Stalin: The Court of the Red Tsar

by Simon Sebag Montefiore

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

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

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

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

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

  “If the Party tells us to, we will.”

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

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

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

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

  “There we are then,” said Stalin. “Let them get it sorted out themselves first. Let’s go, comrades.” Stalin led the way out of the office. As they climbed into the cars outside, Stalin uttered his first words of truth since the war began: “Everything’s lost. I give up. Lenin founded our state and we’ve fucked it up.” Stalin cursed all the way to Kuntsevo. “Lenin left us a great heritage and we his successors have shitted it all up . . .” Even when they had arrived at the house, Molotov remembered him swearing, “ ‘We fucked it up!’ The ‘we’ was meant to include all of us!” Stalin said he could no longer be the Leader. He resigned. At Kuntsevo, Molotov “tried to cheer him up.” They left the broken Stalin sulking at the dacha.186

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  Once this was fixed, Molotov called Mikoyan, who was talking to Voznesensky, and the Politburo gathered. The magnates had never been so powerful: these manoeuvres most resembled the intrigues just after Stalin’s stroke twelve years later, for this was the only real opportunity they had to overthrow Stalin since the revelation of Lenin’s damning Testament almost twenty years earlier. Molotov told them about Stalin’s breakdown but Mikoyan replied that even if the Vozhd was incapacitated, “the very name Stalin was a great force for rousing the morale of the people.” But bumptious Voznesensky made what ultimately proved to be a fatal mistake: “Vyacheslav!” he hailed Molotov. “You go ahead and we’ll follow you!” Molotov must have blanched at this deadly suggestion and turned to Beria187 who proposed his State Defence Committee. They decided to go out to Kuntsevo.

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

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

  The magnates were frightened too: Beria later teased Mikoyan for hiding behind t
he others. Molotov, who was the most senior and therefore the most exposed to Stalin’s vengeance, stepped forward.

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

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

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

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

  “With whom at its head?” Stalin asked.

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

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

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

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

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

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

  Next afternoon, Stalin reappeared in the office, “a new man” committed to play the role of warlord for which he believed himself specially qualified. On 1 July, the newspapers announced that Stalin was the Chairman of the State Defence Committee, the GKO. Soon afterwards he sent Timoshenko to command the Western Front defending Moscow: on 19 July, Stalin became Commissar of Defence and, on 8 August, Supreme Commander-in-Chief: henceforth, the generals called him Verkhovnyi, Supremo. On 16 July, he restored the dual command of political commissars that the army so hated, abolished after Finland: the commissars, led by Mekhlis, were to conduct “ceaseless struggles against cowards, panic-mongers and deserters” but these overweening amateurs often took actual command, like their master. “The Defence Commissariat,” said Khrushchev, “was like a kennel of mad dogs with Kulik and Mekhlis.”188 Meanwhile Stalin reunited the security forces, the NKVD and NKGB, under Beria. On 3 July, Stalin spoke to the people in a new voice, as a Russian national leader.

  “Comrades, citizens,” he began conventionally, his voice low, his breathing audible across the radio waves of the Imperium, along with his sips of water and the clink of his glass. “Brothers and sisters! Warriors of the army and the fleet! I call upon you, my friends.” This was a patriotic war but patriotism stiffened by terror: “Cowards, deserters, panic-mongers” would be crushed in a “merciless struggle.” 8 A couple of nights later, Stalin and Kalinin walked out of the Kremlin at 2 a.m. under heavy guard, commanded by Vlasik, and entered Lenin’s Mausoleum to bid goodbye to the mummy of their late leader before it set off by secret sealed train to Siberia.9

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

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

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

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

  “You’re right, Comrade Stalin,” they replied in one voice. But Zhukov did not always get his way.10

  Faced with the threat of more giant encirclements in the south, Stalin devised draconian measures to terrorize his men into fighting. In the first week, he approved NKGB Order No. 246 that stipulated the destruction of the families of men who were captured, and now he made this public in his notorious Order No. 270. He ordered it to be signed by Molotov, Budyonny, Voroshilov and Zhukov, even though some of them were not present, but it was, after all, a traditional method of Bolshevik rule.11 These measures ruined the lives of millions of innocent soldiers and their families, including Stalin’s own.189

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

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

  “1. As far as I know [w
rote Stalin] the rations in the air force are quite sufficient. 2. A special uniform for Stalin’s son is not on the agenda.”12

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

  “Even if you retreat to the Urals, you’ll still win in the end.”13

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

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

  “Why talk nonsense?” bawled Stalin.

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

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

  “Don’t get heated,” said Stalin to Zhukov, but “since you mentioned it, we’ll get by without you.” Zhukov gathered his maps and left the room, only to be summoned back forty minutes later to be told that he was relieved as Chief of Staff, a blessing in disguise, which allowed this fighting general to return to his natural habitat. Stalin soothed him: “Calm down, calm down.” Shaposhnikov was recalled as Chief of Staff. Stalin knew he was ailing but “we’ll help him.” Zhukov asked to leave but Stalin invited him for tea: Stalin was drawn to Zhukov. The unfolding disaster around Kiev soon proved the wisdom of his “nonsense.” 14