Stalin: A Biography

34. THE WORLD IN SIGHT

Stalin the Leader was multifaceted. He was a mass killer with psychological obsessions. He thought and wrote as a Marxist. He behaved like the more ruthless Russian rulers of earlier centuries. He was a party boss, administrator, editor and correspondent. He was a paterfamilias and genial host at his dacha as well as a voracious reader and intellectual autodidact. Depending on circumstances, he displayed all these aspects at once or hid some while exhibiting others. He had the capacity to divide and subdivide himself. Stalin’s multitude of forms left his associates impressed, baffled and fearful — and indeed this was one of the secrets of his success in maintaining dominance over them.

His record as an international statesman has always been controversial. The jury of history has offered a majority verdict that his preoccupation with Soviet economic development and political consolidation deflected his attention from foreign affairs. Some have accused Stalin of knowing and caring nothing about events abroad. The building of ‘socialism in a single country’ was among his main slogans, and the General Secretary’s advocacy of this priority fostered the misperception, both at the time and later, that he was not bothered by what happened in the rest of the world. The general assumption has been that he and his Politburo comrades had ditched the project of worldwide socialist revolution. His opponents Trotski and Bukharin said this, and their view has attracted the nodding heads of most subsequent commentators. About Stalin’s concentration on the situation inside the USSR there is no doubt. But this did not mean he overlooked foreign policy. Nor did he allow it to be formulated without his active intervention: he continued to give it the high priority it had had for him in the 1920s.

Stalin had always thought hard about international relations and Soviet external security. During the Civil War he had had responsibility for policy in the Caucasus and the Baltic region. In 1920 he discussed with Lenin the future of a Europe under socialist administration. Stalin offered his thoughts on military and political aspects of the Red Army’s campaign in Poland; he also came to the fore with proposals for expanding Soviet influence along the entire frontier from Turkey to Afghanistan. Under the New Economic Policy, far from being preoccupied with factional and bureaucratic matters, he took an active leading part in the Politburo’s decisions on Britain, Germany and China.

Detailed elaboration of policy was still left to institutions with the necessary expertise: the People’s Commissariat of External Affairs and the Comintern. When Georgi Chicherin retired through ill health in 1930, Maxim Litvinov took his place despite having no recent affiliation with Stalin;¹ and when the post of Secretary-General of the Executive Committee of the Comintern was created after the Seventh World Congress in 1935, Stalin turned not to an adjutant such as Molotov or Kaganovich but to the Bulgarian communist Georgi Dimitrov, whom he barely knew but who had worldwide fame after being put on trial in Nazi Germany. Stalin in public mentioned foreign policy in his political reports on behalf of the Central Committee but wrote no substantial piece on the subject. Yet when items of importance cropped up, an internal group of the Politburo consulted among themselves.² Stalin watched, regulated and directed. He sent instructions. No important decision was taken before he had given his approval. Yet he did not usually roll up his sleeves and get involved in the minutiae of implementation as he did in internal affairs.

This detachment from the day-to-day running of the People’s Commissariat and the Comintern as well as the confidentiality of discussions at the highest level (which was maintained for decades after Stalin’s death)³ sustained the mystery about the Politburo’s intentions. Abroad, speculation was rife. The USSR’s military might was growing at a steady rate. Each May Day parade indicated that the Soviet state was recovering its position as a European and Asian power of importance.

Yet what did Stalin want to do in the world? If he is judged by his own speeches and articles, he looked upon global politics through the lens of Marxism–Leninism and rejected any suggestion that Soviet foreign policy was based on the selfish pragmatism of the USSR as a single state. Repeatedly he declared his indebtedness to the ideas of Vladimir Lenin. At Congresses he cited this as the party’s main legacy. Lenin had argued that, so long as capitalism survived around the world, imperialist rivalries would recur. Economic competition between advanced industrial powers would inevitably spill over into diplomatic conflicts and outright wars. Those powers lacking overseas colonies and informal dependencies were bound to seek access to the markets of their more fortunate rivals. A Second World War — and possibly further global wars — would be the inevitable result. In his address to the Eighteenth Party Congress, Stalin picked up this theme. The diplomatic and military conflicts of the 1930s appeared to him as confirmation of Lenin’s analysis in every detail: capitalism was inherently incapable of maintaining peace around the globe.

From this viewpoint the treaties signed at the end of the Great War were a prescription for future military explosion. Germany had been humbled at Versailles in 1919 and its determination to reassert itself would cause ceaseless trouble. The USA, victorious in the First World War, had an interest in dismantling the British Empire and in restricting Japanese influence in the Pacific region. Throughout Europe and Asia there were suppurating sores in international relations which could lead to wars. Supposedly the problem lay with the persistence of the global capitalist economy. The USSR meanwhile remained a pariah state. When the League of Nations met for the first time in January 1920, it withheld a seat from the Soviet regime. The post-war treaties, moreover, created successor states in eastern Europe hostile to the October Revolution. The perceived danger for the Politburo was that somehow this volatile situation might result in a crusade against the USSR.

For Stalin, as had been true for Lenin before him, the primary aim of Soviet security policy was to stay clear of entanglement in conflicts between capitalist powers. Since the mid-1920s Stalin had emphasised a concern with building ‘socialism in a single country’. This did not mean that he urged pacifism or envisaged permanent abstention from military activity; indeed he looked forward to the possibility that the Red Army might exploit difficulties among capitalist powers as a result of their wars. He had never revoked his statement in Problems of Leninism that more revolutions were needed for the Soviet state to secure itself against the possibility of foreign military intervention and overthrow.⁴ For the most part he emphasised another aspect of Lenin’s thought, namely that the USSR should seek to stay out of world wars. As he put it, he and his fellow leaders were not going to ‘pull chestnuts out of the fire’ on behalf of capitalist powers.

Such considerations conditioned Soviet foreign policy in the inter-war period. But they were of a generalised nature and led many contemporary politicians and diplomats — and subsequent writers — to suppose that Stalin was a pragmatist who had put ideology behind him. This is a tricky topic. It is true that, if account is taken of the somersaults in Soviet diplomatic activity, Lenin and Stalin showed little consistency. In Lenin’s time the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk had been signed in 1918 and some observers, including a lot of communists, treated this as an abandonment of Bolshevik revolutionary goals. Yet the Red Army invaded Poland in 1920 and engaged in ‘revolutionary war’. Similar inconsistency was evident from the late 1920s. At first Stalin used the Comintern to instruct communist parties in Europe to regard social-democratic and labour parties as their greatest enemies; but he then insisted that communists should join ‘popular fronts’ with such parties. Of course the Marxist–Leninist stress on the importance of flexibility in Soviet foreign policy was hardly distinctive: it is an almost universal characteristic of diplomacy regardless of time, place or political orientation. Marxism–Leninism after 1917 was reinventing the ancient wheel of international relations.

And even when Stalin appeared ‘ideological’, he never overlooked practical considerations. The USSR was an isolated state whose structure of politics and economy posed a challenge to the world’s capitalist powers. Hostility to the Soviet Union had led to military intervention in the Civil War; this put the Politburo on constant alert for a possible repetition. Stalin and his associates had a pragmatic interest in ending their international isolation; they looked for opportunities for revolutionary self-assertion. There were few ways to alter the fundamental situation short of demolishing the legacy of the October Revolution. At the very least the USSR would have had to reintroduce the market economy and recognise the debts owed by Russian governments before October 1917.

Nothing about Stalin suggested that he would contemplate such a step. Accused by Trotski of betraying the October Revolution, he indeed distorted and eliminated much of Lenin’s legacy. But a Leninist of a sort he remained while introducing a personal dimension to his handling of international relations. He acted as if politics were fundamentally a matter of unmasking and neutralising conspiracies at home and abroad. Lenin had not been averse to impugning the motives of foreign states; he had not failed to trump up the charge in March 1921 that the Kronstadt mutineers were in league with governments hostile to the Soviet state. Stalin, moreover, made little distinction between types of capitalist state. He was equally ready to deal with fascists, liberal democrats and socialists in governments abroad; the popular-front policy was premised on pragmatic judgement rather than ideological preference. Yet this was no different from the attitude struck by Lenin, who in 1920 had urged the German communists to form an alliance with the German extreme right as a means of undermining the Weimar Republic and tearing up the Treaty of Versailles. Trotski in exile exaggerated the discrepancy between the viewpoints on Soviet foreign policy taken by Lenin and Stalin.⁵

But how could Stalin translate these principles into action? In the early 1930s he had no constructive programme of foreign policy except for his aim to enable the USSR to survive. He did not shape events but instead reacted to them. This remained true while few options for alliance were available to a Soviet state whose very existence was a challenge to the world’s other powers. The best Stalin could hope for was to neutralise the threats of a crusade against the USSR. He was agitated by signs of expansionism on his borders. To the north and south there was little menace, but the omens were dire to the east. In December 1931 the Japanese invaded Manchuria and installed the puppet state of Manchukuo under the heel of the Kwantung Army. Militarism held sway in Tokyo. The Kremlin was concerned lest this might be the prelude to an attack on the USSR through Siberia.

During the First Five-Year Plan Stalin saw reasons to be hopeful about developments to the west. There was in fact much congruence between policy at home and policy abroad: at the beginning of the 1930s it was extremely radical in both cases. Communist parties across Europe were encouraged to go on to the political attack against their governments. Ultra-leftist campaigns were approved. The Comintern, which had tended towards caution in Germany after the failure of revolution to occur there and had eliminated leftist leaders who sympathised with Trotski, started to campaign against those whom it accused of ‘rightism’. The basis for Stalin’s optimism was the acute trouble in the world economy. The Wall Street Crash in 1929 created havoc in every capitalist country. While the Politburo and Gosplan planned and achieved a massive increase in Soviet industrial output, the markets in North America and Europe fell into disarray — and no country was more economically disrupted than Germany. Communists in the main German cities took political advantage, claiming that the Great Depression signalled the final crisis of capitalism around the globe. Stalin agreed with this interpretation, which fitted Bolshevism’s long-standing predictions and analyses.

Thus it came about that during the Reichstag electoral campaign in July 1932 he instructed the Executive Committee of the Comintern to order the German Communist Party to treat the social-democrats rather than Hitler’s NSDAP as the main enemy. Hegemony over the political left was to be given precedence over struggling against Nazism. This egregious mistake is taken as evidence that he had no serious perspective on the general situation in Europe. German communist leaders were alarmed by his instruction and a delegation was sent to him. When they pleaded that the danger from the Nazis was a most urgent one, he retorted that he had taken this into account. Stalin understood that Hitler might do well in the elections. His riposte to his visitors, who included Franz Neumann, was blunt. He argued: ‘Don’t you think, Neumann, that if the nationalists come to power in Germany, they’ll be so completely preoccupied with the West that we’ll be able to build up socialism in peace?’ By this he seemed to mean that the Nazis as fundamental adversaries of the Treaty of Versailles would cause havoc in Europe. He appeared to believe that the result would probably be to the advantage of the Comintern in the cause of spreading revolution westwards from Russia.⁶

In fact the defeated leader of the Right Deviation, Bukharin, had anticipated that Hitler would be a much more aggressive and effective leader than Stalin supposed; and this prognosis was vindicated when the Führer, building on his electoral success, became German Chancellor in January 1933. He tore up the Treaty of Rapallo. He withdrew the Wehrmacht from its collaboration with the Red Army. He fulminated against the Bolshevik political and ideological menace to Europe. The contents of Mein Kampf were shown to have been no aberration as Hitler asserted himself in Europe. Stalin’s assessment of German political trends had been proved dangerously naïve. The threat from the West had become as acute as the threat from the East, and Germany and Japan became the twin focus of changes in Soviet foreign policy for the rest of the decade. Stalin took little note of North America beyond encouraging closer commercial links between the USSR and the USA. About South America, Africa and the rest of Asia he had little to say. The Politburo continued to avoid risky revolutionary initiatives. Armaments production was kept as a high priority. Discussions were held in Moscow to elaborate a foreign policy adequate to deal with German expansionism.

The Politburo, shocked by Hitler’s success in Germany, took steps to increase Soviet security. One such improvement was achieved that same year when the USA announced its decision to give diplomatic recognition to the USSR. This suited the interests of American business abroad. Having spent years enhancing Soviet influence in Europe, Stalin had acquired a window on to the New World.⁷

Meanwhile the Red Army was reinforced in the Far East in case Tokyo should try to use its Manchurian quasi-colony as the base for an invasion of the USSR. Stalin had not forgotten about the Japanese incursions into eastern Siberia before the Bolsheviks won the Civil War in Russia. As regards Germany, there was greater room for manoeuvre. People’s Commissar of External Affairs Maxim Litvinov argued that rapprochement with all Europe’s anti-fascist parties and the formation of popular fronts were essential for Soviet interests. This had the support of Georgi Dimitrov, who had been released from a German prison in February 1934 and given political asylum in the USSR. Dimitrov objected to the official characterisation of the leaders and members of other socialist parties as ‘social-fascists’.⁸ Although the ideas originated with Litvinov and Dimitrov, sanction had to come from the Politburo and in particular from Stalin. France was recognised as the country in Europe which needed to be pulled into the Soviet embrace. Like the USSR, France felt threatened by Hitler’s foreign policy; it was reasonable for Stalin to assume that a reconciliation between the USSR and France would suit both governments.

Stalin also accepted advice from Litvinov to adopt a policy of ‘collective security’. At the Seventeenth Party Congress in January 1934 he expressed satisfaction at the improvement in diplomatic relations with France and Poland. Although he denied this implied a reversal of the USSR’s antagonism to the Treaty of Versailles, he objected to the stated anti-Soviet pretensions of Nazi leaders and offered no olive branch to Germany. His hopes at that time lay with the USA (and even in Japan, which he thought could be induced into co-operating with the USSR). ‘We stand’, said Stalin,

But he omitted to say how these aims could be achieved. What was clear was that Soviet leaders were seeking a way out of their isolation.

The formation of popular fronts would involve communist support for anti-fascist coalition governments. At last the threat from Nazi Germany was recognised as being of a unique order. Dimitrov argued that the Comintern had to be reorganised to deal with this. In October he argued that the Comintern was over-centralised. Communist parties abroad, he wrote to Stalin, should be given the latitude to react autonomously to national conditions.¹⁰ This did not mean that the foreign communist parties would have a choice about whether to set up popular fronts. They were peremptorily told to set them up.¹¹ Dimitrov was writing about secondary matters; he wanted the parties to handle day-to-day affairs without constantly referring them upwards. He was hoping for pies in the sky. While calling for independence for these parties, he did not break the chains of their continued subjection.

Stalin approved these ideas of Dimitrov without much modification. Dimitrov was proving a fertile source of ideas for allowing the USSR and Europe’s communist parties to adapt to fast-changing political and military realities. Stalin failed to come up with novel ideas of his own. Nevertheless such changes as were made to foreign policy had to have his personal permission; and while giving Dimitrov his head in the Comintern, he and Litvinov had other fish to fry. Stalin did not limit the USSR’s initiatives in international relations to contacts with left-of-centre parties. He also wanted reconciliation with the French government of Gaston Doumergue. Steadily the Soviet leadership was edging its way to a policy founded on treaties of ‘collective security’. With this in mind, Stalin permitted his diplomats to apply for and secure the USSR’s entry into the League of Nations in September 1934. Not only France but also Czechoslovakia and Romania were the object of Soviet overtures.¹² Stalin was aided by the general fear of a Germany resurgent under Hitler. The existence of the Third Reich scared these states, and all of them were considering surmounting their fundamental distaste for dealing with the USSR. The Red Army’s potential as an anti-Nazi force in eastern and central Europe made negotiations with the Kremlin more attractive than at any time since the October Revolution.

There was much disagreement among observers about Stalin’s purposes. To some it seemed that he was steadily moving towards a more traditional Russian agenda in foreign policy. The particular treaties and alliances did not matter for them: such things always changed in each generation. But the idea was gaining currency that Stalin had abandoned the internationalist objective of Leninism and wished for the USSR’s recognition as a great power with no interest in the overturning of the world political and economic system. Others accepted this as true but qualified the judgement. To them it seemed obvious that both the geopolitical position of the Soviet Union and Stalin’s personal preference dictated an inclination towards rapprochement with Germany at the expense of good relations with the United Kingdom and France. Yet such an analysis was challenged by those who felt that Stalin lacked the mental preparation to be anything else than reactive as a global statesman.

They underestimated his thoughtful adaptiveness and the extent of his break with Marxism–Leninism. Equally clearly he was eager to avoid the mistakes made under Lenin’s leadership. He told guests at a dinner party attended by Georgi Dimitrov that Lenin had been wrong to call for a European civil war during the Great War.¹³ He also set about studying the history of international relations, and much scholarly research on this was published at his instigation in Moscow in the 1930s. While thrusting this information into the frame of his worldview, he retained a readiness to keep Soviet foreign policy flexible. Lenin had come to power with this attitude. Stalin had been impressed and sought to emulate him. Just as Lenin had confronted and survived the deadly diplomatic trial of strength with Germany in 1917–18, Stalin was determined to prove his mettle in the contests of the 1930s. As the threats in Europe and Asia grew, he wanted to be intellectually prepared. Without such knowledge, he knew, he could be caught out of his depth; and he had no desire to put himself as an innocent into the arms of the People’s Commissariat of External Affairs or of the Communist International.

Civil war had broken out in Spain in July 1936 when the fascist general Francisco Franco revolted against the Republican coalition government of Diego Barrio (who derived authority from a popular front). Franco appealed for assistance from Germany and Italy. Both complied, and Hitler’s Luftwaffe was given experience in bombing towns and villages. Meanwhile France and the United Kingdom, while sympathising with the elected government, maintained a position of neutrality. The Spanish government rallied all the forces it could on the political left. Spain’s communists in particular stood by it.

In Moscow the time had come for a decision on whether or not to intervene as Hitler and Mussolini had already done. Deployment of Red military units was not feasible at such a distance. But the revolutionary tradition impelled Stalin to look favourably on the request from Madrid for help. So too did the awareness that if no resistance to German assertiveness were shown, Europe as a whole would be exposed to the expansionist aims of the Third Reich. Failure to act would be taken as a sign that the policy of the popular front had no substance. Finance and munitions were dispatched by boat to Spain from Leningrad. Simultaneously the Communist International sent the Italian Communist Party leader Palmiro Togliatti under the alias Ercoli to direct the activities of the Spanish communists. Togliatti and his fellow political and military emissaries found a chaotic scene. At Stalin’s command they sought to turn the Spanish Communist Party into the leading force on the left without actually entering the government coalition. The policy of the popular front was maintained and Moscow frowned on all talk of a communist seizure of power. Dimitrov came into his own by leading the implementation of the general line agreed in the Kremlin: he knew it was not safe to ignore his master’s voice.¹⁴

As the Republic’s armed forces were pushed on to the retreat by Franco, the Spanish government pressed for the communists to enter the coalition. Stalin had to be phoned for consent and then Dimitrov sent the tactical instructions to communist leader José Diaz. Eventually the socialist party chief Largo Caballero emerged as head of government. By March 1937 Stalin had become distinctly edgy about being drawn into a military struggle of internal significance without being able to control the consequences, and reports about the effectiveness of the coalition and its army were not encouraging. His instinct was to pull out of Spain and disband the International Brigades in the event that Germany and Italy were also to withdraw; but for the moment he insisted on a merger of the communist and socialist parties in Spain.¹⁵ This immediately became Comintern policy. Yet the inter-party negotiations in Spain made little progress: years of mutual antagonism could not be discounted overnight. Nor did Stalin help the situation by deploying NKVD agents to seek out and liquidate Spanish Trotskyists. Distrust on the political left grew rapidly as members of the POUM, loyal to Trotski’s ideas, were rounded up. Remorselessly the Spanish Communist Party reinforced its influence in the government.

The situation changed from month to month and the socialists refused to do the bidding of the Spanish Communist Party. By February 1938 Stalin had concluded that the communists should resign from the government. Dimitrov in Moscow and Togliatti in Spain complied with the decision despite the disarray it was bound to cause in the anti-Franco alliance.¹⁶ The political tensions on the left were not concocted out of nothing by Stalin. But he made them murderously worse than they need have been; and if anyone thought that his accusations against internal victims in the USSR were merely an instrument of despotism without genuine importance for him, they were disillusioned by events in Spain. Exactly the same political persecutions were put in train. Stalin was determined that the far-left elements on the Republican side should be liquidated before they could infect the Spanish Communist Party with their diseased purposes. Of course there were plenty of leftists in Spain who by their own profession were Trotskyists, anarchists or independent communists. Stalin had no need to ponder the options: he knew he had to cauterise the wound of far-left pluralism. Spain was going to be helped on the terms of his political homicidalism.

The Civil War had by then turned decisively in Franco’s favour. By March 1939 it was over. The Republicans had lost the protracted struggle against reactionary forces backed by German and Italian fascism. Stalin’s policy was criticised by Trotski as excessively cautious. For Trotski, the Spanish Civil War offered one of those regular opportunities to spread revolution west of the USSR and to undermine the political far right across Europe. Stalin, though, was mindful of the risks he would run with any strong intervention. Always he dreaded thrusting the French and British governments into the arms of General Franco. Too obvious a communist hegemony over the Spanish government coalition might easily have brought this about. But he and the Comintern at least did something, and it is hardly likely that the Republicans would have held out so long if he had not sanctioned the Spanish Communist Party’s participation. His Trotskyist critics accused him of excessive pragmatism in his management of Soviet foreign policy. They ignored the limited resources available to the USSR. Economically, militarily and — above all — geographically there was no serious chance for him to do more than he achieved at the time.

If he could not have done much more to help, however, he could certainly have done less to hinder. His behaviour towards the Spanish political left, especially in the suppression of the POUM, rightly earned him the opprobrium of George Orwell in Homage to Catalonia. For Stalin acted within the cage of his assumptions. He could not imagine how a revolutionary movement could be properly mobilised unless it was purged of untrustworthy elements. At the very same time as he was getting rid of such people in the USSR he was determined to eliminate them from the ranks of the Comintern. The cause of the Revolution would rest on the inner health of the political far left. Trotskyists were infectious vermin. Stalin’s Comintern agents fought for the cause of Soviet internal politics in the mountains and plains of distant Spain.

35. APPROACHES TO WAR

Domestic politics, state security and foreign policy were knotted together in the late 1930s. Stalin arrested hundreds of thousands of harmless Soviet citizens who were of an awkward national ancestry. Poles, Finns, Chinese and Koreans resident in border areas next to the states of their co-nationals were routinely deported to other distant regions of the USSR. Even the Greeks living in the Soviet republics by the Black Sea, hundreds of maritime miles from Greece, suffered this fate.¹ Soviet state security policy had a national and ethnic dimension. While promoting the press and schooling for non-Russians in the Soviet multinational state, Stalin showed an intense hostility to some among them. What has become known as ethnic cleansing was not new to the USSR. The Politburo had practised such a policy against Cossacks in the north Caucasus at the end of the Civil War.² Proposals for cleansing on the basis of nationality resurfaced at the start of the Five-Year Plan.³ But Stalin’s deportations, arrests and executions during and after the Great Terror mounted to a higher scale of national and ethnic repression.

The application of this policy did not exclude card-carrying communists in the Soviet Union. Stalin’s zeal to make the country safe from subversion from abroad went to the point of the extermination of the Communist Party of Poland exiles in Moscow. Polish communists were especially suspect to him. Several of their leaders had sympathised with Soviet internal oppositions in the 1920s. Earlier still, many of them had sided with the Polish Marxist leader and theorist Rosa Luxemburg against Lenin before the Great War. Stalin had anyway always fretted about the menace posed by Poland to the USSR. He was easily convinced by reports from Yezhov’s NKVD that the Polish exile community had been infiltrated by the intelligence agencies of the Western capitalist powers. Stalin was in no mind in November 1937 to treat people on an individual basis: he demanded the entire party’s dissolution. Dimitrov, himself a Bulgarian exile in Moscow, docilely complied and wrote to Stalin for procedural advice. Stalin replied with the blunt demand that Dimitrov should show a sense of urgency: ‘The dissolution is about two years late.’⁴ Already several Polish communist leaders were in the Lubyanka. The NKVD swiftly picked up the remainder, and most of the prisoners were shot.

Dimitrov’s obedience did not save the Comintern from Stalin’s suspicions. Scores of functionaries in its Executive Committee as well as its various departments were executed. No exemption was given to emissaries serving in Spain who were loyally slaughtering the POUM. Stalin and Yezhov tricked many of them back from Madrid and had them killed. Stalin was blunt to Dimitrov, raging that ‘all of you in the Comintern are hand in glove with the enemy’.⁵ In Moscow he could carry out the purge he desired. Abroad he got Dimitrov to compel the freely operating communist parties — few though they had become — in France, Spain, Italy, the United Kingdom and the USA — to expel members who refused to support the official line or who had sympathised with Stalin’s opponents in the past. This punitive atmosphere pervaded the worldwide communist movement. Stalin wanted only such support abroad as was unmistakably loyal.

As the Republicans went down to defeat in the Spanish Civil War, Stalin’s interest reverted to the French Communist Party and its policy toward Léon Blum’s socialist government. French communist leader Maurice Thorez, like his counterparts elsewhere in Europe, had been wary of the turn towards the popular front; but, having accepted it, he proposed to join Blum’s cabinet in 1936. Permission had to be sought in Moscow. When Moscow demurred, Thorez obeyed Moscow.⁶ Always the Kremlin kept tight tutelage and Stalin was in command. The chief restriction on his manoeuvres was the quality of information reaching him from the Executive Committee of the Comintern as well as from France and other countries; and leaders such as Thorez, much as they strove to please Stalin, draped their messages in the cloth of their political preferences. Stalin had confidence in the system of decision-making he had established. He also functioned according to his general assumptions about global developments. While recognising the importance of international relations, he could not afford to spend most of his time on them if he was to secure the kind of internal transformation he sought — and in the late 1930s the carrying through of the bloody mass purges remained his first priority. Only an extraordinarily decisive Leader could operate as he did on the European and Asian political stage.

This was obvious in his intervention in the affairs of the Chinese Communist Party. Stalin continued to demand that Mao Tse-tung maintain the alliance with Chiang Kai-shek. Although Mao thought that Stalin overrated the Chinese nationalist movement — the Kuomintang — led by Chiang Kai-shek, he sorely needed financial and political assistance from Moscow. ‘United front’ tactics were demanded by Stalin, and Mao had to accede. Since being suppressed by the Kuomintang in 1927, the Chinese Communist Party had regrouped. The Long March had been undertaken in 1934 to the north of China, where Mao consolidated the party’s support in the villages. The Kuomintang and the Chinese Communist Party remained intensely hostile to each other. Mutual suspicion spilled over into sporadic violence. Civil war was prevented only by the external threat posed by militarist Japan. The Japanese, who had occupied Manchuria in 1931 and set up the Manchukuo puppet state, plainly contemplated further territorial expansion. To Stalin, who as usual thought in broad geopolitical categories and desired to enhance the immediate security of the USSR, it seemed best for Mao and Chiang to put aside their rivalry; this was the advice supplied by the Comintern to the Chinese communists throughout the mid-1930s.

Mao continued to wriggle away from the Comintern line. No foreign communist party leader before the Second World War displayed such contumacy (as Stalin regarded it). Mao’s men hated the policy of alliance with Chiang and wanted to free themselves from it as soon as they could. Yet when Chiang was captured by an independent Chinese warlord, they found themselves compelled to send Zhou Enlai to secure his release. They had to do this or else face losing crucial military supplies from the USSR. Communist discipline had prevailed.⁷

The situation changed in July 1937 when the Japanese invaded China proper. Beijing and Shanghai fell quickly to their forces. The Chinese Red Army resumed a more co-operative attitude towards the Kuomintang in the national interest. Yet China’s joint forces were no match for Japan. Down the country swept the conquering army, carrying out massacres of civilians in the cities. Stalin pledged weapons and finance to the Chinese communists. He also reorganised his own borderlands. It was in these years that Stalin ordered ethnic purges of Koreans and Chinese living in the Soviet Far East. The regional leadership of the NKVD was replaced and the Red Army was put on alert for any menace from Japan’s Kwantung Army in Manchukuo. The two sides, Soviet and Japanese, kept each other guessing about their geopolitical pretensions. Frequent border skirmishes aggravated the situation and on 25 November 1936 the Japanese signed the Anti-Comintern Pact with Germany and Italy. Concern in the Kremlin was acute. Stalin saw no point in diplomatic concessions, and when the Kwantung Army clashed with Soviet forces in May 1939 at Nomonhan, he met fire with fire. War broke out. The Red Army in the Far East was reinforced by tanks and aircraft. Commander Georgi Zhukov was dispatched to lead the campaign.⁸

The maps in east, south and west were being redrawn by militarism. The League of Nations had proved ineffective as Japan overran first Manchuria and then China. International protests failed to save Ethiopia from Italian conquest; and Germany, after intervening actively in the Spanish Civil War, annexed Austria and Czechoslovakia. Yet until Nomonhan the Red Army had seen more action against Soviet peasant rebels than against the foreign enemies of the USSR. The great test of Stalin’s industrial and military preparations was at last taking place.

Despite the lacerations of the Great Terror, the Red Army acquitted itself well. Just as the Russians had expected an easy victory over an inferior enemy in 1904, the Japanese expected a Soviet military collapse. Intelligent and adaptive, Zhukov had learned much from the German training programmes observed on the soil of the USSR until 1933. Like Tukhachevski, he identified tank formations as essential to contemporary land warfare. His arrival in the Far East energised the Soviet offensive strategy. He had witnessed Stalin’s destruction of the Supreme Command and knew that nothing short of comprehensive victory over the Japanese would keep the NKVD off his back.⁹ His sole advantage was that Stalin, as had been the case since the Civil War, did not stint in the granting of men and equipment to his commanders. Zhukov plotted to outmatch the enemy in resources before taking them on. By August 1939 he had amassed such a force and could start his planned offensive. Stalin watched warily through the prism of reports reaching him from army commanders and the military intelligence agency. While Zhukov needed Stalin’s trust, Stalin needed Zhukov’s success in the campaign.

Stalin himself was being courted by Britain and France as their governments sought ways to restrain Hitler by means of an agreement with the USSR. Yet there was little urgency in the overtures. The British Foreign Office sent out a middle-ranking official by steamship to Leningrad instead of flying him out, and the official was not allowed to take any diplomatic initiative. Stalin, hedging his bets in European diplomacy, took the drastic step of letting Berlin know that he would not be averse to an approach from the Germans.

He had already expended a load of precious resources on extending the internal state terror to foreign parts. The extermination of Trotskyists and anarchists in Spain was just part of his repressive zeal. Assassinations were carried out against anti-communist Russian émigrés in Europe. Individual communist critics of Stalin were also targeted. The greatest quarry of all was Trotski. Huge priority was accorded by the Soviet intelligence organs to funding and organising attempts on his life. Shunted from one country to another, he had finally found refuge in Coyoacán on the outskirts of Mexico City. No longer a fundamental threat to Stalin in the Kremlin, Trotski had infuriated him by publishing the Bulletin of the Opposition and organising the Fourth International. The first attack on him in Coyoacán was led by the mural artist David Alfaro Siqueiros. It failed, and Trotski reinforced his security precautions. But Stalin was obsessed with his wish to kill him. The second attack was more subtly arranged. NKVD agent Ramón Mercader managed to infiltrate the Trotski household by posing as a follower of his. On 20 August 1940 he had the opportunity he had awaited in the villa and plunged a mountaineering ice-pick into Trotski’s head.

The hunting down of Stalin’s mortal enemy had involved a large diversion of resources from other tasks of espionage.¹⁰ Nevertheless the Soviet spy network was not ineffective in the 1930s. Communism was seen by many European anti-fascists as the sole bulwark against Hitler and Mussolini. A small but significant number of them volunteered their services to the USSR. Stalin and the NKVD could also count on regular reports from communist parties in Europe and North America.

This provided the Soviet leadership with the information to formulate its foreign policy on the basis of sound knowledge about the likely response from abroad. In Japan, Germany and the United Kingdom the NKVD had high-level spies with extraordinary access to state secrets. The problem was not the provision of information but its processing and distribution. Stalin insisted on restricting the reports from diplomatic and espionage agencies to a tiny handful of associates. An inner group of the Politburo was established to monitor, discuss and decide. But such was his suspicion towards fellow politicians in the Kremlin that he often let no one else inspect the available reports. As crises in international relations multiplied and deepened before 1939, this meant that the actions of the USSR depended crucially, to a much greater extent even than in Germany, on the lonely calculations of the Leader. Simultaneously he was also examining reports on the entire gamut of internal policies on politics, security, economy, society, religion, nationhood and culture. His time for scrutinising the material flowing from abroad was finite. The reportage was always contradictory in content; it was also of diverse degrees of reliability. Stalin’s mistrust of his associates meant that he wasted the advantages supplied by his intelligence network.¹¹

He was culpable too for reducing the People’s Commissariat of External Affairs to a shadow of its former self. The Great Terror had removed hundreds of qualified personnel. Jews in particular were repressed. The result was that after 1937–8 every functionary in Moscow and the embassies avoided saying anything that might conceivably cause trouble. Strong, direct advice to Stalin was eschewed.

Nerves of steel were required for Stalin and his Politburo associates as they followed events in Europe and Asia in 1939. His personal interventions in diplomatic affairs were becoming ever more frequent, and on 5 May 1939 he formalised the situation by changing the leadership of Sovnarkom. Stalin installed himself as Chairman for the first time. This was a step he had until then resisted; since 1930 he had been content to let Molotov run the government. The darkening picture of international relations induced a change of mind. Molotov, though, was not discarded but assigned to the People’s Commissariat of External Affairs. Maxim Litvinov was eventually, in 1941, appointed ambassador to the USA. His known preference for a system of collective security against the fascist threat in Europe had appeared to limit Soviet diplomatic options in mid-1939. The door was opened for a more flexible foreign policy towards Nazi Germany if the opportunity arose. (The fact that Litvinov was Jewish was a further impediment to conciliation with Hitler.) Molotov was Stalin’s senior henchman as well as a Russian. Yet another signal was being given that Stalin believed highly important developments to be in the offing.

This has led to speculation that he was playing a long-term hand with a view to a deal with Germany. This was a tradition in Soviet foreign policy. When socialist revolution failed to break out in Berlin after October 1917, Lenin persistently sought to regenerate the Soviet economy by means of German concessionaires. Without German assistance, whether socialist or capitalist, he saw little chance of restoring industry and agriculture across the country. The Treaty of Rapallo in 1922 went some way in this direction. Did Stalin have a similar orientation? It is surely most unlikely. He had introduced the First Five-Year Plan so as to liberate the USSR from dependency on all foreign support, even if, for a few years, imports of American and German technology had to continue.

Stalin’s observation of the world since the Wall Street Crash confirmed his set of ideas. To him, capitalism appeared inherently unstable. It was also, however, still dangerous. Until such time as the Red Army was an unchallengeable force on two continents it behoved Soviet diplomacy to manoeuvre towards agreements with foreign powers. Even Germany, despite being ranged on the opposite side in the Spanish Civil War, was not necessarily irreconcilable. Like Japan, Germany was a constant geopolitical factor to be taken into account in his calculations. But increasingly he felt that the USSR’s industrial and military achievements were allowing a more active foreign policy. In the 1920s, when military commanders Mannerheim and Piłsudski held power in Finland and Poland, the Politburo was perpetually worried about their depredatory intentions. In the following decade these fears diminished. The Red Army was a power to be reckoned with. In 1939 its forces were at war with Japan and holding their own. The People’s Commissariat of External Affairs could deal with bordering states — Finland, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Romania and Bulgaria — from a position of strength. Their potential to cause damage to the USSR would only be realised if they concerted their efforts. But after Hitler’s rise to power they were more concerned about being conquered by the Germans than exercised by thoughts of bringing down Bolshevism in Moscow.

Germany, though, could act independently. Its successive campaigns of expansion had been condoned by the United Kingdom and France. Soviet diplomatic attempts to organise resistance had been rebuffed. Stalin had offered assistance to Czechoslovakia before its destruction in March 1939. Whether he was seriously intending to commit the Red Army is doubtful. He was making a public statement of the USSR’s anti-fascism in the knowledge that the British and French were most unlikely to take a stand against Hitler. The Czechoslovaks themselves were reluctant to have Soviet armed units on their soil. In spring and summer 1939 Hitler increased the pressure on Poland. He evidently had his eyes on Danzig on the Baltic coast. Poland was under military threat, and yet its politicians refused to ally with the USSR. Soviet–Polish enmity was an irremovable feature of Warsaw’s calculations. In these circumstances it was hardly surprising that Stalin began to consider whether a deal with Hitler might be preferable to standing wholly outside developments in eastern Europe.

Stalin relied primarily upon military power, intelligence reports and diplomatic finesse to see him through. The Comintern was a weak source of assistance. The Chinese communists were incapable of defeating the Japanese and had yet to crush the Kuomintang. The German communists were dead or in concentration camps — and a few were émigrés in the USSR. Communism as a political force in central and eastern Europe was on its knees. In Spain and Italy too it was battered. In the rest of the world, including North America, it still counted for little. In the United Kingdom it was a minor irritant to the status quo, mainly to the British Labour Party. In only one country, France, did the communist party retain a mass following. But the French communists were but one party on the left. Although they could organise industrial strikes and political demonstrations, they were chiefly a disruptive factor in national politics. Stalin was often criticised, especially by Trotski’s Fourth International, for turning away from the Comintern in the 1930s. The reality was that the world communist movement offered little hope of making revolutions.

Even if a revolution had broken out, there would have been complications for Soviet military and security policy. The USSR had few options in the last years of the decade. Stalin, who had always been sceptical about forecasts of a European revolutionary upsurge, reposed his immediate confidence in the activity of the Soviet state. This did not mean that he had abandoned belief in the inevitability of socialist revolution around the world. The global ‘transition’, he thought, would eventually take place as had been predicted by Marx, Engels and Lenin. But he was realistic about the current weakness of the world communist movement; and being a man who liked to operate with a broad programmatic scheme at any given time, he put his trust in his army, in his intelligence agencies and — above all — in himself and his subordinate partner Molotov.

Stalin and Molotov, with their limited diplomatic experience, assumed dual responsibility; and although Molotov occasionally stood up to Stalin in matters of ideology,¹² they never clashed about foreign policy. But this commonalty increased the country’s jeopardy. Stalin could scarcely have fashioned a more perilous arrangement in which decisions of state might be taken. He alone took the supreme decisions. On his mental acuity depended the fate of his country and peace in Europe and the Far East. Most leaders would have lost sleep over this burden of responsibility. Not Stalin. He was supremely self-confident now that he had liquidated those prominent intellectuals who had made him feel edgy and — deep down in his mental recesses — inadequate. He learned fast and prided himself on his mastery of detail. He had never lacked will power. The rest of the Politburo, terrified by the purges of 1937–8 and immersed in their other vast functions of governance, left foreign policy to the Boss. Steadily the inner group was left out of discussions. Yet its members remained impressed by his competence and determination. This was a situation which beckoned to disaster. Disaster was not long in paying a visit.

36. THE DEVILS SUP

An event occurred in the early hours of 24 August 1939 which shocked the world when the USSR and Germany sealed a ten-year non-aggression pact. The ceremony took place in Molotov’s office in the Kremlin with Stalin in attendance,¹ and the two foreign ministers — Molotov and Ribbentrop — appended their signatures. Six years of mutual vilification between the Soviet Union and the Third Reich ended. Pravda ceased to excoriate Hitler and Nazism in its editorials and Hitler stopped criticism of ‘Judaeo-Bolshevism’. Anti-German films were withdrawn from Soviet cinemas; anti-Soviet pamphlets and books were taken down from the shelves of German bookshops. Two dictatorships which had supported opposite sides in the Spanish Civil War embraced each other.

Stalin in his dog-eared tunic looked over Molotov’s left shoulder as he signed the document. Like Lenin with the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk, he kept back in case things turned out badly. Stalin was delighted with the way things had turned out since Ribbentrop’s arrival at the Central Aerodrome on the previous day. Ribbentrop had come to the Kremlin in mid-afternoon, where Stalin and Molotov met him. For Ribbentrop, this was a sign that the Soviet leadership really had a serious interest in a deal with the Third Reich. Diplomatic notes had passed between Berlin and Moscow for three weeks. Ribbentrop had come to propose an agreement to settle the Soviet–German relationship from the Baltic Sea down to the Black Sea. Hitler’s immediate objective was an invasion of Poland, but the enterprise would be perilous without the USSR’s collusion. The Führer authorised Ribbentrop to arrange a non-aggression treaty between the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany. The proposed treaty anticipated the division of the northern regions of eastern Europe into two zones of Soviet and German influence; it also laid down a scheme to increase mutually beneficial trade. Ribbentrop had flown to Moscow to stress that Hitler, despite being the author of Mein Kampf, was in earnest.

The willingness of Stalin to enter such an arrangement with Nazi Germany had been strengthened by the half-heartedness of diplomatic efforts by alternative powerful partners. By mid-August the prospect of alliance with Britain and France had disappeared, and each day made any German offer more tempting. Molotov on Stalin’s instructions sent a confidential note agreeing to diplomatic talks. Germany’s impatience was growing. Hitler needed to invade and subjugate Poland before winter set in. On 19 August Stalin intimated that Moscow was ready to receive Ribbentrop. Such was the haste of the rapprochement that Hitler had no time to attend — or perhaps he would not have gone to Moscow in any case.

Stalin, though, was pleased. Three hours of quiet negotiation in the afternoon of 23 August left just one divisive matter. This involved the fate of Latvia. Hitler had instructed Ribbentrop to keep Latvia, with its influential German minority, in Germany’s zone of influence. But Stalin and Molotov were intransigent. The old Imperial frontiers were something of a preoccupation for Stalin. There was also the factor of strategic security. If Hitler were to overrun Latvia, he would have a territorial wedge cutting into the USSR’s borderlands. Talks were adjourned at 6.30 p.m. for Ribbentrop to withdraw to consult his Führer. Hitler quickly conceded, and Ribbentrop went back to the Kremlin to tell Stalin the news. Stalin, who was normally as impassive as stone when he wanted to be, could not stop shaking. But he got a grip on himself and as the two groups finalised the text of a treaty, Stalin brought out the bottles and proposed a toast ‘to the Führer’s health’. Ribbentrop reciprocated on the Führer’s behalf.² Deep in the night the formal ceremony took place with Stalin grinning at Molotov’s shoulder. Teetotaller Hitler was told at his Eagle’s Nest retreat above Berchtesgaden and allowed himself a small glass of champagne.³

Hitler had need of the assurance that the USSR would not oppose his conquest of most of Poland. This was a temporary compromise: he had not dropped his objective of an eventual invasion of the USSR. But what about Stalin himself? In the light of what happened in 1941, when Hitler ordered Operation Barbarossa, was he prudent to do what he did in 1939?

This raises the question of whether Stalin had a realistic alternative. Evidently the reconciliation with Germany was his personal decision after consultation with Molotov. Staff in the People’s Commissariat of External Affairs were given no advance warning and were not asked to prepare background briefings.⁴ There had been no hint in the central daily newspapers. Apart from Molotov, the foreign-policy group in the Politburo which included Malenkov, Beria and Mikoyan was left in the dark about the matter.⁵ If ever there was proof that Stalin was willing to take immense risks, the Nazi–Soviet agreement provided it. Having reached the decision, moreover, he did not deign to explain his calculations to others. In truth there were at the time only two basic options for Soviet foreign policy: an agreement with Hitler or an agreement with France and the United Kingdom. Peace with Hitler would give Stalin a period of respite to go on building up Soviet military strength. By contrast it was not clear that the French and British were seriously interested in a deal. The fact that the British had sent only a middle-ranking Foreign Office official to conduct talks in Moscow in summer 1939 was deeply discouraging to the Kremlin.

Stalin, fearing dangerous isolation, believed a deal with Germany was the only option on the table. He had to surmount ideological inhibition: the Nazis were the greatest enemy of world communism. Yet Stalin did not let doctrine impede him. Marxism–Leninism anyway made no fundamental distinction between types of capitalist states. For Stalin, all such states — whether liberal-democratic or fascist — were fundamentally deplorable. When he moved towards the policy of the popular front in 1934, he was merely making the practical calculation that the Third Reich posed an immediate threat to the USSR in Europe. This had not ruled out the ultimate possibility of a treaty with Hitler any more than Lenin had excluded the possibility of temporary armed collusion with German proto-Nazis in mid-1920.⁶ Furthermore, Lenin too had wanted the Soviet state to avoid entanglement in a world war among capitalist states. The basis of the USSR’s policy should be for the great powers to fight any future world war among themselves and for the Red Army to exploit whatever situation might result. If it took a non-aggression treaty to keep Hitler’s hands off the USSR and to induce Germany to move its armed forces against France and the United Kingdom, Stalin was willing to take the step.

He did not believe that a mere treaty would secure peace for the Soviet Union. He also knew that Hitler was a formidable potential enemy. Molotov was to recall:⁷

This has the ring of truth. In public it was necessary for a Marxist to stress that Nazism was supported mainly by the middle class. Yet Stalin knew that he was up against a Führer whose people were behind him. He also had no reason to believe that Hitler would quickly crush the armies of the French after defeating Poland. Like most observers, Soviet leaders assumed that the Third Reich would be enmired in difficulties in the West and that this would enable the USSR to go on preparing for war rather than having to fight one against the Wehrmacht.

There were two sections to the Treaty of Non-Aggression: one was public, the other secret. The public section stipulated that the USSR and the German Reich agreed not to make war on each other either individually or in concert with other powers. Disputes between them were to be settled by negotiations or, if this proved ineffective, by an arbitration commission. The treaty entailed that, if either party became engaged in war with another power, no support should be forthcoming to that other power. The treaty was to remain valid for ten years with provision to extend it for five years. The USSR and Germany were to increase their trade on a mutually advantageous basis. Yet the treaty’s secret section was still more significant. Its clauses demarcated ‘spheres of interest’ for the Soviet and German regimes in eastern Europe. Germany was recognised as having freedom of action from its existing eastern frontier across to Lithuania. Influence in Poland was to be divided between the USSR and the Third Reich. Without expressly saying so, Hitler and Stalin intended to occupy their ‘spheres’ and reduce them to direct political subservience.

Hitler quickly realised his geopolitical objective. On 1 September 1939 a Blitzkrieg was started against Poland. Within days the Polish military resistance had been crushed. Warsaw fell on 27 September. The British and French governments, somewhat to Hitler’s surprise, delivered an ultimatum to Berlin on the first day of the war. Hitler ignored it. To German dismay, Stalin at first refused to sanction the movement of the Red Army into the territory agreed as falling within the Soviet sphere of interest. The reason was that the USSR and Japan remained at war in the Far East, and the military risk of deploying forces in eastern Poland was too great until the two countries agreed to make peace on 15 September. The Red Army moved into Polish territory two days later. A second agreement — the Treaty of Friendship, Co-operation and Demarcation — was agreed on 28 September. Stalin demanded not only Estonia and Latvia but now also Lithuania as part of the Soviet sphere. He aimed both to recover the land of the Russian Empire and to secure a compact area of defence for the USSR. Hitler, who already was thinking about attacking France, quickly acceded.

Stalin’s established procedures for dealing with ‘enemies of the people’ came into effect. Political, economic and cultural leaders were rounded up. Army officers too were arrested. Some were shot, others were sent to labour camps in Siberia and Kazakhstan. The NKVD, learning lessons from the Great Terror, had prepared itself carefully with lists of people to be seized. Stalin wanted to be sure that police action hit exactly those groups which he had identified as hostile to Soviet interests. He and Beria did not confine themselves to persecuting individuals. Whole families were arrested and deported. Poland was the first country to suffer.⁸ Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania were next on the agenda as Stalin and Molotov ordered their governments to sign pacts of mutual assistance. A similar command was conveyed to Finland. The consolidation of the entire region under Soviet hegemony was pursued. The problem was that Finland, which was diplomatically close to Germany, was unwilling to lie down. Negotiations ceased. Stalin set up a government-in-waiting with Moscow-based Finnish communists and, on 30 November, the Red Army attacked confident that it would soon reach Helsinki.

The Finns, however, held steadfast. The Reds, racked by the effects of the Great Terror, fought hard but incompetently. The Winter War turned into a bloody stalemate in the northern snows. The Finnish government was aware that the total defeat of the Red Army was beyond it. Discussions were resumed and a peace treaty was signed in March 1940. The realistic Finns gave up much territory and several military bases. The Soviet frontier with Finland was moved hundreds of miles to the north of Leningrad. Stalin had achieved his ends but at a terrible price. One hundred and twenty-seven thousand Red Army soldiers perished.⁹ More importantly for Stalin (who cared nothing for the number of deaths), the military might of the USSR had been exposed as weaker than the world had thought. If the Soviet armed forces could not crush Finland, what would they be able to do against the Third Reich if ever war broke out with Hitler?

The shock was general in the Kremlin. With so large a force, the Red Army had been expected to thrust back the Finns without difficulty and enable the establishment of a Finnish Soviet Republic which would apply for incorporation in the USSR. Stalin was beside himself with fury. He rebuked Voroshilov. Drink and old friendship loosened Voroshilov’s tongue. Despite the Great Terror, he kept a sense of personal honour and was unwilling to accept criticism from the Leader who had supervised every large decision about security and defence in recent years. Voroshilov had had enough: he picked up a plate of suckling pig and crashed it down on the table.¹⁰ This sort of outburst would have condemned most men to the Gulag. (They would usually have gone to the Gulag long before they got round to shouting at the Leader.) The war, though, gave Stalin reason to take stock strategically and necessitated a reorganisation of the Red Army. Stalin dismissed the inadequate Voroshilov and appointed Semën Timoshenko, a professional commander, to lead the People’s Commissariat of Defence.

The urgency of the task was demonstrated in summer 1940 as the Wehrmacht raced through the Low Countries into France, forcing Paris’s capitulation and the emergency evacuation of British forces from the beaches of Dunkirk. The fall of the United Kingdom seemed imminent. Timoshenko, with Stalin’s consent, restored a sense of pride to the Soviet officer corps. Political education was reduced as a proportion of required military training. Plans were put in hand for a new line of defence works to be constructed along the boundaries separating the German and Soviet spheres of interest. In order to realise this aim it appeared necessary to bring Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania under the USSR’s control. There was to be no repetition of the Finnish débâcle. A brief charade was played out. Incidents of ‘provocation’ were arranged for the Kremlin to have a pretext to intervene. Baltic politicians had to be intimidated. Ministers were summoned from the capitals of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania. Stalin and Molotov were bullies with decades of experience. The visitors to Moscow were given no choice but to accept annexation. Molotov snarled to the Latvian Foreign Minister: ‘You’re not going to return home until you give your signature to your self-inclusion in the USSR.’¹¹ The three governments were militarily helpless. Resistance would lead to national disaster.

Compliance, of course, would also bring disaster since Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania would undoubtedly undergo the same treatment as eastern Poland. In fact the bully-boy methods did not immediately result in signed requests for incorporation in the USSR. The Red Army therefore moved in force to secure Stalin’s aims, and NKVD units — some of which had been operating in Poland — were close behind. A façade of constitutionalism was maintained. Politburo member Andrei Zhdanov, closely liaising with his master Stalin, was sent to the Baltic region to carry out his orders behind the scenes. Police arrests took place under the cover of a news black-out. Executions and deportations ensued as the Soviet-dominated media announced fresh elections. Only candidates belonging to the communists, or at least supporting them, were allowed to stand. Parliaments assembled in Tallinn, Riga and Vilnius in July and declared total agreement with Moscow’s wishes. All petitioned, as Stalin had demanded, for incorporation in the USSR. For form’s sake Stalin declined to admit the three on the same day. Lithuania entered the USSR on 3 August, Latvia two days later and Estonia a day after that.

Stalin was playing the geopolitical game for all it was worth. Communist political prospects in Europe had vanished. For Stalin, an inveterate opportunist, this was no problem. While not ceasing to believe in the superiority of communism over capitalism, he waited for the next chance to promote his kind of dictatorship abroad. Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia were not the only places he had in his sights as lying within the zone of the USSR’s special interest. Stalin and his representatives persistently specified Romania and Bulgaria in this way. Nor did he fail to argue that Turkey fell within the Soviet zone of hegemony. And Stalin, while delivering abundant quotas of grain and oil to a Germany at war with France and the United Kingdom, demanded German technology in exchange. Berlin had to sanction the sale of Messerschmitt fighters, a Panzer-III tank and the cruiser Lutzow; it also showed the construction plans for the battleship Bismarck to Soviet specialists.¹² Stalin has the reputation of having been gulled by Hitler. This was not how things appeared to Berlin in 1939–40. Stalin had driven a hard bargain and insisted on its complete fulfilment. As he pushed his case at the risk of raising tension between Moscow and Berlin, Hitler described him as a ‘cold-blooded blackmailer’.¹³

What changed Stalin’s attitude was nothing that happened in eastern Europe or the Far East. France’s collapse in summer 1940 transformed everything. Soviet military planning had been based on the assumption that Hitler would encounter more effective resistance from the French armed forces than had been met in Poland. Geopolitics in Europe were turned upside down. Few observers gave the United Kingdom much chance of survival in the following months. For Stalin, the implications were dire. The Wehrmacht looked as if it was close to completing its tasks in the West. It would no longer face a two-front war if it turned its power against the USSR. Stalin’s relations with Hitler immediately reflected the consequences of France’s collapse. Truculent since August 1939, he began to appease. War with Germany had to be averted at any cost.¹⁴

Appeasement was practised without any express declaration of a change in stance. But Stalin’s statements behind the scenes, recently made available, reveal his worries. At the October Revolution anniversary dinner in the Kremlin on 7 November 1940 he indicated his shock at the military developments. He did not limit himself to the French débâcle. The Soviet–Japanese War had indicated weaknesses in the country’s air force if not in its tanks. The Winter War with Finland had gone much worse for the USSR, revealing gross defects in organisation and planning. Then Germany had overwhelmed France in the summer campaign and driven the British back over the Channel. Stalin was blunt: ‘We’re not ready for war of the kind being fought between Germany and England.’¹⁵ Molotov was to recall him concluding around that time that ‘we would be able to confront the Germans on an equal basis only by 1943’.¹⁶ The diplomatic ramifications were enormous. Hitler had to be reassured that Soviet military intentions were entirely peaceful. His requests for raw materials had to be met even if German technology was not immediately available in exchange: late delivery, once complained about, was now forgivable.

As the diplomatic world darkened in the first half of 1941, Stalin revised several of his political judgements. Already he had added to the Russian national ingredients in Marxism–Leninism. Steadily, as he looked out on the countries of Europe under the Nazi jackboot, he reached the conclusion that the Comintern’s usefulness had come to an end. If communism was going to appeal to broad popular opinion, it had to be regarded as a movement showing sensitivity to local national feelings. Perhaps Stalin also urgently wanted to reassure Hitler that Soviet expansionism was a defunct aspiration. He mentioned this to Dimitrov in April 1941; communist parties, he asserted,¹⁷

Dimitrov had virtually been told that his job was obsolete.

This did not mean that Stalin had given up faith in the ultimate worldwide success of communism; but what Dimitrov was hearing, in an indirect way, was a judgement that the military situation in Europe had become so complex and dangerous that it was no longer to the USSR’s advantage to maintain a co-ordinated communist movement under the direction of the Comintern. Stalin had not abandoned hope of controlling the activity of other communist parties. Instead he had made the provisional judgement that his policy of appeasing Germany would be enhanced if he put distance between his government and the Comintern. Only the outbreak of war with Germany delayed Stalin’s dissolution of the Comintern.

Yet Stalin, while seeking to appease Hitler, wanted to keep up the morale of his own Red Army. On 5 May 1941 he addressed the ceremony for graduates of military academies in Moscow. His words, unreported in the press at the time, were combative. Instead of the reassuring words he issued to the media about Germany, he declared:¹⁸

Stalin urged the Soviet armed forces to prepare for war.¹⁹ He explained:²⁰

Stalin continued:

Was this — as some have suggested — the index of an intention to attack Germany within the near future? Undeniably he had no scruples about stabbing friends and allies in the back. Hitler felt and acted the same way, and Nazi propaganda about Lebensraum and Slavic Untermenschen had not been forgotten in the Kremlin. It would have made strategic sense for Stalin to strike down Hitler before Hitler could invade the USSR. It is also true that Zhukov and Timoshenko were sketching plans for such an offensive.

Yet none of this proves that Stalin genuinely contemplated his own offensive in the immediate future. A military graduation ceremony in the Europe and Asia of mid-1941 was hardly an occasion for a political leader to moderate the combat mentality of future officers. They needed to be readied for war; they also had to see that they had a political leadership willing to wage war. Moreover, it would have been remiss of Stalin to fail to instruct Zhukov and Timoshenko to plan for an offensive. All armies need to undertake multiple planning and the Red Army was no exception. Stalin wished to be able to deal with every possible contingency. He was realistic about the need for at least a couple of years before his forces could take on the Germans. He did not exclude the possibility of attacking Germany if and when the Wehrmacht seemed weak. The Marxist–Leninist tradition in foreign policy prescribed that the USSR should exploit the political, economic and military rivalries among capitalist powers. This was how states of all kinds had behaved since time immemorial. If Germany looked weak, the Soviet mountain eagle would swoop down and take its prey.

Consequently Stalin’s priority in May and June 1941 was to avoid giving Hitler a reason to start a war. The General Staff had yet to complete a definitive comprehensive plan for defence.²¹ Diplomatic and economic appeasement remained foremost in Stalin’s mind. The analyses of military professionals in Berlin and Moscow had pinpointed the importance of beginning such hostilities in early summer in order to shatter the USSR’s defences before the onset of winter; and Stalin was hoping that all this was correct. Hitler had been prevented from invading the Soviet Union at the appropriate time because of trouble in Yugoslavia since the spring. But the secret decision had already been taken in Berlin: Hitler was going to attack as soon as he had amassed sufficient forces in German-occupied Poland. His confidence rested on ignorance of Soviet military capacity. Stalin’s secretiveness meant that the Germans had been kept in the dark about the USSR’s true strength. By the time such information started to reach Berlin, it was too late to persuade Hitler to call off the invasion.²²

Stalin hoped against hope that his diplomatic manoeuvres were paying off as midsummer approached. He ignored the rising mountain of information that Hitler was up to no good on his borders. Zhukov was becoming frantic. In mid-June he made one of his recurrent attempts to snap Stalin out of his policy of appeasement. Stalin angrily pounced on him: ‘What are you up to? Have you come here to scare us with the idea of war or is it that you really want a war? Haven’t you got enough medals and titles?’²³ This was a punch below the belt that made Zhukov lose his temper even with Stalin. But the moment passed and the appeasement policy was maintained. Thus the conditions for the greatest military disaster of the twentieth century were unwittingly prepared by the supremely confident Leader in the Kremlin.

37. BARBAROSSA

In the hour before dawn on 22 June 1941 the German armed forces started Operation Barbarossa. There was no warning from Hitler; this was a classic Blitzkrieg and Stalin was in bed at the time in his Blizhnyaya dacha. In the diplomatic crisis of recent weeks he had judged that intelligence sources predicting a German invasion were just a provocation. Timoshenko as People’s Commissar of Defence and Zhukov as Chief of the General Staff thought him mistaken and had stayed up on duty all that last night. At 3.30 a.m. they received reports of heavy shelling along the Soviet–German frontier. They knew this for what it was: the beginning of war. Timoshenko ordered Zhukov to call Blizhnyaya by telephone. Zhukov obediently asked a sleepy Vlasik, the chief of Stalin’s bodyguard, to rouse the Leader.¹

Like a schoolboy rejecting proof of simple arithmetic, Stalin disbelieved his ears. Breathing heavily, he grunted to Zhukov that no counter-measures should be taken.² The German armies had had no more compliant victim. Stalin’s only concession to Zhukov was to rise from his bed and return to Moscow by limousine. There he met Zhukov and Timoshenko along with Molotov, Beria, Voroshilov and Lev Mekhlis.³ (Mekhlis was a party bureaucrat who had carried out many tasks for Stalin in the Great Terror.) Pale and bewildered, he sat with them at the table clutching an empty pipe for comfort.⁴ He could not accept that he had been wrong about Hitler. He muttered that the outbreak of hostilities must have originated in a conspiracy within the Wehrmacht. Always there had to be a conspiracy. When Timoshenko demurred, Stalin retorted that ‘if it were necessary to organise a provocation, German generals would bomb their own cities’. Ludicrously he was still trying to persuade himself that the situation was reversible: ‘Hitler surely doesn’t know about it.’ He ordered Molotov to get in touch with Ambassador Schulenburg to clarify the situation. This was clutching at a final straw while Armageddon erupted. Schulenburg had in fact already requested an interview with Molotov in the Kremlin. In the meantime Timoshenko and Zhukov went on imploring Stalin’s permission to organise armed counter-measures.⁵

Schulenburg, who had sought to discourage Hitler from invading, brought the unambiguous military news. Molotov reported back to Stalin: ‘The German government has declared war on us.’ Stalin slumped into his chair and an unbearable silence followed. It was broken by Zhukov, who put forward measures to hold up the forces of the enemy. Timoshenko corrected him: ‘Not to hold up but to annihilate.’ Even then, though, Stalin continued to stipulate that Soviet ground forces should not infringe German territorial integrity. Directive No. 2 was dispatched at 7.15 a.m.⁶

The Germans swarmed like locusts over the western borderlands of the USSR. Nobody, except perhaps Stalin, seriously expected the Red Army to push them back quickly to the river Bug. A military calamity had occurred on a scale unprecedented in the wars of the twentieth century. Stalin had not yet got a grip on himself. He was visibly distraught and could not focus his mind on essential matters. When Timoshenko returned from the People’s Commissariat of Defence to confer, Stalin refused to see him. Politics, even at this moment, had to come first and he insisted that a Politburo meeting should take precedence. Finally at nine o’clock in the morning Timoshenko was allowed to present a plan for the creation of a Supreme Command. The Politburo meanwhile gave Molotov the task of speaking on radio at midday.⁷ Stalin still felt disoriented. If he had wanted, he could have given the address himself. But shock and embarrassment deflected him. He was determined to stay at the centre of things, however — and he knew that Molotov would not let him down at the microphone. Stalin was not wasting time with resentment about what Hitler had done to him. War had started in earnest. He and the USSR had to win it.

How had he let himself be tricked? For weeks the Wehrmacht had been massing on the western banks of the River Bug as dozens of divisions were transferred from elsewhere in Europe. The Luftwaffe had sent squadrons of reconnaissance aircraft over Soviet cities. All this had been reported to Stalin by his military intelligence agency. In May and June he had been continuously pressed by Timoshenko and Zhukov to sanction the dispositions for an outbreak of fighting. Richard Sorge, the Soviet agent in the Germany embassy in Tokyo, had raised the alarm. Winston Churchill had sent telegrams warning Stalin. The USSR’s spies in Germany had mentioned the preparations being made. Even the Chinese Communist Party alerted Moscow about German intentions.⁸

Yet Stalin had made up his mind. Rejecting the warnings, he put faith in his own judgement. That Stalin blundered is beyond question. Yet there were a few extenuating circumstances. Stalin expected there to be war with Germany sooner or later. Like military planners everywhere, he was astonished by Hitler’s easy triumph over France. The success achieved by the Wehrmacht in the West was likely to bring forward any decision by the Führer to turn eastwards and attack the USSR. But Stalin had some reason to believe that the Germans would not risk an attack in the year 1941. Although France had been humbled, Hitler had not dealt a fatal blow to the British. His armed forces had also met difficulties in the Balkans in the spring when action against the German occupation of Yugoslavia diverted troops needed for Operation Barbarossa. Stalin continued to hold to the belief that a successful invasion of the USSR would have to be started in early summer at the latest. Napoleon’s fate in 1812 had shown the importance of beating Russians without having to trudge through snow. By mid-June 1941 it looked as if the danger of a German crusade had faded.

Some Soviet intelligence agents were also denying that a German attack was imminent. A fog of reports befuddled Stalin’s calculations.⁹ He made things worse by insisting on being the sole arbiter of the data’s veracity. The normal processing of information was disallowed in the USSR.¹⁰ Stalin relied excessively on his personal intuition and experience. Not only fellow politicians but also People’s Commissar of Defence Timoshenko and Chief of the General Staff Zhukov were kept in the dark about reports from embassies and intelligence agencies.¹¹ The Germans took advantage of the situation by planting misinformation; they did much to induce Stalin to believe that a military campaign was not in the offing. Thus Stalin in the early months of 1941 moved along a dual track: he scrupulously observed the terms of his pact with Nazi Germany while telling gatherings of the Soviet political and military elite that, if the Germans attacked, they would be repulsed with ferocious efficiency. He had been taking a massive gamble with his country’s security. Cautious in so many ways, Stalin trusted in his ability to read the runes of Hitler’s intentions without discussing the evidence with anyone else.

Stalin was shocked by Operation Barbarossa, but Molotov always defended the Boss against the charge that he collapsed under the strain:¹²

Stalin’s visitors’ book confirms that he did not lapse into passivity.¹³ Zhukov too insisted that Stalin’s recovery was swift. By the next day he had certainly taken himself in hand, and over the next few days he seemed much more like his old self. His will power saw him through. He had little choice. Failure to defeat the German armed forces would be fatal for the communist party and the Soviet state. The October Revolution would be crushed and the Germans would have Russia at their mercy.

On 23 June Stalin worked without rest in his Kremlin office. For fifteen hours at a stretch from 3.20 a.m. he consulted with the members of the Supreme Command. Central military planning was crucial, and he allowed his political subordinates to get on with their tasks while he concentrated on his own. Then at 6.25 p.m. he asked for oral reports from politicians and commanders. Molotov was with him practically the whole time. Stalin was gathering the maximum of necessary information before issuing further orders. Visitors are recorded as having come to him until 1.25 a.m. the next morning.¹⁴

The Supreme Command or Stavka — the term used under Nicholas II in the First World War — had also been established on 23 June. Stalin was initially disinclined to become its formal head. He was not eager to identify himself as leader of a war effort which was in a disastrous condition. So it was Timoshenko who as Chairman led a Stavka including Stalin, Molotov, Voroshilov, Budënny, Zhukov and Kuznetsov. The others also tried to persuade Stalin to permit his designation as Supreme Commander. He refused even though in practice he acted as if he had accepted the post. The whole composition of Stavka was shaped by him,¹⁵ and it was noticeable that he insisted that leading politicians should belong to this military body. Not only Molotov but also Voroshilov and Budënny were basically communist party figures who lacked the professional expertise to run the contemporary machinery of war. Timoshenko, Zhukov and Kuznetsov were therefore outnumbered. Stalin would allow no great decision to be taken without the participation of the politicians, despite his own gross blunders of the past few days. He called generals to his office, made his enquiries about the situation to the west of Moscow and gave his instructions. About his supremacy there was no doubt.

He drove himself and others at the maximum pace until the early hours of 29 June, when Molotov, Mikoyan and Beria were the last to leave him. (V.N. Merkulov, who had headed the state security organisation for several months, had departed some minutes before.)¹⁶ At that point he started to behave mysteriously. His visit to the Ministry of Defence two days earlier had been a difficult one. When Timoshenko and Zhukov showed him the operational maps, he was shocked by the extent of the disaster for the Red Army. Having surmounted his bewilderment about Operation Barbarossa on 21 June, he suffered a relapse. Fellow members of the Politburo, Sovnarkom and Stavka had no idea what had happened to him. When calls were put through to the Blizhnyaya dacha, his chief aide Poskrëbyshev claimed not to know where he was. Yet he was indeed skulking at that dacha. Commanders and politicians were left to get on with the war with Germany as best they could. No one outside Blizhnyaya knew whether he was alive or dead.

The German advance quickened across the Soviet borderlands. Trained by Stalin to accept his whims, his military and political subordinates tried to run their institutions as if nothing strange was occurring. But they worried about doing anything without clearing it with him beforehand. The situation was changing by the hour. Stalin’s sanction had been essential for years and Stavka needed his presence at the centre of things. What was he doing? One possibility was that his morale had fallen so low that he felt incapable of continuing at his post. He had much reason to feel bad about his recent performance. Another possibility is that he was seeking to impress upon his subordinates that, however poorly he had performed, he remained the irreplaceable Leader. Stalin was an avid reader of books on Ivan the Terrible and to some extent identified himself with him. Tsar Ivan had once abandoned the Kremlin and withdrawn to a monastery; his purpose had been to induce boyars and bishops to appreciate the fundamental need for him to go on ruling. After some days a delegation came out to the Tsar to plead with him to return to the Kremlin. Perhaps Stalin was contriving a similar situation.

The truth will never be known since Stalin never spoke of the episode. His subordinates eventually plucked up courage to find out what was going on. Nikolai Voznesenski, the rising star in state planning bodies, was visiting Mikoyan when a call came through from Molotov for them to join him. Malenkov, Voroshilov and Beria were already with Molotov, and Beria was proposing the creation of a State Committee of Defence. Mikoyan and Voznesenski agreed. This State Committee of Defence was envisaged as supplanting the authority of both party and government and as being headed by Stalin. It was the first great initiative for years that any of them had taken without seeking his prior sanction.¹⁷

The snag was to get Stalin to agree. The group resolved to drive out to Blizhnyaya to put the proposal to him directly. When Molotov raised the problem of Stalin’s ‘prostration’ in recent days, Voznesenski stiffened his nerve: ‘Vyacheslav, you go first and we’ll be straight behind you.’ Mikoyan interpreted this as more than a travelling plan. Voznesenski was saying that, if Stalin could not pull himself together, Molotov should take his place. Arriving at the dacha, they found him slumped in an armchair. He looked ‘strange’ and ‘guarded’, quite unlike the Leader they were used to. ‘Why,’ he muttered, ‘have you come?’ Mikoyan thought Stalin suspected that they were about to arrest him. But then Molotov, his old comrade, spoke for everyone by explaining the need for a State Committee of Defence. Stalin was not yet reassured, and asked: ‘Who’s going to head it?’ Molotov named Stalin himself. Even then Stalin appeared surprised and simply said: ‘Good.’ The ice was melting. Beria suggested that four Politburo members should join him in the State Committee: Molotov, Voroshilov, Malenkov and Beria. Stalin, recovering his confidence, wanted to add Mikoyan and Voznesenski.¹⁸

Beria objected that Mikoyan and Voznesenski were indispensable for work in Sovnarkom and Gosplan. Voznesenski rose angrily against Beria. Stalin was in his element: his subordinates were more interested in arguing with each other than in rivalling him. Agreement to a State Committee of five members was obtained with wide powers for Mikoyan to organise supplies and for Voznesenski to co-ordinate armaments production.¹⁹ The decision was confirmed in the press on 1 July.²⁰ And Stalin was back in charge. The suggestion that Molotov might be substituted for Stalin could have been the death of all of them; it was kept secret from him. It was anyway an occasion which Stalin was unlikely to forget. Beria believed that sooner or later the visitors to the dacha would pay the price just for having seen him in a moment of profound weakness.²¹

On 10 July, after being prodded by Zhukov among others, Stalin allowed himself to be appointed Supreme Commander. He was cautious even about this and the acquisition of the title was withheld from the media for several weeks. His reason for this fumbling was not disclosed and he never discussed it with his intimates. But it is hard to avoid the conclusion that Stalin had wanted to avoid too close an association in the popular mind with the catastrophe at the front. If the defeats continued, he would make other heads roll. He took even longer to take official charge of Stavka. Not until 8 August did he agree to become its Chairman. Was this yet another sign that he had learned from biographies of the first Roman emperor, Augustus, that real power mattered more than titles? Whatever it signifies about Stalin’s attitude to his image, it is clear evidence that at last he thought that the Red Army had recovered from its disastrous first days in the field against the Germans. The beginnings of an effective defence were being organised, and order and efficiency were replacing chaos: Stalin could at last take the risk of assuming full supreme responsibility; and indeed failure to do so would raise questions about his commitment.

Someone who paid the ultimate price for annoying Stalin even without having seen him in his depressed mood at the dacha was Western Front commander Dmitri Pavlov. Placed in an impossible situation by Stalin’s military mismanagement before and on 22 June 1941, Pavlov was being made the scapegoat for the German military success. To err is human and Stalin had erred on a stupendous scale. He forgave himself but not others; and when he made a mistake, it was others who got the blame. Pavlov was arrested, tried by court martial and sentenced to death. Quite what Stalin thought he was achieving by this is hard to understand. The sentence was not given wide publicity. Most probably Stalin was just doing what had become his normal practice, and he wanted to keep his commanders in fear of him. But perhaps he also discerned the need to avoid causing a collapse in the morale of the entire officer corps. Hence he opted for compromise. He obtained his victim but refrained from the pre-war scenario of torture, show trial and forced confession. This was little consolation to the hapless Pavlov, but it was the earliest frail sign that Stalin understood the need to adjust his behaviour in the furnace of war.

Hitler’s Wehrmacht meanwhile continued to rampage deep into Soviet territory. The German strategic plan was to motor across the plains and marshes of the western borderlands of the USSR and, within a few weeks, occupy the main European regions. They seemed about to fulfil every expectation of the Führer. Experienced tank formations rolled over vast territory encountering brave but ineffective defensive operations. Minsk, Belorussia’s capital, fell on 29 June, Smolensk on 16 July. No great urban centre lay between Smolensk and Moscow. Despairing of the existing command on his Western Front, Stalin released Timoshenko and Zhukov to reorganise things on the spot and stiffen resistance. Some deceleration of the German advance was achieved against Army Group Centre. But Panzer formations were simultaneously smashing their way towards Leningrad in the north and Kiev further south. Already all Poland, Lithuania and Belorussia was subject to rule by the General Government appointed by Hitler. It seemed that nothing could save ‘Soviet power’. Operation Barbarossa was undertaken by armed forces which had conquered every country in Europe they had attacked. Over three million men had been amassed for the campaign against the USSR. At Hitler’s disposal were more than three thousand tanks and two thousand aircraft. Security forces followed in the path of their victories: Einsatz-kommandos extirpated all those thought hostile to the New Order. Everything had been planned and supplied to evident perfection.

Panic seized Moscow and Leningrad as thousands of inhabitants tried to leave before the Germans arrived. The refugees included party and government functionaries. Stalin was merciless. Beria, who had been given general oversight of security matters in the State Committee of Defence, was empowered to set up barrier detachments on the capital’s outskirts and mete out summary justice to those who sought to flee. Strategic dispositions were made as the State Committee established high commands for the North-Western, Western and South-Western Fronts. Stalin’s confidence in military professionalism had not matured. Although he appointed Timoshenko to the Western Front, he stipulated that Voroshilov should head the North-Western Front while Budënny took the South-Western Front.²² Voroshilov and Budënny, his comrades in the Civil War, had won no laurels in the Soviet–Finnish War and yet Stalin stood by them. Party committees and soviet executive committees in the provinces were brought directly under the State Committee’s leadership and ordered to stiffen the spirit of resistance. The conscription of men for the Red Army was to be intensively undertaken. Armaments production had to be boosted, labour discipline tightened and food supplies secured from the villages. How this was done was a matter of indifference to Stalin. He cared only for results.

An immense number of prisoners-of-war fell into German hands: more than 400,000 Red Army troops were seized in the battle for Minsk alone. The Soviet air force in the western borderlands had been destroyed, mainly on the ground, in the first two days of hostilities. The linkages of transport and communications had been shattered. When Smolensk was occupied, the party headquarters had no time to incinerate its documents. The USSR lost its Soviet republics in the western borderlands as Ukraine, Belorussia, Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia were subjected to German rule. The USSR had lost half its industrial and agricultural capacity and almost the same proportion of its population. Morale was low in the unoccupied zones. Civil administration was chaotic. German bombers continued to wreck places of habitation many miles beyond the lines of the Wehrmacht’s advance. In Moscow there was gathering panic. Many government officials tried to flee. Neither Molotov’s speech on 22 June nor Stalin’s eleven days later convinced most people that successful defence was possible.

Nor did the USSR lack citizens who were pleased with what seemed to be happening. Many in the western borderlands welcomed Wehrmacht troops as liberators. Ukrainian peasants greeted them with the traditional bread and salt. Stalin’s aim to extirpate the possibility of a fifth column by means of the Great Terror proved ineffective. All he had achieved was a stoking up of the fires of embitterment with his rule. The peasantry longed to be freed from the torments of the collective-farm system. They were not the only ones. In towns and cities, especially among people who were not Russians or Jews, there was much naïveté about Hitler’s purposes. This was not surprising since German occupation policy had yet to be clarified, and some Nazi functionaries saw advantage in seeking voluntary co-operation in the conquered regions of the Soviet Union by dismantling the entire order constructed since 1917. Churches were reopened. Shops and small businesses began to operate again. Hitler foolishly overruled any further proposals in this direction. All Slavic peoples were to be treated as Untermenschen, fit only for economic exploitation on behalf of the Third Reich. Wehrmacht and SS were instructed to squeeze labour and raw materials out of Ukraine as if the country was a lemon.

The war effort in the USSR began to be co-ordinated. Party functionaries were ordered to address factory meetings and to tell the workforces that the Germans were about to be halted. Huge demands were to be made of Soviet citizens. Working hours were lengthened, labour discipline tightened still further. The menace of Nazism would be dispelled. The USSR was going to win and the Third Reich, despite current appearances to the contrary, to lose. The Soviet regime would act as ruthlessly in war as it had done in peace.

Yet it was difficult to believe the few real optimists. Official spokesmen were assumed to be saying only what they had been ordered to say. The Luftwaffe was bombing Moscow by 21 July. A month of fighting had brought the Soviet Union to its knees. Army Group North was approaching Leningrad and, with the fall of Moscow apparently imminent, Hitler and his generals began to contemplate switching forces to Army Group South to secure the coming conquest of Kiev. The Soviet refugees streaming into central Russia brought with them tales of German military success which undermined Pravda’s insistence that the Red Army was ceasing to retreat. What Hitler was achieving was what German commanders Ludendorff and Hindenburg had threatened to do if Lenin and the communists had failed to sign a separate treaty at Brest-Litovsk in early 1918. Vast economic resources had come under German occupation for use in the war against the USSR. Evacuation of factories and workforces was attempted on Stalin’s orders; and Red troops and the NKVD, as they retreated, implemented a scorched-earth policy to minimise the benefit to the Wehrmacht. Hitler prepared himself to be master of the East.

38. FIGHTING ON

Autumn 1941 was grim for the Russians. The United Kingdom had stood alone against Germany for over a year and now the USSR joined it in even greater peril. The British could not send much aid in finances, armaments or troops. Although the front between the Wehrmacht and the Red Army was but one of the fronts in the Second World War, it was at this time virtually a separate war. The front had yet to be stabilised by effective Soviet defence. In October the German forces, having lunged across the plains and marshes to the east of the River Bug, were massing outside Moscow for a final thrust at the USSR’s capital. Critical decisions needed to be taken in the Kremlin. The initial plan was for the entire government to be evacuated to Kuibyshev on the Volga. Stalin was set to leave by train — and Lenin’s embalmed corpse, reinfused with chemicals, was prepared for the journey to Tyumen in west Siberia. Moscow appeared likely to fall to the invader before winter. Not since Napoleon’s invasion in 1812 had the Russian capital faced such a plight — and Stalin, unlike Alexander I, could scarcely expect that Hitler would grant him his life in the event of the increasingly probable German victory.

Yet the line held. Zhukov, Stavka’s Chief of Staff, was transferred to the field for the defence of Moscow. At the last moment Stalin decided to stay in the capital. While sanctioning the departure of several People’s Commissariats to Kuibyshev, he decided that Zhukov might pull off victory and instructed the leading politicians to remain with him in the capital. He could not have dreamed up a better piece of propaganda. The word got out that the Leader was refusing to forsake the capital. Resistance was going to be shown by everyone from Stavka members down to the ordinary infantryman and factory worker.

The first test of Stalin’s resolve came towards the end of the year with Stavka’s discussion about deep defence. Zhukov was a natural forward-mover; he was never more content than when organising Red forces to attack the Wehrmacht. But he was also a professional military man. The strategic chances of resisting German forces advancing on Kiev were minimal, and Zhukov — like the other commanders — concluded that the abandonment of the Ukrainian capital would conserve human and material resources which could be used at a later stage in the war. He put this to Stalin at his predictable peril. Stalin was angry. ‘How,’ he asked, ‘could you even think of giving up Kiev to the enemy?’ Still Zhukov stood his ground: ‘If you think the Chief of Staff can’t talk anything but absolute nonsense, he’s got no business here.’¹ Nevertheless Stalin stayed with his own impulses and the order was given that Kiev should be defended to the last. Timoshenko, usually timid about offending Stalin, considered withdrawing from Kiev without telling Stalin. (This, obviously, would have been a suicidal measure for Timoshenko.) Attack, attack and attack: this was Stalin’s way to repel the Nazi invasion. So at Stalin’s insistence the armed forces in the capital were ordered to prepare for decisive action. Civilians were told to stay behind.

The Wehrmacht moved forward. What astounded its commanders were Soviet pluck, determination and flexibility. They had been taught to regard the Russians as Untermenschen but discovered that the peoples of the USSR, including the Russians, were far from being primitives. Stalin would not yet budge on strategy. Abandonment of great cities was anathema to him. He had yet to learn that strategic withdrawal could facilitate an indispensable regrouping. He acted like a military ignoramus just as he had been proved a diplomatic one in mid-1941. Inevitably Kiev fell to the larger and better-organised forces of the Wehrmacht on 19 September.

The Red Army’s strategic options were few. While the Wehrmacht held the initiative, Stavka had to react to German moves. Commanders were ordered to hold their present positions. Stavka decided which sectors most needed reserves to be rushed to them. While Zhukov worked on a plan of campaign, Stalin harassed his politicians into expanding output for the armed forces. Astonishing feats were performed in the USSR in 1942. The factories and workforces evacuated from the western regions of the USSR were restored to operation in the Urals. Meanwhile the industrial enterprises of central Russia were intensifying activity. The grievous losses of 1941 were being made good. This was done with Stalin’s customary ruthlessness. The slogan ‘Everything for the Front!’ was realised almost to the letter. Industry, already heavily tilted towards military needs before 1941, produced virtually entirely for the needs of the armed forces. Consumer goods ceased to be manufactured. Soviet economic might was so successfully dedicated to the war effort that in the last six months of 1942 it reached a level of production which the Germans attained only across the entire year. The numbers were remarkable. In that half-year the USSR acquired fifteen thousand aircraft and thirteen thousand tanks.²

The price was paid by other sectors of the economy. Resources were denied to agriculture. As young men were conscripted into the armed forces and young women left for jobs in the factories, conditions on the collective farms sharply deteriorated. Many farms fell out of production or else were run by the labour of women long past their time of youthful vigour. Yet the government procurement quotas were maintained so that the soldiers and workers might be fed. The result was the deeper impoverishment of the countryside. The state administrative order which reported massive achievements in turning out tanks and aircraft was a disaster for agriculture. Stalin’s propagandists — and many later commentators — emphasised that his policies had proved themselves wonderfully in war; they could do this only by keeping silent about farms in the unoccupied regions.

Yet the patriotic spirit was unquenchable. Propaganda stiffened the resistance by publishing details of German atrocities. Pravda did not become a ‘paper of record’, yet it did not have to concoct falsehoods about the Wehrmacht and the SS. Once the Soviet military resistance began to stiffen, Moscow’s media concentrated effectively on German atrocities. Jews, Roma and communists were being shot out of hand. Murder and pillage were ravaging the USSR’s western borderlands. Although the Germans allowed most churches and some private shops to be reopened in Ukraine, they generally treated the country as a place for plunder. Harvests were routinely seized, and the German occupiers found the collective farms too useful an instrument of grain procurement to be abandoned. Early in Operation Barbarossa there had been debate in Berlin about policies of occupation. Several officials had urged the prudence of seeking to neutralise opposition in the western regions of the USSR by granting economic and social concessions. Hitler quashed this talk. For him, the whole purpose of the invasion was to realise his ideological dream. The Wehrmacht, SS and civilian administration were ordered to treat the Slav Untermenschen as a human resource exploitable to the point of death.

This apparently had no effect on Stalin. He had failed to anticipate the intensity of Nazi brutality; but even when reports reached him from behind the German lines, he held his tongue about them. He spoke only in general terms about German atrocities (whereas Churchill and Roosevelt emphasised the massive disregard for international laws on war). Stalin himself waged war, as he conducted politics, with his own immense savagery. The NKVD had rampaged across Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania killing or arresting whole strata of the population. It was through Operation Barbarossa that for the first time since the Civil War he confronted an enemy as willing as he was to use terror against innocent non-combatants.

Stalin in any case gave little thought to the matter.³ Calling on his compatriots to fight a bitter war regardless of cost, he had no interest in focusing attention on the horrific strength and ruthlessness of the Wehrmacht. He and Stavka got on with planning, organising and supervising the war effort. They were hard men by any standards. Those communist leaders with a soft side to their thinking — Bukharin, Kamenev, Tomski or Ryazanov — had perished in the Great Terror. There were no such spirits in Stavka or the State Committee of Defence. If any of them had reservations about Stalin’s severity towards his own forces, they kept quiet about them. Both sides in the German–Soviet conflict went at each other without regard to the Geneva Convention. Prisoners-of-war were treated atrociously. Strategy and tactics were developed which spared neither soldier nor civilian. The restraints which characterised the fighting between Germany and the Western Allies never prevailed on the front with the Red Army. Warfare reverted to the colossal brutality last seen in Europe in the religious wars of the seventeenth century, and Stalin was in his element.

The USSR’s survival of that first terrible winter of 1941–2 seemed a miracle at the time. The USA entered the war against Germany in 1941. Stalin’s Western Allies, despite their public bravado, had not given him much of a chance; and although Washington promised arms and other supplies through the system of Lend-Lease (which postponed any payment till the end of hostilities), little reached the USSR until the later months of 1942. The Soviet Union had had to cope with Nazi Germany on its own, while Hitler could draw upon increasing support from Italy, Hungary, Romania and Slovakia.

Sober assessment was less unfavourable to Stalin’s chances. The pre-war analysis, shared in Berlin and Moscow, held that the Germans needed to attack by early summer if they were to conquer. The actual military campaign validated this analysis. The Wehrmacht, after massive advances into the western borderlands of the USSR, was halted outside Leningrad and Moscow; it had failed to overrun the Russian heartland, oil-rich Baku and the Volga transport routes. The USSR retained adequate human and material resources to go on resisting the aggressor. The Wehrmacht operated in bleaker conditions than Hitler had anticipated. The last months of 1941 were bitterly cold. German lines of communication and supply were overstretched: Hitler had not got far enough to have final success but had gone too far to maintain his armed forces in a decent condition. Germany’s military equipment, moreover, had not been built to specifications for the rigours of the Russian winter. The odds began to turn in the USSR’s favour despite the enduring impact of Stalin’s miscalculations about Operation Barbarossa.

Stalin had gained his second wind even though the immediate situation was deeply discouraging. The Wehrmacht prowled like a panther outside Moscow and Leningrad. Supplies of food in the unoccupied parts of the USSR had fallen by a half as a result of German control of Ukraine. The Don Basin too had been seized, and with it had vanished three quarters of the country’s access to coal, iron and steel. Other metal deposits lay in the territories held by Germany; these included copper, manganese and aluminium. Potential conscripts to the Red Army were reduced by the speed and depth of the Wehrmacht’s advance. In the Soviet-held territories, moreover, there was much chaos. Millions of refugees streamed into central Russia. Trains reached Moscow from the west with wagons piled high with the machinery of factories that had been evacuated.

The Supreme Commander reverted to instinct. Attack, he insisted to his exhausted generals, was preferable to defence. Even Stalin acknowledged that this was impossible near Moscow and Leningrad. But he thought his maps indicated German weakness in the Don Basin. Generals and commissars warned him that logistics and geography were unpropitious; but they got nowhere. Stalin argued — or rather he assumed and did not care about what others argued against him — that almost any action was better than passivity. In April 1942, as the snow gave way to mud, Stalin overrode Stavka and compelled its military specialists to organise an offensive in eastern Ukraine with the objective of seizing Kharkov. This would be the first serious Soviet counter-attack. It was planned with egregious indiscretion and German intelligence agencies had prior knowledge. The Wehrmacht had made its arrangements and was waiting; it also knew in advance about Stalin’s plan to retake the Crimea. A strategic trap was sprung. Despite the objections from his advisers, Stalin insisted on the offensives and the Red Army drove its tanks straight into the jaws of defeat.

Hitler had dealt a juddering blow to the Soviet armed forces, and Kharkov stayed in the hands of the enemy. Hitler continued to think in grandiose terms. The war was going well for German forces in north Africa and it was not unreasonable to suppose that the Wehrmacht, coming from the south and the north, would soon overrun the entire Middle East and take possession of its oil. The Japanese, Hitler’s allies, were moving fast down the western rim of the Pacific Ocean. No country could hold out against Japan; the European imperial powers — Britain, France and Holland — were being worsted in the Asian struggle. Hitler confidently chose Stalingrad (formerly known as Tsaritsyn) as his next target.

Stalin ordered the city to be held at all costs. There is much unwarranted commentary that both he and Hitler exaggerated Stalingrad’s strategic significance. Stalin had been based there for some months in 1918 and his propagandists had treated the Tsaritsyn campaign as crucial to the outcome of the Civil War. Hitler, it is said, was drawn to attacking Stalingrad because the city bore Stalin’s name. Sentiment and symbolism may well have contributed to the German determination to take Stalingrad and the Soviet will to resist. But the primary reason for Hitler’s decision was strategic. Stalingrad lay in an area vital for the logistics of the USSR’s war effort. German control over the mid-Volga region would cut the USSR off from its oil supplies in Baku and Grozny. Its possession would also permit the Germans to break across the Volga to south-eastern Russia and dangerously reduce Moscow’s access to grain and potatoes. The alternative would have been to concentrate on the capture of Moscow so as to dominate the centre of transport and administration for the entire USSR. But Hitler’s decision was sound even if it was not the sole option available to him.

Germany and its allies started the Stalingrad campaign on 28 June 1942. Quickly they reached and took Voronezh. Then Rostov fell. Stalingrad seemed doomed and a confident Hitler split the attacking forces so as to seize the oil of the north and south Caucasus. The reports to Moscow made painful reading for Stavka. Panic gripped the inhabitants of Russia’s south. To prevent any repetition of the kind of panic which had disrupted the capital in July 1941, Stalin issued Order No. 227, ‘Not a Step Backward!’, on 28 July 1942. Its terms, read out to troops in the field but withheld from the Soviet media, demanded obedience on pain of severe punishment. Retreat, unless it had clear sanction from the Kremlin, was to be treated as treason. Soviet-held territory was to be defended at all costs. ‘Panickers’ and ‘cowards’ were to expect summary treatment: they would either be shot on the spot or transferred to the so-called penal battalions (where they stood little chance of survival). Order No. 227 had been edited and signed by Stalin. No serving soldier was left in doubt of his determination to compel the Red Army to fight without giving an inch.

Yet when Stalin refused to send reinforcements to Stalingrad, he was not relying on Order No. 227. He was fearful about diverting his reserves from Moscow and Leningrad. German commander Friedrich Paulus’s forces moved unrelentingly on Stalingrad. Stalin turned again to Zhukov. Implicitly he recognised that he had been making misjudgements in Ukraine and southern Russia which at last he called upon his most dynamic officer to rectify. As a reward for his achievements Zhukov was made Deputy Supreme Commander. After a swift visit to the front, Zhukov stood out for a changed set of military dispositions. In particular he called for the dispatch of reserves to Stalingrad. This plan was agreed in September 1942, and Zhukov and the new Chief of Staff Alexander Vasilevski worked out the details with Stalin. Gradually the Supreme Commander was learning how to work with fellow Stavka members. The plan for a wide counter-offensive — Operation Uranus — was elaborated. Reserves were assembled and the defenders of Stalingrad, cut off by the Germans, were ordered to hold out for the duration. Whole districts of the city were reduced to rubble by the constant bombing raids of the Luftwaffe. Vasili Chuikov was appointed the new Soviet commander, but Hitler believed that Paulus would soon have possession of Stalingrad.

Zhukov and Vasilevski conferred with Stalin and other commanders at each stage of their planning. This was the outcome of Stalin’s growing respect for their professional expertise. Zhukov reported to Stalin on his direct observations near the front. When he made recommendations about operational defects, he had to put up with Stalin expatiating on contemporary warfare.⁴ Yet generally Stalin behaved himself. He proposed that Operation Uranus should be postponed if preparations were not fully in place.⁵ This was not a Stalin seen earlier in the war.

Final decisions on Operation Uranus were taken on 13 November. Zhukov and Vasilevski took comfort from the fact that Romanian rather than German troops would stand across the line of the Soviet advance; they also had numerical superiority in men and armaments. Stalin listened attentively, slowly puffing on his pipe and stroking his mous-tache.⁶ Members of the State Defence Committee and the Politburo came in and out. The general plan was gone over several times so that all leaders might understand their responsibilities. Zhukov and Vasilevski, while advocating this counter-offensive, reminded Stalin that the Germans would almost certainly transfer troops from Vyazma to strengthen Paulus’s forces. They therefore suggested a synchronised counter-offensive by the Red Army to the north of Vyazma. Stalin gave his consent: ‘This would be good. But who of you is going to take up this matter?’ Zhukov and Vasilevski divided the responsibilities between them, and Stalin ordered Zhukov to leave next day for Stalingrad to oversee the last arrangements before Operation Uranus. Stalin left the date for the start of the campaign to Zhukov.⁷ Zhukov and Stalin were almost as confident as they were determined. This time the Germans would be beaten.

Operation Uranus had initial success on 19 November but then got held up by the German defence. Stalin, according to Zhukov, sent dozens of telegrams hysterically urging his commanders to crush the enemy.⁸ This was his old way with subordinates: they had to be kept functioning at a frantic pace or Stalin would get angry. Hitler meantime transferred Erich von Manstein, one of his best generals, to break through the Soviet lines around Stalingrad. But Stalin had also learned patience. It helped that the geography of the region was well known to him. This made it less likely that he would impose manifestly impractical ideas. But still Stalin displayed ‘excessive nervousness’ in Stavka.⁹

In December 1942 he decided in the State Defence Committee to put Konstantin Rokossovski in sole command of the front. Stalin had until then been exercising a degree of self-restraint at planning sessions, and the surprised Zhukov fell silent. Stalin exclaimed: ‘Why are you keeping quiet? Or is it that you don’t have your own opinion?’ Zhukov, who had spent weeks assembling a command group at Stalingrad, pointed out that these commanders, especially Andrei Yeremenko, would take offence. But Stalin had made up his mind: ‘Now is not the time to be offended. Ring up Yeremenko and tell him the State Defence Committee’s decision.’¹⁰ Yeremenko indeed took it badly, but Stalin refused to speak to him. The plan and the personnel were at last in place. The fighting around Stalingrad had reached a peak of intensity. The city had been turned into a lunar landscape; hardly a building remained intact. Ammunition and food were running out. The icy Volga winter made conditions hardly bearable for soldiers on both sides: frostbite and malnutrition affected many of them. Soviet forces, however, were somewhat better supplied than the Germans and their allies. Hitler had failed to remedy the problem of stretched lines of communication. Unmistakably the Red Army had the edge.

Hitler was altogether too casual about the difficulties in Stalingrad until Paulus had been cut off by Konstantin Rokossovski’s Don Front and Nikolai Vatutin’s South-Western Front. Paulus’s only option was to attempt a break-out; but Hitler, who thought that the Luftwaffe would keep German forces supplied until such time as Manstein could make a crushing advance, overruled him. Zhukov and Vasilevski had anticipated all this. They filled the gap between Paulus and Manstein with a mass of armoured divisions. From this position they intended to deliver two strategic blows. Operation Saturn aimed to retake Rostov-on-Don while Operation Circle would complete the closure of Stalingrad and the destruction of Paulus’s forces. This dual scheme was too ambitious. It allowed Manstein to stabilise his front and threaten the Soviet besiegers of Stalingrad. By themselves Zhukov and Vasilevski might have reacted more flexibly. But they had Stalin looking over their shoulders. Once he had the scent of victory, he could not contain himself. The result was that the Reds were needlessly fighting to the point of exhaustion — and the Germans were given a second chance.

Yet Soviet forces regrouped. Manstein failed to smash down their defences, and Rokossovski was able to turn his divisions on Paulus. The Wehrmacht experienced the fate it had customarily meted out to its enemies. German soldiers had been convinced by Nazi propaganda that they were going to fight a rabble of Untermenschen in the name of European civilisation; they were instead being reduced to a piteous condition by a superior power which was well armed, well organised and well led.

Other war leaders might have gone down to witness some of the action. Stalin resolutely stayed put in Moscow. The reality of war for him was his conversations with Zhukov, his inspection of maps and the orders he shouted down the telephone line at frightened politicians and commanders. He neither witnessed nor read about the degradation among Paulus’s forces. They froze and starved and caught rats and chewed grass and tree bark for food. The end was approaching, and Paulus was invited to surrender. The street fighting pinned him deep into the city. Hand-to-hand combat continued until Paulus gave himself up, and on 2 February 1943 German resistance ceased. Stalingrad was a Soviet city again. The German losses were greater than in any previous theatre of the Second World War: 147,000 of them had been killed and 91,000 taken captive. The Red Army had lost still more men. But it had gained much more in other ways. The myth of the Wehr-macht’s invincibility had been discredited. Hitler had visibly lacked basic skills of generalship. Whereas Soviet citizens had once doubted whether the Red Army could win the war, now everyone thought it might have a chance.

Stalin was generous to his commanders. Zhukov and five others were awarded the Order of Suvorov, 1st class. Stalin made himself Marshal of the Soviet Union. He convinced himself that he had been tested in the heat of battle and had achieved everything demanded of him. His real role had been as a co-ordinator and instigator. He drew together the military and civilian agencies of the Soviet state. The expertise was supplied by the commanders in Stavka, and the courage and endurance came from the officers and men of the Red Army in conditions of almost unbelievable privation. The material equipment was produced by poorly fed factory workers who toiled without complaint. Food was provided by kolkhozniks who themselves had barely enough grain and potatoes to live on. But Stalin was unembarrassed by self-doubt. Whenever he appeared in public and whenever pictures of him appeared on newsreels or in the press after Stalingrad, he donned the marshal’s uniform.

39. SLEEPING ON THE DIVAN

The German invasion deprived Stalin of the presence of his family. His sons Yakov and Vasili were on war service. Yakov was a lieutenant in the 14th Armoured Division, Vasili a very young air force commander. Yakov suffered a terrible fate. Captured near Vitebsk by the Wehrmacht in 1941, his identity was discovered and he was kept as a prized prisoner. Hitler sanctioned an offer to ransom him for one of the leading German generals. The Germans interrogated him in the hope of hearing things which might be used to embarrass his father. Yakov, despite his youthful misdemeanours, proved a stoical inmate and stood up for Stalin and the USSR. Stalin endured the situation and refused the German proposal point blank. Yet the situation deeply troubled him; he asked Svetlana to stay in his bedroom for several successive nights.¹ Only Zhukov dared to enquire after Yakov. Stalin walked about a hundred paces before replying in a lowered voice that he did not expect Yakov to survive captivity. Later at the dining table he pushed aside his food and declared with a rare intimacy: ‘No, Yakov will prefer any death to the betrayal of the Motherland. What a terrible war! How many lives of our people has it taken away! Obviously we’ll have few families without relatives who have perished.’²

Order No. 270, which had been edited and sharpened by Stalin,³ prohibited Soviet servicemen from allowing themselves to be taken prisoner. Red Army POWs were automatically categorised as traitors. Yet Stalin exempted his son Yakov from blame. Nevertheless the iron was in his soul: he wanted the policy of no surrender to be taken seriously and could not afford to be seen indulging his son.

The relationship between Stalin and his sons had been poor long before the war. Yakov had continued to annoy his father, even refusing to join the communist party. Stalin sent for him and remonstrated: ‘And you are my son! What do I look like? Me, the General Secretary of the Central Committee? You can have all the opinions you wish, but do think of your father. Do it for me.’ This argument got through to Yakov and he joined the party.⁴ But they saw little of each other and Stalin was never slow to issue reprimands. It was a similar situation with his younger son Vasili, who took more than the normal time to qualify for the officer corps in the Soviet air force (which was the favourite section of the armed forces for the offspring of Politburo members). It is said that Stalin complained: ‘You should long ago have got your diploma from the Military Academy.’ Vasili is reported to have lashed back: ‘Well, you haven’t got a diploma either.’⁵ Perhaps the story is apocryphal. But it has the sound of psychological truth. Stalin was always trying to impress others as a man who understood armies and military strategy. Only his son would have dared to point out the amateurish foundations of his military knowledge.

Until the war Svetlana had been the apple of his eye. Nadya’s strict standards of behaviour were relaxed after her death,⁶ and Svetlana was fussed over by tutors and housekeeper Katerina Til. A nurse combed her hair. The general oversight of her daily schedule, though, was handed to Stalin’s chief bodyguard Nikolai Vlasik.⁷ Stalin was too busy to see a lot of her; in any case his opinion was that ‘feelings were a matter for women’.⁸ What he wanted from his children was that they should be a delight for him on those occasions when they spent time together. He in turn wished to be fun for them. Yakov and Vasili did not meet these specifications: neither of them worked hard at school or behaved with the mixture of respect and levity that he required. But Svetlana fitted the bill. He penned letters to her pretending to be her ‘first secretary comrade Stalin’. She wrote out orders to him such as ‘I hereby command you to permit me to go to the theatre or cinema with you.’ To this he replied: ‘All right, I obey.’⁹ As Maria Svanidze, Stalin’s sister-in law from his first marriage, recorded in her diary for 1934, Svetlana adored him: ‘Svetlana rubbed against her father the whole time. He stroked her, kissed her, admired her and fed her from his own spoon, lovingly choosing the best titbits for her.’¹⁰

Relations between father and daughter deteriorated after Operation Barbarossa. By her mid-teens she was interested in men, and this brought out his ill-tempered side. When she showed him a photograph of herself in clothes he thought immodest (and he had strict ideas on this subject), he snatched it from her and ripped it up.¹¹ He hated her wearing lipstick. When she wanted to stay overnight at the Berias’ dacha, where she was a frequent visitor, he ordered her to return home immediately: ‘I don’t trust Beria!’¹² Stalin was aware of Lavrenti Beria’s proclivities towards young women. Although it was Beria’s son Sergo she was visiting, Stalin took no chances and attached a security official — known to Svetlana as Uncle Klimov — to act as her chaperone.

Svetlana’s discomfort was increased by what she learned about her family’s history. Her aunt Anna told her, when she reached the age of sixteen, that her mother Nadya had not died of natural causes but had committed suicide. Svetlana was shocked by what she heard; her father had always avoided the topic.¹³ Anna did not tell Svetlana much more: she had already taken a large risk in breaching Stalin’s confidence. Svetlana proceeded to ask her father for further information. According to Sergo Beria, in whom she confided, Stalin’s response was hurtful. He resented the way Svetlana kept on examining pictures of Nadya. When she asked him whether her mother had been beautiful, he replied more insensitively: ‘Yes, except that she had teeth like a horse.’ He added that the other Alliluev women had wanted to sleep with him. This too may well have been true, but it was a painful message for Svetlana. He finished by explaining: ‘At least your mother was young, and she really loved me. That’s why I married her.’¹⁴

It was around this time that Svetlana started going out with film-writer Alexei Kapler. A more unsuitable boyfriend could not be imagined. Kapler was a womaniser who had had a string of affairs. He was over twice Svetlana’s age. He was also Jewish — and Stalin even before the war had been trying to identify himself and his family with the Russians. Kapler was incredibly indiscreet. He acquired Western films such as Queen Christina (starring Greta Garbo) and Walt Disney’s Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs and showed them to Svetlana. He passed on books by Ernest Hemingway, who was then unpublished in the USSR. Kapler handed her — a girl who loved literature — copies of poems by Anna Akhmatova who had been in official disgrace before the war.

Kapler made Svetlana feel desirable as a woman, and she fell head over heels in love with him.¹⁵ Stalin, on hearing about developments from Vlasik, knew how things might turn out. Hadn’t he himself seduced girls in Siberia? Hadn’t he taken a woman half his age off to Tsaritsyn in 1918 and exploited his mature charms? Something had to be done. Stalin decided that the best thing — for once — was not to have the man arrested but to send him as a Pravda correspondent to the front at Stalingrad.¹⁶ It was mere coincidence that Kapler was to be sent to Stalingrad where Stalin and Nadya Allilueva had spent several months. Stalin wanted to give Kapler a fright by assigning him to the vicinity of direct military conflict. After the Great Terror such an intervention from the Kremlin was enough to scare the daylights out of anyone, but Kapler carried on regardless. Far from crumbling under the pressure, he sent articles to Moscow with obvious hints at his relationship with Svetlana. ‘At the moment in Moscow,’ he wrote in one of them, ‘doubtless the snow is falling. From your window is visible the jagged wall of the Kremlin.’ Such recklessness brought Svetlana to her senses and she cut contact with Kapler.¹⁷

But her heart remained with him and when he returned from Stalingrad they started to see each other again. They kissed and cuddled despite being accompanied by Uncle Klimov. Poor Klimov felt damned if he reported this and damned if he didn’t. On hearing what was happening, Vlasik angrily sent an official to order Kapler out of Moscow. Extraordinarily enough, though, Kapler told him to go to hell.

Stalin at last intervened. ‘I know everything,’ he said to Svetlana. ‘All your telephone conversations, here they are!’ He tapped his pocket, which was full of transcripts. He had never spoken so contemptuously to her. Glaring into her eyes, he shouted: ‘Your Kapler is an English spy; he’s been arrested!’ Svetlana shouted: ‘But I love him!’ Stalin lost his self-control and sneered: ‘You love him!’ He slapped her twice in the face. ‘Just think, nanny, what’s she’s come to! There’s such a war going on and she’s tied up with all this!’ A torrent of obscenities flowed from his lips until his anger had subsided.¹⁸ She broke with Kapler, and her father seemed to have got his way. But his victory was illusory. No sooner had she dropped Kapler than she turned her attention to Beria’s son Sergo. Sergo’s father and mother were horrified by the dangers which could arise from such a relationship, and told him to keep away from her. Sergo’s mother Nina was frank with Svetlana: ‘You are both young. You must get a job first. And he looks on you as a sister. He’ll never marry you.’¹⁹ Svetlana recognised reality and looked elsewhere. In spring 1944, after a brief courtship, she married one of her brother Vasili’s friends, Grigori Morozov. This time Stalin was more restrained. Although he refused to invite Morozov to the Blizhnyaya dacha, he let the marriage go ahead.

He could not control absolutely everything and, while a war was going on, did not try. Disappointed in his family, he let his thoughts turn back to Georgia and to his boyhood friends. He had never forgotten them despite years without direct contact. From the thousands of rubles in his unopened pay packets he made a money transfer to Petr Kapanadze, Grigol Glurzhidze and Mikhail Dzeradze. (He was characteristically precise: 40,000 rubles for the first and 30,000 each for the others.) The Supreme Commander signed himself Soso.²⁰

He had gone on seeing old friends and relatives after Nadya’s suicide, but everyone noticed how lonely he was becoming. He welcomed the Alliluevs and Svanidzes to the Blizhnyaya dacha until the late 1930s. The Great Terror changed this. Stalin had Maria Svanidze arrested in 1939 and sent to a labour camp. Her husband Alexander Svanidze also fell victim to the NKVD: he had been arrested in 1937 and was shot in 1941. Alexander behaved with extraordinary courage under torture and refused to confess or beg for mercy. Although Stalin did not yet touch the closest relatives of his deceased second wife, their spouses were not so lucky. Stanisław Redens, Anna Allilueva’s husband, was arrested in 1938.²¹ Anna got permission to plead his case along with her parents in the presence of Stalin and Molotov. But on the day of their meeting her father Sergei Alliluev refused to go with them. Stalin took this badly and Redens’s fate was sealed.²² Even those among Stalin’s outer family who escaped incarceration lived in continuous dread of what might happen to them. Yet like everyone in the Kremlin elite, they were moths flying near to the light source; they were incapable of pulling themselves out of their orbits.

During the war there would have been little time for family conviviality even if Stalin had not already ravaged the lives of his relatives. Such hours as he got for relaxation — and they were few — were spent in the company of the commanders and politicians who happened to be at hand. These occasions were predominantly male affairs, and the drink was as lavishly provided as the food. Yet he rationed the evenings he devoted to pleasure. He focused his waking energies on leading the war effort.

That Stalin managed to cope with the intense physical pressures is remarkable. Through the 1930s he had experienced bouts of ill health. His neck artery went on troubling him. His blood circulation was monitored by a succession of doctors; but he distrusted nearly all of them: he had persuaded himself that hot mineral baths were the best cure for any ailments. In 1931 he had a bad throat inflammation just after taking the waters in Matsesta and had a temperature of 39°C. A streptococcal infection followed five years later. His personal physician Vladimir Vinogradov was worried enough to go off and consult other specialists about desirable treatment. Stalin was too sick to join in the New Year celebrations in 1937. Again in February 1940 he was struck down by a raging high temperature and the usual problem with the throat.²³ Until 1941, however, he could count on lengthy breaks for recuperation. Usually he had spent several weeks by the Black Sea, giving his body time to recover from the punishing schedule he set himself in Moscow. This was not possible after Operation Barbarossa. Throughout the hostilities, except when he travelled to Yalta and Tehran to confer with the Allied leaders or when he made a much-publicised trip to the proximity of the front,²⁴ Stalin stayed in Moscow or its environs. And he worked himself like a dog.

The strains were manifest. His hair turned grey. (Zhukov unreliably said it was white.)²⁵ His eyes were baggy from insufficient sleep. Excessive smoking aggravated the growing problems of arteriosclerosis. Not that he would have listened to doctors’ advice to change his style of life. Tobacco and alcohol were his consolation, and anyway the medical experts who saw him are not known to have counselled an alteration in the way he lived. They feared to do this — or possibly they did not see much wrong with his behaviour: not every doctor in that period was as severe as their present-day successors. Relentlessly, therefore, Stalin was driving himself to an earlier grave than biological inheritance had prescribed for him.²⁶

Stalin lived an odd life after his wife’s suicide, but others in his entourage had even odder ones. Beria was a rapist of young girls. Others in the Kremlin had a taste for women even though outright physical coercion was not involved. Abel Enukidze, executed in 1937, had been notorious for employing attractive young women whom he took to bed. Kalinin had a penchant for ballerinas, Bulganin for opera divas. Khrush-chëv was said to chase women on a regular basis. The sexual history of the Soviet elite included promiscuousness on the part of several leaders, and a few of them had not confined themselves to intercourse with women. Yezhov had been bisexual and found comfort sometimes with both the husband and wife in a marriage. Such individuals were using their political power to secure gratification. As they knew, they could be arrested at any time. Many of them also found relief in drink. Zhdanov and Khrushchëv were boozers on a heroic scale. An evening for them was not complete without a skinful of vodka and brandy, and Yezhov had often been drunk by the late morning. Terror brought odd individuals to the apex of the Soviet order and the pressure made them still odder.

It may seem surprising that they managed to function at all as politicians. But this would miss the point. Although they would have engaged in sexual and alcoholic excess even if they had not become Soviet politicians, undoubtedly they were also driven in this direction by the pressures — and dangers — of their jobs.

Stalin’s existence before Operation Barbarossa had been stolid by comparison, but it was not devoid of female companionship or heavy drinking. A plausible piece of gossip was that Stalin took a fancy to his deceased wife Nadya’s sister-in-law Yevgenia. She saw quite a lot of him in the months after the suicide. Another who did so was Maria Svanidze.²⁷ This was not approved by Maria’s husband Alexander, who thought that it might lead to hanky-panky. Maria made no secret of the fact that she ‘loved Joseph and was attached to him’.²⁸ She was good-looking and worked on stage as a singer:²⁹ she could hardly help attracting Stalin’s attention. But it was Yevgenia who was most gossiped about. In fact Yevgenia, whose husband Pavel Alliluev died in 1938, quickly married an inventor called Nikolai Molochnikov. Although it is doubtful that she and Stalin had a sexual relationship, there remains the suspicion that Yevgenia went off with Molochnikov as a way of avoiding becoming more closely involved with Stalin. Her daughter Kira has said opaquely: ‘She got wed so as to defend herself.’³⁰ But filial piety discouraged her from stating whether it was Stalin’s attentions that she wanted to escape. What is known is that Stalin subsequently rang her several times and that during the Second World War he asked her to accompany Svetlana and other relatives as they were evacuated from Moscow. Yevgenia refused his request on the ground that she had her own immediate family to think about.³¹

Rumours had other candidates as his lovers in the late 1930s; it was even said that he secretly married again. The person said to have been his wife was named as Rosa Kaganovich. This allegation was peddled by the German Nazi media. Supposedly Rosa was Lazar Kaganovich’s beautiful sister. It was a pack of lies. Lazar Kaganovich had only one sister, Rakhil, who died in the mid-1920s.³² Another suggestion was that it was Lazar Kaganovich’s daughter Maya whom Stalin took to bed. Certainly she was good-looking. But there is no credible evidence. Lazar Kaganovich was not a prude and had no reason as a pensioner to pretend that his daughter had had no relationship with Stalin if this was not true.³³

What is beyond doubt is the kind of life enjoyed by Stalin among his male friends. He loved to sing with Molotov and Voroshilov accompanied by Zhdanov on the piano. Molotov came from a musical family and could play the violin and mandolin. When he had been in administrative exile in Vologda before the Great War, he had supplemented his convict’s allowance by joining a mandolin group which went round the local restaurants and cinema. Zhdanov too had a cultural hinterland and joined in the fun at the dacha, and Voroshilov had a decent voice. All had memorised church music as youngsters and, ignoring their atheistic commitment, performed the hymns they loved.³⁴ Stalin’s voice had held up well and he could still take the baritone’s parts.³⁵ He also sang to his daughter Svetlana and his Alliluev nephews and nieces. Kira Allilueva recalled him dandling her on his knee and giving renditions of his favourite tunes.³⁶ Despite later being imprisoned and exiled by his police, she continued to hold her uncle in affection. His joviality in private surroundings had not vanished with his wife’s suicide.

Another form of recreation was billiards. When the Alliluevs visited, Stalin sometimes played against Nadya’s elder brother Pavel. Usually it was a convivial occasion, but not always. Pavel had grown wary of Joseph. The house rule was that losers in any match had to crawl under the table afterwards. One evening in the 1930s Pavel and Joseph lost a match to Alexander Svanidze and Stanisław Redens. Pavel anticipated dangerous resentment and ordered his sons to do the crawling on behalf of himself and Stalin. But Pavel’s daughter Kira was present. ‘This,’ she cried with childish righteousness, ‘is against the rules. They’ve lost, let them crawl under!’ A frightened Pavel strode across to her and struck her with his cue. Stalin could not be allowed to feel humiliated.³⁷

Indulgence also had to be shown him at his dinner parties. He himself liked to flirt with women and probably he bedded some of them. It would be astounding if such an egotist had failed to take his opportunities with at least some of the many women who made themselves available. But he disapproved of public licentiousness (which is one of the reasons why his sex life after 1932 remains mysterious). His hypocritical prudery about women, though, was accompanied by an open relish for sessions of heavy drinking. He virtually forced brandies and vodka on his guests — and then stood back and waited for them to blurt out some secret while under the influence of alcohol. He himself took the precaution of drinking wine in the same size of glass that the others had for vodka. Another of his tricks was to imbibe a vodka-coloured wine while others drank spirits. (He admitted this stratagem to Ribbentrop in 1939.)³⁸ Having put his guests uncomfortably at their ease, he wanted to watch and listen rather than to get drunk. He liked practical jokes and dirty anecdotes, and there was trouble for anyone who declined to join in. Among his more childish tricks was to put a tomato on the seat of a Politburo member. Always the squelching sound brought tears of laughter to his eyes.

Such parties continued to be held after 1941 even though they happened less frequently. They belonged to the secret life of the Kremlin’s rulers. The only witnesses, apart from the small number of servants, were communist emissaries from eastern Europe who reached Moscow in the closing years of the war. Brought up to imagine Stalin as an austere character, they were always stupefied by the vulgarity of the scene. Stalin must have suspected that this would be the reaction of most people. Although he ordered lots of drink for Churchill and Roosevelt, he never got up to the usual japes in their presence.

He also dressed up for meetings with the Allied leaders. But this was exceptional. With other visitors he saw no need to look smart. He continued to shuffle around the grounds of the Blizhnyaya dacha in his favourite Civil War coat which had fur on both its inside and outside. Alternatively he might put on his ordinary fur coat (which had also been acquired after the October Revolution). When servants surreptitiously tried to get rid of it, he was not fooled: ‘You’re taking the opportunity to bring me a new fur coat every day but this one has another ten years in it.’ He was no less attached to his old boots.³⁹ Zhukov noted that he stuffed his pipe not with any special tobacco but with the filling of the Herzegovina Flor cigarettes available in all kiosks. He unravelled the cigarettes himself.⁴⁰ One rising young official, Nikolai Baibakov, was taken aback by his shabbiness. His boots were not only decrepit; they even had holes in the toes. Baibakov mentioned this to Stalin’s personal assistant Poskrëbyshev, who told him that Stalin had cut the holes to relieve the friction on his corns.⁴¹ Anything to avoid submitting himself to a doctor’s regular inspection!

Although he occasionally let his hair down, Stalin spent most of the war overladen with work. Most nights were passed in his makeshift office deep below the Mayakovski Metro station. The days were long and exhausting, and usually he slept not in a bed but on a divan. Not since Nicholas I, that most austere of Romanovs, had a ruler of the Russians been so frugal in his habits. Stalin was aware of the precedent,⁴² and turned himself into a human machine for the winning of the Great Patriotic War.

40. TO THE DEATH!

Victory at Stalingrad in February 1943 made the defeat of the Wehrmacht possible but not yet certain. Hitler’s forces in the East were determined and well-equipped. They kept Leningrad under siege. The Ice Road linking the city to the rest of Russia was under constant bombardment. Moscow too remained in peril. Any strategic mistake or diminution of patriotic commitment would have baleful consequences for the USSR.

The Red Army strove to follow up Stalingrad with total victory. Stalin’s growing readiness to listen to advice in Stavka and the State Defence Committee paid dividends. It was as well that he changed his ways, if only for the war’s duration. Manstein was hastily reassembling the divisions of the Wehrmacht after the Stalingrad defeat for a campaign which he designated Operation Citadel. Pushing up from Ukraine, he aimed to confront the Red Army at the large bulge in its south-facing front near Kursk on the Russo-Ukrainian border. Manstein was planning rapid action. But he was prohibited by Hitler from opening his offensive and taking Stavka by surprise. Hitler had learned like Stalin that the careful preparation of each campaign was crucial; inadvertently he gave the Reds time to think and react. This should have played into Stavka’s hands. Unfortunately, though, Stalin’s caution was only intermittent. The instinct to attack at every opportunity had not died in him. Learning that the Wehrmacht was holding back, he could not help himself: he demanded that Stavka organise a massive offensive without delay.

Zhukov would have none of this; he delivered a report to Stavka insisting that defence in depth was the better option: bloody but dependable attrition was preferable to a bloodier and riskier attack — and Zhukov predicted that Kursk would be the place where the decisive battle would take place.¹ On 12 April a Stavka conference was held. Stalin gruffly gave way to Zhukov’s proposal, which was backed by his military colleagues Alexander Vasilevski and Alexei Antonov.² German intentions quickly became clear as fifty of Hitler’s best divisions were moved into an attacking position where Zhukov had predicted. Stalin, though, had second thoughts in May and argued again in favour of a pre-emptive offensive. Zhukov, Vasilevski and Antonov held firm and carried opinion in Stavka with them.³ Stalin accepted the result and rushed Zhukov and Vasilevski to take direct command. By 4 July the imminence of the German attack was obvious to Zhukov, who ordered Rokossovski to put the agreed plan into operation. Stalin was informed of the decision without prior consultation. It was a bold gesture of autonomy by Zhukov but he got away with it. Stalin received the news without his usual rancour: ‘I’ll be in Stavka awaiting the development of events.’⁴

When hostilities started early next morning, Zhukov was immersed in the task of reacting to unexpected dispositions made by the Germans. It was Stalin who rang him rather than the other way round: ‘Well, how’s it going? Have they started?’ Zhukov simply replied: ‘They’ve started.’⁵ Stalin had to bide his time and control his nerves. The fate of the USSR was in the hands of the Red Army, and there was no longer anything he could do from Moscow that could affect the outcome of battle.

Wehrmacht tanks made ground in the first two days, but then the Soviet lines held. Zhukov and Manstein struggled to outwit and out-punch each other. Zhukov’s ruthless tactics were effective. Instead of waiting for his artillery to batter the enemy before throwing his tanks at them, he undertook both actions simultaneously. Soviet losses were immense; but although the Germans suffered fewer, they could ill afford them in the light of their increasing shortage of men and supplies. Zhukov by his own estimation had 40 per cent more troops, 90 per cent more weaponry, 20 per cent more tanks and 40 per cent more aircraft.⁶ Wasteful though he was of his resources, he had calculated that the Germans faced disaster unless they carried off a speedy victory. German success was never likely. In accordance with the long-elaborated plan, the Red Army counter-attacked from both the Bryansk Front and the Western Front. The Wehrmacht was pummelled backwards. Stalin could not resist demanding the intensification of offensive operations, and as usual it fell to Zhukov to get him to allow time for physical recovery and tactical regrouping. Disputes proliferated and Stalin made plenty of wounding accusations.⁷ But Zhukov was made of strong stuff and was sustained by confidence in imminent triumph. In August he had his moment of glory when he was able to report his final success to Stavka.

The Germans had failed to win the battle of Kursk. The Red Army had not won in a conventional sense because the Wehrmacht conducted a planned and orderly retreat. Thus there was no definitive end to the battle. But Hitler had sustained strategic defeat simply by not having been able to win. After Kursk the Wehrmacht was pushed steadily westwards. Red Army morale rose as German spirits dipped. The USSR conscripted its vast reservoir of peasant soldiers while the Germans and their allies were running out of fighting men. Soviet factories reached a peak of production and were accelerating at a faster rate than Germany’s industrial capacity. Stalin and his Stavka believed that the reverses suffered by German arms at Kursk signalled the beginning of the end for Hitler’s New Order in Europe.

Soviet commanders were right that Stalin had contributed less than themselves to the victory at Kursk. Yet they saw only the military side of his activity: they had little cognisance of his other interventions in the USSR’s war effort. Stavka had nothing to do with foreign policy, political organisation, cultural and social policy or economic mobilisation. Stalin interfered in all these sectors and his impact was deep. In 1941–2 this had already led to several adjustments which he thought necessary to the interests of the USSR. The massive territorial losses in the war’s early months precipitated a collapse in food supplies as Ukrainian wheat, potatoes and sugar beet fell into the hands of the Germans. Although no directive was issued, the authorities slackened off their efforts against the black market in agricultural produce. The exceptions were cities under siege such as Leningrad where the NKVD punished anyone caught trading on the street. But market economics more widely crept back into the Soviet order as party and municipal government accepted that peasants bringing sacks of vegetables for sale helped to alleviate urban malnutrition;⁸ and Stalin, who had fulminated against the flouting of trading laws in the 1930s, kept silent about this during the war.

He also understood the need to widen the limits of cultural expression. Many intellectuals who had been suspect to the authorities were told that the state welcomed their creative services. Notable among them were the poet Anna Akhmatova and the composer Dmitri Shostakovich. Akhmatova had been married to the poet Nikolai Gumilëv, who had been killed as an anti-Soviet militant in 1921; her son Lev still languished in prison and her writings had not been published for years. But well-read members of society remembered her with affection. It was in Stalin’s interest to allow her work to be read over the radio and at concerts. This permission was not indiscriminate. Preference was given to those of her poems which emphasised the achievements of the Russian people. Shostakovich had learned the lesson of his troubles before the war and given up accompanying his music with words. He wrote the score of his Seventh (Leningrad) Symphony while working as a night fire warden. The piece was recognised for its greatness by the first-night audience in 1942.

Cheap editions of the Russian classics were distributed at the front. Stalin as writer also belonged to the Soviet literary pantheon and the commissars gave his pamphlets to the troops; but he was not in fact a favourite author for men on active service. The regime recognised this and moderated its insistence on placing his oeuvre at the centre of its propaganda.

Stalin also dropped the Internationale as the USSR state hymn (or national anthem) and held a competition for a new one. The winner was Alexander Alexandrov with a melody which stirred the soul. Words were added by Sergei Mikhalkov and Garold El-Registan and they were among the most effective items in the armoury of official propaganda. The first verse went:⁹

The second verse moored patriotism in allegiance to the October Revolution:

The hymn had a genuine emotional resonance for the wartime generation; it was hardly a cultural ‘concession’ since it contained a paean to Stalin; but it indicated that the authorities understood that cosmopolitanism, as embodied in the Internationale, did little to make Russians fight for the Motherland.

Still more important were Stalin’s decisions on the Russian Orthodox Church. By 1939 there were only around a hundred places of worship still open to believers.¹⁰ No monastery had survived the Soviet years. Tens of thousands of priests had been slaughtered in the Civil War, the First Five-Year Plan and the Great Terror. People nevertheless believed in God. When the USSR census took place in 1937, some 55 per cent of the population rejected the aspirations of the atheistic state and declared themselves religious believers — and naturally the true proportion of the faithful must have been much greater.

Stalin, former pupil of the Tiflis Spiritual Seminary, welcomed Acting Patriarch Sergei’s patriotic stance. He was also pleased by the offertories collected in churches for the production of armaments. The Dmitri Donskoi tank column came from this source. It suited Stalin nicely that the Russian Orthodox Church was stiffening the military commitment of its congregations. Buildings were quietly allowed to be reopened for religious purposes. Stalin formalised the position by inviting Acting Patriarch Sergei to a meeting with him in the Kremlin on 4 September 1943. Sergei arrived, wondering what exactly awaited him.¹¹ Stalin acted as if no contretemps had ever taken place between the Soviet state and the Russian Orthodox Church. Jovially he enquired of Sergei why he had come with so few priests. Sergei overcame the temptation to say that he could easily have mustered more clergy if Stalin had not spent the previous decade arresting and executing them. Yet the atmosphere was lightened by Stalin’s proposal that in return for the termination of persecution and for a measure of freedom to hold services of worship the Church should acknowledge the legitimacy of the Soviet state and avoid criticism of its internal and external policies.¹²

The timing of this concession was never explained by Stalin; he did not even allow Pravda to make a public announcement. Yet it was a concordat in all but name. This has led to speculation that foreign policy might have been the motivating factor. Stalin was about to meet Roosevelt and Churchill at the Tehran Conference. It has been suggested that a demonstrable diminution of anti-religious persecution was thought likely to enable him to squeeze a better deal out of the Western Allies.¹³

This would be more plausible if he had simultaneously lessened the pressure on the other Christian denominations, especially those with organisations in the West. But Stalin openly privileged the Russian Orthodox Church. The explanation is probably connected to his calculations about rule in the USSR. The meeting with the Acting Patriarch occurred shortly after the battles of Stalingrad and Kursk. The Red Army was about to start offensives to retake the western borderlands. Hitler had permitted Christian denominations, including the Ukrainian Autocephalous Church, to function under German occupation. Religious freedom, having been tasted again, would be hard to suppress quickly. While restoring limited autonomy to the Russian Orthodox Church, Stalin enabled it to resume charge of buildings which had not belonged to it since the 1920s. As the Soviet armed forces fought their way into Ukraine and Belorussia, churches were transferred into the possession of the Russian Orthodox Church. Evidently Stalin judged that Christian believers would be more easily controlled if Sergei, who was elected Patriarch at the Synod held in September 1943, was presiding over them. Stalin left nothing to chance. He appointed G. Karpov to the Governmental Council on the Russian Orthodox Church to oversee relations with it. Stalin wanted his pound of flesh.

Another change in policy occurred in the international communist movement. Stalin reverted to his inclination in early 1941 to abolish the Comintern. Turning to Dimitrov, he instructed him to organise the necessary formalities. At meetings of the Comintern Executive Committee in May 1943 the foreign communist leaders meekly agreed to Stalin’s demands.¹⁴ He claimed to have concluded that it had been mistaken to try — as Lenin had done — to run the world communist movement from a single centre. He himself had repeated the error, and the result had been that communist parties had been accused by their enemies of being directed by the Kremlin. Stalin wanted them to be able to appeal to their respective parties without this albatross round their necks.¹⁵

It hardly needs to be stressed that Stalin was being disingenuous. He had not the slightest intention of releasing his political grip on foreign communist parties. While allowing them the appearance of autonomy, he aimed to keep them on a short lead. Comintern Secretary-General Georgi Dimitrov would simply be transferred to the International Department of the Central Committee Secretariat of the All-Union Communist Party. His duties would be kept secret and essentially unchanged. Dimitrov had always been expected to advise and obey Stalin in relation to the world communist movement, and the same situation persisted after the Comintern’s dissolution. This gives a clue to Stalin’s reasons for the astonishing decision. There was speculation at the time and subsequently that he was trying to reassure the Western Allies about his intentions. But it can hardly have been the main motive. The period when Stalin most needed to call upon their trust had already passed. The USSR had been at its weakest before Stalingrad and Kursk, when the Wehrmacht had hopes of winning the war. Yet Stalin had done nothing for two years. He had bided his time until victory for the Red Army started to appear likely.

The timing is unlikely to have been accidental. Stalin and his advisers were making plans for Europe after the war. Ivan Maiski and Maxim Litvinov, removed as ambassadors to London and Washington, gave their ideas. Dimitrov added his. Molotov was constantly available. All were thinking hard about what could be done to maximise the security and power of communism to the west. Clandestine communist groupings had been scratching out an existence in the early years of the Soviet–Nazi military conflict. While the USSR was on the defensive, anything that could be done by the foreign parties of the Comintern to sabotage Hitler’s New Order in Europe was welcomed. But in mid-1943 these limits on ambition had to be lifted. Stalin wanted to build up support for communist parties in eastern and east-central Europe. The parties themselves were frail — and he had not helped the situation by exterminating as many Polish comrades as possible in 1938. The Red Army was poised to recover the western borderlands of the USSR, as its territory had stood before the Nazi–Soviet diplomatic agreement of August 1939. Indeed, it was about to overrun most countries to the east of Germany and Stalin knew that their communists were regarded as agents of Moscow. It was vital for them and him to pretend that they were not Moscow’s stooges. The Comintern’s dissolution was a basic precondition.

This meant that communist parties should find ways to identify themselves not only as internationalists but also as defenders of the national agenda. Stalin ensured that this was understood among the foreign communist leaders resident in Moscow as well as among those who had maintained contact from their own countries. Heroes, symbols, poems and songs of a nationalist resonance had to be grasped by communism; and in this way, he assumed, the local appeal of communist parties would be enhanced. This had been undertaken for Russians in the USSR; it needed to be repeated in countries which the Red Army was about to conquer. Communism was neither just an international movement nor just a Russian one; it was seeking, at Stalin’s behest, to acquire a diversity of national colours.¹⁶

This was a concession masking militant aims. Other shifts of policy in the second half of 1943 were less covertly introduced. Among them was the reassertion of Marxism–Leninism. Russian national feeling was far from being rejected. Heroes of old Russia — the ones acceptable to the regime — were retained: Ivan the Terrible, Peter the Great, Suvorov, Lomonosov, Pushkin and Tolstoi. But the limits had to be respected. And as the war was drawing to a close, the Kremlin began to emphasise Soviet motifs. Patriotism was put forward as a greater value than internationalism, and the ‘fraternal friendship’ of the Soviet peoples was affirmed. Cosmopolitan became a dirty word. Any sign of admiration for the societies and cultures of the West was severely punished. The Soviet armed forces’ dependence on jeeps, explosives and other military equipment supplied to the USSR by the USA under the terms of Lend– Lease was the object of Stalin’s suspicion. The influx of high-quality foreign products could undermine official Soviet boasts. In 1942 the crime ‘praise of American technology’ was added to the USSR’s legal code and people could be thrown into the Gulag camps simply for expressing appreciation of a jeep.¹⁷ Stalin was aiming at the reinsulation of the Soviet mind from foreign influences at the very time when hopes were growing for the convergence of the Red Army with its Western Allies in Germany for the defeat of Nazi power.

Ideas were tried out to increase the Red Army’s appeal in eastern and east-central Europe. Among them was Panslavism. This was the notion that the Slavs, regardless of nationality, politically and culturally had much in common. Alexander III and Nicholas II had exploited it so as to increase the Russian Empire’s influence in Bulgaria and Serbia. Stalin let groups be formed dedicated to the unification of the Slavs in the struggle against Hitler.¹⁸ He gave the non-Marxist historian Yevgeni Tarle a platform to promote the idea. For Stalin, the USSR — unlike the Russian Empire — was practising Panslavism (or Slavophilia as he referred to it) on a unique basis: ‘We, the new Slavophile Leninists — the Slavophile Bolsheviks, communists — stand not for the unification of Slavic peoples but for their union.’ For Stalin, such a union was crucial if the Slavs were to solve the age-old problem of protecting themselves against the Germans.¹⁹

The intent was obvious: the conquest of the eastern half of Europe would be eased if the USSR could count on sympathy in those countries beyond the usual constituency of communist parties. This had been done by the last two Romanovs with much success in diplomatic relations with Bulgaria and Serbia, and Stalin counted on using it similarly. It contained damaging flaws, however, which were exposed almost as soon as he played the Panslavist card. Not all Slavs were of the Orthodox Church or had a traditional feeling of linkage with Russians. Poles and Czechs, being Catholic, remembered centuries of antagonism. Furthermore, not all peoples in eastern and east-central Europe were Slavs. Panslavism was a downright threat to Hungarians, Romanians and Germans. (It did not commend itself to Estonians, Latvians and Lithuanians, but they were anyway going to be re-annexed to the USSR.) Stalin persisted with the policy until after the defeat of Nazi Germany. It was a sign of his wrong-headedness. Not all his wartime shifts in policy were successful. It also exhibited an acute perception that the campaign to win the peace had to be worked up long before the war was over. Stalin had no illusions about the difficulties ahead.

Proof that his Panslavism had ulterior motives lies in the development of Soviet internal policy. The motif of the Motherland dominated official statements, and steadily the coarseness of anti-internationalism increased. Alexander Fadeev, Chairman of the USSR Union of Writers, roundly condemned ‘rootless cosmopolitanism’. ²⁰ Stalin did not comment publicly on this initiative; but the fact that Fadeev’s provocative article became the unchallengeable party line is proof that this chauvinistic version of patriotism had Stalin’s approval and indeed had been instigated by him. Among those groups most clearly threatened by the accusation of cosmopolitanism, of course, were Soviet Jews. Stalin was already playing with one of the grubbiest instruments of rule: anti-semitism.

This deserves consideration by those who want to make sense of Stalin and Soviet politics. Public life in the wartime USSR was not homogeneous. Nor was there a sudden break in 1945. Of course Stalin made concessions in the war; but several of them — especially as regards the Orthodox Church and the Comintern — really belonged to an agenda of increased rather than decreased state pressure. Stalin conceded when he had to, but snatched back his limited compromises as soon as he had the chance. His behaviour was mysterious to those who surrounded him. To them it appeared that he was more open than in the past to military advice and to the country’s religious and cultural traditions. They hoped that some kind of conversion had taken place and that this behaviour would continue after the war had been won. They fooled themselves. There were plenty of signs in 1943 and even earlier that Stalin had given ground only tactically. Those who knew him intimately, especially fellow members of the State Committee for Defence, noticed nothing to indicate that the Boss wanted reform; they understood that the recent relaxations might not necessarily be permanent. They were right.

Yet the rest of Soviet society — or at least those of its members who wanted to think the best of him — were kept in the dark. War left them no time to ponder. They were fighting, working and looking for food. The relief of pressures was welcomed by them, but they expected much more. Indeed thousands of Russian POWs, once removed from the grip of Stalin’s regime, decided that Stalin too was an enemy and volunteered to help the Germans defeat him under the leadership of Lieutenant-General Andrei Vlasov. But the vast majority of those captured by the Wehrmacht refused to cross sides.²¹ Like other citizens of the USSR, they hoped against hope that deep reforms would take place at the end of the war. Rigours which had been bearable in the battles against Nazism would be regarded as unnecessary and intolerable once Germany had been defeated.

People were deluding themselves. Stalin had made only those concessions vital for the prosecution of a successful military effort. The basic Soviet order remained intact. Since the start of Operation Barbarossa Stalin had ordered the NKVD to mete out merciless punishment to military ‘cowards’ and labour ‘shirkers’. Any sign of deviation from total obedience invoked instant retaliation. The state planning agencies diverted available resources to the armed forces at the expense of civilians, who were left with barely enough for subsistence. The vertical chains of command were tightened. Central and local political leaderships were required to carry through every decree from the Kremlin to the letter. The one-party dictatorship was being put to the ultimate test and was reorganised so as to use the powers at its disposal to the maximum effect. The party in particular acquired importance as an organisation co-ordinating relations between the Red Army and the governmental institutions in each locality; it was also the party which devised the propaganda to stiffen the morale of soldiers and civilians. Yet the USSR remained a terrifying police state and the basic structures of coercion stayed in place. No informed citizens should have expected anything different from Stalin. He had ruled by fear for too long for there to be doubt about how he would behave on the resumption of peace.

41. SUPREME COMMANDER

The man with the gammy left arm rejected for conscription in the First World War and criticised for military bungling in both the Civil War and the Soviet-Polish War commanded a state at war with Nazi Germany. Stalin in Moscow confronted Hitler in Berlin. In the minds of both men this was a personal duel as well as a clash between ideologies and state-systems. Neither of them lacked self-belief in directing his war effort.

The Soviet war leader took time to judge how to handle public opinion. Molotov made the initial announcement about the war on behalf of the political leadership on 22 June 1941. Another hero of the day was the radio announcer Isaak Levitan, whose rich bass voice epitomised the popular will to resist the German invasion at any cost. When at last Stalin made his broadcast to Soviet citizens on 3 July, eleven days after the start of military hostilities, he adjusted his language to the wartime emergency. These were his opening words:¹

Many have noted that Stalin was reverting to traditional Russian discourse by addressing himself to ‘brothers and sisters’. This is true. But what is usually missed is that he started his speech by appealing to comrades and citizens (and at least one listener noted a caesura between ‘Citizens! Comrades!’ and ‘Brothers and sisters’).² Nor did he seek to identify himself exclusively with Russians. When listing the peoples threatened by Germany, he mentioned not only the Russians but also ‘the Ukrainians, Belorussians, Lithuanians, Latvians, Estonians, Uzbeks, Tatars, Moldavians, Georgians, Armenians, Azerbaijanis and the other free peoples of the Soviet Union’.³

Listeners were grateful for signs that resolute defence was being prepared. The writer Yekaterina Malkina heard the speech and was inspired by it; and her house servant was so moved that she broke down in tears. Malkina wrote to a friend:⁴

Few persons who heard him that day forgot the experience.

Groping his way towards an appropriate mode of communication, he sometimes succeeded brilliantly:

These words were delivered in an unyielding tone which confirmed that the fight would be taken to the Germans. The challenge was flung back at Hitler and the Wehrmacht.

Stalin’s rhetoric was woefully unrealistic about the kind of enemy facing the Red Army. He warned people that enslavement to ‘German princes and barons’ awaited them in the event of the USSR’s failure to beat the Wehrmacht.⁵ He ignored the specific nature of Nazism’s New Order. Not princes and barons but Gauleiters and the SS were the Third Reich’s enforcers. Racial violence, mobile gas-wagons and concentration camps were installed in the East and yet not once did Stalin refer to them. The First World War remained imprinted on his mind. He was also transfixed by the memory of the Civil War. In his speech on Red Square on 7 November 1941 — the anniversary of the October Revolution — he rambled on about foreign ‘interventionists’ as if they and the Nazis were threats to the Soviet state of equal importance.⁶ Equally adrift from the facts was his claim that Germany was racked by ‘hunger and impoverishment’.⁷ Stalin was dredging up outdated clichés of Bolshevik party pronouncements. As Soviet soldiers and civilians came into direct contact with the Wehrmacht and SS, they learned for themselves that Nazism had methods and purposes of unique repulsiveness. Stalin’s reputation as a propagandist was greater than his performance.

There were limits indeed to Stalin’s adaptability. Winston Churchill’s regular parliamentary speeches and Franklin Roosevelt’s weekly radio broadcasts stood in contrast with Soviet practice. Stalin delivered only nine public wartime addresses of any length. He did not write for the newspapers. Although he could have got others to compose pieces for him, he refused to publish in his own name what he himself had not written. Information in general about him was scanty. He passed up opportunity after opportunity to inspire people outside the format of his preferred modalities.

Pravda continued to mention him with cultic reverence. Photographers were seldom allowed to take his picture; it was mainly old photos which were published in the press, and even these were used sparingly.⁸ It was as if the decision was taken to treat him as a disembodied symbol of the USSR’s war effort rather than the living Supreme Commander. Posters, busts and flags continued to be produced. Booklets of his best-known articles and speeches were on sale at cheap prices. Commissars in the armed forces gave lectures on political policies and military strategy as well as on Stalin’s personal leadership. He let no details of his activities be aired in the mass media. He continued to handle his public image on his own terms, and he had never felt comfortable with the frequent communing with society which the leaders of the Western Allies found congenial. Nor did he change his mind on letting a subordinate — as Hitler did with Goebbels — manufacture a public image for him. As before the war, Stalin kept direct control of what was said on his behalf.

Yet his reclusive tendency retained at least some advantages and was not as harmful to the regime as it would have been elsewhere. Many Soviet citizens inferred that a wise patriarch commanded the political and military agencies of the state. This may have helped more than it hindered the war effort. Stalin was inept at tasks of self-endearment or public reassurance. His characteristic inclination at large gatherings and in radio broadcasts was to project ferocity. If people had seen him more often, the illusion of his well-meaning sagacity could have been dispelled. His seclusion allowed them to believe in the sort of Stalin they wanted. They might persuade themselves that all the troubles of the inter-war period would be resolved once the Germans had been defeated. There was immense popular expectation that a victorious Stalin would sanction a relaxation of the Soviet order. People in their millions had got him wrong. But their mistake helped them to fight on for victory despite the horrific rigours.

Abroad his re clusiveness worked even better. Little was known about him. He had baffled even many Moscow-based diplomats before the war.⁹ Interest had been greatest among communists, but loyal members of the Comintern did not stray beyond the pieties offered in the official biography; and renegades such as the Trotskyists, who knew a lot more, were a vociferous but ignored minority. The general public in the West were hardly better informed after the Nazi–Soviet pact in August 1939. David Low, cartoonist for London’s Evening Standard, produced wonderful images of Stalin and Hitler embracing while each hold a dagger behind the other’s back. Stalin was represented as a baleful tyrant. Yet it was Hitler rather than Stalin who held the attention of Western commentators. This remained the situation until Operation Barbarossa. It was then that Stalin became the hero of the anti-Nazi belligerent countries. The same fact reduced the incentive to pry into the dark corners of Stalin’s career. If his Red Army was fighting back, he had to be supported and his communist loyalists in Western countries needed to be treated as patriots rather than subversives. British diplomats and journalists ceased any criticism. Stalin was their new idol.

When the USA entered the war in December 1941, the adulation crossed the Atlantic. In the following year Time magazine named Stalin its Man of the Year. The commendation noted brightly:¹⁰

More generally the editorial declared:

This comment set the tone for Western descriptions of him for the rest of the war. He had already won Time magazine’s accolade as Man of the Year at the beginning of 1940.¹¹ But whereas earlier he had been praised as a master of clever, pragmatic manoeuvres, the current emphasis was upon straightforwardness and steadfastness. He was being hailed as a statesman with whom the West could do business. Churchill kept his reservations to himself in the interests of the Grand Alliance. The cult at home acquired its affiliate shrines in the lands of capitalism — and it was just as vague and misleading in the West as it was in its homeland.¹²

Beyond the public gaze Stalin was as complex an individual as ever. An accomplished dissembler, he could assume whatever mood he thought useful. He could charm a toad from a tree. The younger public figures promoted in the late 1930s were particularly susceptible. One such was Nikolai Baibakov. What struck Baibakov was Stalin’s ‘businesslike approach and friendliness’. While discussion took place in his office, he would pace around and occasionally direct a penetrating gaze at his interviewees. He had several tricks up his sleeve. One of them was to set up a debate between experts without revealing his preference in advance. Baibakov also recalled that Stalin never held discussions until he had studied the available material. He was well informed about many matters. He seldom raised his voice and scarcely ever bawled at anyone or even expressed irritation.¹³

Baibakov was looking back through rose-tinted spectacles; the rest of his account indicates that interviews could be terrifying affairs. Stalin, when putting him in charge of the oil installations of the Caucasus, spelled out his terms:¹⁴

This was hardly the most ‘businesslike and friendly’ of injunctions; but Baibakov in retrospect thought that circumstances required such ferocity. Plucking up courage in Stalin’s presence, he had quietly replied: ‘But you leave me no choice, comrade Stalin.’ Stalin walked across to him, raised his hand and tapped his forehead: ‘The choice is here, comrade Baibakov. Fly out. And think it over with Budënny and make your decision on the spot.’¹⁵

Another incident was overheard by General A. E. Golovanov in October 1941. He was at Stavka when Stalin took a phone call from a certain Stepanov, Army Commissar on the Western Front. Stalin’s telephone receiver had a built-in amplifier and Golovanov was able to listen to the exchange. Stepanov, on behalf of the Western Front generals, asked permission to withdraw staff headquarters to the east of Perkhushkovo because of the proximity of the front line. This was the sort of request which enraged Stalin, and the conversation went as follows:¹⁶

He did not usually have to bother with sarcasm. The memory of the Great Terror was enough to discourage most military and political personnel from making such an approach to him.

The atmosphere of fear and unpredictability choked nearly everyone into compliance with whatever Stalin was demanding. Just a few Soviet leaders dared to object to what he said. Two of these were Georgi Zhukov and Nikolai Voznesenski. Yet Stalin intimidated even Zhukov. He also exasperated him. Stalin, Zhukov noted, had taken time to understand the need for careful preparation of military operations by professional commanders. He was like a ‘fist-fighter’ in discussion when better results could have been obtained by more comradely methods.¹⁷ He was also arbitrary in his appointment and replacement of commanders, acting on the basis of partial information or of mischievous suggestions. The morale of commanding officers would have been higher if he had not meddled in this way.¹⁸

Stalin’s other subordinates had learned to keep their heads down. ‘When I went to the Kremlin,’ said Ivan Kovalëv about his wartime experience in the post of People’s Commissar of Communications,

Stalin’s visitors’ diary makes it clear that these three saw him more frequently than any other politicians. Mikoyan had a theory about this. He hypothesised that Stalin kept Molotov in his office because he feared what Molotov might get up to if he was allowed to be by himself.²⁰ Mikoyan had a point even if he exaggerated it. Stalin had to include others in affairs of state and they in turn had to know what was afoot. Needless to add, he did not give a damn that the main state leaders would be dog-tired by the time they got to their People’s Commissariats and started at last to deal with their own business.

He trusted none of his politicians and commanders. Even Zhukov, his favourite military leader, was the object of his disquiet: Stalin instructed Bogdan Kobulov in the NKVD to put a listening device in his home. Seemingly the same was done to Stalin’s old comrades Voroshilov and Budënny. His suspicions were boundless.²¹ Having ordered Dmitri Pavlov’s execution in the early days of the war, Stalin was little more satisfied with Ivan Konev, Pavlov’s successor on the Western Front. Konev’s failure to bring an immediate halt to the German advance was reason enough to question his loyalty. Stalin was all for shooting him. Zhukov was no friend of Konev’s but thought such a fate completely undeserved. He had had to plead with Stalin to relent.²² Zhukov was being taught that absolutely no commander was secure in post and life.

Stalin knew he could not do without Zhukov from October 1941. German tank corps had reached the outskirts of Moscow and German bombers flew over the city. Soviet regular forces were hurried out to meet the threat. Panic seized the minds of ordinary citizens, and the NKVD rounded up those who tried to flee. The factories and offices hardly shut for the duration of the battle. Stalin and Zhukov conferred:²³

Having assured the Supreme Commander that Moscow would not fall, Zhukov had to fulfil his commitment regardless of difficulties.

When sending telegrams to Stalin and phoning him from the field, Zhukov addressed him as ‘Comrade Supreme Commander’.²⁴ The nomenclature was a typical Soviet mishmash: Zhukov had to refer to him as a fellow communist as well as a commander. Stalin kept up the proprieties in return. Even in emergencies he often avoided giving orders in his own name. Phoning through to his generals on the various fronts, he was inclined to say some such phrase as ‘the Committee of Defence and Stavka very much request the taking of all possible and impossible measures’.²⁵ Zhukov remembered these evasive niceties many years later.

He also recalled how Stalin delighted in using pseudonyms. There were patches of comradeliness between them when the fighting was going in the USSR’s favour and he held Zhukov in esteem (despite keeping him under surveillance). Zhukov and he worked out an agreed code for their exchanges by land line or telegram: Stalin was ‘Vasilev’ and Zhukov ‘Konstantinov’. Stalin had used this pseudonym before 1917, and perhaps it signalled some kind of self-identification with Russia. False names were in any case a bit of a game: there was little chance of the German intelligence agencies being fooled by a pseudonym, especially one which had been used by Stalin in the past. Yet Stalin ought not to be judged too harshly. (There are abundant other reasons to indict him without artificially inflating the number.) The pressures on the two of them were immense, and it is no surprise that ‘Comrade Supreme Commander’ consoled himself with nicknames. In his lighter moments he knew how to encourage as well as how to terrify his military subordinates.

He would not be induced, however, to witness conditions at the front; indeed he scarcely left Moscow apart from completely unavoidable trips to the Allied conferences at Tehran and Yalta. While urging audacity upon his commanders, he took no risks with his personal security. There was one exception and it was much trumpeted in the press. In 1942 he made a journey to the front, ostensibly to monitor the progress of the campaign. When he got to within thirty or forty miles of active hostilities, he was greeted by military commanders on the Minsk Chaussée who advised him that they could not guarantee his safety if he travelled further. Stalin must have known that they would say this. This was the nearest he approached to any point of direct action in the war. He never saw a shot fired. But he made much of the conversation with his commanders and, after due display of disappointment, returned to the Kremlin. Much was made of the journey in official propaganda. Pravda reported it as if Stalin really had reached the front and given much needed orders on strategy and tactics to the frontal command.

Mikoyan told a less flattering tale of the journey. ‘Stalin himself,’ he wrote, ‘was not the bravest of men.’ Allegedly Stalin, as he talked with his commanders, felt an urgent call of nature. Mikoyan speculated that it might have been mortal fear rather than the normal effects of digestion. Stalin anyway needed to go somewhere fast. He asked about the bushes by the roadside, but the generals — whose troops had not long before liberated the zone from German occupation — could not guarantee that landmines had not been left behind. ‘At that point,’ Mikoyan recorded with memorable precision, ‘the Supreme Commander in sight of everyone dropped his trousers and did his business on the asphalt. This completed his “reconnoitring of the front” and he went straight back to Moscow.’²⁶

Avoidance of unnecessary risk was one thing, and Stalin took this to an extreme. But it is scarcely fair on Stalin to claim that he was a coward. Probably his behaviour stemmed rather from an excessive estimate of his own indispensability to the war effort. He looked on his military and political subordinates and thought they could not cope without him. Nor was he afraid of personal responsibility once he had got over the shock of 22 June 1941. He lived or died by his success in leading army and government. He exhausted every bone in his body for that purpose. And Zhukov credited Stalin with making up for his original military ignorance and inexperience. He went on studying during the fighting, and with his exceptional capacity for hard work he was able to raise himself to the level where he could understand most of the military complexities in Stavka. Khrushchëv later caricatured Stalin as having tried to follow the campaigns on a small globe he kept in his office, and this image has been reproduced in many subsequent accounts. In fact Stalin, while scaring his commanders and often making wholly unrealistic demands upon them, earned their professional admiration.

Not only military dispositions but also arrangements about the entire civilian sector of society and economy were in Stalin’s hands. He kept a watch on all resources and wrote down details in a little notebook. He was always keen that his subordinates should husband the resources already in their possession. Everything from tank production to foreign currency reserves was recorded by him, and he was miserly in making additions to what was already assigned to institutions. His leading associates were instructed to take the same approach to their own underlings: Molotov for tanks, Mikoyan for food supplies, Kaganovich for transport, Malenkov for aircraft and Voznesenski for armaments. The little notebook ruled their lives.²⁷ Stalin was the linchpin of the Soviet war effort. The two sides of that effort, the military and civilian, were kept separate. Stalin did not want the commanders to interfere in politics and the economy nor the intervention of politicians in Stavka; and when he held meetings of the State Committee of Defence it was he who brought the two sides together.

42. THE BIG THREE

Vital interests of the USSR, the USA and the United Kingdom coincided after the events of June and December 1941. Churchill offered assistance to Stalin as soon as the German–Soviet war broke out. An agreement was signed on 12 July 1941. A British delegation headed by Lord Beaverbrook and accompanied by American diplomat Averell Harriman flew out for talks with Stalin in September. Negotiations ensued between Washington and Moscow when war started between Germany and the USA in December. A Combined Chiefs of Staff committee was created to co-ordinate American and British operations. The leaders of the Allied countries — Churchill, Roosevelt and Stalin — were soon as known as the Big Three.

The Grand Alliance was racked by mutual suspicions. A global war was being fought and the distribution of resources between the battlefields of Europe and Asia had yet to be agreed. There also had to be consultation about strategic operations. As the fighting continued between the Third Reich and the USSR, the Americans and British needed to decide when to open a ‘second front’ in western Europe. There was also the question of mutual assistance. Both the USSR and the UK looked to the USA, the world’s largest economic power, as a source of equipment, food and financial credit. The governments had to agree on the terms for this. War aims too had to be clarified. There was ceaseless tension between the Americans and the British since Washington had no desire to prop up the British Empire in the event of Allied victory. Similarly neither the Americans nor the British wished to give Stalin a free hand in his dealings with eastern Europe. Nor had the Allies discussed what to do with Germany after Hitler. Such were the dilemmas which would eventually necessitate the involvement of the supreme leaders.

The Big Three kept in contact by means of telegrams and embassies. Direct negotiations, however, were also desirable. The problem was that Roosevelt was physically disabled, and frequent long air-trips were too gruelling for him. Churchill, though, was an enthusiastic voyager. The British Prime Minister crossed the Atlantic to meet Roosevelt in Placentia Bay in August 1941 and in Washington the same December. He made still more dangerous flights to hold talks with Stalin in Moscow in August 1942 and October 1944 (which involved stop-overs in Gibraltar, Cairo, Tehran and the airfield at Kuibyshev).

Stalin, obsessively wishing to control everything in Moscow and being unwilling to risk journeys by air, held out against any such trips whenever he could possibly avoid them. Molotov as People’s Commissar of External Affairs had been dispatched to Berlin in 1940. He also flew to the UK over the Baltic and across the North Sea in May 1942; such was his distrust of perfidious Albion that he slept with a revolver under his pillow. Stalin egocentrically expected others to take the risks. His immobility exasperated Roosevelt and Churchill. Roosevelt described the splendours of the Ghiza pyramids to persuade the Soviet leader to fly to Cairo.¹ As he pointed out, he himself was willing to travel even though the USA Constitution restricted the time a president could spend abroad.² Stalin could not put off a meeting of the Big Three indefinitely; and after turning down Cairo, Baghdad and Basra, he agreed to Tehran in November 1943. It was not far from the USSR and he had assured himself that the Soviet embassy in the Iranian capital could guarantee safety. Otherwise he refused to travel outside the territory of Soviet jurisdiction. The next conference was held at Yalta in the south of the RSFSR in February 1945. Stalin had got used to working at night and sleeping for most of the day. He had to go back to a more conventional schedule for meetings with Roosevelt and Churchill.³

Stalin had made his own preparations for travel. In 1941 he ordered the fitting out of a special railway carriage which would enable him to carry on working while travelling. At eighty-three tons, it was heavily armoured. Inside it had every facility — study, sitting room, toilet, kitchen and bodyguards’ compartment — fitted out in the solid style he favoured. There was nothing luxurious about the carriage; the heavy wood and metal of its interior bespoke a leader who disliked frippery and demanded to be guaranteed conditions of regular work. Carriage FD 3878 was like a mobile Kremlin office.⁴

Agreements with the Western Allies were put into place long before Stalin used his new facility. The USSR urgently needed supplies. Churchill had offered assistance after the start of Operation Barbarossa and military convoys were sent to the Arctic Ocean. But the British themselves relied on American supply ships. It was therefore important for the Soviet government, once Hitler had declared war on the USA, to seek help from Roosevelt. In fact it was in the American interest to comply with such requests if this meant that the Wehrmacht would be weakened by the strengthened resistance of the Red Army. The Lend– Lease arrangement already in place with the United Kingdom was extended to the USSR. Loans, military equipment and food were earmarked for Soviet use. Shipments to the USSR were made by Arctic convoys to Murmansk or else across the frontier with Iran. The war with Japan in the Pacific ruled out the other routes. Steadily, though, American jeeps, spam, sugar and gunpowder filled vital gaps in production. Destruction of British vessels was frequent under attack from German submarines but Stalin took the rate of loss as undeserving of comment when the Red Army was giving up the lives of millions of its troops against the Germans.

The other thing agitating Stalin left him even less satisfied. He wanted the Western Allies to organise the opening of a second front in Europe as a means of relieving the pressure on his own armed forces. He never lost a chance to demand greater urgency from the USA and the UK. Fresh to the anti-Hitler military struggle, the Americans talked airily about managing this by the end of 1942. Churchill was more circumspect and, on his Moscow visit in August 1942, pulled out a map of western Europe to explain the vast logistical difficulties of a seaborne invasion from Britain. Stalin continued to bait him: ‘Has the British navy no sense of glory?’⁵ Churchill was on the point of leaving for London without further discussion. He had had enough of the Soviet leader’s angry demands. Seeing that he had gone too far, Stalin invited him to yet another convivial dinner and the crisis faded. Roosevelt and his advisers, when they acquainted themselves with the military logistics, accepted the cogency of Churchill’s argument; and Stalin had to recognise that until they were ready and willing to launch their ships across the English Channel, there was nothing he could do to make them hurry.

Although Stalin went on rebuking Churchill and Roosevelt in his correspondence, he could also be tactful. To Roosevelt, on whom he was dependent for finance and military supplies, he wrote on 14 December 1942:⁶

It made no difference. The Americans and the British refused to rush their preparations.

Their stubbornness increased the urgency for Stalin to accede to their invitation to a meeting of the Big Three. Thus the Tehran Conference was organised. Churchill knew his Allied partners well by that time but Stalin and Roosevelt had never met. The Soviet and American leaders set about charming each other. They hit it off well. Stalin was on his best behaviour, impressing the President as someone he could have dealings with. Both Stalin and Roosevelt wanted to see the British Empire dissolved, and Roosevelt said this when they were alone together. Roosevelt prided himself on understanding how to handle Stalin, who appeared to him a crude but reliable negotiator; it did not occur to him that Stalin was capable of turning on his own bonhomie to suit his purposes. Roosevelt was ailing by the middle of the war. His energy and intellectual acumen were running out. At the Tehran and Yalta Conferences Stalin made the most of his friendly relationship with Roosevelt and tried to hammer a wedge between him and Churchill. He did not always succeed. But he did well enough to prevent Churchill from insisting on a firmer line being taken against Soviet pretensions in eastern Europe.

Yet Churchill too had to be conciliated. Churchill had been the world’s loudest advocate of a crusade against Soviet Russia in the Civil War. He had referred to the Bolsheviks as baboons and had called for the October Revolution to be ‘strangled’ in its cradle. Stalin brought up the matter in a jovial fashion. Churchill replied: ‘I was very active in the intervention, and I do not wish you to think otherwise.’ As Stalin contrived a smile, Churchill ventured: ‘Have you forgiven me?’ Stalin’s diplomatic comment was that ‘all that is in the past, and the past belongs to God’.⁷

The Western leaders of the Grand Alliance could at any rate count on royal treatment à la sovíetique when they made journeys to meet Stalin. It was Churchill who got the most sumptuous welcome by dint of going to Moscow. In October 1944 Molotov as People’s Commissar for External Affairs put on an enormous party at which the tables heaved with food and wine. The British official group ate heartily before leaving for a concert in the Chaikovski Hall. The orchestra played Chaikovski’s Fifth Symphony and Rakhmaninov’s Third. Stalin had agreed to dine that night at the British embassy. Churchill and he were getting on well at the dinner party, and such was Stalin’s bonhomie that he came through to the lower rooms so that the rest of the visiting Britons could see him. They toasted him before he went back to a further bout of eating and drinking. Usually Stalin staved off inebriation by drinking a vodka-coloured wine while others drank spirits. He had admitted this stratagem to Ribbentrop in 1939.⁸ But that night he allowed himself to become well oiled before leaving the den of Anglo-Saxon capitalist reaction at four o’clock in the morning.⁹ By custom Stalin was wide awake at that hour; but his British hosts did not know that: they were left with the impression of a genial guest who had shared in the mood of the occasion.

There had been similar hospitality at the Tehran Conference and this created the atmosphere among the Big Three for agreement on large decisions. Stalin, Roosevelt and Churchill were determined to prevent Germany from ever again becoming a menace to world peace. The most effective step, they concurred, would be to break up the state,¹⁰ and some in Roosevelt’s entourage wished to go as far as the compulsory deindustrialisation of the country. Borders in eastern and central Europe also attracted attention at Tehran. Stalin’s concern with Soviet security induced Churchill to propose a redrawing of the European map. He demonstrated this with the aid of three matchsticks. Apparently he thought that without a visual aid he would not get his point across to the Caucasian. Churchill wanted to shift both Poland and Germany westward.¹¹ The western edge of the USSR in his estimation should end at the line proposed in mid-1920 by Lord Curzon (which, as Anthony Eden pointed out, was virtually the same as what was known in the West as the Ribbentrop–Molotov frontier — Molotov did not demur).¹² The USSR would be expanded at Poland’s expense. Poland would be compensated by acquisitions in eastern Germany.¹³ To guarantee his continental security Stalin also demanded that the city-port of Königsberg should pass into the possession of the USSR, and Roosevelt and Churchill agreed.¹⁴

Stalin had to adjust his daily timetable to achieve his goals; for whereas he could intimidate all leading Soviet politicians and commanders into adopting his nocturnal work-style, he could not expect Roosevelt and Churchill to negotiate by candlelight. Stalin played his hand with an aplomb sustained by a secret advantage he held over his interlocutors in Tehran: he had their conversations bugged. Beria’s son Sergo wrote about this:¹⁵

Even though the Western delegations worked from the premise that Soviet intelligence agencies might be listening to them, Stalin may have been less baffled about Roosevelt and Churchill than they were by him.

On Churchill’s trip to Moscow in October 1944 there was an acute need to talk further about the future of Europe. Churchill broached the matter deftly: ‘The moment was apt for business, so I said: “Let us settle our affairs in the Balkans.”’ Churchill took the bull by the horns and scribbled out his proposal on a blank sheet of paper. He suggested an arithmetical apportionment of zones of influence between the USSR on one side and the United Kingdom and the USA on the other. This was the notorious ‘percentages agreement’:¹⁶

Stalin waited for the translation, glanced at the paper and then took his blue pencil from a bronze pot and inscribed a large tick. There followed a long pause: both men sensed they were deciding something of historic importance. Churchill broke the silence: ‘Might it not be thought rather cynical if it seemed we had disposed of these issues, so fateful to millions of people, in such an offhand manner? Let us burn the paper.’ But Stalin was untroubled, and said: ‘No, you keep it.’¹⁷

Churchill, talking later to the British ambassador, referred to his proposal as the ‘naughty document’. Stalin had second thoughts about details and asked for greater influence in Bulgaria and Hungary. In both cases he demanded 80 per cent for the USSR. British Foreign Secretary Anthony Eden, with Churchill’s consent, agreed to this amendment in a session with Molotov.¹⁸ Mythology has descended upon the agreement on percentages. The legend grew, for example, that Stalin and Churchill had carved up all Europe between them and that their conversation predetermined all the territorial and political decisions subsequently taken by the Allies. In reality the ‘naughty document’ was a provisional bilateral accord for action in the immediate future. It left much undiscussed. No mention was made of Germany, Poland or Czechoslovakia. Nothing was said about the political and economic system to be installed in any country after the war. The intended post-war order in Europe and Asia had yet to be clarified, and the percentages agreement did not bind the hands of the USA. Unconsulted, President Roosevelt could accept or reject it as he wished. Yet such in fact was his desire to keep the USSR sweet until Germany’s defeat that he welcomed the ‘naughty document’ without demur.

By the time the Big Three met at Yalta on 4 February 1945 it was urgent for them to grasp the nettle of planning post-war Europe and Asia. For Stalin it was also an occasion for the Soviet authorities to show off their savoir faire. Each delegation stayed in a palace built for the tsars. This cut no mustard with the aristocratic British Prime Minister. Churchill said that ‘a worse place in the world’ would not have been discovered even with a decade’s exploration. The length of the journey can hardly have annoyed this inveterate traveller. Yalta is on the Crimean peninsula. Before 1917 it was one of the favourite spots for holidaying dignitaries of the Imperial state. Stalin loved the entire shore from Crimea down to Abkhazia — and it is hard to resist the observation that Churchill was indulging in English snobbery.

The Yalta Conference took decisions of enormous importance and Stalin was at his most ebullient. He asked to be rewarded for promising to enter the war against Japan after the coming victory over Germany. In particular, he demanded reparations to the value of twenty billion dollars from Germany. This was controversial, but the Western leaders conceded it to Stalin. More hotly debated was the treatment of Poland. At the insistence of Roosevelt and Churchill the future Polish government was to be a coalition embracing nationalists as well as communists. Yet they failed to pin down Stalin on the details. The wily Stalin wanted a free hand in eastern and east-central Europe. Roosevelt and he were on friendly terms and sometimes met in Churchill’s absence. As the junior partner of the Western Allies Churchill had to put up with the situation while making the best of it; and when Stalin demanded south Sakhalin and the Kurile Islands — known to the Japanese as their Northern Territories — in return for joining the war in the Pacific, Churchill was as content as the American President to oblige. Stalin and Churchill also acceded to Roosevelt’s passionate request for the establishment of a United Nations Organisation at the war’s end. For Roosevelt, as for Woodrow Wilson after the First World War, it was crucial to set up a body which would enhance the prospects for global peace.

The Western Allies were not in an enviable position. Although Germany was on the brink of defeat, there was no telling how long Japan might hold out. The American and British forces in Europe, moreover, had been told they were fighting in alliance with the Red Army. Not only Pravda but also the Western establishments buffed up Stalin’s personal image. No sooner had the USSR entered the war with the Third Reich than the British press replaced criticism with praise. On the occasion of Stalin’s birthday in December 1941 the London Philharmonic Orchestra, not previously known as a communist front organisation, played a concerto in his honour.¹⁹ Public opinion more widely in the West was acutely grateful to the Red Army (as well it might have been) and, less justifiably, treated Stalin as its brave and glorious embodiment. A military confrontation by the Western Allies with the USSR would have been politically as well as militarily difficult. More could have been done nevertheless to put pressure on Stalin; and although Churchill was firmer than Roosevelt, even he was too gentle.

In fact the worst contretemps among the Big Three at Yalta occurred not during the formal negotiations. Roosevelt after a drink at lunch told Stalin that in the West he was known as Uncle Joe.²⁰ The touchy Soviet leader felt himself the object of ridicule: he could not understand that his nickname indicated a high degree of grudging respect. Needled by the revelation, he had to be persuaded to remain at table. The use of nicknames was anyway not confined to Stalin: Churchill called himself ‘Former Naval Person’ in telegrams to the American President.²¹ Stalin was not averse to taking a dig at Churchill. At one of the Big Three’s meals together he proposed that to prevent a resurgence of German militarism after the war the Allies should shoot fifty thousand officers and technical experts. Churchill, knowing Stalin’s bloody record, took him at his word and growled that he would rather be shot himself than ‘sully my own and my country’s honour by such infamy’. Roosevelt tried to lighten the atmosphere by saying that the execution of forty-nine thousand members of the German officer corps would be quite sufficient. Churchill, nauseated by the banter, made for the door and had to be brought back by Stalin and Molotov, who apologised for what they claimed had been a joke.²²

The British Prime Minister remained unconvinced that Stalin had been jesting; but not for a moment did he contemplate withdrawal from the Yalta Conference. As at previous meetings, he — like Stalin and Roosevelt — saw that the Allies had to stick together or hang separately. When personal insults, however intentionally, were delivered to one of them, the others had to smooth ruffled feathers. In fact it was one of Churchill’s entourage, General Alan Brooke, who had the worst verbal exchange with Stalin. This had happened at a banquet at the Tehran Conference when Stalin rose to accuse Brooke of failing to show friendship and comradeship towards the Red Army. Brooke was ready for him and replied in kind that it seemed that ‘truth must have an escort of lies’ in war; he went on to assert that he felt ‘genuine comradeship’ towards the men of the Soviet armed forces. Stalin took the riposte on the chin, remarking to Churchill: ‘I like that man. He rings true.’²³

Clever though he was, Stalin was no diplomatic genius. Yet the Big Three had conflicting interests and he took advantage. Stalin had been given his inch and aimed to take a mile. Already the idea had formed in his mind that the USSR should conquer territory in the eastern half of Europe so as to have a buffer zone between itself and any Western aggressor. Stalin had a decent working partnership with the exhausted Roosevelt; and although he and Churchill did not trust each other, they felt they could go on dealing across the table. Many in Poland and elsewhere felt that this co-operation was taken to excessive lengths. The Polish government-in-exile warned about Stalin’s ambitions, but in vain. On 12 April, however, Roosevelt died. Stalin, a man scarcely prone to sentimental outbursts, sent a warm letter of condolence to Washington. It was not so much the death of a fellow member of the Big Three as the collapse of a working political relationship that he mourned. Personal diplomacy had obviated many snags which could have disrupted the tripartite military alliance since 1941. Stalin had enjoyed being taken seriously as a politician by Churchill and Roosevelt for the duration of hostilities, and their meetings had enhanced his self-esteem. Roosevelt’s successor, Vice-President Harry Truman, had a more right-wing reputation. Stalin anticipated rougher modes of deliberation on world affairs in the time ahead.

43. LAST CAMPAIGNS

At last in summer 1944 the Western Allies were ready to open the second front. Operation Overlord began on 6 June, when American, British, Canadian and other forces under the command of Dwight Eisenhower landed on the beaches of Normandy in northern France. It was an amphibious operation of immense daring and cleverness. Having fooled the Wehrmacht about the precise spot, the Allied armies pushed the Germans into retreat. If Stalin had been beginning such an offensive in the East, he would have demanded that the Western Allies attack the Germans simultaneously. Yet he did not hurry his preparations any more than the Americans and the British had done in earlier years. The Eastern counterpart was to be Operation Bagration. The name was not chosen accidentally: Bagration was one of Alexander II’s most successful commanders in 1812; he was also a Georgian like the USSR’s Supreme Commander. Massive German forces remained in the east, 228 divisions as compared to the 58 facing Eisenhower and Montgomery. On 22 June, after months of preparation by Zhukov and Vasilevski, Operation Bagration was begun. It was exactly three years after the Germans had crashed over the River Bug in Operation Barbarossa. Deep, complex combinations of tanks and aircraft were deployed across the long front.¹ In East and West it was clear that the final battles of the war in Europe were imminent.

The Pripet marshes between Belorussia and Poland were the next fighting ground, and Stalin basked in the glory obtained by the success of his military professionals. On 22 July Rokossovski’s forces crossed the Bug. Stavka concentrated the Red Army’s advance in the direction of Warsaw and Lwów. Stalin had last been involved in battles over the territory in 1920, and this time he was in total charge of the Red Army’s activities. When Lwów fell on 27 July, the Wehrmacht pulled back across the River Vistula. Neither Hitler nor his generals had a serious strategy to reverse the fortunes of the Third Reich. German forces faced the prospect of war against formidable enemies on two massive fronts. The Western Allies were grinding their way towards the Ardennes, while the Red Army could see Warsaw through their binoculars.

The Wehrmacht stood across the Red Army’s advance not only in Poland but also in every country of eastern Europe. The obvious temptation, after the Red Army crossed the Bug, was to order the pursuit of the enemy to Warsaw. Against this was the calculation that Soviet forces had not yet completed the reconquest of the Baltic states and that a massive defence had been prepared by Hitler in Poland itself. There were reasons for Stavka to allow the Red Army to be rested and resupplied for the arduous crossing of the Vistula. Stalin also needed to be assured that any thrust at Warsaw would not expose his forces to a wheeling movement by the Germans from Romania. Although he had driven the Wehrmacht off Soviet territory, he recognised that a serious military campaign lay ahead.² A further problem was the weakness of Soviet intelligence in respect of the Polish situation. Stalin was largely to blame for this. By annihilating thousands of Polish communists in Moscow in the Great Terror, he had deprived himself of agents who could have been infiltrated behind the lines in 1944. And his murderous behaviour towards fleeing Poles in 1939–41 had added to the general suspicion of him in Poland.

In fact the Polish anti-German resistance had secretly been preparing an uprising in Warsaw, and plans were at an advanced stage. Nationalists, far from wanting to welcome the Red Army, hoped to overturn Nazism in Warsaw without Soviet interference. The purpose was to prevent Poland falling prey to the USSR after liberation from Germany. The military organisation was led by the Home Army, and the Warsaw Uprising began on 1 August. It was a brave but doomed endeavour. The Germans brought in the Wehrmacht and steadily the rebels were picked off and defeated. The fighting was over by 2 October.

The Red Army’s lengthy period of recuperation and re-equipment caused much adverse comment both at the time and in subsequent years. The Home Army, while planning to defeat the Germans in Warsaw by Polish efforts, pleaded desperately for Soviet support and received almost nothing. Not that the question of earlier military intervention failed to be raised in Moscow; indeed there had been no angrier discussion in Stavka since before the battle of Kursk. Unfortunately almost nothing is known about who said what until the Warsaw Uprising was over. Zhukov, the military professional, was still arguing the need for a prolonged pause in early October. Molotov took the opposite side, demanding an immediate offensive. Beria made mischief among the disputants, delighting in pitting one member of Stavka against another. Stalin predictably leaned towards Molotov: action was his preference. But Zhukov persisted. Eventually Stalin gave way, albeit with his customary lack of grace.³ Zhukov had won the debate at the expense of piling up problems for his relations with Stalin at the war’s end. The Red Army drew itself up on the eastern bank of the Vistula and stayed put for the rest of the year.

What Stalin said to Zhukov was probably not the full extent of his thinking. The weary condition of the Red Army was only one of the factors to be weighed in the balance. Stalin was already looking for ways to secure political dominance over Poland during and after the war. His experience in the Soviet–Polish War of 1920 had convinced him that Poles were untrustworthy because their patriotism outweighed their class consciousness. ‘Once a Pole, always a Pole’ might have been his motto in dealing with them and their elites. He was determined that whatever Polish state emerged from the débris of the war would stay under the hegemony of the USSR. This meant that the émigré government based in London was to be treated as illegitimate and that any armed organisation formed by the Poles in Poland would be treated likewise. Stalin felt no incentive to handle Poles sympathetically. He had ordered the murder of thousands of captured Polish officers in April 1940 in Katyn forest in Russia. He no more wanted the survival of Poland’s political and military elite than he aimed to preserve the elites in Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania — and he was long practised in the art of solving public problems by means of the physical liquidation of those who embodied them.

Stalin also had objective strategic reasons for refusing to start an early offensive across the Vistula. Hitler and his commanders in August had treated the Red Army as the most urgent enemy and left the suppression of the Warsaw Uprising to their security units while the Wehrmacht massed by the river to repulse any attempt at a crossing by Rokossovski. The German authorities were confident they could easily suppress Polish insurgents. What was militarily inexcusable in Stalin’s behaviour, however, was his rejection of all Polish pleas for assistance once the Warsaw Uprising had begun on 1 August 1944. Churchill detected the dirty work and rebuked the Kremlin.⁴ British aircraft based in Italy were dispatched to drop supplies to the Poles. But Stalin was immovable and the Red Army did not budge.

The Warsaw Uprising was neither soon nor easily suppressed. While the Red Army took the opportunity for rest, recovery and resupply, the Home Army of the Poles got about its business. The insurgents were flexible, well organised and utterly determined. The Germans had no idea how to contain them until the order was given to raze the districts of insurgence to the ground. Stalin might have had justified doubts that aid for the Polish rebels by means of an amphibious assault across the Vistula would decisively weaken the Wehrmacht. But if it had been a large group of Russian or Ukrainian partisans rising against the Third Reich, he would surely have dropped guns and food for their use and bombed the Germans. His prevention of assistance to Warsaw involved a calculated decision about Poland’s future. Already Stalin had set up a Provisional Government. This was the cabinet, appointed by the Kremlin and beholden to it, which he intended to put into power after Germany’s defeat. Other Polish leaders, however popular they might be across the country, were to be kept away from the centre of events. Stalin aspired to rule Poland through his communist stooges. The more insurgents were wiped out by the Germans, the nearer he would come to his objective. Churchill’s imprecations about Stalin’s military and political measures were justified ones.

Nevertheless Churchill was to impress on Stalin at their Moscow meeting in October 1944 that he held no suspicion that the Red Army had been deliberately held back.⁵ The cohesion of the Grand Alliance took precedence. The Wehrmacht, despite being on the defensive in East and West, had not lost its resilience. The Allies knew they had a fight on their hands as Germans, despite grumbling about Hitler’s military and economic failures, stood by their Führer. Churchill and Stalin understood the importance of getting to Berlin first. The conquest of territory would put the conqueror in a position to prescribe the terms of peace. Roosevelt and Eisenhower felt differently; their strategy was premised on the desire to minimise casualties on their side rather than join a race to reach Berlin first. Stalin was determined to win the race even if the Americans declined to compete. He was worried that the USA and the United Kingdom might do a deal with the Germans for an end to the fighting. This could lead to a joint crusade against the Soviet Union; and even if this did not happen, the Germans might surrender to the Western Allies and deprive the Soviet Union of post-war gains. Stalin selected his finest field commanders — Rokossovski, Konev and Zhukov — to reinforce the campaign to seize the German capital.

The Red Army on his orders started the Vistula–Oder Operation on 12 January 1945. Although his Red Army outnumbered the Wehrmacht by three to one, the German will to resist had not faded. Konev’s 1st Ukrainian Front burst forward on the southern wing of a military force which stretched across the length of the Polish lands. Zhukov’s 1st Belorussian Front advanced in the north. As German defences crumbled, Zhukov could report that he held the banks of the River Oder. The pockets of Germans who had not retreated were caught in a trap. Königsberg and its population were cut off. On its way through Poland the Red Army came across terrible sights as it entered the concentration camps. Evidence of mass murder had been obliterated at Belzec, Sobibor and Treblinka, but at Auschwitz (Oswiecim) the fleeing Germans had not had time to disguise the incarceration, forced labour, starvation and murder. Soviet soldiers would have acted furiously even without such an experience. German atrocities in the USSR had been systematic from the beginning of Operation Barbarossa, and Soviet wartime propaganda had dulled any lingering sensitivities towards the Germans as a people. As it moved into central Europe, the Red Army went on the rampage; its troops pillaged and raped with almost no restraint by its commanders.

Red troops acted with almost no discrimination about nationality. Not only Germans but also other peoples were brutally treated and Stalin refused to punish the offenders. The Yugoslav communist leader Milovan Djilas complained to him in vain. ‘Well, then,’ Stalin replied:⁶

Djilas, who had fought in the Balkans and was not noted for sensitivity, could hardly believe his ears.

Careless about how his soldiers behaved off-duty, Stalin was determined that they should take the German capital. He deceived the Western Allies about his intention. On 1 April 1945, as he was settling his military plans in Moscow, he telegraphed Eisenhower, agreeing that Soviet and Western forces should aim to converge in the region of Erfurt, Leipzig and Dresden; and he added: ‘Berlin has lost its previous strategic significance. Therefore the Soviet Supreme Command is thinking of assigning second-level forces to the Berlin side.’⁷ Compounding the lie, he proposed that the ‘main blow’ should be delivered in the second half of May. Simultaneously he ordered Zhukov and Konev to hurry forward their preparations.⁸ Churchill became ever more concerned. Politically, in his view it was vital to meet up with the Red Army as far to the east as was possible. But he failed to get a positive response from Roosevelt before the Soviet forces were on the move again. On 19 April they threw down the Wehrmacht defences between the river Oder and the river Neisse. On 25 April they had reached the outskirts of Potsdam outside Berlin. This was on the same day that Konev’s divisions made direct contact with the First US Army at Torgau on the River Elbe. Yet the Reds got to Berlin first. Zhukov prevailed over Konev in their race. On 30 April Hitler, recognising the hopelessness of his position, committed suicide. Unconditional surrender followed.⁹

Many divisions of the Wehrmacht surrendered to the American and British forces on 8 May, whereas Zhukov received such offers only the next day. The collapse of German military power permitted Stalin to turn his face eastwards. The USSR could never be secure while an aggressive Japan sat on its borders. He was to refer to the ‘shame’ heaped upon the Russian Empire through defeat in the naval battle of Tsushima in 1905. Tokyo had put forces into the Soviet Far East in the Civil War. Japan had invaded Manchuria in 1931 and signed the Anti-Comintern Pact in 1936. War had exploded between Japan and the USSR in 1938, involving the largest tank battles yet seen in the world. It was not until mid-1941 that Japanese rulers decided to undertake expansion southwards along the rim of the Pacific rather than westward through Siberia.

The Western Allies, having to husband their human and material resources, continued to need help from the Red Army. There was every sign that the Japanese were readying themselves to defend their territory to the last soldier. Stalin at Yalta had exacted the promise from Roosevelt and Churchill that the USSR would receive the Kurile islands in the event of Allied victory. This was still Stalin’s objective after the victory in Europe. Rapid preparations were made by Stavka for the Red Army’s entry into the war in the Pacific. Having suffered from Japanese expansionism in the 1930s, Stalin intended to secure a peace settlement that would permanently protect the interests of the USSR in the Far East. Nearly half a million troops were transferred along the Trans-Siberian railway to the Soviet Far East. Yet the Kuomintang under Chiang Kai-shek refused to accept the terms which had been put by Stalin to the Western Allies. Stalin conducted further negotiations with the Chinese and made an unadorned case for concessions from China and territory from Japan. Otherwise, he asserted, the Japanese would remain a danger to its neighbours: ‘We need Dairen and Port Arthur for thirty years in case Japan restores its forces. We could strike at it from there.’¹⁰

By 16 July 1945, however, the Americans had successfully tested their A-bomb at Alamogordo. It had also become clear that the Japanese would fight for every inch of their islands, and President Truman saw nuclear weapons as a desirable means of avoiding massive loss of lives among the invading American forces. He no longer saw any reason to encourage Soviet military intervention. Having seen how Stalin had tricked Roosevelt over Berlin, he was not going to be fooled again. American policy towards the USSR was in any case getting steadily sterner. What Truman would not do, though, was retract Roosevelt’s specific promises at Yalta to Stalin about China and Japan: he did not want to set a precedent for breaking inter-Allied agreements. Stalin did not know this. He had yet to test Truman’s sincerity as a negotiating partner. He sensed that, unless the Red Army intervened fast, the Americans might well deny him the Kurile Islands after Japan’s defeat. Stalin wanted total security for the USSR: ‘We are closed up. We have no outlet. Japan should be kept vulnerable from all sides, north, west, south, east. Then she will keep quiet’¹¹ The race for Berlin gave way to the race for the Kuriles.

Stalin, Truman and Churchill came together at the Potsdam Conference from 17 July. This time there was no argy-bargy about the choice of venue; the leaders of the Big Three wanted to savour victory at the centre of the fallen Third Reich. While Stalin took his train from Moscow, Truman made the long trip across the Atlantic and joined Stalin and Churchill in Berlin. Meetings were held in the Cecilienhof. The wartime personal partnership was already over, with Roosevelt’s replacement by Truman. Perhaps Roosevelt would anyway have ceased to indulge Stalin in the light of American global ambitions after the world war. Certainly Truman already felt this way.

The other great change in the Big Three occurred in the course of the Potsdam Conference. On 26 July the British elections swept the Labour party to power. Churchill ceded his place at the negotiations to his Deputy Prime Minister Clement Attlee. The new government was no gentler on Stalin than Churchill, and the Potsdam Conference turned into a trial of strength between the USA and the USSR with the British regularly supporting the Americans. Several topics were difficult: the Japanese campaign; the peace terms in Europe; and Poland’s frontiers and government. The Americans, buoyed by their monopoly of nuclear-weapons technology, were no longer eager for Soviet military assistance in the Far East. This time it was Stalin who stressed the need for the USSR’s participation. On Europe there was agreement on the Allies’ demarcation of zones of occupation. But wrangles remained. It was decided to hand over the details for resolution by the Council of Foreign Ministers. Poland, though, could not be pushed aside. The Conference at Stalin’s insistence listened to the arguments of the USSR-sponsored Provisional Government. The Americans and British complained repeatedly about Soviet manipulation and about political repression in Warsaw. The Western Allies expected Stalin to respect Polish independence and to foster democratic reform.

Both Truman and Stalin knew that the American A-bomb was ready for use, but Truman did not know that Stalin knew. In fact Soviet espionage had reported accurately to Moscow, and on this occasion Stalin did not disbelieve his agents. When Truman informed him about the American technological advance, Stalin had prepared himself to be unperturbed — and Truman was astounded by his sangfroid. In the same period Stalin buttonholed his commanders, urging them to bring forward the Soviet offensive against Japan. But technical reasons obstructed any change in schedule, and Stalin restrained an inclination to insist on the impossible. Increasingly the Western Allies ignored him. Truman, Churchill and Chiang Kai-shek issued their own ultimatum to the Japanese government from Potsdam. Nobody consulted Stalin.¹²

Arriving back in Moscow, Stalin kept pestering Vasilevski in Stavka. The response from Vasilevski was that Soviet forces would be ready to attack the Japanese no later than 9 August. But even this was too late. Truman had taken his decision to instruct American bombers to undertake their first military operation with nuclear weapons. On 6 August a B-29 took off from Tinian island to drop a bomb on Hiroshima. A fresh stage in human destructiveness had been reached as an entire city was reduced to rubble by a single military overflight. Still Stalin hoped to include himself in the victory. On 7 August he signed the order for Soviet forces to invade Manchuria two days later. But again he was preempted. The failure of the Japanese to sue for peace led Truman to sanction a further bombing raid by B-29s on 8 August. This time the target was Nagasaki. The result was the same: the city became an instant ruin and the population was annihilated. The Japanese government, at the behest of Emperor Hirohito, surrendered on 2 September 1945. Stalin had lost the race for Tokyo. The Manchurian campaign still went ahead as planned in Moscow and the Kwantung Army was attacked. But really Japan’s fate lay in the hands of President Truman.¹³

The only lever left to Stalin in diplomacy was his impassivity. At a reception for Averell Harriman and the diplomat George Kennan on 8 August he made a point of seeming unconcerned about the fate of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. He also displayed knowledge about the German and British attempts to build A-bombs. Evidently he wished to let Truman know that Soviet spies were briefing the Kremlin about the development of military nuclear technology worldwide. He deliberately let slip that the Soviet Union had its own atomic-bomb project.¹⁴ Stalin acted his chosen role to perfection. American diplomats knew very well that the Soviet political elite had been depressed by the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The USSR’s pre-eminence with the USA and the United Kingdom as a victorious power had been put into question, and the immense sacrifices offered across the Soviet Union in 1941–5 could soon prove to have brought little benefit to its citizens. Stalin had won many hands without having the aces to finish the game.

44. VICTORY!

In the early hours of 9 May 1945 radio announcer Isaak Levitan read out the news everyone had been greedy for. The war with Germany was over. Popular excitement had been growing for days. When the moment came, the celebrations were tumultuous; they occurred across the USSR and in all the countries which had fought Hitler’s New Order. The Soviet government had arranged a fireworks display for the evening in Moscow, but people had started their festivities hours earlier. Millions thronged the central districts. Everywhere there was dancing and singing. Any man in the green uniform of the Red Army stood a fair chance of being hugged and kissed. A crowd gathered outside the US embassy as the chant went up: ‘Hurrah for Roosevelt!’ The American President was so much identified with the Grand Alliance that few remembered he had died in April. Behaviour was unrestrained. Prodigious drinking occurred; the police overlooked young men urinating against the walls of the Moskva Hotel. Restaurants and cafeterias were packed with customers where food was scarce but vodka plentiful.¹ There was joy that Nazism had been crushed under the tank tracks of the Red Army.

Stalin’s daughter Svetlana phoned him after the radio broadcast: ‘Papa, congratulations to you: victory!’ ‘Yes, victory,’ he replied. ‘Thanks. Congratulations to you too. How are you?’ The estrangement of father and daughter melted in the warmth of the moment.² Khrushchëv was less lucky. When he made a similar phone call, Stalin rebuked him. ‘He made it known,’ Khrushchëv suggested, ‘that I was taking up his valuable time. Well, I simply froze to the spot. What was this about? Why? I took it all badly and cursed myself thoroughly: why had I phoned him? After all, I knew his character and could have expected no good whatever to come of it. I knew he would want to show me that the past was already a stage we had gone through and that he was now thinking about great new matters.’³

Stalin delivered an ‘address to the people’ starting: ‘Comrades! Men and women compatriots!’⁴ Gone were the gentler vocatives of his radio broadcast at the start of Operation Barbarossa. The USSR had been saved and the ‘great banner of freedom of peoples and peace between peoples’ could at last be waved. The Great Patriotic War was over.⁵ But, if his style was solemn, it was also gracious at least for his Russian listeners. At a banquet for Red Army commanders on 24 May he declared:⁶

Previously he had never unequivocally endorsed one nation out of the many which composed the USSR. To many Russians it seemed that the oven of war had smelted the base metals out of him and produced a stainless Leader who deserved their trust and admiration.

These were canting words since Stalin was as much afraid of Russians as proud of them. But it suited him to put the Russian people on an even higher pedestal of official esteem than before the war. Intuitively, it would seem, he understood that he needed to grant legitimacy to a national patriotism less qualified by Marxism–Leninism. At least he did this for a while. (And perhaps even Stalin got a bit carried away by the euphoria of the moment.) What had appeared completely inconceivable in summer 1941 had come to pass. Hitler was dead. Nearly all the eastern half of Europe was under Soviet military control. The USSR was treated by the USA and the United Kingdom as co-arbiter of the fate of the world.

Allegedly Stalin had wanted Hitler caught alive and was annoyed by his suicide, and there was a story that Zhukov had vowed to parade him in a cage on Red Square. This may indeed have been how a commander might have bragged to his political master. But it is improbable that Stalin would have allowed such a spectacle: he still wished to avoid giving unnecessary offence to his allies. The goal of the USA and the United Kingdom was the methodical de-Nazification of German public life, and they hoped to persuade Germans to abandon their affection for Hitler. Conquerors had last humiliated their enemy leaders in such a fashion during the triumphs granted to successful Roman commanders. Cheated of catching his quarry alive, Stalin instructed his intelligence agencies to bring him the physical remains. This was done in deadly secrecy; once it had been ascertained that the charred parts of a burnt corpse outside Hitler’s bunker were those of the Führer, they were conveyed to the Soviet capital. Stalin’s sense of urgency derived from political concerns. Nothing was to be left on German soil which could later become a focus for pro-Nazi nostalgia.

In a peculiar way this was an involuntary gesture of respect for Hitler, as Stalin was implying that his dead enemy was still dangerous. Towards most other leaders in the world apart from Churchill and Roosevelt he felt condescension at best. (What he thought about Mussolini remains mysterious, but the only Italian he took seriously was the communist party leader Palmiro Togliatti.) Churchill’s successor Clement Attlee made little imprint on his consciousness. Even Truman failed to impress him. Whereas Roosevelt had aroused his personal curiosity, he barely gave his successor a second thought. There is nothing in the records of Stalin’s conversations to indicate an appreciation of Truman’s talents. He was more appreciative of Churchill. Yet the United Kingdom, as Stalin’s economic experts such as Jeno Varga demonstrated to him, was no longer the force in world affairs it had once been. Churchill could huff and puff, but the house of the USSR would not fall down. Stalin saw himself as one of history’s outstanding figures. When he came across domineering characters of his own type such as Mao Tse-tung, he refused to treat them decently. Mao arrived in Moscow in December 1949 after seizing power in Beijing, and he was told none too politely that the USSR expected massive concessions from China. In any case Stalin, mounting to his crest of post-war grandeur, had no intention of allowing a fellow communist to rival his prestige. Master of world communism and leader of a triumphant state, he desired to bask alone in the world’s acclaim.

The day set aside to celebrate the triumph over Nazism was 24 June 1945. There was to be a parade on Red Square in front of tens of thousands of spectators. Victorious regiments which had returned from Germany and eastern Europe were to march in triumph before the Kremlin Wall. It was put to Stalin that he should take pride of place, riding a white horse in the traditional Russian mode. (This was how Russia’s generals had headed military parades through Tbilisi.) An Arab steed was found which Stalin tried to mount. The result was humiliation. Stalin gave the stallion an inappropriate jab with his spurs. The stallion reared up. Stalin, grabbing the mane ineffectually, was thrown to the ground. He injured his head and shoulder and was in a vile mood as he got to his feet. Spitting in anger, he declared: ‘Let Zhukov lead the parade. He’s an old cavalryman.’⁷ Some days before the parade he summoned Zhukov, who had returned from Berlin, and asked whether he could handle a horse. Zhukov had belonged to the Red Cavalry in the Civil War; but his first instinct was to remonstrate that Stalin should head the parade as Supreme Commander. Without revealing his equestrian difficulties, Stalin replied: ‘I’m too old to lead parades. You’re younger. You lead it.’⁸

The ceremonial arrangements were meticulously realised on the day itself. While Stalin and other political leaders stood on top of the Lenin Mausoleum below the Kremlin Wall, Marshal Zhukov rode across Red Square to salute him. The entire Soviet military effort between 1941 and 1945 was acclaimed. A regiment from each front in the war marched behind Zhukov. All saluted Stalin. The packed crowd, drawn from people whom the authorities wanted to reward, roared approval. The climax of the ceremony came when the banners of the defeated Wehrmacht were carried over the cobbled space to be cast down directly in front of Stalin. The weather was not at its best; there had been an earlier downpour.⁹ But the applause for Stalin and the troops of the Soviet armed forces cancelled the gloom. He had risen to the apex of his career and was being recognised as father of the peoples of the USSR.

All went to plan on 24 June apart from the unseasonable rain, and the Soviet order seemed stronger than ever. The Red Army dominated to the River Elbe. Eastern and east-central Europe were subject to Soviet military and political control and, while the war in the Pacific continued, Red forces were being readied to take part in the final offensive against Japan. Secretly, too, the USSR was intensifying its research on the technology needed to make an atomic bomb. Already its armaments industry was capable of supplying its military forces with all they needed to maintain Soviet power and prestige. The political and economic system consolidated before the Second World War remained intact. Party, ministries and police had firm authority, and the tasks of peaceful reconstruction of industry, agriculture, transport, schooling and healthcare seemed well within the USSR’s capacity to discharge. Hierarchy and discipline were at their peak. Morale in the country was high. Stalin’s despotism appeared an impregnable citadel.

Next day at the Kremlin reception for participants in the Victory Parade he was triumphant:¹⁰

The ‘people’ for him were mere cogs in the machinery of state and not individuals and groups of flesh and blood with social, cultural and psychological needs and aspirations. The state took precedence over society.

Yet Stalin, while masterminding an image of omnipotence for the Soviet state, did not himself believe in it. The USSR had daunting problems. He ordered the security agencies to collate information with a view to making the Soviet case for reparations when the Allies next conferred. Catalogues of devastation were compiled. Twenty-six million Soviet citizens had perished in the Second World War. Stalin was not innocent of blame: his policies of imprisonment and deportation had added to the total (as had his disastrous policy of agricultural collectivisation, which impeded the USSR’s capacity to feed itself). But most victims died at the front or under Nazi occupation. Some 1.8 million Soviet civilians were reportedly killed by the Germans in the RSFSR; double that number was recorded for Ukraine.¹¹ The dead were not the only human losses in the USSR. Millions of people were left badly wounded or malnourished, their lives having been wrecked beyond repair. Countless children had been orphaned and fended for themselves without public support or private charity. Whole districts in the western borderlands had been depopulated so drastically that farming had ceased. The Soviet Union had paid a high price for its victory, and it would take years to recover.

As the NKVD completed its cataloguing tasks (while not ceasing to discharge the duty of arresting all enemies of Stalin and the state), the scale of the catastrophe was made clear. In the zone of the USSR previously under German occupation scarcely a factory, mine or commercial enterprise had escaped destruction. The Wehrmacht was not the sole culprit: Stalin had adopted a scorched-earth policy after 22 June 1941 so as to deprive Hitler of material assets. Yet the subsequent German retreat in 1943–4 had taken place over a lengthier period, and this had provided the Wehrmacht with time to carry out systematic destruction. The record put together by NKVD almost defies belief. No fewer than 1,710 Soviet towns had been obliterated by the Germans along with around seventy thousand villages. Even where the Wehrmacht failed to set fire to entire townships, it succeeded in burning down hospitals, radio stations, schools and libraries. Cultural vandalism was as near to comprehensive as Hitler could make it. If Stalin had a crisis in the availability of human resources, he faced an equally appalling set of tasks in consequence of the devastation of the material environment.

Not only that: the structure of administrative control was much more shaky than it had been before the war. Displaced persons were everywhere; and as the troops came back from Europe, the chaos increased. No picture of this was permitted to appear in the newspapers or the newsreels. The emphasis continued to fall upon the bravery and efficiency of the Red Army in Germany and the other occupied countries of central and eastern Europe. The reality was very different. The Soviet order was most easily restored in the larger cities, especially those which had never been under German rule. But the intense concentration on military tasks in the Great Patriotic War had led to the running down of those aspects of civilian administration which were not narrowly connected with the fight against the Germans. In the zone previously occupied by the Wehrmacht the shambles of organisation was acute. In places it was hard to believe that the Soviet order had ever existed as peasants reverted to a way of life which predated the October Revolution. Private trade and popular social customs had reasserted themselves over communist requirements. Stalin’s writ was unchallengeable in Moscow, Leningrad and other conurbations, but in smaller localities, especially the villages (where most of the population still lived), the arm of the authorities was not long enough to affect daily lives.

And despite the Red Army’s triumph in Europe there were problems in several countries under Soviet occupation. The military, security, diplomatic and political agencies of the USSR, already stretched to the limit before 1945, had somehow to cope with the responsibilities of peace. Yugoslavia was unusual in as much as its own internal forces under Tito had liberated it from the Germans. Elsewhere the Reds had played the crucial part in defeating the Wehrmacht. Victory proved simpler than occupation. Few people in central and eastern Europe wished to be subject to communist rule. Stalin and the Politburo knew how effectively the communists had been eradicated by Hitler and his allies and how little support the national communist leaders in Moscow-based emigration had in their homelands.

Somehow Stalin had to devise a way of gaining popular sympathy in these occupied countries while solving a vast number of urgent tasks. Food supplies had to be found. Economies had to be regenerated and post-Nazi administrations set up. Functionaries had to be checked for political reliability. The shattered cities and damaged roads and railways had to be restored. At the same time Stalin was determined to gain reparations from the former enemy countries, not only Germany but also Hungary, Romania and Slovakia. This was bound to complicate the task of winning popularity for himself and for communism. The Western Allies were another difficulty. An understanding existed with them that a rough line ran from north to south in Europe separating the Soviet zone of influence from the zone to be dominated by the United States, Britain and France. Yet there was no clarity about the rights of victor powers to impose their political, economic and ideological models on the countries they occupied. Nor had the victors specified what methods of rule were acceptable. As the ashes of war settled, tensions among the Allies were rising.

The global rivalry of the Allies was bound to increase after they had crushed their German and Japanese enemies. Stalin’s armies had taken the brunt of the military burden in Europe, but American power had also been decisive and was growing there. In the Far East the Red Army contributed little until the last few days. The United States, moreover, was the world’s sole nuclear power. The management of the post-war global order posed many menaces to Soviet security — and Stalin was quick to comprehend the danger.

If his regime was unpopular abroad, it was not much more attractive to Soviet citizens. There was a paradox in this. Undoubtedly the war had done wonders to enhance his reputation in the USSR; he was widely regarded as the embodiment of patriotism and victory. Even many who detested him had come to accord him a basic respect — and when defectors from the Soviet Union were interviewed it was found that several basic values propagated by the authorities found favour. The commitment to free education, shelter and healthcare as well as to universal employment had a lasting appeal. But the haters in the USSR were certainly numerous. Armed resistance was widespread in Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, western Belorussia and western Ukraine. These were recently annexed areas. Elsewhere the regime was much more durably in control and few citizens dared to organise themselves against Stalin and his subordinates. Most of those who did were young people, especially students, who had no memory of the Great Terror. Small, clandestine groupings were formed in the universities. Typically they were dedicated to the purification of Marxist–Leninist ideology and behaviour from Stalinist taint: state indoctrination had got the brightest youngsters to approve of the October Revolution. These groupings were easily penetrated and dissolved.

More worrisome for the authorities was the hope prevailing across society that immense political and economic changes would follow the achievement of military victory. Stalin was a student of Russian history; he knew that the Russian Imperial Army’s entry into Paris in 1815 after the defeat of Napoleon had led to political unrest in Russia. Officers and troops who had experienced the greater civic freedom in France were never the same again, and in 1825 a mutiny took place which nearly overthrew the Romanovs. Stalin was determined to avoid any repetition of that Decembrist Revolt. The Red Army which stormed Berlin had witnessed terrible sights in eastern and central Europe: gas chambers, concentration camps, starvation, and urban devastation. Nazism’s impact was unmistakable. But those serving soldiers had also glimpsed a different and attractive way of life. Churches and shops were functioning. Goods were available, at least in most cities, which in the USSR were on sale only in enterprises reserved for the elites. The diet was more diverse. Peasants, if not well dressed, did not always look destitute. The pervasive regimentation of the USSR, too, was absent from the countries over which they had marched. This included Germany itself.

Stalin did not receive explicit reports on this: the security agencies had long since learned that they had to give him the truth in ideologically acceptable terms, and Stalin did not want to hear that life was more congenial abroad. What he was told by the agencies was alarming enough. Booty brought back by soldiers included all manner of goods from carpets, pianos and paintings to gramophone records, stockings and underwear. Red Army soldiers had made a habit of collecting wristwatches and, as often as not, wearing all of them simultaneously. Even civilians who had not moved beyond the old Soviet frontiers but had been held under German military rule had had experience of a different way of life which had not been in every way uncongenial. Churches, shops and small workshops had been restored after the initial success of Operation Barbarossa. Such Soviet citizens had neither war booty nor the experience of foreign travel; but their expectation that things would change in the USSR was strong. Across the entire Soviet Union, indeed, there was a popular feeling that it had been worth fighting the war only if reforms were to ensue.¹²

And so beneath the draped red flags of victory there lurked danger and uncertainty for Stalin and his regime. He understood the situation more keenly than anyone near to him in the Kremlin. It was this awareness as well as a perennial grumpiness that had made him so curt with Khrushchëv after the fall of Berlin. He saw that critical times lay ahead.

Yet he would not have been human if warmer feelings had not occasionally suffused him. At the spectacular ceremonies he puffed out his chest. The stream of foreign dignitaries coming to Moscow at the end of the Second World War caught the sense of his mood. On such occasions he let pride take precedence over concern. Stalin, the Red Army and the USSR had won the war against a terrible enemy. As usual he compared current conditions with those which had prevailed under his admired predecessor. This was obvious from what he said to Yugoslav visitors:¹³

Stalin was proud that he had gone one stage further than Lenin had thought possible. Whereas Lenin had hoped to preserve the Soviet state by keeping it out of inter-capitalist military conflicts and letting the great capitalist powers fight each other, Stalin had turned the USSR into a great power in its own right. Such was its strength that the USA and the United Kingdom had been obliged to seek its assistance.

How long, however, would the alliance hold after the end of hostilities with Germany and Japan? On this, Stalin was quietly definite when he met a Polish communist delegation:¹⁴

Despite what he said in public about the warmongering tendencies of the Western Allies, he expected a lengthy period of peace from 1945. The Soviet Union and the states friendly to it in eastern Europe would not have an easy time. Devastation by war and the complications of postwar consolidation would exert the minds and energy of the communist movement for many years. But the USSR was secure in its fortress.

For many, especially those who were unaware of Stalin’s homicidal activities, there would have been no Soviet victory in the Second World War but for his contribution — and perhaps Germany would permanently have bestridden the back of the European continent. In the USSR, too, the acclaim for him had intensified although it would be wrong to think that the exact degree of approval for him is ascertainable. Nor would it be right to assume that most citizens had uncomplicated feelings about him. Throughout the war he had held back from identifying himself with specific political and social policies. He had made that mistake during agricultural collectivisation in the late 1920s, and the self-distancing manoeuvre of ‘Dizzy with Success’ had not succeeded in saving him from the peasantry’s opprobrium. Quite who was responsible for the avoidable horrors of Soviet wartime measures was therefore not clear to everyone. Millions of citizens were willing to give him the benefit of the doubt: they wanted a relaxation of the regime and assumed that this would come about as the war came to an end.

Stalin was more widely loved than he had any right to expect. In his more relaxed moods he liked to compare himself with the Allied leaders. His qualities, he told others, included ‘intelligence, analysis, calculation’. Churchill, Roosevelt and others were different: ‘They — the bourgeois leaders — are resentful and vengeful. One ought to keep feelings under control; if feelings are allowed to get the upper hand, you’ll lose.’¹⁵ This was rich coming from the lips of a Leader whose own violent sensitivities were extreme. But Stalin was in no mood for self-criticism. In a confidential meeting with Bulgarian communists he derided Churchill for failing to anticipate his defeat in the British parliamentary elections in July 1945 — and Churchill, according to Molotov, was the foreign politician whom Stalin respected the most. The conclusion was obvious: Stalin had become convinced of his own genius. He was master of a superpower beginning to fulfil its destiny. His name was as glorious as the victory being celebrated by the communist party and the Red Army. World renown had settled upon the cobbler’s son from Gori.