Promoted to marshal, Zhukov next led the Red Army to victory in the greatest tank battle ever fought, at Kursk in 1943. The Red Army pushed ever westward, into Poland and then into Germany itself, where the last great battle of the European war was fought through the streets of Berlin. Stalin typically took overall command of the Battle of Berlin himself, forcing the two commanders, Zhukov and Marshal Konev, to compete in the race to the Reichstag. In the early hours of May 1, 1945 Zhukov telephoned Stalin to inform him that Hitler was dead. The next day the city surrendered.
When the war was over, Zhukov was a national and international hero. The Soviet military rank and file idolized him, and Western generals thought extremely highly of him. Ironically, all this made him a political threat: Stalin had him accused of Bonapartist tendencies and demoted him, but he ensured Zhukov was not arrested.
After Stalin’s death in 1953, Zhukov was brought back to the center of Soviet politics as defense minister. He helped Nikita Khrushchev become Stalin’s heir by arresting Lavrenti Beria, the head of Stalin’s secret police, but he was independent and had a fractious relationship with the new leader. In 1957 he again supported Khrushchev, helping to defeat the old Stalinists, but afterward he was sacked, once more accused of Bonapartism.
Zhukov, who died in 1974, was tough and brutal and sometimes made costly mistakes. He believed in Stalinist methods and was arrogant about his own ability. But as Eisenhower was to put it, “no one did more to achieve victory in Europe than Marshal Zhukov”—he was undoubtedly the outstanding general of the Second World War. As his colleague Marshal Timoshenko noted, “Zhukov was the only person who feared no one. He was not afraid even of Stalin.” Ultimately, he represents native Russian military genius and now his statue on horseback stands just outside the Kremlin near Red Square.
CAPONE
1899–1947
You can get much further with a kind word and a gun than you can with a kind word alone.
Al Capone
Al “Scarface” Capone epitomized the murderous American Mafia mobsters who ran their rackets with impunity during the Prohibition era. Ironically, despite his deep involvement in organized crime and murder, the only charge he was ever convicted of was income-tax evasion.
Born in Brooklyn, New York, Alphonse “Al” Capone was the son of Gabriele Capone, an Italian barber who had arrived in America with his wife Teresina in 1894. Al embarked on his career in organized crime when he left school at just age fourteen, and fell under the influence of a gangster boss, Johnny “the Fox” Torrio. From there he graduated to the Five Points Gang in Manhattan. It was during this period that he was slashed in the face after a bar-room brawl, leaving him with the scar by which he would later be known. He was also suspected of involvement in two killings, though witnesses refused to come forward and nothing was ever proven.
Capone’s mentor Torrio had left New York for Chicago in 1909 to run a brothel racket. Ten years later he sent for his protégé, and it was probably Capone who was responsible for the murder in 1920 of Torrio’s boss, “Big Jim” Colosimo, with whom Torrio had fallen out. Torrio subsequently emerged as the undisputed kingpin of crime in the Windy City.
The introduction of Prohibition in 1920 endowed America’s gangsters with a gold mine of opportunities. Trade in smuggled alcohol became big business, and speakeasies where bootlegged liquor was readily available became the defining image of the era. But behind the relaxed jollity of the speakeasy and the gangster glamour lay violence, wanton sadism and psychopathic brutality.
In 1923 a reform-minded mayor, William E. Dever, was elected in Chicago on a platform of reining in the mobsters. As a result, Torrio and Capone opted to relocate much of their business to the satellite town of Cicero. The following year, with council elections scheduled for Cicero, Capone was determined to ensure that his candidates won, by whatever means. In the resulting violence, his brother Frank was killed and an election official was murdered, amid a wave of kidnappings, ballot-box theft and general intimidation. When it was all over Capone had won in Cicero, in one of the most dishonest elections ever seen.
Within weeks Capone, apparently believing himself impregnable, shot dead a small-time gangster called Joe Howard who had insulted a friend of his in a bar. The crime made Capone a target for William McSwiggen—the “hanging prosecutor”—and though he failed to pin any charges on Capone, McSwiggen did succeed in putting the gangster firmly in the public spotlight, setting Capone on the road to becoming America’s public enemy number one.
In 1925 Torrio retired after an attempt on his life by a rival concern, the North Side Gang run by Dean O’Banion, George “Bugs” Moran and Earl “Hymie” Weiss. Capone now took over from Torrio as the leading figure in the Chicago underworld. Thereafter, he developed an increasingly public persona, ostentatiously attending major sporting occasions, such as baseball games, and even the opera, presenting himself as an honest, successful businessman, with a flair for the common touch. In truth everyone knew the real source of Capone’s wealth.
Protection rackets, illegal gambling, bootlegging and prostitution—wherever there was a quick buck to be made, Capone had a hand in it. His eye for profit was combined with a ruthless approach to dealing with possible rivals—and the greatest threat to his hegemony, in Capone’s view, was the North Side Gang, the hoodlums who had earlier attacked Johnny Torrio.
The result was the 1929 St. Valentine’s Day Massacre. Disguising his men as policemen, Capone sent them to Moran’s warehouse at 2122 North Clark Street, where they lined seven of the North Siders up against a wall and machine-gunned them in cold blood. Several of the victims were also blasted with a shotgun in the face. The gang leader, Moran, escaped, but with his key lieutenants dead his operation went into steep decline. Capone was left as Chicago’s undisputed Mr. Big.
But outrage over the killings generated pressure for more action on the part of the authorities against Capone. It was this that led the FBI to launch its ingenious bid to pursue Capone for income-tax offenses. Aware that he was unlikely ever to be indicted for any of his more violent activities (both because of the distance he now kept between himself and specific actions and because of the fear of reprisals that kept any potential witnesses from testifying), the federal government appointed a Treasury agent, Eliot Ness, and a hand-picked team of agents—the Untouchables—to go after Capone.
As a strategy it proved to be a stunning success. In June 1931 Capone was formally charged with income-tax evasion, and that October he was found guilty and sentenced to eleven years in prison. Initially sent to Atlanta penitentiary, in 1934 he was transferred to the maximum-security facility at Alcatraz. In 1939 he was released early, owing to ill health. But he was never able to regain control over his criminal empire. A shadow of his former self, Capone retreated into obscurity—finally dying of syphilis in 1947, a forgotten figure.
BERIA
1899–1953
Let me have one night with him and I’ll have him confessing he is the King of England.
Lavrenti Beria
Lavrenti Pavlovich Beria was a sinister Soviet secret policeman, psychopathic rapist and enthusiastic sadist who ordered the deaths of many and took a personal delight in the torture of his victims. The personification of the criminal monstrosity of the Soviet state, he was a coarse, cynical intriguer, a vindictive cut-throat, a deft courtier and a perverted thug. Yet he was also a highly intelligent, enormously competent and indefatigable administrator with the vision ultimately to reject Marxism and propose the sort of liberal program that Mikhail Gorbachev brought to fruition years later.
Beria was born in Georgia in 1899 to a very religious mother but of uncertain paternity—he was probably the illegitimate son of an Abkhazian nobleman. In Baku during the Russian Civil War he worked as a double agent, serving both the anti-Bolshevik regime and the Bolsheviks. Once Baku was retaken by the Bolsheviks, he proved a shrewd politician, and in 1921 he joined the new secret police, the Cheka, rising quickly to become head of th
e Georgian branch. He first met Stalin, a fellow Georgian, in 1926, and always behaved toward him not like a Bolshevik comrade (as was then the fashion) but like a medieval liege to his king. Stalin decided to use him against the old Georgians who ran the Caucasus, promoting him against their protests to first secretary of Georgia, and then of the entire Caucasus. When Stalin made his courtiers garden with him, Beria used an ax and told Stalin he would use it to tear out any weeds that he was ordered to extract. Beria understood Stalin’s vanity and produced a book on the history of the communists in the Caucasus that inflated Stalin’s importance before the Revolution.
Stalin’s local ally in the Caucasus was Abkhazian boss Nestor Lakoba, who had helped to promote Beria. But now Lakoba and Beria clashed, and in 1936 Stalin allowed Beria to destroy his old friend which he did by poisoning Lakoba after an evening at the opera in Tiflis. Then, in what was to become a typical pattern, Beria set about destroying the entire Lakoba family, killing his brothers, young children and friends. When the Great Terror really started, Beria killed and tortured his way through the Caucasus, murdering far more victims than his quota.
In late 1938 Stalin brought Beria to Moscow and promoted him to “assist Yezhov,” the head of the NKVD, the secret police. Beria had been friendly with Yezhov, but now his role was to destroy him. On November 25 he was made boss of the NKVD in Yezhov’s place, and set about restoring order to the frenzied chaos of Yezhov’s killing machine. The Terror was officially over—but it never ended, it simply became secret, as Beria set about purging more Soviet leaders and generals. He liked to torture them himself, and beat one victim so hard that he knocked out one of his eyes. Stalin and Beria enjoyed coming up with imaginatively lurid ways of destroying their enemies. When Beria found out that Lakoba’s wife feared snakes above anything else, he drove her to insanity by placing snakes in her cell. He kidnapped and murdered his comrades’ wives and killed other comrades in faked car crashes.
After Stalin signed the Nonaggression Pact with Hitler in 1939, allowing him to annex eastern Poland, the Baltic States and Moldavia, Beria supervised the brutal killing and deportation of hundreds of thousands of innocent people suspected of anti-Soviet tendencies. In 1940 Beria, on Stalin’s orders, presided over the execution of 28,000 Polish officers in the Katyn Forest. Following Hitler’s invasion of the Soviet Union in 1941, Beria became ever more powerful. Promoted to commissar-general of security and made a marshal of the Soviet Union, he was one of the key administrators on the new state defense committee through which Stalin ran the war. Running the vast Gulag camp system as well as much of the country’s industrial production, Beria continued to run the secret police and terrorize the generals on Stalin’s behalf. In 1941 Beria proposed the deportation of the Volga Germans, and later, in 1944, the deportation of the Chechens, Karachai, Kalmyks, Balkars and Crimean Tartars. Hundreds of thousands were killed or perished en route. In 1945 Beria accompanied Stalin to Yalta, where President Roosevelt, spotting Beria at a dinner, asked his identity: “That’s Beria,” replied Stalin. “My Himmler.”
Beria’s wife Nina was pretty and elegant, and his son Sergo was his pride and joy. He loved his family, but spent nearly all his time in the office, day and night, and the rest of his energy was devoted to a priapic addiction to sex. He always had mistresses—his last one was a fourteen-year-old beauty—and he was also addicted to rape.
The stories of his degeneracy circulated by his enemies after his fall are true. He would send out his bodyguards to kidnap and deliver young girls whom he had spotted from his cruising limousine, invite them to dinner, propose a toast to Stalin, and slip sleeping pills into their wine. He would then force himself on them. Afterward, his chauffeur would take them home, and present them with a bouquet of flowers. Even during the Second World War, when he was virtually running the country, and afterward when he was in charge of the nuclear project, Beria still found time for these squalid escapades, and caught venereal diseases several times. When Berias’s crimes were reported to Stalin, the dictator tolerated him—commenting that Beria was a busy man under great stress.
During the Potsdam Conference, President Truman informed Stalin about America’s new nuclear weapons. Stalin immediately placed Beria in charge of over 400,000 workers, including many brilliant scientists, tasked with developing a Soviet atom bomb. In 1946 Beria became a full member of the Politburo. But Stalin had started to distrust him, sensing his cynicism about Marxism itself and his increasing dislike of his master. Stalin removed him from the ministry of internal affairs in 1946, purged his protégés and promoted Abakumov, another ruthless thug, to be minister of state security, independent of Beria. Yet Beria still managed to wield considerable influence. In 1949, to Stalin’s delight, Beria delivered the Soviet atom bomb. In the same year, Beria managed to turn Stalin against two of his chosen heirs, and both were shot in the Leningrad Case.
By the early 1950s Stalin was in decline, forgetful, more and more paranoid, and never more dangerous. He now loathed “Snake-eyes” Beria, who, in turn, hated Stalin and his system, even though he himself was one of its monsters. When Stalin died in March 1953, Beria emerged from the deathbed as the strongman of the new regime. Although his title was first deputy premier, he dominated the nominal premier, the weak Malenkov, and took charge of the ministry of internal affairs. He disdained the coarse, clumsy but shrewd Khrushchev, whom he fatally underestimated. Freed of the hated Stalin, Beria overconfidently proposed the freeing of millions of prisoners, liberalization of the economy and the loosening of Soviet hegemony over eastern Europe and the ethnic republics. Yet at the same time he was still arresting his personal enemies and intimidating his rivals. No one trusted him everyone feared him. Three months after Stalin’s death, Khrushchev orchestrated a palace coup backed by Marshal Zhukov and the Soviet military. Beria was arrested, and secretly confined in a military bunker. Here he begged for his life, writing pathetic letters to his ex-comrades, but to no avail: at his trial he was sentenced to death. On the day he was due to die, he cried and collapsed until his executioner, a Soviet general, stuffed a towel in his mouth and shot him through the forehead.
Short, squat, bald and increasingly fat, Beria had a flat face with large fleshy lips, greeny-gray skin, and, behind his glinting pince-nez, gray, colorless eyes. At the same time, he was energetic, witty, quick, curious and an avid reader of history. “He was enormously clever with inhuman energy,” said Stalin’s deputy Molotov. “He could work for a week with one night’s sleep.” According to one of his henchmen, “Beria would think nothing of killing his best friend.” Several of his colleagues observed that if he had been born in America, he would have been head of General Motors. Yet—with his love of intrigue, poison, torture and killing—he would also have flourished at the court of the Borgias.
HEMINGWAY
1899–1961
Man is not made for defeat. A man can be destroyed but not defeated.
The essence of man’s—and Hemingway’s—indomitable spirit captured in The Old Man and the Sea (1952)
Ernest Hemingway was arguably the most important American writer of the 20th century. His novels and short stories, rejecting the stuffy 19th-century values he saw in his own family and in the world around him, introduced a new and powerful style of writing: sparse, economical, tough, masculine prose that captures the horrors of war and the trials of love, and advocates a strong moral code for conducting life in a complex world of pain and betrayal. Hemingway could be unpredictable, violent, bad-tempered, vainglorious, ridiculous and drunken, but these were all aspects of a troubled yet brilliant mind. He was awarded the Nobel Prize in recognition of his work and his distinctive and unique contribution to literature.
Hemingway grew up in a Chicago suburb. His father, physician Dr. Clarence Hemingway, urged him toward manly outdoor activities like hunting, shooting and fishing. His mother, Grace, instilled in him a familiarity with literature. He used to claim that the first words he said as a baby were “Afraid of nothing! Afrai
d of nothing!” probably untrue but typical of his famed machismo. As a young man Hemingway went to Italy to serve in the First World War. He was blown up by a mortar in 1918, but, despite being injured by shrapnel and coming under machine-gun fire, he managed to carry two comrades to safety.
Though he later embellished this experience, it was an outstanding act of bravery for which the Italian government awarded him the Silver Medal of Honor. While recuperating, Hemingway fell in love with a Red Cross nurse, Agnes von Kurowsky, who declined to marry him. He never forgot the experience.
When he returned to America, his mother reprimanded him for his “lazy loafing and pleasure seeking,” accusing him of “trading on his handsome face” and “neglecting his duties to God.” Hemingway had always despised his mother’s written style, her sermonizing and her religion, which he saw as running counter to human happiness. Now he began to despise her wholesale. The breach with his family was never reconciled, and when in 1921 Hemingway took a job as foreign correspondent on the Toronto Star, based in Paris, he cut himself free and became his own man.
In Paris Hemingway fell in with prominent literary figures such as Gertrude Stein, Ezra Pound, and his friend F. Scott Fitzgerald, author of The Great Gatsby and the other American literary genius of the time. In 1924–5 Hemingway published his short-story cycle In Our Time, and in 1926 the successful novel The Sun Also Rises, which dealt with the lives of the aimless socialites of America’s postwar “Lost Generation,” who decadently drifted around Europe without purpose.
Hemingway’s first masterpiece was A Farewell to Arms, published in 1929. It was heavily autobiographical, telling a love story set in the First World War. A young ambulance man, Frederic Henry, falls in love with Catherine Barkley, an English nurse tending to his recuperation. After Henry deserts his post, the couple flee to Switzerland, but Catherine and her baby die in childbirth, leaving Henry desolate.
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