PART SIX
28
When Stalin concentrated on diplomacy, he first aimed his guns at his own diplomats. On the night of 3 May 1939, NKVD troops surrounded the Foreign Commissariat, bringing home the urgency of the countdown to war and the coming revolution of alliances. Molotov, Beria and Malenkov arrived to inform Maxim “Papasha” Litvinov, the worldly rambunctious champion of European peace through “collective security,” that he had been sacked. This was not a surprise to Litvinov: Stalin would pat his Foreign Commissar and say, “You see, we can reach agreement.”
“Not for long,” Papasha Litvinov replied.
The new Foreign Commissar was Molotov, already the Premier. Stalin emerged from the Terror more paranoid and more confident, a state of mind that made him, if anything, less equipped to analyse the dangerous international situation. Mikoyan noticed this new Stalin “was an utterly changed person—absolutely suspicious, ruthless and boundlessly selfconfident, often speaking of himself in the third person. I think he went barmy.” Kaganovich recalled that he hardly ever called together the Politburo now, deciding most things informally. Stalin does not “know the West,” thought Litvinov. “If our opponents were a bunch of shahs and sheikhs, he’d outwit them.” Nor were his two main advisers, Molotov and Zhdanov, any better qualified. Stalin educated himself by reading history, particularly Bismarck’s memoirs, but he did not realize that the Iron Chancellor was a conventional statesman compared to Hitler. Henceforth Stalin quoted Talleyrand and Bismarck liberally.
Molotov always said that Bolshevik politics was the best training for diplomacy and regarded himself as a politician not a diplomat, but he was proud of his new career: “Everything was in Stalin’s fist, in my fist,” he said. But he worked in his tireless, methodical way under immense pressure, arguing ideas through with Stalin, while terrorizing his staff in “blind rages.” Yet in his letters to his wife Polina, he revealed the vainglory and passion within: “We live under constant pressure not to miss something . . . I so miss you and our daughter, I want to hold you in my arms, to my breast with all your sweetness and charm . . .” More direct and less intellectual than Stalin, he told Polina that he was starting to read not about Talleyrand but about Hitler. Apart from the smouldering desire for Polina, the most amusing part of these letters was the unabashed delight Molotov took in his new fame. “I can tell you, without boasting,” he boasted, “that our opposite numbers feel . . . they deal with people that know their stuff.”
Stalin and Molotov developed into an international double act of increasing subtlety, masters of the old “good cop, bad cop” routine. Stalin was always more radical and reckless, Molotov the stolid analyst of the possible, but neither saw any contradiction between imperial expansionism and their Marxist crusade: on the contrary, the former was the best way to empower the latter.
Europe in early 1939 was, in Stalin’s own words, a “poker game” with three players, in which each hoped to persuade the other two to destroy one another and leave the third to take the winnings. The three players were the Fascists of Adolf Hitler’s Nazi Germany, the Capitalists of Neville Chamberlain’s Britain allied with Daladier’s France—and the Bolsheviks. Though the Georgian admired the flamboyant brutality of the Austrian, he appreciated the danger of a resurgent Germany militarily, and the hostility of Fascism.
Stalin regarded the Western democracies as at least as dangerous as Germany. He had matured politically during their intervention during the Civil War. He instinctively felt he could work with Hitler. As soon as the “Austrian corporal” took power, Stalin began probing gently, advised by Karl Radek, his German expert, and using as personal emissaries Abel Yenukidze and David Kandelaki. The sensitivity of these discussions was absolute since Stalin was simultaneously shooting thousands as German agents, with the country in a frenzy of Prussophobic war preparations. The legates were shot.
Hitler kept Stalin at arm’s length as long as the democracies continued to appease him. But the Munich agreement convinced Stalin that the West was not serious about stopping Hitler. On the contrary, Stalin was sure that they were willing to let Hitler destroy Soviet Russia. Munich rendered Litvinov’s “collective security” bankrupt. Stalin warned the West that the Soviet Union would not be left to “pick their chestnuts out of the fire.” The way forward was a division of the world into “spheres.” This was an oblique signal to Germany that he would deal with whoever would deal with him. Berlin noted the change. Afterwards, at the Plenum, Stalin attacked Litvinov.
“Does that mean you regard me as an Enemy of the People?” asked plucky Litvinov. Stalin hesitated as he left the hall: “No, we don’t consider Papasha an Enemy. Papasha’s an honest revolutionary.”149
Meanwhile, Molotov and Beria were terrorizing a meeting of their worldly diplomats, many of them Jewish Bolsheviks at home in the great capitals of Europe. Beria glanced around at them.
“Nazarov,” he said. “Why did they arrest your father?”
“Lavrenti Pavlovich, you no doubt know better than I.”
“You and I will talk about that later,” laughed Beria.
The Foreign Commissariat was almost next door to the Lubianka and the two ministries were nicknamed “the Neighbours.” Molotov’s deputy, Vladimir Dekanozov, forty-one, another of Beria’s intelligent Caucasian henchmen, supervised the purge of diplomats. This red-haired midget, with a taste for English movies (he called his son Reginald) and teenage girls, was a failed medical student who had known Beria since university when they both joined the Cheka. He was a Russified Georgian. Molotov joked that he was an Armenian pretending to be Georgian to please Stalin, who nicknamed him “Slow Kartvelian” after his region of origin. At Kuntsevo, Stalin mocked his ugliness. When he appeared at the door, Stalin said sarcastically to general laughter:
“Such a handsome man! Look at him! I’ve never seen anything like it!”
The press officer of the Foreign Commissariat, Yevgeni Gnedin, himself a piece of revolutionary history as the son of Parvus, Lenin’s financier and middle man with Kaiserine Germany, was arrested by Dekanozov and taken to Beria’s office where he was ordered to confess to spying. When he refused, Beria ordered him to lie on the floor while the Caucasian “giant” Kobulov beat him on the skull with blackjacks. Gnedin was a “lucky stiff.” In July, Beria ordered Prince Tsereteli to kill the Soviet Ambassador to China, Bovkun-Luganets, and his wife, in cold blood in a faked car accident (the method of killing those too eminent to just disappear).150
Stalin’s diplomatic Terror was designed to appeal to Hitler: “Purge the ministry of Jews,” he said. “Clean out the ‘synagogue.’ ” “Thank God for these words,” Molotov (married to a Jewess) explained. “Jews formed an absolute majority and many ambassadors...”1
Stalin was an anti-Semite by most definitions but until after the war, it was more a Russian mannerism than a dangerous obsession. He was never a biological racist like the Nazis. However, he disliked any nationality that threatened loyalty to the multinational USSR. He embraced the Russian people not because he rejected his own Georgian origins but for precisely the same reason: the Russians were the foundations and cement of the Soviet Union. But after the war, the creation of Israel, the increased self-consciousness among Soviet Jews and the Cold War with America combined with his old prejudice to turn Stalin into a murderous anti-Semite.
Stalin and his Jewish comrades like Kaganovich were proudly internationalist. Stalin, however, openly enjoyed jokes about national stereotypes. He certainly carried all the traditional Georgian prejudices against the Moslem peoples of the Caucasus whom he was to deport. He also persecuted Germans. He enjoyed the Jewish jokes told by Pauker (himself a Jew) and Kobulov, and was amused when Beria called Kaganovich “the Israelite.” But he also enjoyed jokes about Armenians and Germans, and shared the Russian loathing for Poles: until the forties, Stalin was as Polonophobic as he was anti-Semitic.
He was always suspicious because the Jews lacked a homeland which made them “mystical, intangible, otherworldly.” Yet Kaganovich insisted that Stalin’s view was formed by the Jewishness of his enemies—Trotsky, Zinoviev and Kamenev. On the other hand, most of the women around him and many of his closest collaborators, from Yagoda to Mekhlis, were Jewish. The difference is obvious: he hated the intellectual Trotsky but had no problem with the cobbler Kaganovich.
Stalin was aware that his regime had to stand against anti-Semitism and we find in his own notes a reminder to give a speech about it: he called it “cannibalism,” made it a criminal offence, and regularly criticised anti-Semites. Stalin founded a Jewish homeland, Birobizhan, on the inhospitable Chinese border but boasted, “The Tsar gave the Jews no land, but we will.”
Yet nationality always mattered in Soviet politics, however internationalist the Party claimed to be. There were a high proportion of Jews, along with Georgians, Poles and Letts, in the Party because these were among the persecuted minorities of Tsarist Russia. In 1937, 5.7 percent of the Party were Jews yet they formed a majority in the government. Lenin himself (who was partly Jewish by ancestry) said that if the Commissar was Jewish, the deputy should be Russian: Stalin followed this rule.151
Yet Stalin was “sensitive” about Kaganovich’s Judaism. At Kuntsevo dinners, Beria tried to bully Kaganovich into drinking more but Stalin stopped him:
“Leave him alone . . . Jews don’t know how to drink.” Once, Stalin asked Kaganovich why he looked so miserable during Jewish jokes: “Take Mikoyan—we laugh at Armenians and Mikoyan laughs too.”
“You see, Comrade Stalin, suffering has affected the Jewish character so we’re like a mimosa flower. Touch it and it closes immediately.” It happened that the mimosa, that super-sensitive flower that flinches like an animal, was Stalin’s favourite. He never again allowed such jokes in front of Kaganovich.
Nonetheless, there was increasing anti-Semitism during the thirties: even in public, Stalin asked if a man was a “natsmen”—a euphemism for Jewish based on the fifth point on Soviet personnel forms which covered “nationality.” When Molotov remembered Kamenev, he said he “did not look like a Jew except when you looked into his eyes.”
The Jews at Stalin’s court felt they had to be more Russian than the Russians, more Bolshevik than the Bolsheviks. Kaganovich despised Yiddish culture, asking Solomon Mikhoels, the Yiddish actor: “Why do you disparage the people?” When the Politburo debated whether to blow up the Temple of the Saviour, one of the acts of vandalism in the creation of Stalinist Moscow, Stalin, Kirov and the others supported it but Kaganovich said, “The Black Hundreds [the anti-Semitic gangs of 1905] will blame it on me!” Similarly, Mekhlis reacted to Stalin’s swearing about Trotsky’s “Yids”: “I’m a Communist not a Jew.” More honestly, he explained his own rabidity: “You should realize that there is only one way of fighting [anti-Semitism]—to be brave; if you’re a Jew, to be the most honest, pure as crystal, a model person, especially in human dignity.”
Stalin realized that, while he had to be seen to oppose anti-Semitism, his Jews were one obstacle to rapprochement with Hitler, particularly Litvinov (born Wallach). Many Jewish Bolsheviks used Russian pseudonyms. As early as 1936, Stalin ordered Mekhlis atPravda to use these pseudonyms: “No need to excite Hitler!” This atmosphere sharpened at the Plenum in early 1939 when Yakovlev attacked Khrushchev for promoting a cult of personality using his full name and patronymic, a sign of respect. Khrushchev, himself anti-Semitic, replied that perhaps Yakovlev should use his real name, Epstein. Mekhlis intervened to support Khrushchev, explaining that Yakovlev, being a Jew, could not understand this.
The removal of the Jews was a signal to Hitler—but Stalin always sent double messages: Molotov appointed Solomon Lozovsky, a Jew, as one of his deputies.2
The European poker game was played out with swift moves, secret talks and cold hearts. The stakes were vast. The dictators proved much more adept at this fast-moving game than the democracies who had started to play in earnest much too late. As the fighting intensified against the Japanese, Hitler was raising the ante, having consumed Austria and Czechoslovakia, by turning his Panzers towards Poland. Belatedly, the Western democracies realized he had to be stopped: on 31 March, Britain and France guaranteed the Polish borders. They needed Russia to join them but failed to see things from Stalin’s angle and did not understand his sense of weakness and isolation. Ironically the Polish guarantee increased Stalin’s doubts about the depth of this British commitment: if Hitler invaded Poland, what was to stop “perfidious Albion” from using the guarantee as a mere bargaining chip to negotiate another Munich-style deal, leaving Hitler on his borders?
Stalin therefore required a contractual military alliance with the West if he was not to turn to Hitler. On 29 June, Zhdanov backed the German option in a Pravda article in which he stated his “personal opinion” that “I permit myself to express . . . although not all my friends share it . . . They still think that in beginning negotiations with the USSR, the English and French governments have serious intentions . . . I believe the English and French governments have no wish for a treaty of equality with the USSR . . .” The vulnerability of Leningrad made a free hand in the Baltic States necessary: that was the price of what Zhdanov called “equality.” Zhdanov’s son Yury remembers Stalin and his father reading a specially translated Mein Kampf and endlessly discussing the pros and cons of a German alliance. Stalin read in D’Abernon’s Ambassador of the World that if Germany and Russia were allies, “the dangerous power of the east” would overshadow Britain. “Yes!” Stalin noted approvingly in the margin.
Britain and France had despatched a hapless and ludicrously low-level delegation to Moscow by slow steamship to offer an alliance but no guarantee of Soviet frontiers and no freedom of action in the Baltics. When Admiral Sir Reginald Aylmer Ranfurly Plunkett-Ernle-Erle-Drax (author of a book called Handbook on Solar Heating) and General Joseph Doumenc arrived in Leningrad on the night of 9–10 August, the German–Russian flirtation was getting serious. The Admiral and the General took the train to Moscow and were taken to meet Voroshilov and Molotov.
Stalin was unimpressed with the quadruple-barrelled Admiral when he discussed the delegations with Molotov and Beria: “They’re not being serious. These people can’t have the proper authority. London and Paris are playing poker again . . .”
“Still the talks should go ahead,” said Molotov.
“Well if they must, they must.” This was now turning into an auction for Stalin’s favours but with only one serious bidder. In Germany, meanwhile, Hitler decided to invade Poland on 26 August: suddenly, the agreement with Stalin was desperately necessary. The meetings with the Western powers only got started on 12 August but the gap between what the West was willing to offer and the price Stalin demanded was unbridgeable. That day, the Russians signalled to the Germans that they were ready to start negotiations, even on the dismemberment of Poland. On the 14th, Hitler decided to send Ribbentrop, his Foreign Minister, to Moscow. On the 15th, the German Ambassador Count Friedrich Werner von der Schulenburg requested a meeting with Molotov, who, rushing to check with Stalin, reported that Russia was ready. When this news reached Ribbentrop, he hurried to tell Hitler at the Berghof. On the 17th, Voroshilov proposed a treaty of mutual military assistance to the British and French but added that there was no point in continuing the discussion until they had persuaded the Poles and Romanians to allow the passage of Soviet troops in the event of a German attack. But Drax had not yet received orders from London.
“Enough of these games!” Stalin told Molotov. “The English and French wanted us for farmhands and at no cost!” On the afternoon of Saturday the 19th, Molotov hurriedly summoned Schulenburg, handing him a draft non-aggression pact that was more formal than the German version but contained nothing objectionable. Having signed the trade treaty that Stalin had specified was necessary before the real business could begin, the Germans, whose deadline was fast approaching, waited with a gambler’s anticipation. Hitler shrewdly decided to cut the Gordian knot of mutual trust and prestige by personally addressing Stalin in a telegram dated 20 August: “Dear Mr. Stalin.” Stalin, Molotov and Voroshilov agreed to the reply:
To Chancellor of Germany A. Hitler. Thank you for your letter. I hope the German–Soviet agreement of non-aggression will be a turning point towards serious improvement of political relations between our countries . . . The Soviet government has instructed me to inform you that it agrees to Mr. Ribbentrop visiting Moscow on 23 August.
J. Stalin.
Far to the east, that Sunday the 20th, Georgi Zhukov, commander of the Soviet army on the Khalkin-Gol River, launched a formidable cannonade against the Japanese, then attacked across the front. By the 23rd, the Japanese were defeated with losses as high as 61,000 men, a bloody nose that was enough to dissuade them from attacking Russia again.
At 3 p.m. on Monday the 21st, Molotov received Schulenburg who passed on Hitler’s request for a meeting on the 23rd. Two hours later, he and Stalin confirmed the historic visit of Ribbentrop. Suddenly the two dictators were no longer holding back but hurtling towards one another, arms outstretched. At 7 p.m. the next day, Voroshilov dismissed the British and French: “Let’s wait until everything has been cleared up . . .”152
Stalin’s reply reached Hitler at eight-thirty that evening: “Marvellous! I congratulate you,” declaimed Hitler, adding, with the flashiness of the entertainer: “I have the world in my pocket.”
That night, Voroshilov was leading a vital delegation of the Soviet leadership on a duck-shooting expedition into the countryside. Khrushchev had just arrived from Kiev. Before setting off to shoot duck, Khrushchev dined with Stalin at the dacha. It was then that Stalin, “who smiled and watched me closely,” informed him that Ribbentrop was arriving imminently. Khrushchev, who knew nothing about the negotiations, was “dumbfounded. I stared back at him, thinking he was joking.”
“Why should Ribbentrop want to see us?” blurted out Khrushchev. “Is he defecting?” Then he remembered that he was going hunting with Voroshilov on the great day. Should he cancel?
“Go right ahead. There’ll be nothing for you to do . . . Molotov and I will meet Ribbentrop. When you return, I’ll let you know what Hitler has in mind . . .” After dinner, Khrushchev and Malenkov set off to meet Voroshilov at his hunting reserve while Stalin remained at the dacha to consider tomorrow. Unless he was in a very good mood, he thought “hunting was a waste of time.”153 Perhaps it was that night that Stalin, reading Vipper’s History of Ancient Greece, marked the passage about the benefits of dictators working closely together.
On Tuesday, 22 August, all the magnates visited the Little Corner some time during the day. If the details were secret, the policy was not. Its architects were Stalin assisted by Molotov and Zhdanov but there was no party against it. Even Khrushchev and Mikoyan, in their memoirs designed to blacken Stalin wherever possible, admitted that there was no choice. These Leninists, as Kaganovich put it, understood this was a Brest-Litovsk in reverse.
That evening, as the duck-shooters set off into the marshes of Zavidovo, seventy miles north-west of Moscow, the tall, pompous, ex–champagne salesman Ribbentrop set off in Hitler’s Condor aeroplane, Immelman III, with a delegation of thirty. At 1 p.m. on 23 August, Ribbentrop arrived and descended from the Condor in a leather coat, black jacket and striped trousers, impressed to find the airport emblazoned with swastikas. An orchestra played the German national anthem. Ribbentrop was then guided into a bullet-proof black ZiS (a Soviet Buick) by Vlasik. They sped into town for a short stop at the German Embassy for caviar and champagne. At three, Ribbentrop, due to meet Molotov, was driven through the Spassky Gate to the Little Corner. Ribbentrop was greeted by Poskrebyshev in military uniform and led up the stairs through anterooms, into a long rectangular room where they found Stalin, in Party tunic and baggy trousers tucked into boots, and Molotov in a dark suit, standing together.
When they sat down at the table, the Russians, with their interpreter N. N. Pavlov on one side, the Germans on the other, Ribbentrop declared: “Germany demands nothing from Russia—only peace and trade.” Stalin offered Molotov the floor as Premier.
“No, no, Joseph Vissarionovich, you do the talking. I’m sure you’ll do a better job than I.” They swiftly agreed to the terms of their pact which was designed to divide Poland and eastern Europe into spheres of influence— Stalin got Eastern Poland, Latvia, Estonia, Finland and Bessarabia in Romania, though Hitler kept Lithuania.
But when Ribbentrop proposed a paean to German–Soviet friendship, Stalin snorted: “Don’t you think we have to pay a little more attention to public opinion in our two countries? For many years now, we have been pouring buckets of shit over each other’s heads and our propaganda boys could not do enough in that direction. Now all of a sudden, are we to make our peoples believe all is forgotten and forgiven? Things don’t work so fast.” With so much agreed so fast, Ribbentrop returned to the embassy to telegraph Hitler.
At 10 p.m., he arrived back at the Little Corner, accompanied by a much larger delegation and two photographers. When Ribbentrop announced that Hitler approved the terms, “a sudden tremor seemed to go through Stalin and he did not immediately grasp the hand proffered by his partner. It was as if he had first to overcome a moment of fear.”
Stalin ordered vodka and toasted: “I know how much the German nation loves its Führer. He’s a good chap. I’d like to drink to his health.” Molotov then toasted Ribbentrop who toasted Stalin. One of the young Germans, a six-foot SS officer named Richard Schulze, noticed Stalin was drinking his vodka from a special flask and managed to fill his glass from it, only to discover it contained water. Stalin smiled faintly as Schulze drank it, not the last guest to sample this little secret.
By 2 a.m. on 24 August, the treaty was ready. The photographers—the Germans with up-to-date equipment, the Russians with ancient wooden tripod and wood-and-brass camera—were escorted into the room. The Red Army Chief of Staff, the ailing Shaposhnikov, respected by Stalin, took notes in a small notebook. When it came to the photograph, Stalin noticed the towering SS man who had sampled his flask and beckoned him into the picture where he positioned him between Ribbentrop and Shaposhnikov. Molotov signed.
A maid brought in champagne and snacks. When one of the German photographers flashed as Stalin and Ribbentrop raised their glasses, the former shook his finger and told him he did not want such a photograph published. The photographer offered to hand over his film but Stalin said he could trust the word of a German. At 3 a.m., as the excited leaders parted, Stalin told Ribbentrop: “I can guarantee on my word of honour that the Soviet Union will not betray its partner.”
Stalin headed to Kuntsevo where the hunters awaited. Voroshilov, Khrushchev, Malenkov and Bulganin had already brought their ducks to be cooked in Stalin’s kitchen. When Stalin and Molotov arrived jubilantly with a copy of their treaty, Khrushchev boasted about out-shooting Voroshilov, the vaunted “First Marksman,” before the laughing Vozhd told them how they had signed the world-shattering Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact: “Stalin seemed very pleased with himself” but he was under no illusions about his new friendship. As they feasted on duck, Stalin boasted:
“Of course it’s all a game to see who can fool whom. I know what Hitler’s up to. He thinks he’s outsmarted me but actually it’s I who’s tricked him.” War, he explained, “would pass us by a little longer.”154 Zhdanov mocked Ribbentrop’s pear-shaped figure: “He’s got the biggest and broadest pair of hips in all of Europe,” he announced as the magnates laughed about Ribbentrop’s preposterous girdle: “Those hips! Those hips!”
“The Great Game,” as Molotov called the tournament of nerves between Stalin and Hitler, had begun.3
At 2 a.m. on 1 September, Poskrebyshev handed Stalin a telegram from Berlin informing him that early that evening “Polish” troops (in fact German security forces in disguise) had attacked the German radio station in Gleiwitz. Stalin left for the dacha and went to bed. A few hours later, Poskrebyshev called again: Germany had invaded Poland. Stalin monitored the campaign as Britain and France declared war on Germany, honouring their guarantees. “We see nothing wrong in their having a good, hard fight and weakening each other,” he told Molotov and Zhdanov. Stalin planned the Soviet invasion of Poland with Voroshilov, Shaposhnikov and Kulik, who was to command the front along with Mekhlis, but waited until he had secured an end to the war with Japan first. At 2 a.m. on 17 September, Stalin, accompanied by Molotov and Voroshilov, told Schulenburg: “At 6 a.m., four hours from now, the Red Army will cross into Poland.” Premier Molotov took to the radio to announce the “sacred duty to proffer help to . . . Ukrainian and Belorussian brothers.” Mekhlis claimed to Stalin that the West Ukrainians welcomed the Soviet troops “like true liberators” with “apples, pies, drinking water . . . Many weep with joy.”
Khrushchev, Ukrainian First Secretary, donned a military uniform and, accompanied by his NKVD boss, Ivan Serov, joined the forces of Semyon Timoshenko, commander of the Kiev Military District. Timoshenko was a tough, shaven-headed veteran of the First Cavalry Army in Tsaritsyn; he was a competent officer, yet in the Terror, he had both denounced Budyonny and been denounced himself. Khrushchev claimed to have saved his life. Khrushchev’s advance into Poland was an adventure for him, but even more so for his wife Nina Petrovna who, also sporting a military uniform and a pistol, liberated her own parents who had remained in Poland since 1920. Khrushchev, ensconced in Lvov, celebrated at the sight of her and her parents but lost his temper when he saw her pistol.155
If the invasion was joyous for the Khrushchevs, it unleashed depredations on the Polish population every bit as cruel and tragic as those of the Nazis. Khrushchev ruthlessly suppressed any sections of the population who might oppose Soviet power: priests, officers, noblemen, intellectuals were kidnapped, murdered and deported to eliminate the very existence of Poland. By November 1940, one-tenth of the population or 1.17 million innocents had been deported. Thirty percent of them were dead by 1941; 60,000 were arrested and 50,000 shot. The Soviets behaved like conquerors. When some soldiers were arrested for stealing treasures from a Prince Radziwill, Vyshinsky consulted Stalin.
“If there’s no ill will,” he wrote on the note, “they can be pardoned. J.St.”4
At 5 p.m. on Wednesday 27 September, Ribbentrop flew back to negotiate the notorious protocols, so secret that Molotov was still denying their existence thirty years later. By 10 p.m., he was at the Kremlin in talks with Stalin and Molotov around the green baize table. Stalin wanted Lithuania. Ribbentrop telegraphed Hitler for his permission so the talks were delayed until 3 p.m. the next day. But Hitler’s message had not arrived by the time Ribbentrop returned to negotiate the cartographic details.
That night, while Stalin held a gala dinner for the Germans to celebrate the carve-up of Europe, the Russians were meeting the unfortunate Estonian Foreign Minister to force him to allow Soviet troops into his country, the first step to outright annexation. The Nazis were greeted at the door of the Great Kremlin Palace, led through the dull wooden Congress Hall which looked like a giant schoolroom, and then dazzled by the scarlet and gold reception room where Stalin, Molotov and the Politburo, including Jewish Kaganovich, awaited them. Stalin’s manner was “simple and unpretentious,” beaming with “paternal benevolence” that could turn to “icy coldness” as he “rapped out orders,” though he used a “jocular and kind manner with his junior assistants.” The Germans noticed how respectful the Russians were to Stalin: Commissar Tevosian, the “lucky stiff” who had narrowly avoided execution in 1938, rose “like a schoolboy” whenever Stalin addressed him. The fear surrounding Stalin had become intense since 1937. But he was cordial with Voroshilov, friendly with Beria and Mikoyan, matter-of-fact with Kaganovich, chatty with Malenkov. Only Molotov “would talk to his chief as one comrade to another.”
Their swagger was so raffish that Ribbentrop said he felt as at ease as he did among old Nazi comrades. While the guests were chatting, Stalin went into the sumptuous Andreevsky Hall to check the seating plan, which he enjoyed doing, even at Kuntsevo.156 The twenty-two guests were dwarfed by the grandeur of the hall, the colossal flower arrangements, the imperial gold cutlery and, even more, by the twenty-four courses that included caviar, all manner of fishes and meats, and lashings of pepper vodka and Crimean champagne. The white-clad waiters were the same staff from the Metropol Hotel who would serve Churchill and Roosevelt at Yalta. Before anyone could eat, Molotov started to propose toasts to each guest. Stalin stalked over to clink glasses. It was an exhausting rigmarole that would become one of the diplomatic tribulations of the war. When Molotov had run through every guest, the Germans sighed with relief until he announced: “Now we’ll drink to all members of the delegations who couldn’t attend this dinner.”
Stalin took over, joking: “Let us drink to the new anti-Comintern Stalin,” and he winked at Molotov. Then he toasted Kaganovich, “our People’s Commissar of Railways.” Stalin could have toasted the Jewish magnate across the table but he deliberately rose and circled the table to clink glasses so that Ribbentrop had to follow suit and drink to a Jew, an irony that amused Stalin. Forty years on, Kaganovich was still telling the story to his grandchildren.
When Molotov embarked on another toast to his Vozhd, Stalin chuckled: “If Molotov really wants to drink, no one objects but he really shouldn’t use me as an excuse.” Stalin himself drank almost nothing and when Ribbentrop noticed how well he was bearing the toasts, he cheerfully revealed that he was drinking white wine. But Beria, who had transformed the Georgian tradition of forced hospitality into a despotic trial of submission, delighted in making his guests drink. The German diplomat Hilger, who wrote vivid memoirs of the evening, refused another vodka. Beria insisted, drawing the attention of Stalin himself who was sitting opposite them.
“What’s the argument about?” he asked, adding, “Well if you don’t want to drink, no one can force you.”
“Not even the chief of the NKVD himself?” smiled the German.
“Here at this table,” replied Stalin, “even the NKVD chief has no more say than anyone else.” At the end of the dinner, Stalin and Molotov excused themselves as the Germans were despatched off to the Bolshoi to watch Swan Lake. As he left, Stalin whispered to Kaganovich, “We must win time.” They then walked upstairs where the Estonian Foreign Minister miserably waited for Stalin to emasculate his little Baltic nation. Molotov demanded a Soviet garrison of 35,000 troops, more than the entire Estonian army.
“Come on, Molotov, you’re rather harsh on our friends,” said Stalin, suggesting 25,000, but the effect was much the same. Having swallowed a country during the first act of Swan Lake, Stalin returned to the Germans at midnight for a final session during which Hitler telephoned his agreement to the Lithuanian concession.
“Hitler knows his business,” muttered Stalin. Ribbentrop was so excited that he declared the two countries must never fight again:
“This ought to be the case,” replied Stalin, shocking Ribbentrop who asked for it to be retranslated. When the German suggested Russia joining a military alliance against the West, Stalin just said, “I shall never allow Germany to become weak.” He obviously believed that Germany would be restrained in the West by Britain and France. When the maps were finally ready in the early hours, Stalin signed them in blue crayon, with a massive signature ten inches long, an inch high, and a tail eighteen inches long. “Is my signature clear enough for you?”
By 3 October, all three Baltic States had agreed to Soviet garrisons. Stalin and Molotov turned their guns and threats on the fourth Baltic country in their sphere of influence, Finland, which they expected to buckle like the others.5