The Allies

by Winston Groom

  Religion also came under scrutiny. In early 1943, in the war’s most critical stages, Stalin had relaxed the state’s opposition to organized religion. He did so in order that people—soldiers and civilians alike—might find solace for their hardships through God. Twenty thousand Russian Orthodox churches reopened, and their priests were freed from the work camps. But pure, unadulterated communism had room for no god. Stalin understood that churches were by their very definition count­errev­oluti­onary. Thus, he now installed as the official government overseer of the nation’s churches one G. Karpov, a colonel in the NKVD. Observation and persecution of religion began anew, though not as blatantly as before. Stalin merely set into motion a higher authority to ensure that good Christians must be good Communists too.

  * * *

  AS THE GERMAN ARMIES RECEDED, the extent of the destruction they wrought was practically unimaginable. Nearly two thousand Russian towns and seventy thousand villages had been obliterated within the area of German occupation. Not a factory, mine, commercial enterprise, or home of any sort was left standing. Nor did schools, hospitals, libraries, or public or private buildings escape the Nazi torch. Millions of displaced people crowded the countryside begging for food. Gangs of orphaned children with neither public assistance nor private charity roamed about, stealing. Repairing all this was a task of Herculean magnitude—which, at least, would be easier in a command economy such as the Soviet Union’s, although terribly hard on the people. Every able-bodied man and woman must be put back to work, came the orders. Stalin gave the job of solving all this to Beria and the NKVD.

  More than 26 million Soviet citizens had been killed during the war. Most were soldiers, but 8 million were civilians, most of these murdered by the Germans out of sheer meanness. The devastation was a breathtaking travesty.

  * * *

  WHEN NEWS CAME OF ROOSEVELT’S DEATH Stalin wrote a heartfelt letter in which he hardly mentioned wartime decisions or cooperation but spoke of the genuine friendship he felt for the American president. In private, however, he called him “weak and rapacious.”15

  As the Russians drove deeper into Germany, they recovered Soviet prisoner of war camps run by the Germans. An estimated 2 million Soviet POWs resided there—and, true to his declaration of 1942, these unfortunates were treated by Stalin as “malicious deserters.”

  As they were repatriated, the former POWs were sent immediately to prison labor camps in Siberia and elsewhere for long terms of incarceration. Some were singled out for execution. Not only that, but Stalin had demanded—and the British and Americans had shamefully acceded—that all Soviet prisoners of war in camps liberated by Eisenhower’s armies also be returned to Russia. It was apparently quite a pitiful sight, as these miserable creatures who had been nearly starved for years in German POW camps lived to see victory in the war but resisted with all their might the possibility of being returned to their own homeland. Many cried and begged not to be sent back to Russia, but it did no good. The Americans and British turned them over anyway.

  As well, the Soviet government had extracted from the Allies a promise to turn over all Soviet citizens living in areas under Allied control, many of whom had escaped from the Communist country years before; many of these had, in fact, fought for the White Russians against the Communists. There was little doubt of their fate when the NKVD finished investigating them. Count Nikolai Tolstoy-Miloslavsky (a relation of Leo) cataloged this eyewitness account of the proceedings in Graz, Austria, from a British sergeant as the former prisoners were handed over to Russian representatives: “As they reached the reception point, a woman rushed to the viaduct over the River Muir and threw her child into the water, then jumped in herself…Men and women were herded together into a huge concentration camp fenced with barbed wire…That nightmare will remain with me as long as I live.”16

  German prisoners did not fare well in Stalin’s POW camps either. Of an estimated 3 million Germans captured by the Soviets, an estimated 1 million died in labor camps. Most were held long after the war had ended. The last German prisoner wasn’t released until 1956.17

  * * *

  BY 1945 STALIN’S AGE was beginning to catch up to him. He was slightly stooped, his hearing was weak, and he had begun to dodder. He had little in the way of family. His son Yakov, whom he had disavowed, had been killed by the Germans; Vasily was a hopeless alcoholic; and he was more or less estranged from his daughter Svetlana, although she occasionally still served as a hostess to his mostly stag dinner parties. These affairs over time had become more and more bizarre.

  All manner of pranks and practical jokes were encouraged, such as unfastening the lid of the saltshaker so that it dumped its entire contents into the food of the unsuspecting butt of the joke—who, often as not, was Molotov, Stalin’s longtime foreign minister. Large ripe tomatoes were slipped onto the seats of chairs. Vodka was poured into wine bottles. The banquets began late and ended in the early hours, with a great many vodka toasts that often devolved into levity, insults, and sometimes veiled threats. Charles de Gaulle was present at one of these; Stalin rose to toast his quartermaster general, who was charged with supplying the army on the fighting fronts. “And he’d better do his job,” the Soviet dictator concluded of the quartermaster with a cringeworthy smile, “or he’ll be hanged. That’s the custom in our country.” Later, Stalin jokingly threatened to banish his interpreter to Siberia because he “knew too much.”

  Stalin had tried of late to ingratiate himself with the large Alliluyev family of his wife Nadya; he’d made little headway, since he had imprisoned several Alliluyev women because they also “knew too much” about her suicide. The others were terrified of him.18

  When the war finally ended, it was decided to throw the largest victory parade in the history of the world. Millions of Soviet soldiers, interspersed by an endless procession of tanks, artillery pieces, bands, and other military paraphernalia, marched before Marshal Stalin’s reviewing stand. It was at first planned to have the nation’s first marshal lead the parade on a white horse—but at the last moment Stalin demurred, citing his age and telling General Zhukov, “No, you ride it.”

  This was the last publicity stunt accorded Zhukov or any of the other Soviet marshals, whom Stalin feared might somehow eclipse him as the most worshiped figure in the Communist world. After this event Zhukov, who had been the head of the Soviet army, was reassigned to a lowly command in the Urals. Agents tapped the phones of generals and recorded their conversations. Some were confronted with the fact that they had made disparaging remarks about the Stalin regime; these men were shot, their families banished to Siberia. Posters of a heroic-looking Stalin, replete in his marshal’s uniform, his pockmarks airbrushed and a little gray now added to his hair, flooded the land on billboards and the walls of schools, factories, and government buildings. The dictator’s cult of personality was at its height.

  The war had given Stalin total control of the government and its people, and he intended to keep it that way. Soviet Russia had become government by fear and firing squad (if it wasn’t that before). No one felt completely safe, including Stalin. His most immediate threat would have been from Lavrenty Beria, with his huge secret police apparatus. So Stalin—gently, by his standards—stripped Beria of the part of his job having to do with internal affairs. Likewise, he removed Georgy Malenkov from the position of chairman of the Committee on the Rehabilitation of Liberated Areas, which had become, essentially, a criminal enterprise. Whole factories from Germany were dismantled and “liberated” back to Russia under war reparations agreements. But many of the eastern European countries found that estate-size mansions, complete with their automobiles, livestock, shrubbery, and even their servants, were also “liberated” to the Soviet Union. This last was not the reason Malenkov was fired, however; the reason was that he was sloppy with the liberated factories, many of which stood for years with their machinery in rusting heaps beside railroad tracks.
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  In July 1945 the final conference of the Big Three was held at Potsdam, on the outskirts of ruined Berlin. The composition of the group, however, was much altered. Roosevelt had died in office earlier that year, and President Harry S. Truman now represented the United States among the Allies. In the British delegation, Churchill was joined by the socialist Clement Attlee; back home the British awaited the outcome of a general election, and Attlee stood to replace Churchill as prime minister if the Tories lost. When Churchill expressed anxiety about the election outcome, Stalin remarked that he was sure the British statesman had nothing to worry about. After all, one of Stalin’s favorite aphorisms was: “It doesn’t matter who votes, it only matters who counts the votes.”

  As he had at Tehran and Yalta, Stalin spent his time at Potsdam consolidating “his unavowed intention of dominating and, in effect, annexing eastern European states, which later became known as ‘Soviet satellites.’ ”19 Stalin’s position on these matters was dictated by the fact that his armies occupied the territories in question. He once privately told a young Communist visitor from Yugoslavia that whoever rules a country militarily dictates the kind of government that it can have—“and that includes France, but we do not now have the ability to go into Paris,” Stalin said.20

  The war in Europe may have been over, but the war in the Pacific was very much alive. At one point, President Truman took Stalin aside and informed him that the United States had just successfully conducted its first test of an atomic bomb. The Soviet premier seemed unperturbed by this news—even disinterested.

  Stalin, of course, had known about the British and American work on the bomb all along, from Soviet spies such as Klaus Fuchs, Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, and others. When he realized that the Americans actually had one of the weapons, Stalin immediately ordered Beria to redouble his efforts to produce a nuclear bomb in “a short period of time.” This resulted in increased spying, and by 1949 the Soviets had assembled and successfully tested an atomic weapon along the American design. Two years later, they produced an even more powerful one of their own design.21

  Stalin now commanded the world’s largest modern military and, along with his satellite states, the largest bloc on the European continent. But the fact that peace was at hand was not what Stalin needed. In his Orwellian world, what he needed was enemies: something his millions of subjects could hate and strive against, something that would make them work harder and feel more loyalty to the Motherland. Ironically, it was Winston Churchill, the out-of-work former British PM, who fulfilled Stalin’s need.

  On March 5, 1946, Churchill took to the podium of small Westminster College in Fulton, Missouri, and gave his famous Iron Curtain speech. It received worldwide coverage, and its hostility toward the Soviet Union was the final straw. Stalin could now blame everything that was wrong on his former allies, who now had revealed themselves as enemies. The Comintern, which had never fully gone out of business, was back in operation at full speed—and all roads led to Moscow.

  Churchill had lambasted the Russians openly at a time when the U.S. State Department was still trying to keep the Grand Alliance from falling apart. The United States did not officially break with the Soviet Union until June 25, 1950, when Kim Il Sung’s Communist North Korea launched a full-scale attack on neighboring democratic South Korea, capturing its capital Seoul in three days. It appeared that nothing could stop the Communist onslaught, which was armed and supplied by Stalin’s military via Russia’s Trans-Siberian Railway. But Stalin had made a grave miscalculation.

  Just as it appeared all of South Korea would fall, President Harry Truman sent his diplomats to Roosevelt’s new United Nations, where they secured a favorable vote in the Security Council for armed intervention. The Soviet Union might have blocked the vote, but Stalin had been boycotting the UN over its policy of recognizing Chiang Kai-shek’s government in Taiwan as the legitimate Chinese authority. As a result, Stalin found himself confronting an alliance of eighteen nations who agreed to join the United States in the fight against Communist aggression.22

  Douglas MacArthur was selected to drive the North Koreans out of the South, which he did in 1950 with a brilliant seaborne invasion at the port of Inchon that split the Communist forces in two and soon pushed them back beyond their own border at the 38th Parallel. Then the Chinese Communists of Mao Tse-tung invaded South Korea, and the fighting began all over again until it bogged down into a bitter and protracted stalemate.

  One thing the Korean War did was to cement Western nations, including Australia and New Zealand, against communism. It strengthened Stalin’s case that capitalist countries were the implacable enemies of the Soviet Union. But the expense of the war was a strain on the Soviets, who were still trying to rebuild their shattered country after World War II. In the air, American jet fighters battled Russian MiGs flown by Soviet aviators, and the Americans were getting the better of it. Stalin had been promised a short, decisive war by Kim Il Sung. But instead the conflict dragged on for three years, with Kim continuously begging for more help until a Soviet-backed truce was finally declared, the North Koreans pushed back into their own territory.

  * * *

  IN 1950, THE MAYOR OF Leningrad and six fellow Communist Party officials were arrested, tried, and shot in one batch for treason. Stalin had begun another purge. Two thousand other officials from that city were exiled to Siberia. The Politburo, where the Soviet power lay, resembled as much as anything a den of thieves whose members were engaged in ongoing conspiracies against one another. The chief conspirator, Stalin, having disposed in one way or another of most of his old friends as well as enemies, now engineered Molotov’s turn at the screws. First Stalin had Molotov’s wife arrested. She was Jewish, and the rap was that she had become too friendly with Israeli envoy Golda Meir, whom she had known since school days. Next, Molotov was sacked as foreign minister. Stalin had his home telephone bugged, and Molotov was no longer invited to the dictator’s dacha for banquets. His wife remained in jail, accused of being at the head of a Jewish conspiracy to turn the Crimea into “a California for Jews.” In 1952, Stalin gave what would be his last speech to the Politburo, denouncing Molotov and others for being “cowards and defeatists.” Later it was charged that Molotov was a British spy because he’d spent a few moments alone with British foreign minister Anthony Eden while on a Scottish train in 1943. He must have known what was coming next but fate intervened.23

  * * *

  ON THE NIGHT OF MARCH 1, 1953, Stalin suffered a cerebral hemorrhage. He was found by his bodyguards unconscious on the bedroom floor of his dacha outside Moscow, having spent the night before drinking heavily with his Kremlin cronies.

  Stalin was placed on a couch and a blanket put over him. No one thought to summon a doctor; instead a call was placed to the minister of security in Moscow, who passed the buck to Beria and Malenkov. These two, plus Nikolai Bulganin and Nikita Khrushchev—the four top Communist lieutenants—drove out to the dacha to have a look. Once more, medical attention was not immediately sought, giving rise to suspicions that this was deliberately done to see if Stalin might die. All four, in some way or other, were on Stalin’s hit list.

  When doctors at last were summoned, they found that Stalin was paralyzed on his right side and his breathing was poor. Medical advice was sought at once from, ironically, Moscow’s Lubyanka prison and secret police headquarters, where many of Russia’s most distinguished physicians (most of them Jewish) had been recently incarcerated by Stalin, who insisted that they were traitors and spies. This consultation revealed that the prognosis was grave and death likely imminent. Svetlana, now twenty-eight and twice divorced, was called, as was Stalin’s son Vasily, who arrived drunk and was asked to leave.

  Stalin lingered for four days before expiring on March 5 after undergoing a massive stomach hemorrhage. He was seventy-four years old. Mr. and Mrs. Molotov were off the hook. Meanwhile, like conspirators in a Shakespearean play, the four S
oviet top brass began arguing over the order of succession. Intermittently, during the deathwatch, they had gone over to Stalin’s unconscious form and touched him—Beria, according to one account, “slobbering on Stalin’s hand in an unctuous display of fidelity.”24

  The world was informed of the death of the Soviet leader, while Stalin’s body was embalmed at the special institute set up to keep Lenin’s corpse in top shape. Word was put out that the four old Communists would each take charge of a ministry or ministries and run the Soviet Union as equal partners. Within six months, however, Khrushchev emerged as the first secretary of the Communist Party and first leader of the council of ministries. Malenkov was selected as leader of the Soviet Union but Khrushchev was effectively the new boss.

  Within a few months Beria was arrested, tried, and shot, having been accused of initiating all the murders and other crimes that Stalin had ordered. Before his death, Beria had told the others that it was actually he who had killed Stalin by poisoning him. Nobody knows if that’s true or not; the autopsy document has been lost.*3

  Stalin’s funeral was a monumental affair. His body was laid out in a catafalque in the Hall of Columns on Red Square beneath a sign that read “Proletarians from All Countries, Unite!” In one of the great feats in the history of taxidermy, the corpse had been gutted, stuffed, and mounted to last a lifetime or longer on his funeral bier.