Stalin

by Simon Sebag Montefiore

  The trap snapped shut on a quarter of a million men and 1,200 tanks. The next day, Stalin called off the offensive but it was too late. The exhilarated Germans pushed on towards the Volga and the Caucasus: the road to Stalingrad was open.6

  Timoshenko and Khrushchev feared they would be shot. The two friends soon fell out in the scramble to save their careers and lives. There is a story that Khrushchev suffered a nervous breakdown after the encirclement, flying to Baku where he stayed with Bagirov, Beria’s ally, who naturally reported Khrushchev’s arrival. An unstable Khrushchev started vehemently denouncing Timoshenko, who repaid him in kind.

  “Comrade Stalin,” wrote Timoshenko by hand, “I must add something to our report. The increasingly nervous state of Comrade Khrushchev influences our work. Comrade Khrushchev has no faith in anything—one can’t make decisions in doubt . . . The whole Council think this is the reason for our fall!” He seems to confirm that Khrushchev did have a mental breakdown: “It’s difficult to discuss—Comrade Khrushchev is very ill . . . We gave our report without saying who was guilty. Comrade Khrushchev wants to blame only me.”

  Stalin played with the idea of appointing Bulganin to investigate the situation. Bulganin, sensing Stalin’s reluctance and, perhaps, guilt, begged to be excused for the un-Bolshevik reason that he and Khrushchev were such friends. Stalin did not insist but reflected mildly on Khrushchev’s simplicity: “He doesn’t understand statistics,” said Stalin, “but we have to put up with him” since only he, Kalinin and Andreyev were “real proletarians.” Instead Stalin summoned Khrushchev for a threatening history lesson: “You know in World War One, after our army fell into German encirclement, the general was court-martialled by the Tsar—hanged.” But Stalin forgave him and sent him back to the front. Khrushchev was still terrified since “I knew of many cases when Stalin reassured people by letting them leave his office with good news and then had them picked up.”

  Stalin was also astonishingly tolerant when Timoshenko asked for more men, having squandered so many: “Maybe the time has come for you to wage war by losing less blood, as the Germans are doing? Wage war not by quantity but by skill. If you won’t learn how to fight better, all the armaments produced in our whole country won’t be enough for you . . .” This was highly ironic from the most wasteful Supremo in history. Even as they retreated, Stalin remained sarcastically mild to Timoshenko: “Don’t be afraid of Germans—Hitler’s not as bad as they say.”

  Khrushchev thought they were spared because Mikoyan and Malenkov had witnessed his call to Kuntsevo but it was perhaps simpler: life and death was Stalin’s prerogative, and he liked203 Khrushchev and Timoshenko. Either way, this was Khrushchev’s greatest crisis until, as Stalin’s successor, he blundered into the Cuban Missile Crisis twenty years later. Later, Stalin humiliatingly emptied his pipe on Khrushchev’s head: “That’s in accordance with Roman tradition,” he said. “When a Roman commander lost a battle, he poured ashes on his own head . . . the greatest disgrace a commander could endure.”7

  On 19 June, a Luftwa fe aircraft crashed beyond German lines, containing a briefcase bearing the plans for Hitler’s summer offensive to exploit the Kharkov disaster and push towards Stalingrad and the North Caucasus. But Stalin decided that the information was either incomplete or a plant. A week later, the Germans attacked exactly as the plans warned, smashing a hole between the Briansk and South-Western Fronts, heading towards Voronezh and then Stalingrad. But it was the oil fields that Hitler really coveted. When he flew into headquarters at Poltava, he told Field Marshal von Bock: “If we don’t take Maikop and Grozny, then I must put an end to the war.”

  Timoshenko and Khrushchev fell back towards Stalingrad. When Timoshenko asked for more divisions, Stalin replied sharply: “If they sold divisions in the market, I’d buy you one or two but unfortunately they don’t.” Once again, Timoshenko’s front was in free fall. On 4 July, Stalin sarcastically quizzed the Marshal: “So is it a fact that the 301st and 227th Divisions are now encircled and you’re surrendering to the enemy?”

  “The 227th is retreating,” replied Timoshenko pathetically, “but the 301st—we can’t find it . . .”

  “Your guesses sound like lies. If you continue to lose divisions like this, you’ll soon be commander of nothing. Divisions aren’t needles and it’s a very complicated matter to lose them.”8

  Dizzy with over-confidence, Hitler divided his forces into two: one pushed across the Don to Stalingrad while the other headed southwards towards those Caucasian oil fields. When Rostov-on-Don fell, Stalin drafted another savage order: “Not One Step Backwards,” decreeing that “panic-mongers and cowards must be liquidated on the spot” and “blocking units” must be formed behind the lines to kill waverers. Nonetheless, Hitler’s southern Army Group A broke into the Caucasus. On 4 and 5 August, Stalin, Beria and Molotov spent most of the nights in the office as the Germans took Voroshilovsk (Stravropol), racing towards Grozny and Ordzhonikidze (Vladikavkaz) in the Caucasus and, on the Volga, approached Stalingrad. Paulus’s Sixth Army was poised to take the city and split Russia in two.9

  On 12 August, amid the calamitous stirrings of the decisive battle of the entire war, Winston Churchill arrived in Moscow to tell Stalin that there would be no Second Front soon, a mission he compared to “carrying a lump of ice to the North Pole.” Molotov met him at the airport and then escorted him to the residence he had been assigned. On the way, Churchill noticed that the Packard’s windows were over two inches thick.

  “It’s more prudent,” said Molotov. Stalin and Beria took Churchill’s visit very seriously, assigning him a bodyguard of 120. The defences around the Kremlin were redoubled. Stalin gave up his own house, Kuntsevo, dacha No. 7. It is a mark of Soviet obscurity that the British were never told and it has taken sixty years to emerge. Perhaps Stalin was repaying Churchill in kind for lending his dacha, Chequers, to Molotov.

  37

  Churchill Visits Stalin: Marlborough vs. Wellington

  Astrapping aide-de-camp of a princely family, according to Churchill, acted as his host at Kuntsevo. Churchill was shown into Stalin’s dining room, where the long table was laden with “every delicacy and stimulant that supreme power can command.” The British curiously explored.204 Without realizing it, Churchill described Stalin’s home: surrounded by a stockade, fifteen feet high, guarded on both sides, it was a “fine large house standing in its own extensive lawns and gardens in a fir wood of about twenty acres. There were agreeable walks . . . fountains . . . and a large glass tank with . . . goldfish. I was conducted through a spacious reception room to a bedroom and bathroom205 of almost equal size. Blazing almost dazzling electric lights displayed the spotless cleanliness.”

  Within three hours, Churchill, Harriman, and the British Ambassador Sir Archibald Clark Kerr were driven into the Kremlin to meet with Stalin, Molotov and Voroshilov who, banned from front-line commands, now became the Vozhd’s diplomatic gimp, a comedic sideshow to Stalin’s diplomatic double act with Molotov. Churchill decided to declare the bad news first: no Second Front that year. Stalin, faced with a fight for his life on the Volga, reacted sarcastically: “You can’t win wars without taking risks,” he said and later: “You mustn’t be so afraid of the Germans.”

  Churchill growled that Britain had fought alone in 1940. Having got the worst bit out of the way, Churchill revealed that the British and Americans were about to launch Operation Torch to seize North Africa, which he illustrated with the drawing of a soft-bellied crocodile and the big globe that stood in the room adjacent to Stalin’s office. In an impressive demonstration of his geopolitical instincts, Stalin immediately rattled off the reasons that this operation made sense. This, wrote Churchill, “showed the Russian Dictator’s swift and complete mastery” of military strategy. Then Stalin surprised them more: “Let God help the success of this enterprise!”1

  The next morning, Churchill met that “urbane, rigid diplomatist” Molotov alone to warn him: “Stalin will make a great mistake to treat
us roughly when we have come so far.”

  “Stalin’s a very wise man,” Molotov replied. “You may be sure that, however he argues, he understands all.”

  At eleven, Stalin and Molotov, accompanied by the usual interpreter Pavlov, received Churchill in the Little Corner where the Vozhd handed his guest a memorandum attacking the West for not launching a Second Front, and again mocked British cowardice.

  “I pardon that remark only on account of the bravery of Russian troops,” replied the Prime Minister, who then launched into a magnificent Churchillian soliloquy on the Western commitment to the war. When Churchill poked his unsatisfactory interpreter Dunlop: “Did you tell him this? Did you tell him that?” Stalin finally smiled: “Your words are of no importance. What’s important is your spirit.” But the conviviality was ice-thin: Stalin’s insults infuriated Churchill, who afterwards stalked Kuntsevo, no stranger to gloom and malice, threatening to go home.2

  Still angry and sullen, Churchill had to appear at the Catherine Hall for the Bacchanalian banquet Stalin held in his honour. Stalin sat in the centre with Churchill on his right, Harriman on his left, then an interpreter followed by General Alan Brooke, Chief of Imperial General Staff, and Voroshilov. Molotov kept the toasts coming for over three hours as nineteen courses were piled onto the table, which was “groaning with every description of hors d’oeuvre and fish etc.,” wrote Brooke, “a complete orgy . . . Among the many fish dishes was a small suckling pig . . . He was never eaten and, as the evening slipped by, his black eye remained fixed on me, and the orange peel mouth developed a sardonic smile!”

  Stalin was at his most charming, making it clear that “he wanted to make amends,” thought Clark Kerr, “but the PM . . . cold-shouldered him.”

  Stalin tried backhanded flattery: “Some years ago, we had a visit from Lady Astor,” Stalin recounted mischievously. When she suggested inviting Lloyd George to Russia, Stalin had replied: “Why should we invite . . . the head of the Intervention?” Lady Astor corrected him: “That’s not true . . . It was Churchill.” Stalin told Astor: “If a great crisis comes, the English . . . might turn to the old warhorse.” Besides, he added, “we like a downright enemy better than a false friend.”

  “Have you forgiven me?” asked Churchill.

  “All that is in the past,” replied the ex-seminarian, “and the past belongs to God. History will judge us.” There was then a crash as Churchill’s bodyguard, Commander Thompson, slumped backwards knocking the ice cream out of a waiter’s hand, which then narrowly missed Stalin himself.

  “Then,” recorded the Soviet interpreter Pavlov portentously in his notes, “Stalin spoke.” During the Supremo’s toasts, Voroshilov, whom Brooke thought “a fine hearty old soul, willing to talk about anything with great vivacity” though with the military expertise of a “child,” spotted the Ulsterman was drinking water instead of vodka. Voroshilov ordered yellow pepper vodka, with an ominous chilli floating in it, with which he filled both their glasses: “No heel taps,” he said—but Brooke managed to sip his glass. Voroshilov then downed two glasses of this firewater: “The result did not take long to show itself. His forehead broke out in beads of perspiration which soon started to flow down his face. He became sullen and quiet sitting with a fixed stare straight to his front and I wondered whether the moment had arrived for him to slip under the table. No, he retained his seat . . .” But just as this cherubic inebriate subsided into peppery oblivion, Stalin, who noticed everything, “descended straight on him” with a toast the irony of which was missed by the Westerners.

  “One of the main organizers of the Red Army was Marshal Voroshilov and he, Stalin, would like to raise a toast to Marshal Voroshilov.” Stalin grinned roguishly like a wicked old satyr because, as Molotov and the others knew well, it was only three months since he had denounced Voroshilov’s “bankruptcy.” Voroshilov struggled to his feet, holding on tightly to the table with both hands, “swaying gently backwards and forwards with a distant and vacant look in his eyes.” When Stalin raised his toast, Voroshilov tried to focus and then lurched forward, just managing to clink glasses. As Stalin swaggered off to toast Shaposhnikov, “Voroshilov, with a deep sigh, sank back onto his chair.”

  After dinner, Stalin invited Churchill to watch a film— The German Rout before Moscow—but Churchill was too angry and tired. He said goodbye and was halfway across the crowded room before Stalin hurried after him and accompanied him to his car.3

  Churchill awoke as sulky as “a spoilt child” according to Clark Kerr who arrived at the dacha to discover that “the PM had decided to pack up and go.” Sporting “a preposterous ten-gallon hat,” surely the most bizarre headgear ever seen at Kuntsevo, Churchill stomped into the garden and turned his back on Clark Kerr who found himself addressing “a pink and swollen neck.” The Ambassador explained that Churchill “was an aristocrat and a man of the world and he expected these people to be like him. They weren’t. They were straight from the plough or the lathe.”

  “This man has insulted me,” retorted Churchill. “From now on, he can fight his battles alone.” Finally he stopped: “Well, and what do you want me to do?”

  Within the hour, Churchill’s entourage was calling the Kremlin to ask for a tête-à-tête with Stalin. The only response was that “Stalin was out walking,” surely a diplomatic promenade since Churchill’s tantrum coincided with momentous events that would lead directly to the Battle of Stalingrad: at 4:30 that morning, the German Sixth Army had attacked and smashed the Fourth Tank Army in the loop of the Don River, a more immediate crisis than a pinguid Englishman fulminating in a “ten-gallon hat.”

  At 6 p.m., Stalin agreed to meet. Churchill bade Stalin goodbye in the Little Corner. When he was about to leave, Stalin “seemed embarrassed” and then asked when they would meet again: “Why don’t you come to my house and have a little drink?”

  “I replied,” wrote Churchill, “that I was in principle always in favour of such a policy.” So Stalin led Churchill and his interpreter, Major Birse, “through many passages and rooms till we came out into a still roadway within the Kremlin and in a couple of hundred yards gained the apartment where he lived.” Stalin showed the Englishman round his “simple, dignified” four-room apartment with its empty bookshelves: the library was in Kuibyshev. A housekeeper, not Valechka, since Churchill described her as “ancient,” started to lay up dinner in the dining room. Stalin had planned this dinner: that afternoon, Alexandra Nakashidze called Zubalovo and announced that Stalin had ordered Svetlana to be ready that evening “to be shown off to Churchill.” Stalin brought the conversation round to daughters. Churchill said his daughter Sarah was a redhead. So is mine, said Stalin who had his cue: he asked the housekeeper to get Svetlana.

  A “handsome red-haired girl” arrived and kissed her father, who rather ostentatiously presented her with a little present. He patted her on the head: “She’s a redhead,” he smiled. Churchill said he had been a redhead as a young man.

  “My father,” wrote Svetlana, “was in one of those amiable and hospitable moods when he could charm anyone.” She helped lay the table while Stalin uncorked the wine. Svetlana hoped to stay for dinner but when the conversation returned to “guns and howitzers,” Stalin kissed her and “told me to go about my business.” She was disappointed but dutifully disappeared.

  “Why shouldn’t we have Molotov?” Stalin asked. “He’s worrying about the communiqué. We could settle it here. There’s one thing about Molotov—he can drink.” When Molotov joined them, followed by a parade of heavy dishes, culminating in the inevitable suckling pig, Stalin started to tease his Foreign Commissar “unmercifully.”

  Churchill joined in: “Was Mr. Stalin aware that his Foreign Secretary on his recent visit to Washington had said he was determined to pay a visit to New York entirely by himself and that the delay in his return was not due to any defect in the aeroplane but because he was off on his own?”

  Molotov frowned, Churchill noticed, not realizing he may have bee
n sowing the seeds of mistrust that almost cost Molotov his life. But Stalin’s face lit with merriment: “It was not to New York he went. He went to Chicago where the other gangsters live.”

  “Have the stresses of this war been as bad to you personally as carrying through the policy of collective farms?” Churchill asked.

  “Oh no,” replied Stalin revealingly. That had been “a terrible struggle.”

  Churchill invited Stalin to London and the Vozhd recalled his visit in 1907 with Lenin, Gorky and Trotsky. On the subject of great historical figures, Churchill praised his ancestor the Duke of Marlborough as an inspiration for he, “in this time, put an end to the danger to European freedom during the War of Spanish Succession.” Churchill got “carried away” praising Marlborough’s military brilliance. But a roguish “smile loomed on Stalin’s face”: “I think Britain had a more talented military leader,” teased Stalin, “in the person of Wellington who crushed Napoleon who presented the greatest danger in History.”

  By 1:30 a.m., they had not yet started eating but Stalin popped out, probably to hear the latest dire news from the Caucasus. When Sir Alexander Cadogan, Permanent Under-Secretary at the Foreign Office, arrived with a draft of the press release, Stalin offered him the suckling pig. “When my friend excused himself,” wrote Churchill, “our host fell upon the victim single-handedly.” The dinner finally ended around 3 a.m. Churchill begged Molotov not to see him off at dawn for he “was clearly tired out.”

  “Do you really think I would fail to be there?” replied Molotov urbanely.

  Back at Kuntsevo, Churchill lay full length on Stalin’s sofa, “started to chuckle and to stick a pair of gay legs in the air: Stalin had been splendid . . . What a pleasure it was to work with ‘that great man.’ ” As Churchill, undressed to reveal a “skimpy crumpled vest” whence “a pair of wrinkled creamy buttocks protruded,” he continued to rave, as he finally climbed into a bath, “Stalin this, Stalin that.” It was already dawn; the alliance was saved; Molotov arrived to take him to the airport.4