukov’s memoirs were published in Moscow, this was regarded as too dangerous to be included. It was only in 1990, when the full version was published, that this account appeared.

[53] TsKhSD Party Control Commission 13/76, vol. 1, p. 30. Pavel Sudoplatov to the Party Control Commission 11 Oct. 1960. See also: Sudoplatov, pp. 146–7. Sergo B, p. 324. Beria, p. 112. Zhukov II, pp. 201–3. Volkogonov, pp. 172–3, quotes Marshal K. S. Moskalenko on Beria’s 7 Oct. 1941 peace probe, via Stamenev again. Erickson, Stalingrad, pp. 221–2. Anfilov, Zhukov in Stalin’s Generals, pp. 350–1.

[54] TsAMO 48a.1554.91.346, Shaposhnikov to Budyonny and Koniev appointing Zhukov Stavka rep. 6 Oct. 1941. Zhukov II, pp. 201–16. Spahr, pp. 269–71. Anfilov, Zhukov in Stalin’s Generals, p. 351; Stalin’s Ghosts, Woff, p. 364; Rzheshevsky, Koniev, p. 95. Simonov, “Zametki,” Molotov and Zhukov, p. 56. S. Khrushchev, Superpower, p. 236. Overy, pp. 114–5. Plumber Bulganin: Sergo B, p. 127.

[55] Voronov; Bialer (ed.), p. 302; Zhukov’s tone: Belov, p. 295. TsAMO 132.2642.233, Stalin to Fedorenko, commander of Tank Dept., Red Army 3 Aug. 1941. By 12 October, Stalin uses AA guns vs. tanks; TsAMO 132a.2642. 45.26, Stalin Stavka order, 12 Oct. 1941. Erickson, Stalingrad, p. 238.

[56] RGVA 9.39.103.390, Beria to Mekhlis 12 Dec. 1941. RGVA 9.39.100.312–4, Abakumov to Stalin, Molotov, Malenkov, Mekhlis and Zhukov 28 July 1941. Lesser Terror, pp. 47–9. RGASPI 558.3.25, p.32. D’Abernon, Stalin’s Library.

[57] Yakovlev, Century, p. 174. Lesser Terror, pp. 47–9.

 

[58] Natalya Poskrebyshev. Lesser Terror, pp. 69–72. Anatoly Sulianov, Arrestovat v Kremle; O zhizni i smerti marshala Beria, p. 189.

[59] Panic: Valery Soyfer, Lysenko and the Tragedy of Soviet Science , p. 148: account of A. A. Prokofyeva-Belagovskaya. Harriman-Abel, pp. 84–5. Panic in Moscow; Beria, Kaganovich, Malenkov; Ilya Novikov, secretary of Sverdlovsk Committee; Vasily Pronin, in Rybin, Stalin v Oktyabre 1941, pp. 3–14. Sudoplatov, p. 135. Chaos at factories: Mikoyan, p. 420. V. P. Pronin, Izvestiya TsK KPSS 4 (1991), p. 218; VIZh 10 (1991), p. 39. Overy, pp. 113–18. Erickson, Stalingrad, pp. 249–50

[60] Voroshilov marksman: Rybin: Kto Otravil Stalina?—memoir of V. Tukov, pp. 55–6. Panic: Rybin, Stalin v Oktyabre 1941, pp. 3–10. Belov in Bialer (ed.), p. 296. Stalin walking: Natalya Andreyeva. Berezhkov, p. 145. Brooks, Thank You C. Stalin, p. 178. Simonov, “Glazami,” p. 251. Ivan the Terrible book: RGASPI 558.3.350. Parachutists: Voronov, Bialer (ed.), p. 302.

[61] Mikoyan, pp. 417–22. MR, p. 42. Rybin, Stalin v Oktyabre 1941, pp. 8–14. Rybin, who uses the testimony of bodyguards though he himself was no longer one of Stalin’s personal security guards, being responsible for security of the Bolshoi Theatre, claims that the events described during the night of the 15th and morning of the 16th preceded the meeting described by A. Shakhurin, the People’s Commissar for Aircraft Production. Naturally the bodyguards did not know which meeting was which. V. P. Pronin, Izvestiya TsK KPSS 4 (1991), p. 218; VIZh 10 (1991), p. 39.

[62] In distant Kuibyshev, the ancient city of Samara on the Volga that had been chosen as the new capital should Moscow have to be abandoned, several buildings, including the local Party headquarters and a mansion in a narrow gully beside the steep banks of the Volga, surrounded by paved walks overlooking the river, were prepared for Stalin. A special air-raid shelter, reached by a lift, was constructed whence he could rule what was left of Russia. Svetlana Stalin was set up in a small town house with a courtyard along with her housekeeper Alexandra Nakashidze, and Galina, Vasily’s pregnant wife and Yakov’s daughter, Gulia (without her arrested mother). Kalinin and his mistress shared a small house with the Mikoyans; the Khrushchevs shared with the Malenkovs. The Poskrebyshevs, Litvinovs and others lived in the local sanatorium.

 

[63] Soyfer, p. 148. Account of A. A. Prokofyeva-Belagovskaya. Berezhkov pp. 153–5. Mikoyan, pp. 417–22. Natalya Poskrebysheva. Zhukov’s doubts on Stalin: D. I. Ortenberg, “U Zhukova v Perkhushkogo” in Krasnaya Zvezda, 30 Nov. 1991, p. 5. Kuibyshev: Radzinsky p. 467. House in Kuibyshev: S. Khrushchev, Superpower, p. 25. Svetlana, Twenty Letters, pp. 172–3. Mikoyan, pp. 417–22. MR, Rybin, Stalin v Oktyabre 1941, pp. 8–14. Vaksberg, pp. 225–7.

[64] A. Shakhurin, Voprosy Istorii, 3, 1975, pp. 142–3. Shakhurin claims this meeting took place on 16 October but it is clearly later than Mikoyan’s meeting which had a different agenda. Commissars came and left during these meetings which moved between Stalin’s apartment, his office and shelter at Kirovskaya Metro (see next note) and his dachas, so that this is surely a section of the meeting. His logbook of visitors shows Stalin was not in his office on 15–18 Oct.: we know Shakhurin’s meeting took place in his private quarters where no record was kept of meetings: IA. He worked mostly at the house over Kirov Street near Kirovskaya Metro: Rybin, Stalin v Oktyabre 1941, quotes bodyguard N. Kirilin on p. 12. Mikoyan, pp. 417–22.

[65] I am grateful for the access to General Y. Gorkov’s new work on the Kirovskaya Metro headquarters. Also; Nezavisimoe Voennoe Obozrenie , 19, 2002, p. 5: Memoirs of Communications Official Vladimir Kazakov. Shtemenko: Jukes in Stalin’s Generals, pp. 234–8. Deriabin, “bunked together,” p. 105. Khrushchev, Glasnost, p. 65. Volkogonov, p. 416. IA, 1996:2, pp. 68–9. Kuznetsov: Bialer (ed.), p. 428.

 

[66] Zhukov recalled him asking this again in mid-November but V. P. Pronin, Chairman of the Moscow Soviet (Mayor), remembered the question being asked on “16 or 17 October.” He surely asked it several times.

[67] IA, 1996: 2, pp. 68–9. Erickson, Stalingrad, pp. 220–2. Peshkova on Istomina’s “ever smiling.” Svetlana, Twenty Letters, pp. 172–3. Rybin, Stalin v Oktyabre 1941, pp. 8–14, including Istomina. Stalin also discussed this with Zhdanov in Leningrad. Chadaev in Kumanev (ed.), p. 419. RGASPI 558.3.32 Kutuzov by M. Bragin, p. 60. Zhukov in Bialer (ed.), p. 291. Pronin; Izvestiya TsK KPSS, 4, 1991, p. 218. Zhukov dates this conversation after 19 November but Pronin heard a similar one during 16 and 17 October. Zhukov II, pp. 230–6. Belov, Bialer (ed.), p. 296.

 

[68] Volkogonov, pp. 434–5. Rybin, Ryadom, p. 86. Rybin, Stalin v Oktyabre 1941, pp. 9–13. Belov in Bialer (ed.), p. 296. Visit to train? Vlast 5, 2000. Interview E. Zhirnov with Mikhail Smirtukov, Assistant to Sovnarkom.

 

[69] Telegin; Bialer (ed.), p. 304. V. P. Pronin, “Gorod-voin, Bitva za Moskvu,” p. 465; Pronin, Izvestia TsK KPSS, 4, 1991, p. 218. Pronin, VIZh, 10, 1991, p. 39. Pronin, “Gorod u linii fronta,” Moskovskie Novosti, no. 21, 26 Mar./2 Apr. 1995, p. 14. On Beria’s anticipating Stalin’s view and Stalin’s attack on Shcherbakov, Sergo Beria quoting what his father told his mother; he puts Shcherbakov’s crisis in June: pp. 75–6, 71. Djilas, p. 38. Zhukov II, pp. 235–40. Rybin, Stalin v Oktyabre 1941, pp. 11–13. Pronin said the meeting took place in the evening but Stalin’s logbook shows the meeting on the 19th starting at 15:40 and ending 21:20. Spades: Timoshenko in Kumanev (ed.), pp. 272–3. Not your tail: Mikoyan, pp. 417–22. MR, p. 42.

 

[70] Erickson, Stalingrad, pp. 221–2. Overy, pp. 113–20. On Malenkov and Far East, the call was from G. Borkov: Sukhanov, Memoirs . Albert Seaton, Stalin as Military Commander, pp. 124–6. Zhukov II, pp. 235–40. Medvedev, Neizvestnyi Stalin: chapter on Joseph Stalin and Joseph Apanasenko: “The Far Eastern Front during WW2,” quoting memoir of Gen. A. P. Belodorov in Sovietskaya Rossiya, 20 Oct. 1989. The Far Eastern commander Apanasenko managed to camouflage the disappearance of most of his army by forming an instant new one and building it up to a million troops to ensure that the Japanese did not realize his weakness and decide to attack after all.

 

[71] No one else was ever invited to join Stalin in his constant smoking. This honour to Shaposhnikov resembles Queen Victoria graciously permitting the old Disraeli to sit during their audiences, the only Prime Minister to receive such a privilege.

[72] Bunker: Svetlana, Twenty Letters, pp. 172–3. Simonov, Glazami, p. 37. Belov in Bialer (ed.), p. 295. Kaganovich and bunkers: Rybin, Stalin v Oktyabre 1941, p. 7. Shaposhnikov: Rzheshevsky on smoking, patronymic and respect from Stalin, Stalin’s Generals, pp. 226–30. Mikoyan, p. 386. Never without checking: Bialer (ed.), p. 592. Old fellow: Spahr, p. 83. Stalin limits hours: GKO, 11 May 1942. Very kind: Voronov in Bialer (ed.), p. 211. Fear of Beria: S. P. Ivanov, Shtab armeiskii, p. 250. Voodoo: FO 800/360, John Reed, Moscow, 19 Aug. 1942. Churchill and Stalin FCO, Mar. 2002. Also Alanbrooke, p. 303. Trip to front: Volkogonov, pp. 433–4.

[73] Volkogonov, pp. 433–4. Malenkov bomb: Volya and Igor Malenkov. Mikoyan, p. 415. Svetlana, Twenty Letters, pp. 172–3.

 

[74] Chairs: Zarubina, pp. 47–8. On 6–7 Nov. Stepan M, p. 69. P. A. Artemev in Bialer (ed.), pp. 305–9. Volkogonov, p. 436. Sudoplatov, pp. 133–6. 900 Days, p. 384. The music: Rybin, Ryadom so Stalinym v Bolshom Teatre, p. 32.

[75] Zhukov II, pp. 235–44.

[76] Berezhkov, pp. 160–2.

 

[77] In 1760, during the Seven Years War, Empress Elizabeth’s General Todtleben took Berlin. Alexander I took the Prussian capital in 1813.

[78] Maisky, Memoirs of a Soviet Ambassador, pp. 229–37. Berezhkov, pp. 162–8. Alanbrooke, p. 302. TsAMO RF 208.2524.20.124, Zhukov and Bulganin to Golubev, CO Tenth Army 20 Dec. 1941. Overy, pp. 117–22. Erickson, Stalingrad, pp. 248–96. Zhukov: Bialer (ed.), p. 292. Seaton, p. 132–4. Anfilov, Zhukov in Stalin’s Generals, p. 352. Zhukov II, pp. 240–50.

[79] Zhukov II, pp. 254–8.

 

[80] On Beria: Chadaev in Kumanev (ed.), pp. 429–32. On Malenkov: Sukhanov. Memoirs, Mikoyan, pp. 424–6. On Kaganovich: Nikolai Baibakov. Werner Hahn, Postwar Soviet Politics: The Fall of Zhdanov, p. 348. Beria A fair, Andreyev speech, p. 154.

 

[81] This description certainly complimented Arthur Lee, the colourful adventurer and Conservative MP who bought the house with the fortune of his American heiress wife. He was ennobled as Baron (later Viscount) Lee of Fareham by Lloyd George.

[82] Erickson, Stalingrad, p. 398. Berezhkov, pp. 188–9. Golovanov in Stalin’s office: April/May 1942: IA. Golovanov: MR, pp. 46–9, 72, inc. quotation from Churchill, p. 49. Churchill 4, pp. 296–304. Molotov’s vanity: RGASPI 82.2.1592.19–20, Molotov to Zhemchuzhina 8 July 1947, and RGASPI 82.2.1592.40–5, Molotov to Zhemchuzhina Apr. 1945.

 

[83] Mekhlis, pp. 181, 193. Stalin’s attitude to Mekhlis: Meretskov quoted in Mekhlis, p. 228, Mekhlis into Stalin’s office, A. A. Afanasev quoted p. 275; mustard, Khrulev, p. 249. Jokes on manic Mekhlis: Charkviani, pp. 30–1. Zamertsev: Bialer (ed.), pp. 442–7. Starinov: Bialer (ed.), pp. 456–7.

 

[84] Stalin’s nephew, Leonid Redens, met the crestfallen Marshal bathing affably with children in the Volga at Kuibyshev.

[85] Spahr, pp. 277–80. Meretskov, pp. 228–52, 280–3. Leonid Redens. Volkogonov, Voroshilov in Stalin’s Generals, p. 318. Vlasov: KR I, p. 204. Volkogonov, pp. 443–4.

 

[86] Kulik on the Crimean Front and Mekhlis’s investigation: Spahr, pp. 266–7, 294. V. Bobrenov and V. Riazantsev, “Marshal protiv Marshala,” Armia, 1993. no. 9, p. 47. David Glantz, “Forgotten Battles of German-Soviet War—The Winter Campaign: The Crimean Counter-Offensive,” Slavic Military Studies, vol. 14, no. 1, Mar. 2001, pp. 121–70. On Kulik denunciations: Kompromat materials in Mekhlis files RGVA 9.39.105.412–7, July 1941. Kulik’s young wife, Olga: Kira Alliluyeva. Karpov, Rastrelyanniye marshaly, p. 323. Court martial: Volkogonov, Rise and Fall of the Soviet Empire, p. 116.

 

[87] Mekhlis in the Crimea: Mekhlis, pp. 200–31. Glantz, “Forgotten Battles,” pp. 121–70. Stalin and Hindenburg in Spahr, p. 287. Hindenburg quoted by A. M. Vasilevsky, Delo vsei Zhizni, pp. 186–7. Simonov quoted in Medvedev, p. 463. Simonov, p. 36. TsAMO 215. A 1184.73.19, Vasilevsky and Mekhlis conversation on reinforcements and the big music, 23 Jan. 1942. David Ortenberg, Stalin Shcherbakov Mekhlis i drugie, pp. 60–6, 183–4. Mekhlis: “Damn you” said Stalin—Chadaev in Kumanev (ed.), p. 437 states 3 June but IA suggests 28 May. Also: “Go to hell!” Simonov to Kapler, quoted in Biagi, p. 34.

 

[88] The Kharkov offensive: Zhukov II, pp. 271–8. Anfilov Timoshenko in Stalin’sGenerals, p. 251. Erickson, Stalingrad, pp. 332–7, 345–7. Overy, pp. 154–8. Seaton, pp. 144–5. Spahr, p. 282. Stalin liked Timoshenko, to whom he could be surprisingly polite: when Stalin asked Timoshenko to hand over some units to another command, he wrote: “Pass on my words to the Marshal—that I very much ask his agreement with the Stavka proposal to transfer . . . I know will be a very big sacrifice. But I ask for that sacrifice.” Stalin to Timoshenko, 27 Oct. 1941. U.S. Library of Congress, Volkogonov Collection, Gen. Staff Reel. Mikoyan on Timoshenko, brave peasant, p. 386. Telephone call: Khrushchev exaggerated his prescience: his call to Stalin was on the 18th not the 17th. Mikoyan p. 465. Stepan M, p. 104. KR I, pp. 205–7. Khrushchev, Glasnost, pp. 60–2. Zhukov II, pp. 271–82. Kharkov losses: Vasilevsky, p. 193.

 

[89] Timoshenko’s letters to Stalin, scribbled on pages torn out of a notebook, which are in the newly opened Stalin archive, shed light on the Kharkov offensive and Khrushchev’s near breakdown.

[90] “Learn to wage war better.” TsAMO 3.11556.6.16, Stalin to Timoshenko 27 May 1942. Timoshenko denounces Khrushchev for lack of faith and for mental illness and for denouncing him: RGASPI 558.11.818.7, Timoshenko to Stalin 7 June 1942. See also RGASPI 558.11.818.10–11, Timoshenko to Stalin 22 June 1942 and RGASPI 558.11.818.9, Timoshenko to Stalin June 1942. “Hitler not as bad”: RGASPI 558.11.489.9, Stalin to Timoshenko 13 June 1942. Khrushchev and Bagirov story, Natalya Poskrebysheva. Khrushchev denounces Timoshenko: Stalin confirmed this to Zhukov, see William J. Spahr, Zhukov, The Rise and Fall of a Great Captain, pp. 95–101. Bulganin investigation: Chadaev in Kumanev (ed.), p. 442. KR I, pp. 210–12. Kharkov: David Glantz, “The Kharkov Operation, May 1942,” Slavic Military Studies, vol. 5, no. 3, Sept. 1992, pp. 451–94; vol. 5, no. 4, Dec. 1992, pp. 611–86. Volkogonov, p. 433. Ashes on K’s head: William Taubman, Khrushchev, Man and Era, p. 168.

[91] Divisions are not needles: TsAMO 96a.2011.26.137–42, Stalin and Timoshenko 4 July 1942. Antony Beevor, Stalingrad, pp. 69–72. Overy, pp. 156–8. Seaton, p. 147. Divisions in the market Jukes, Vasilevsky in Stalin’s Generals, p. 281.

 

[92] The fall of Rostov, approach to Stalingrad and North Caucasus: Order No. 270, 16 Aug. 1941, TsAMO 3.11.556.9. Volkogonov, p. 459. TsAMO 298.2526.5a, quoted in Volkogonov, p. 427. Order No. 227, 16 Aug. 1942, TsAMO 48.486.28.8, quoted in Beevor, p. 85. Overy, pp. 158–61. Seaton, Stalingrad, pp. 150–3. 4 and 5 August: IA.

 

[93] Kuntsevo’s furniture was “stylish ‘Utility,’ sumptuous and brightly coloured,” thought a young British diplomat, John Reed, “vulgarly furnished and possessed of every convenience a Soviet commissar’s heart could desire. Even the lavatories were modern and . . . clean.” A hundred yards from the house was Stalin’s new air-raid shelter of the “latest and most luxurious type,” with lifts descending ninety feet into the ground where there were eight or ten rooms inside a concrete box of massive thickness, divided by sliding doors. “The whole air-conditioned and execrably furnished . . . like some monstrous . . . Lyons Corner House,” wrote Reed.

[94] The bathrooms in all Stalin’s dachas were capacious with the baths specially constructed to fit his precise height.

[95] Kuntsevo: O. A. Rzheshevsky, Winston Churchill in Moscow 1942; Churchill and Stalin, FCO, Mar. 2002. Churchill 4, pp. 429, 437. Also: FO 800/300. John Reed (Moscow) 19 Aug. 1942. Doc. 32.

[96] Churchill 4, pp. 428–36. Harriman-Abel, pp. 52–5. Cab. 127/23: Record of conversation between Churchill and Stalin 12 Aug. 1942, Churchill and Stalin, Doc. 29, FCO, Mar. 2002. AFP RF 6.4.14.131.20–23, Pavlov notes of Churchill– Molotov meeting, quoted by Rzheshevsky, Churchill in Moscow.

[97] Harriman-Abel, pp. 155–9. Churchill 4, pp. 436–42. CAB 127/23: Record of conversation between Churchill and Stalin 13 Aug. 1942, Churchill and Stalin, Doc. 30.

 

[98] Archive of President of Russian Federation: 45.1.282.48–52: Pavlov’s notes of dinner in honour of Churchill and Harriman, 14 Aug. 1942, quoted by Rzheshevsky, Churchill in Moscow. Berezhkov, pp. 193–9. On eunuch-like Malenkov and hearty Voroshilov: FO 800/300, John Reed. (Moscow), 19 Aug. 1942; Churchill cold-shoulders Stalin: FO 800/300, journal Sir A. Clark Kerr, Moscow, 16 Aug. 1942, both in Churchill and Stalin. Churchill 4, p. 443. Alanbrooke, pp. 301–3. Harriman-Abel, p. 160. Archive of President of Russian Federation, 45.1.282.64, record of Churchill’s meeting with Stalin in his apartment on night of 15–16 Aug. 1942, quoted by Rzheshevsky, Churchill in Moscow. V. N. Pavlov, “Avtobiographicheskie Zametki,” Novaya i Noveishaya Istoriya, no. 4, 2000, pp. 109–110; Svetlana, redheads, the present, Marlborough. In addition, this account uses the conventional sources of Churchill 4, pp. 445–51. Svetlana, Twenty Letters, pp. 178–9. PRO, Prem 3/7612, pp. 35–7, Maj. Birse’s notes. A. H. Birse, Memoirs of an Interpreter, p. 19. Churchill waving his legs, sulks: FO 800/300. Journal entry of Sir A. Clark Kerr, Moscow, 16 Aug. 1942, Churchill and Stalin. Erickson, Stalingrad, p. 369.

 

[99] He received an engraved clock from the Front to show its gratitude: it is now in the Kaganovich archive at RGASPI. Interestingly, both Leonid Brezhnev and Mikhail Suslov, who together ruled the Soviet Union for almost two decades after 1964, got to know Kaganovich on this front.

[100] RGASPI 558.11.489.11, Stalin to Budyonny 27 July 1942, uniting of Malinovsky’s Southern Front with Budyonny’s North Caucasus Front. Kaganovich, Zapiski, pp. 463–79. Strakhov, Bialer (ed.), pp. 442–7, 608. TsAMO 132a. 2642.32.145–7, Stalin to Kaganovich Aug. 1942. RGASPI 558.11.712.119–20, Budyonny to Stalin 19 Sept. 1942 and 25 Nov. 1942. On Stalin’s fury about Kaganovich’s wound: Sudoplatov, p. 148, and Sergo B, p. 83. Kaganovich was wounded in late Oct. and visited Stalin 19 Nov. 1942, IA.

 

[101] Baibakov’s interview for this book has been invaluable as he is one of the last of Stalin’s Ministers still living. Baibakov became a perennial member of the Soviet government: Stalin appointed him Commissar for Oil in 1944 and later he ran Gosplan, the main economic agency, except for a short interval, until being sacked by Gorbachev in the eighties. It is a mark of the obsolescence of Soviet economics that the young men Stalin appointed were still running it forty years later. At the time of writing, this tireless nonagenerian is working in the oil industry, taking conference calls with Stalinist dynamism while wearing his medals, beneath a portrait of Lenin.

 

[102] Beria, p. 120. Sergo B, pp. 79–85. Sudoplatov, pp. 148–51. Tiulenev in Bialer (ed.), pp. 451–2, and Strakhov, pp. 442–7, 608. Interview Nikolai Baibakov. Also: Baibakov, p. 113. Beria’s arrival at Ordzhonikidze: Gela Charkviani from Candide Charkviani, notes. Beria was away 20 Aug.–17 Sept. Overy, pp. 157–9. Erickson, Stalingrad, pp. 370–1, 376–81. Kaganovich, Zapiski, pp. 463–79. TsAMO 132a.2642.32.145–7, Stalin to Kaganovich, Aug. 1942. RGASPI 558.11.712.119–20, Budyonny to Stalin 19 Sept. 1942 and 25 Nov. 1942. “I’ve been back in Moscow for seven days and I want to see you but you are very busy. To be without work in the present situation is impossible . . . please receive me.”

[103] The main sources for this account of Stalingrad are A. Beevor, Stalingrad, Overy, Russia’s War, and Erickson, The Road to Stalingrad and The Road to Berlin, D. Volkogonov, Stalin: Triumph and Tragedy, and the memoirs of Zhukov and Vasilevsky. TsAMO 3.11556.9, Stalin to Vasilevsky, Yeremenko and Malenkov 23 Aug. 1942.

 

[104] When Khrushchev was in power, he ordered his cronies like Yeremenko to inflate his heroic role at Stalingrad, just like Stalin himself.

[105] Zhukov II, pp. 293–9. Erickson, Stalingrad, pp. 384–5. Volkogonov, p. 461. Beevor, Stalingrad, pp. 117–27. Overy, pp. 166–9. Vasilevsky flew back, leaving Malenkov down in Stalingrad to work with Zhukov. Stalin and Zhukov’s characters: Zhukov, “Korotko o Staline,” Pravda, 20 Jan. 1989, p. 3. KR I, p. 218. Victor Gobarev, “Khrushchev and the Military. Historical and Psychological Analysis,” Slavic Military Studies, vol. 11, no. 3, Sept. 1998, pp. 128–44, inc. Gobarev: “K’s finest hour.” Luganski in Bialer (ed.), pp. 54, 610: Gen. Stepan Mikoyan, Vasily Stalin’s friend and son of Mikoyan, casts doubts on this story. Thanks to Antony Beevor for this.

 

[106] A. M. Vasilevsky, Delo Vsey Zhizni, pp. 95–6. Volkogonov, p. 470. Thanks to Prof. Oleg Rzheshevsky for the rest of the story based on his own conversation with Vasilevsky. Money orders: MR, p. 303. On Stalin: “my father was a priest too . . .” Ogonyok, 2 Apr. 1988, no. 14, p. 20. Alexander Bolotin, “Shto my znaem o Liapidevskom?” the famous aviator Anatoly Liapidevsky met Stalin at the Kremlin: “Comrade Liapidevsky, your father was a priest, mine was a priest too. In case of need, contact Comrade Stalin directly,” quoted in Tucker, Power , p. 3. Stalin’s lifelong friendship with priest Peter Kapanadze: Charkviani, pp. 45–6. On Stalin’s freeing a prisoner: Vasilevsky on his friend Shavlovsky in Kumanev (ed.), p. 236. On timetable and Stavka: Erickson, Road to Berlin, p. 41. Shaposhnikov and Voodoo: FO 800/300, John Reed (Moscow), 19 Aug. 1942. TsAMO 215.1184.48.179, decision of GKO no. 1723, signed Stalin Ch, GKO, 11 May 1942. Vasilevsky had actually been serving as Acting Chief of Staff since 24 Apr. when Shaposhnikov had first attempted to retire, Jukes, Vasilevsky in Stalin’s Generals, pp. 279–80. Won’t hurt a fly: Sergo B, p. 339.

 

[107] Simultaneously with Stalingrad’s Operation Uranus, Zhukov launched the forgotten Operation Mars against the Rzhev salient facing Moscow, probably his greatest defeat: hundreds of thousands of men were lost in just two days of an operation that illustrated his bold but crude style.

[108] Zhukov II, pp. 307–58. Anfilov, Zhukov in Stalin’s Generals , p. 354. Erickson, Berlin, pp. 425, 429, 433, 445, 452, 458, 461–63. Beevor, Stalingrad, pp. 213, 232–4, 240. Alan Clark, Barbarossa, p. 218. Slavic Military Studies, vol. 10, no. 4, Dec. 1997, pp. 104–39. Insomnia: PREM 3/430/7: Record of private talk between the PM and Generalissimo Stalin after Plenary Session 17 July 1945, Potsdam: Churchill and Stalin, FCO 2002. On Operation Mars: see David Glantz, Zhukov’s Greatest Defeat: The Red Army’s Epic Disaster in Operation Mars 1942, in which he estimates losses of up to 500,000. Soviet data suggests much lower losses of 70,000 killed and missing. (A. S. Orlov, “Operaziya Mars: razlichnye traktovki” in Mir Istorii, vol. 4, 2000.)