Russian historian Edvard Radzinsky observed this dynamic firsthand.11 “Stalin could afford to sacrifice millions. There were millions more where they came from. Halder believed that Stalin would be overthrown by his own people…But the Soviet people did not even dare ask [themselves] why their leader had been caught napping by the German invasion, why the army was unready to defend itself. Independent thought had evaporated completely in the white heat of terror. He had created a new society…based on fear, the great engine of despotism.”12
* * *
NOW CAME THE CRUCIBLE of Stalingrad. Russia’s great industrial city on the Volga, formerly Tsaritsyn until 1925 when it was renamed for the Man of Steel, stood astride the routes Hitler’s army would take for the breadbasket of the eastern Ukraine. Stalin was determined they would not pass, even if it meant the destruction of the city and everything within it.
From the Germans’ point of view, the capture of Stalingrad was not a great strategic military prize, but it would be an immense propaganda coup, demonstrating to the world that the Soviets were unable to keep even the city named for their leader. It proved to be a reckless adventure for Hitler, the amateur strategist.
In the meanwhile, a German mechanized army group marched south of Stalingrad to take the oil fields of Baku and the Caucasus (where Stalin’s first wife, Kato, had taken ill in 1907 with the typhus that soon killed her). This was a crucial strategic area. Not only would Baku provide the vital oil for Hitler’s armies; it would also deprive the Russians of their main source of oil, which would dry up their tank armies and their military aircraft.
The Battle of Stalingrad began in August 1942, when two German armies began to move on the Baku oil fields. The Fourth Panzer had a relatively easy march, though its soldiers had to cross the difficult Caucasus Mountains. But the Sixth German Army, which did not contain Panzer divisions, was ordered to take Stalingrad on its way to the Caucasus, a feat much easier said than done.
There was ferocious fighting north of the city, as Stalin had ordered “not one step backward.” But German superiority in tactics slowly forced the Soviets back toward Stalingrad. Soviet propaganda (and some historians) have insisted that Stalin lured the Germans into a trap, but that is not the case. Desertions were so common that Stalin ordered the NKVD secret police to form “blocking battalions” to stop soldiers from fleeing. Anyone caught was subject to being shot or imprisoned; others were returned to the front.
All through that summer, the Germans advanced on Stalingrad with Russian and German soldiers dying by the tens of thousands each week. Both sides sent in heavy reinforcements, so that by the beginning of September each opposing army contained approximately a million men, including more than half a million Italians, Romanians, and Hungarians fighting on the side of the Germans.
Stalin also had been building up a huge separate army made of “men beyond the Urals”—just as he had in the battle for Moscow. These troops were led by the man who was then Stalin’s favorite general, Georgy Zhukov, who would make a counterattack when the moment was right.
By this point the German air force had bombed Stalingrad into piles of smoking rubble. Thousands of bodies were entombed inside and the smell hovered like a pall. The weekly casualty figures remained horrendous. On November 19, Zhukov launched his counterattack with the fresh army, which both surprised and overwhelmed the Germans. Zhukov’s strategy was to envelope the Nazi army and surround it.
The Italians, Romanians, and Hungarians soon surrendered—but not the Germans, who were ordered by an idiotically outraged Hitler to fight to the last man. The German commander Friedrich Paulus now found himself vastly outnumbered. With another Russian winter coming on, he requested a withdrawal, but Hitler refused. Instead, the Führer promoted Paulus to field marshal on the novel theory that no German field marshal had ever surrendered.
The Russian winter was even harsher than the previous year, and the Germans troops had received no winter clothing. One soldier told in a letter home how he watched his fingers fall off his right hand “one by one.” The last to go, he said, was his trigger finger. Conditions among the common German soldiers were appalling; they ate their horses and dray animals, lived in freezing basements of ruined buildings with squalid cesspools outside, and piled their frozen dead around the steps for barricades and to keep out the cold.
By December 1942 the city was a wasteland, but Stalin would not let the Germans have it. He ordered a counterattack that defied belief, with a huge number of troops and thousands of tanks and planes. The Russian army grasped the Germans who were slowly starving and freezing, while Field Marshal Paulus sat hapless at his headquarters in the basement of a department store. By February 2, 1943, the Germans had had enough.
They had been supplied intermittently by air, but by New Year’s Day Zhukov’s forces had captured the last remaining enemy airfield. With his army doomed, Paulus sought a surrender to Zhukov and was taken prisoner. He had lost a hundred and fifty thousand men, both killed and missing, and turned over ninety-one thousand as prisoners; only six thousand eventually returned from the Soviet POW camps. On their way there, “ragged, dejected, unshaven, in filthy greatcoats,” Russian children pelted them with stones. In captivity, Paulus joined a Soviet anti-Nazi group and in 1953 was allowed to move to Soviet-dominated East Germany, where he died four years later.13
Hitler descended into a furious rage over the Stalingrad debacle, which was widely publicized through Allied propaganda. Germans generally became fearful, sullen, and depressed. So far the war had been easy and victories were the norm; now they had to stare into the abject face of defeat. Stalingrad is today considered to be a turning point of the war: the decisive strategic battle after which the Germans were never again successful in the field. But the Hitlerites, neither knowing nor accepting this, kept the war going for three more miserable years. It has been estimated that during that time the Nazi army, in an orgy of rapine and racial cleansing, murdered up to 10 million Russian civilians in the occupied territories.
Stalin was celebrated as the unquestioned hero of the victory and made himself a field marshal of the Soviet Union, whose uniform he wore from that time forth. Roosevelt sent a fulsome congratulatory telegram, in which he alluded to Soviet troops “covered with glory,” “proudest chapter of the war,” “forever honored your name,” etc. Stalin wired back, predicting “ultimate victory over our common enemy.”14
* * *
IN STALIN’S OWN PATERNAL DRAMA, his daughter Svetlana’s romance with Aleksei Kapler proceeded apace. He was just as smitten as she, even though she was barely out of childhood, and the two quickly became a couple. This was in 1942, after the Germans had been driven from the immediate gates of Moscow. Aleksei waited for Svetlana after school; they went to art galleries and the ballet. They saw movies and plays and dined in what passed for fashionable restaurants according to the dialectical materialism of Moscow, all the while shadowed by the NKVD man, to whom Kapler sometimes gave cigarettes “to relieve his boredom.”15
The NKVD evidently reported these goings on to Stalin, but the big boss was totally focused on the huge battle then developing at Stalingrad. Apparently he didn’t think there was anything to worry about; after all, a forty-year-old Russian would have to be a total imbecile to try any hanky-panky with the sixteen-year-old daughter of a man such as himself.
And then one day Stalin picked up an issue of Pravda, of which he had once been an editor. It featured an article by Kapler, now on assignment as a war correspondent in the battle area. At the end of the piece, he described recent visits to art galleries and midnight walks around Moscow with an unidentified sweetheart. This coda was the kicker for Stalin, and if he’d had any doubts that a love affair was in progress it resolved then. “It must be snowing in Moscow,” Kapler wrote to his unnamed sweetheart. “From your window you can see the crenellated wall of the Kremlin.”16
It dawned on the Soviet dictator that
Kapler had to be writing about Stalin’s own dacha, where Stalin had installed Svetlana! Enraged, Stalin reached for the phone, and Aleksei Kapler was on his way to the Siberian labor camps before the day was out.
Stalin confronted Svetlana at the dacha two days later, angrily claiming that Kapler was of all things a British spy! When she declared her love for the journalist, Stalin slapped her—twice—for the first time in her life. He shouted, according to historian Radzinsky, “Why do you think he would want you? He’s got women all over the place, you fool!”17
Thus, daughter and father were forever alienated, which resulted in Svetlana’s escape years later from behind the Iron Curtain to the United States, where she wrote a best-selling autobiography.18
* * *
THE STRAIN OF THE WAR had begun to tell on Stalin, now well into his sixties. His eyes were often bloodshot and puffy from lack of sleep or heavy drinking at late night banquets. His hair had begun to turn gray. His nerves were jangled, and he was frequently annoyed though he didn’t have the sort of querulous, shrieking temperament that was a personality trait of Adolf Hitler.19
Stalin also never went to the fighting front—neither to visit his troops, to see it for himself, or for any other reason (although various propaganda portraits show him there in heroic fashion, leading, daring the enemy, in front of his army). He once got within a hundred miles of the front for a photo op during the battle for Moscow. But that was as close as he came, although he continued to wear in public the uniform of a Russian field marshal: the rank he had bestowed upon himself.20
He persisted in his on-and-off routine of stag parties in the Kremlin or at his dacha with Molotov and other high-level Soviet officials. At these affairs, sumptuous food was served, awash in liters of wine, vodka, and brandy. They began late in the evening; Svetlana often served as a “hostess” but would usually leave before 10 p.m. The parties would frequently last until dawn and featured dirty jokes and practical jokes and ended with singing. Stalin was quite proud of his baritone voice, and sly, secretive Molotov, who came from a musical family, played piano and various stringed instruments. These long nights were apparently a way to let off steam and the strain of war. Stalin rarely arose from bed before noon.21
In December 1942 a U.S. team of scientists, led by the Italian Enrico Fermi, set off the first nuclear chain reaction in a top secret site in Chicago. Within a week this information was passed to Joseph Stalin by Lavrenty Beria, the head of the NKVD and one of communism’s most unsavory associates. At the time, Stalin instructed Beria to look into the prospect of nuclear weapons. Beria snatched up a number of Russian physicists presently languishing in Soviet labor camps and set them to working on the problem. Then he sent his spies and agents to Britain and the United States to steal the secrets of the atomic bomb.
* * *
THE AGONY IN LENINGRAD, the once lovely St. Petersburg, was now palpable. There had been 2.2 million people in the city when the Nazis laid siege. Now, those who were left were cut off without power, sewage, facilities, and heat. Food was also scarce, except a scant amount brought in with great difficulty on the Ice Road, an eighty-mile-long thruway over the thick ice of Lake Ladoga.*1 Day after day, German artillery shelled Leningrad and Hitler’s airplanes bombed it, bringing down buildings, raining down death. Hitler had declared in an order on September 29, 1941: “The Führer has vowed to wipe St. Petersburg [Leningrad] from the face of the earth. The objective is to approach the city as closely as possible and destroy it entirely by artillery fire and constant attacks from the air. Requests to be allowed to surrender will be rejected…We have no interest in preserving any part of the population of that large city.”22
Soon Leningrad’s citizens were dying of starvation, as well as from shells and bombs. Before it was over a million civilians would perish. “People would go to visit friends for half an hour, sit down, and die,” recalled the scholar and writer Olga Freidenburg. “They would leave home on business and die on the way. Thousands of people sat down on the ground for a rest, couldn’t get up from hunger weakness, and froze to death. The militia immediately stole their ration cards.” But, she added, “No suffering inflicted on a living people…nothing whatsoever could have made the regime surrender that city. True to the usual law, omnipotence trampled human beings under foot, and spoke of patriotism and heroism of the besieged.”23
But Stalin had neither forgotten nor forsaken Leningrad; in fact, he sent his favorite general, Zhukov, to lift the German siege. After the Battle of Stalingrad ended in a successful conclusion, Zhukov was ordered to Leningrad, where an operation called Iskra (or Spark) was in the late planning stages. It was focused on breaking through the German front to the west of the city and opening a corridor for supplies to get through. Already a quarter million Russian soldiers had died in various actions that seesawed along the German lines, none of which had produced the desired results.
Operation Spark got off January 12, 1943, following two substantial artillery barrages and the bombing of German positions and air bases by Russian planes. After nearly two weeks of fierce fighting, the Russians had opened a six-mile-wide corridor to the east of Leningrad, which they fortified and improved with a hastily built railroad that connected the city with the rest of the Soviet Union. Thereafter, even though the corridor was within range of German artillery, vastly more abundant foodstuffs and supplies began to reach the starving citizens.
Operation Spark had not lifted the siege but at least the German lines were permanently broken. Later that month Stalin ordered the first Order of Suvorov medal, first class (named for an eighteenth-century Russian commander), awarded to Marshal Zhukov for “exceptional leadership in combat operations.”
The question has been raised by some historians over whether Stalin could at this point, or even earlier, have lifted the siege of Leningrad but purposely did not, in order to keep a German army occupied there that might otherwise have been used against Stalin’s other forces. Radzinsky thinks so, writing that Stalin “for tactical reasons used the slavish patriotism of people who died without complaint for nine hundred days and nights. Perhaps no nation in the world could have tolerated this—only this people trained by him to be so meekly obedient.”
It is lucky for Zhukov that he had gained such immense national confidence and popularity for his roles in beating the Germans at Moscow, Stalingrad, and Leningrad. Stalin deeply mistrusted any figure who might conceivably rival him. And in Georgy Zhukov, Stalin was beginning to think he had found his worst nightmare.
*1 The author’s maternal grandfather, a recently retired ship’s captain with the United Fruit Company, led ships from New York and other American ports to Archangel in Russia. It was a dangerous and nerve-wracking trip, both coming and going.
*2 There were great difficulties in securing the Ice Road. In the first weeks, forty trucks plunged through the ice seven hundred feet to the bottom. During the day it was under constant air attack and at night from preset German artillery fire.
CHAPTER TWELVE
Franklin Roosevelt addressed Congress the day after the Pearl Harbor attack. The president made the speech standing, after being assisted to the podium before the dais of the Speaker of the House. He began, “Yesterday, December 7, 1941—a date which will live in infamy—the United States of America was suddenly and deliberately attacked by naval and air forces of the Empire of Japan.”
He told the packed and furious joint House and Senate chambers that the attack was obviously planned far in advance and that the Japanese deliberately sought to deceive the United States, “by false statements and expressions of hope for continued peace,” right up to the moment of the attack. Lamenting the high casualties at Pearl Harbor, Roosevelt listed the other Pacific entities presently under Japanese attack, including Hong Kong; the American possessions of Guam, Wake, and Midway Islands; and the U.S. Commonwealth of the Philippines. “No matter how long it will take us to overco
me this premeditated invasion,” the president said, “the American people in their righteous might will win through to victory.”
It was a five-minute speech but the chamber erupted in a five-minute display of applause, shouting, foot stamping, and fist shaking. To show their solidarity, isolationist congressmen and senators marched through the Capitol corridors arm in arm with their interventionist cohorts. Everyone, from politicians to ordinary Americans, was in a kind of daze, with the enormous events around the world reeling in their minds. For two years they had known the thing was there, and groped to comprehend from headlines how it came to be and have so much power. Now it became clear for the first time: a true world war, and America was in it to the hilt.1
It was a rainy, blustery day in Washington when Roosevelt made his address to Congress, and the mood of the people matched the weather. All over America, starting at the crack of dawn, somber young men formed lines at military recruiting stations. From California to the state of Washington, military spotters dotted the coastline with binoculars, straining to pick up signs of a Japanese invasion. That same morning, Archibald MacLeish, the librarian of Congress, had original copies of the U.S. Constitution, the Declaration of Independence, the Bill of Rights, the Magna Carta, and the Gutenberg Bible packed up and sent by armed guards to underground safes at Fort Knox, Kentucky, where the U.S. gold reserve was stored.
It took Congress less than an hour to vote unanimously for war on Japan—except for one nay vote by the longtime Montana pacifist Jeannette Rankin, who had also voted against entering World War I. Several days later, Hitler’s Nazi government declared war on the United States, which reciprocated by declaring war on Germany and Italy. As Winston Churchill doubtless rubbed his hands in glee, Stalin continued to press for more American munitions—and, of course, his vaunted second front.
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