Stalin: The Court of the Red Tsar

by Simon Sebag Montefiore

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

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

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

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

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

  At three the following morning, Poskrebyshev called the lyricists, putting through the Supreme Songwriter who said that he now liked the text, but it was too “thin” and short. They must add one verse, one rousing verse about the Red Army, power, “the defeat of the Fascist hordes.”219

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

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

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

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

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

  The new Soviet national anthem, Stalin raved, “parts the sky and heaven like a boundless wave.” At its first playing at the Bolshoi Theatre, Stalin arrived to toast the composers who were invited up to the box and then to a dinner in the avant-loge. When Mikhalkov220 and El-Registan downed their vodkas, Stalin bantered: “Why drain your glasses? You won’t be interesting to chat to!”2

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

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

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

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

  The next day, Roosevelt finally agreed to meet at Teheran twenty days later: “The whole world is watching for this meeting of the three of us . . .”3

  42

  Teheran: Roosevelt and Stalin

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

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

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

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

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

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

  The Soviet Embassy was an elegant estate, built for some Persian magnate, surrounded by a high wall. There were several cottages and villas in the grounds: Stalin lived in one house while Molotov and Voroshilov shared the two-storey ambassador’s residence. The advance guard of the NKVD had been frantically preparing the embassy for two weeks. “No one dared disobey” Beria, wrote Zoya Zarubina, a young NKGB officer in Teheran.221

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

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

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

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

  Stalin sent word that he would call on the President, a meeting he had prepared for carefully. Naturally Beria bugged the presidential suite. Beria’s handsome scientist son, Sergo, whom Stalin knew well, was among the Soviet eavesdroppers. Stalin summoned him: “How’s your mother?” he asked, Nina Beria being a favourite. Small talk out of the way, he ordered Sergo to undertake the “morally reprehensible and delicate” mission of briefing him every morning at 8 a.m. Stalin always quizzed him, even on Roosevelt’s tone: “Did he say that with conviction or without enthusiasm? How did Roosevelt react?” He was surprised at the naïvety of the Americans: “Do they know we are listening to them?”222 Stalin rehearsed strategies with Molotov and Beria, even down to where he would sit.223 He did the same for his meetings with Churchill, according to Beria’s son, saying, “You can expect absolutely anything from him.”

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

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

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

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

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

  When they turned to the question of Operation Overlord, the invasion of France, Stalin complained that he had not expected to discuss military issues so he had no military staff. “I’ve only got Marshal Voroshilov,” he said rudely. “I hope he’ll do.” He then ignored Voroshilov and handled all military matters himself. A young British interpreter, Hugh Lunghi,224 was shocked to see that Stalin treated Voroshilov “like a dog.” Stalin insisted on the earliest preference for Overlord, the cross-Channel invasion—and then quietly filled his pipe. Churchill was still unconvinced, preferring a preliminary Mediterranean operation, using troops already in the area. However, FDR was already committed to the Channel. As a flustered Churchill realized he was outvoted, Roosevelt winked at Stalin, the start of his gauche flirtation that greatly enhanced the Marshal’s position as arbiter of the Grand Alliance. Churchill handled Stalin much better by being himself.

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

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

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