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Molotov set off late on 10 November 1940 from the Belorussia Station with a pistol in his pocket and a delegation of sixty which included Beria’s two protégés, Dekanozov, Deputy Foreign Commissar, and Merkulov, sixteen secret policemen, three servants and a doctor. This was Molotov’s second trip to Europe. In 1922, he and Polina had visited Italy in the early days of Fascism. Now he was to observe Fascism at its apogee.
At 11:05 a.m., Molotov’s train pulled into Berlin’s Anhalter Station, which was festooned with flowers sinisterly illuminated with searchlights and Soviet flags hidden behind swastikas. Molotov dismounted in a dark coat with his grey Homburg hat and was greeted by Ribbentrop and Field Marshal Keitel. He spent longest shaking hands with Reichsführer-SS Himmler. The band deliberately played the Internationale at double time in case any ex-Communist passers-by joined in.
Molotov sped off in an open Mercedes with outriders to his luxurious hotel, the Schloss Bellevue, once an imperial palace, on the Tiergarten where the Soviets were dazzled by the “tapestries and paintings,” the “finest porcelain standing round exquisitely carved cabinets” and, above all, the “gold-braided livery” of the staff. Molotov’s entire delegation wore identical dark blue suits, grey ties, and cheap felt hats, obviously ordered in bulk. Since some wore the hats like berets, some on the back of their heads like cowboys and some low over the eyes like Mafiosi, it was clear that many had never worn Western headgear before. The tepidity of the visit became obvious when Molotov met Ribbentrop in Bismarck’s old office and gave little away. “A rather frosty smile glided over his intelligent, chess-player’s face,” noticed a German diplomat who was amused that, in the gilded Bismarckian chairs, little Dekanozov’s feet barely touched the floor. When Ribbentrop encouraged Russia to seek an outlet for her energies in warm oceans, Molotov asked: “Which sea are you talking about?”
After lunch at the Bellevue, the open Mercedes drove Molotov to the Chancellery, where he was led through bronze doors, guarded by heel-clicking SS men, into Hitler’s magnificent study. Two blond SS giants threw open the doors and formed an archway with impeccable Nazi salutes through which this plain, stalwart Russian marched towards Hitler’s gargantuan desk at the far end. Hitler hesitated, then walked jerkily to greet the Russians with “small, rapid steps.” He stopped and made a Nazi salute before shaking hands with Molotov and the others with a “cold and moist” palm, while his “feverish eyes” burned into them “like gimlets.” Hitler’s theatrical rigmarole to terrorize and impress his guests did not affect Molotov, who regarded himself as a Marxist-Leninist and therefore superior to everyone else, particularly Fascists: “There was nothing remarkable in his appearance.” Molotov and Hitler were exactly the same height— “medium” as the small Russian put it. But Hitler “was very smug . . . and vain. He was clever but narrow-minded and obtuse because of his egotism and the absurdity of his primordial idea.”
Hitler showed Molotov to a lounge area where he, Dekanozov and the interpreters sat on the sofa while Hitler occupied his usual armchair, whence he treated them to a long soliloquy about his defeat of Britain, generosity to Stalin, and disinterest in the Balkans, none of which were true. Molotov retorted with a series of polite but awkward questions on the relationship between the two powers, pinpointing precisely Finland, Romania, Bulgaria. “I kept pushing him for greater detail. ‘You’ve got to have a warm-water port. Iran, India—that’s your future.’ And I said, ‘Why that’s an interesting idea, how do you see it?’ ” Hitler ended the meeting without providing the answer.
That night, Ribbentrop hosted a reception for Molotov at the Kaiserhof Hotel attended by Reichsmarschall Göring, sporting a preposterous sartorial creation of silver thread and jewels, and Deputy Führer Hess. The Russian interpreter Berezhkov, observing Molotov talking to Göring, could not imagine two more different men. A telegram from Stalin awaited him, insisting again on the Balkans and Straits. The next morning, Molotov sent Stalin a telegram: “I’m leaving for lunch and talk with Hitler. I will press him on the Black Sea, the Straits and Bulgaria.” First he called on Göring at the Air Ministry where he asked Hitler’s “paladin” more embarrassing questions which the Reichsmarschall simply doused with his pinguid heartiness. He then visited Hess.
“Do you have a Party programme?” he asked the Deputy Führer, knowing the Nazis did not. “Do you have Party rules? And do you have a Constitution?” The Bolshevik ideologue was contemptuous: “How could it be a Party without a programme?”
At 2 p.m., Hitler received Molotov, Merkulov and Dekanozov for a dinner with Goebbels and Ribbentrop. The Russians were disappointed by Hitler’s austere menu that read simply: “Kraftbruhe, Fasan, Obstsalat”— beef tea, pheasant and fruit salad.
“The war is on so I don’t drink coffee,” Hitler explained, “because my people don’t drink coffee either. I don’t smoke, I don’t drink liquor.” Molotov added later: “It goes without saying that I was abstaining from nothing.”
Their second meeting, after the meal, lasted for a “bad-tempered” three hours. Molotov pressed Hitler for answers. Hitler accused Russia of greed. Nothing dented the stolid persistence of “Iron-Arse.” Molotov obeyed Stalin’s telegraphed instructions to explain that “all events from the Crimean War . . . to the landing of foreign troops during the Intervention [Civil War] mean Soviet security cannot be settled without . . . the Straits.”
Hitler almost lost his temper about his troops in Finland and Romania: “That’s a trifle!”
Molotov tartly commented that there was no need to speak roughly. But how could they agree on big issues when they failed to do so on small ones? Molotov noticed that Hitler “became agitated. I persisted. I wore him down.”
Hitler drew out his handkerchief, wiped the sweat off his upper lip and saw his guest to the door.
“I’m sure history will remember Stalin’s name forever,” he said.
“I don’t doubt it,” replied Molotov.
“So we should meet . . .” suggested Hitler vaguely, a meeting that never happened. “But I hope it will remember me too,” he added with mock-modesty, for he had just two days earlier signed his Directive No. 18 that moved the Soviet invasion to the top of his agenda, an enterprise that would guarantee his place in history.
“I don’t doubt it.”
Göring, Hess and Ribbentrop were the star guests at Molotov’s banquet, with caviar and vodka at the grand but faded Soviet Embassy, which was interrupted by the RAF.
“Our British friends are complaining they have not been invited to the party,” joked Ribbentrop as Göring stampeded like a bejewelled, scented bison through the crowd, out to his Mercedes. There was no air-raid shelter at the embassy so most of the Russians were driven back to the hotel. Several got lost and Molotov was shepherded to Ribbentrop’s private bunker. Here, to the music of the RAF bombs, and the cackle of AA-guns, the stuttering Russian sliced through the German’s florid promises. If, as Hitler said, Germany was waging a life-and-death struggle against England, Molotov suggested this must mean that Germany was fighting “for life” and England “for death.” Britain was “finished,” answered Ribbentrop.
“If that’s so, then why are we in this shelter and whose bombs are those falling?” Molotov responded.
Molotov departed next morning, having, as he told Stalin, achieved “nothing to boast of but . . . it does clarify the present mood of Hitler.”
Stalin congratulated Molotov on his defiance of Hitler: “How,” he asked, “did he put up with you telling him all this?” The answer was that Hitler did not: Molotov’s obstinate Balkan ambitions convinced Hitler that Stalin would soon challenge his European hegemony. Having wavered over attacking Russia, he now accelerated his plans. On 4 December, Operation Barbarossa was set for May 1941.
A few days later, Yakovlev, the aircraft designer, who had been with Molotov in Berlin, bumped into the Foreign Commissar in Stalin’s anteroom.
“Ah, here is the German!” joked Molotov. “We’ll both have to repent!”
“For what?” asked Yakovlev nervously.
“Well, did we dine with Hitler? We did. Did we shake hands with Goebbels? We did. We shall have to repent.” The Bolsheviks lived in a world of sin and repentance. When Stalin received Yakovlev, he ordered him to study Nazi planes: “Learn how to beat them.”1
On 29 December 1940, eleven days after Hitler signed Directive No. 21 on Operation Barbarossa, Stalin’s spies alerted him to its existence. Stalin knew the USSR would not be ready for war until 1943 and hoped to delay it by frantic rearming and aggressive brinkmanship in the Balkans—but without provoking Hitler. The Führer, on the other hand, realized the urgency of his enterprise and that he had to secure the Balkans before he could attack Russia.
Stalin’s panic to produce the best weapons and create the best strategy created a new Terror around him. The countdown to war redoubled the unreal miasma of fear and ignorance at the heart of the Soviet power. At a Kremlin lunch, the magnates were just standing to leave when Stalin suddenly tore into them, complaining of the symptoms of his own dictatorship: “I am the only one dealing with all these problems. None of you could be bothered with them. I am out there by myself. Look at me: I am capable of learning . . . every day.”
Kalinin alone dared reply: “Somehow there’s never enough time!”
Stalin retorted furiously: “People are thoughtless . . . They’ll hear me out and go on just as before. But I’ll show you, if I ever lose my patience. You know very well I can do that. I’ll hit the fatsos so hard you’ll hear the crack for miles around!” He addressed himself especially to Kaganovich and Beria, who knew “very well” how hard Stalin could hit “the fatsos.” By the end, there were “tears in Voroshilov’s eyes.”
The more Stalin realized the parlous condition of his military, the more he floundered, both convinced of his own infallibility and oblivious of his technical ignorance. He supervised every detail of every weapon. His meetings became ever more disturbing, his conduct, thought Mikoyan, ever more “unhinged.”
There was a clear etiquette: it was deadly to disagree too much but, amazingly, his managers and generals stubbornly defended their expertise. “I would have been more afraid if I’d known more,” said one commissar later. Silence was often a virtue and veterans advised neophytes on how to behave and survive.
When Stalin sent the Naval Commissar, Nikolai Kuznetsov, to inspect the Far East, the Admiral complained to Zhdanov, the naval overlord, that he was too busy with his new job.
“The papers can wait,” replied Zhdanov. “I advise you not to say a word about them to Comrade Stalin.”171
When a new official arrived who had never attended a Stalin meeting, he called out “Joseph Vissarionovich” when he wanted to speak. “Stalin looked in my direction and again I saw . . . an unfriendly expression on his face. Suddenly a whisper from the man sitting behind me explained everything: ‘Never call him by his name and patronymic. He only allows a very narrow circle of intimates to do that. To all of us, he is Stalin. Comrade Stalin.’ ” It was shrewder to keep silent. Kuznetsov was about to object to building a fleet of heavy cruisers when another official whispered kindly: “Watch your step! Don’t insist!”2
On 23 December 1940 Stalin called meetings of the high command which might have been a good idea had they not been paralysed with fear. Marshal Timoshenko and his most dynamic general, Georgi Zhukov, who commanded the Kiev Military District, criticized the glaring weaknesses of Soviet strategy and proposed a return to the forbidden “deep operations” devised by the visionary Tukhachevsky. The powerful Zhdanov, Stalin’s chief adviser on everything from howitzers to ships, Finland to culture, sat in on the meetings and reported back to Stalin, who next day summoned the generals. The insomniac Stalin, who was so accustomed to nocturnal life that he could only sleep after 4 a.m., confessed that he had not slept at all the night before. Timoshenko replied nervously that Stalin had approved his speech.
“You don’t really think I have time to read every paper which is tossed at me,” replied Stalin, who at least ordered new plans and urgent war games. However, these merely exposed Soviet weakness, which rattled Stalin so much that on 13 January 1941 he summoned the generals without giving them time to prepare. The Chief of Staff, Meretskov, stumbled as he tried to report until Stalin interrupted: “Well, who finally won?”
Meretskov was afraid to speak, which only enraged Stalin even more. “Here among ourselves . . . we have to talk in terms of our real capabilities.” Finally Stalin exploded: “The trouble is we don’t have a proper Chief of Staff.” He there and then dismissed Meretskov. The meeting deteriorated further when Kulik declared that tanks were overrated; horse-drawn guns were the future. It was staggering that after two Panzer Blitzkrieg and only six months before the Nazi invasion, the Soviets were even debating such a thing.
It was Stalin’s fault that Kulik had been over-promoted but, typically, he blamed someone else: “Comrade Timoshenko, as long as there’s such confusion . . . no mechanization of the army can take place at all.”
Timoshenko retorted that only Kulik was confused. Stalin turned on his friend: “Kulik comes out against the engine. It’s as if he had come out against the tractor and supported the wooden plough . . . Modern warfare will be a war of engines.”3
The next afternoon, General Zhukov, forty-five, was rushed to the Little Corner, where Stalin appointed him Chief of Staff. Zhukov tried to refuse. Stalin, impressed by Zhukov’s victory over the Japanese at Khalkin-Gol, insisted. The quintessential fighting general who would become the greatest captain of the Second World War was another Civil War cavalryman and a protégé of Budyonny since the late twenties. The son of an impoverished shoemaker, this convinced Communist had just managed to survive the Terror with Budyonny’s help. Short, squat, indefatigable, with blunt features and a prehensile jaw, Georgi Zhukov shared Stalin’s ruthless brutality, combining savage reprisals and Roman discipline with carelessness about losses. However, he lacked Stalin’s deviousness and sadism. He was emotional and brave, often daring to disagree with Stalin who, sensing his gifts, indulged him.4
A few days later, at Kuntsevo, Timoshenko and Zhukov tried to persuade Stalin to mobilize, convinced that Hitler would invade. Timoshenko advised him on handling Stalin: “He won’t listen to a long lecture . . . just ten minutes.” Stalin was dining with Molotov, Zhdanov and Voroshilov, along with Mekhlis and Kulik. Zhukov spoke up: should not they bolster defences along the Western frontier?
“Are you eager to fight the Germans?” Molotov asked harshly.
“Wait a minute,” Stalin calmed the stuttering Premier. He lectured Zhukov on the Germans: “They fear us. In secret, I will tell you that our ambassador had a serious conversation with Hitler personally and Hitler said to him, ‘Please don’t worry about the concentration of our forces in Poland. Our forces are retraining . . .’ ” The generals then joined the magnates for Ukrainian borscht soup, buckwheat porridge, then stewed meat, with stewed and fresh fruit for pudding, washed down with brandy and Georgian Khvanchkara wine.5
Kulik’s imbecilic advice unleashed another paroxysm of terror that would bring death to a Politburo family. On hearing that the Germans were increasing the thickness of their armour, he demanded stopping all production of conventional guns and switching to 107mm howitzers from World War I. The Armaments Commissar, Boris Vannikov, a formidable Jewish super-manager, who had studied at Baku Polytechnic with Beria, sensibly opposed Kulik but lacked his access to Stalin. Kulik won Zhdanov’s backing. On 1 March, Stalin summoned Vannikov: “What objections do you have? Comrade Kulik said you don’t agree with him.” Vannikov explained that it was unlikely the Germans had updated their armour as swiftly as Kulik suggested: the 76mm remained the best. Then Zhdanov entered the office.
“Look here,” Stalin said to him, “Vannikov doesn’t want to make the 107mm gun . . . But these guns are very good. I know them from the Civil War.”
“Vannikov,” replied Zhdanov, “always opposes everything. That’s his style of working.”
“You’re the main artillery expert we have,” Stalin commissioned Zhdanov to settle the question, “and the 107mm is a good gun.” Zhdanov called the meeting where Vannikov defied Kulik. Zhdanov accused him of “sabotage.” “The dead hold back the living,” he added ominously. Vannikov shouted back:
“You’re tolerating disarmament in the face of an approaching war.” Zhdanov stiffly “declared he was going to complain about me to Stalin.” Stalin accepted Kulik’s solution, which had to be reversed when the war began. Vannikov was arrested.172 Only in Stalin’s realm could the country’s greatest armaments expert be imprisoned just weeks before a war. But Kulik’s motto, “Prison or a medal,” had triumphed again. As the poison spread, it reached Kaganovich’s brother. In the almost biblical sacrifice of a beloved sibling, Lazar’s steeliness was grievously tested.6
Vannikov was cruelly tortured about his recent post as deputy to Mikhail Kaganovich, Lazar’s eldest brother and Commissar for Aircraft Production. The air force was always the most accident-prone service. Not only did the planes crash with alarming regularity, reflecting the haste and sloppiness of Soviet manufacturing, but someone had to pay for these accidents. In one year, four Heroes of the Soviet Union were lost in crashes and Stalin himself questioned the air-force generals even down to the engineers working on each plane. “What kind of man is he?” Stalin asked about one technician. “Maybe he’s a bastard, a svoloch.” The crashes had to be the fault of “bastards.” Vannikov was forced to implicate Mikhail Kaganovich as the “bastard” in this case.
Meanwhile, Vasily Stalin, now a pilot avid to win paternal love, usually by denouncing his superiors to his father, played some part in this tragedy. He remained so nervous that, Svetlana recalled, when his father addressed him at dinner, he jumped and often could not even reply, stammering, “I didn’t hear what you said, Father...What?” In 1940, he fell in love with a pretty trumpet-playing blonde from an NKVD family, Galina Bourdonovskaya, and married her. Yet he was truculent, arrogant, drunken and, while often bighearted, more often dangerous. In this peculiar world, the “Crown Prince” became, according to Svetlana, “a menace.”
“Hello dear Father,” he wrote on 4 March 1941. “How’s your health? Recently I was in Moscow on the orders of Rychagov [the Chief of the Main Directorate of the Air Force], I wanted to see you so much but they said you were busy . . . They won’t let me fly . . . Rychagov called me and abused me very much saying that instead of studying theory, I was starting to visit commanders proving to them I had to fly. He ordered me to inform you of this conversation.” Vasily had to fly in old planes “that are terrible to see” and even future officers could not train in the new planes: “Father, write me just a couple of words, if you have time, it’s the biggest joy for me because I miss you so much. Your Vasya.”
This subtle denunciation cannot have helped Pavel Rychagov, thirty-nine, a dashing pilot just promoted to the high command. He arrived drunk at a meeting to discuss the planes. When Stalin criticized the air force, Rychagov shouted that the death rate was so high “because you’re making us fly in coffins!” Silence fell but Stalin continued to walk around the room, the only sounds being the puffing of the pipe and the pad of soft boots.
“You shouldn’t have said that.” He walked round the deathly quiet table one more time and repeated: “You shouldn’t have said that.” Rychagov was arrested within the week along with several air-force top brass and General Shtern, Far Eastern commander, all later shot. They, like Vannikov, implicated Mikhail Kaganovich.7
“We received testimonies,” Stalin told Kaganovich. “Your brother’s implicated in the conspiracy.” The brother was accused of building the aircraft factories close to the Russian border to help Berlin. Stalin explained that Mikhail, a Jew, had been designated head of Hitler’s puppet government-in-waiting, an idea so preposterous that it was either the moronic solecism of an NKGB simpleton or, more likely, a joke between Stalin and Beria. Did they remember Ordzhonikidze’s fury on the arrest of his brother? Ordzhonikidze had been Kaganovich’s closest friend.
“It’s a lie,” Kaganovich claimed to have replied. “I know my brother. He’s a Bolshevik since 1905, devoted to the Central Committee.”
“How can it be a lie?” retorted Stalin. “I’ve got the testimonies.”
“It’s a lie. I demand a confrontation.” Decades later, Kaganovich denied that he had betrayed his own brother: “If my brother had been an Enemy I’d have been against him . . . I was sure he was right. I protected him. I protected him!” Kaganovich could afford to give an opinion but he also had to make clear that if the Party needed to destroy his brother, his brother must die. “Well, so what?” he added. “If necessary, arrest him.”
Stalin ordered Mikoyan and that sinister duo Beria and Malenkov to arrange a confrontation between Mikhail Kaganovich and his accuser, Vannikov, but “Iron Lazar” was not invited to attend.
“Don’t make him anxious, don’t bother him,” said Stalin.
Mikoyan held the “confrontation” in his office in the same building as the Little Corner where Mikhail defended himself “passionately” against Vannikov.
“Are you insane?” he asked his former deputy who had spent nights at his home during the Terror, afraid of arrest.
“No, you were part of the same organization with me,” replied Vannikov.
Beria and Malenkov told Mikhail to wait in the corridor while they interrogated Vannikov some more. Mikhail went into Mikoyan’s private lavatory (one of the perks of power). There was a shot.8 The three of them found Kaganovich’s brother dead. By killing himself before his arrest, he saved his family. Lazar passed the test. A scapegoat for the aircraft blunders had been found.173
As these commissars travelled from Kremlin to torture chamber and back, the Germans surreptitiously deployed their legions along the Soviet frontier while Stalin channelled much of his energy into reasserting Russian influence in the Balkans. But by March, Hitler had managed to lure Bulgaria, Romania and Yugoslavia into his camp. Then, on 26 March, the pro-German government in Yugoslavia was overthrown, probably with the help of the NKGB and the British secret service. Hitler could not afford such a sore on his flank so the Germans prepared to invade Yugoslavia, which delayed Operation Barbarossa by a month.
On 4 April, Stalin threw himself into negotiations with the new Yugoslav government, hoping this glitch in Hitler’s plan would either drive Berlin back to the negotiating table or, at the very least, delay the invasion until 1942. When he signed a treaty with the Yugoslavs just as the Wehrmachtbegan to bombard Belgrade, Stalin cheerfully dismissed the threat: “Let them come. We’ve strong nerves.” But Yugoslavia was Hitler’s most successful Blitzkrieg of all: ten days later, Belgrade surrendered. Events were moving faster than the erosion of Stalin’s illusions.
That same day, Yosuke Matsuoka, the Japanese Foreign Minister, arrived in Moscow on his way back from Berlin. As the Wehrmacht crushed the Yugoslavs, Stalin realized that he required a fresh path back to Hitler. But he was also aware of the priceless benefit of a quiet Far Eastern front if Hitler invaded. Zhukov’s victory in the Far East had persuaded Tokyo that their destiny lay southwards in the juicier tidbits of the British Empire. On 14 April 1941, when Matsuoka signed a non-aggression pact with the Soviet Union, Stalin and Molotov reacted with almost febrile excitement, as if they had single-handedly changed the shape of Europe and saved Russia. Stalin exclaimed how rare it was “to find a diplomat who speaks openly what is on his mind. What Talleyrand told Napoleon was well known, ‘the tongue was given the diplomat so that he could conceal his thoughts.’ We Russians and Bolsheviks are different . . .” For once, Stalin unwound at the resulting Bacchanal, while Molotov tossed back the champagne until both were as drunk as Matsuoka.
“Stalin and I made him drink a lot,” boasted Molotov later. By 6 a.m., Matsuoka “almost had to be carried to the train. We could barely stand up.” Stalin, Molotov and Matsuoka burst into song, rendering that Russian favourite, “Shoumel Kamysh” that went: “The reeds were rustling, the trees are crackling in the wind, the night was very dark . . . And the lovers stayed awake all night,” to guffaws. At Yaroslavsky Station, the assembled diplomats were amazed to see an intoxicated Stalin, in his greatcoat, brownvizored cap and boots, accompanied by Matsuoka and Molotov who kept saluting and shouting: “I’m a Pioneer! I’m ready!”—the Soviet equivalent of the Boy Scout’s “Dib! Dib! Be prepared!” The Bulgarian Ambassador judged Molotov “the least drunk.” Stalin, who had never before seen any visitor off at the station, hugged the staggering Japanese but since neither could speak the other’s language, their new intimacy was expressed in embraces and grunts of “Ah! Ah!”
Stalin was so excited that he jovially punched the minuscule bald Japanese Ambassador-General on the shoulder so hard that he “staggered back three or four steps which caused Matsuoka to laugh in glee.” Then Stalin noticed the tall attaché Colonel Hans Krebs and, abandoning the Japanese, tapped him on the chest:
“German?” he asked. Krebs stiffened to attention, towering over Stalin who slapped him on the back, wrung his hand and said loudly, “We’ve been friends with you and we’ll remain friends with you.”
“I’m sure of that,” replied Krebs, though the Swedish Ambassador thought he “did not seem so convinced of it.”174 Finally lumbering back to the Japanese, Stalin again embraced the much-hugged Matsuoka, exclaiming, “We’ll organize Europe and Asia!” Arm in arm, he led Matsuoka into his carriage and waited until the train departed. Japanese diplomats escorted Stalin to his armoured Packard while their Ambassador, “standing on a bench, waved his handkerchief and cried in a strident voice, ‘Thank you thank you!’ ”
The celebration was not over for Stalin and Molotov. As he got into the car, Stalin ordered Vlasik to call the dacha at Zubalovo and tell Svetlana, now fifteen, that she was to assemble the family for a party: “Stalin’s arriving any minute.”
Svetlana ran to tell her aunt, Anna Redens, who was there with her children and Gulia Djugashvili, aged three, Yakov’s daughter: “Father’s coming!”
Anna Redens had not seen Stalin since the row about her husband’s arrest and certainly not since his execution. All of them gathered on the steps. Minutes later, the tipsy, unusually cheerful Stalin arrived. Throwing open the car door, he hailed the twelve-year-old Leonid Redens: “Get in—let’s go for a drive!” The driver sped them round the flower bed. Then Stalin got out and hugged the apprehensive Anna Redens, who was holding her younger son Vladimir, now six. Stalin admired this angelic nephew: “For the sake of such a wonderful son, let’s make peace. I forgive you.” Little Gulia, Stalin’s first grandchild, was brought out to be admired but she waved her arms and screamed and was swiftly taken to her room. Stalin sat at the table where he had once presided with Nadya over their young family. Cakes and chocolates were brought. Stalin took Vladimir on to his lap and started opening the chocolates: the little boy noticed his “very beautiful long fingers.”
“You’re spoiling the children by buying them presents they don’t even want,” Stalin reprimanded the staff but, Vladimir says, “in his gentle way that made him very loved by them.”
After tea, Stalin went upstairs for a catnap. He had not slept the previous night. Then Molotov, Beria and Mikoyan arrived for dinner175 at which “Stalin threw orange peel at everyone’s plates. Then he threw a cork right into the ice cream” which delighted Vladimir Alliluyev. The family could not know that Hitler’s imminent invasion, and Stalin’s exhaustion and paranoia, would make this the end of an era. 9
This was an oasis of exhilaration in a darkening sky. Torn between the wishful thinking of his powerful will—and the mounting evidence— Stalin persisted in believing that a diplomatic breakthrough with Hitler was just round the corner, even though he now knew the date of Operation Barbarossa from his spymasters. When Stafford Cripps, the British Ambassador, delivered a letter from Winston Churchill warning of the invasion, it backfired, convincing Stalin that Britain was trying to entrap Russia: “We’re being threatened with the Germans, and the Germans with the Soviet Union,” Stalin told Zhukov. “They’re playing us off against each other.” 10
Yet he was not completely oblivious: in the contest that Molotov called “the great game,” Stalin thought Russia might manage to stay out of the war until 1942. “Only by 1943 could we meet the Germans on an equal footing,” he told Molotov. As ever, Stalin was trying to read himself out of the problem, carefully studying a history of the German-French War of 1870. He and Zhdanov repeatedly quoted Bismarck’s sensible dictum that Germany should never face war on two fronts: Britain remained undefeated hence Hitler would not attack. “Hitler’s not such a fool,” Stalin said, “that he’s unable to understand the difference between the USSR and Poland or France, or even England, indeed all of them put together.” Yet his entire career was a triumph of will over reality.
He persisted in believing that Hitler, the reckless gambler and world-historical “sleepwalker,” was a rational Bismarckian Great Power statesman, like himself. After the war, talking to a small group that included Dekanozov, his Ambassador to Berlin in 1941, Stalin, thinking aloud about this time, obliquely explained his behaviour: “When you’re trying to make a decision, NEVER put yourself into the mind of the other person because if you do, you can make a terrible mistake.”176
Military measures were agonizingly slow. Zhdanov and Kulik proposed removing the old armaments from the Fortified Areas and putting them in the unfinished new ones. Zhukov objected: there was no time. Stalin backed his cronies, so the fortifications were unfinished when the onslaught came.
On 20 April, Ilya Ehrenburg, the Jewish novelist whom Stalin admired, learned that his anti-German novel, The Fall of Paris, had been refused by the censors who were still following Stalin’s orders not to offend Hitler. Four days later, Poskrebyshev called, telling him to dial a number: “Comrade Stalin wants to talk to you.” As soon as he got through, his dogs started barking; his wife had to drive them out of the room. Stalin told him he liked the book: did Ehrenburg intend to denounce Fascism? The novelist replied that it was hard to attack the Fascists since he was not allowed to use the word. “Just go on writing,” said Stalin jocularly, “you and I will try to push the third part through.” It was typical of this strangely literary dictator to think this would alarm the Germans: Hitler was beyond literary nuances.
Even Stalin’s inner circle could smell war now. It was so pervasive that Zhdanov suggested they cancel the May Day Parade in case it was too “provocative.” Stalin did not cancel it but he placed Dekanozov, the Ambassador to Germany, right next to him on the Mausoleum to signal his warmth towards Berlin.11
On 4 May, he sent another signal to Hitler that he was ready to talk: Stalin replaced Molotov as Premier, promoting Zhdanov’s protégé, Nikolai Voznesensky, the brash economic maestro, as his deputy on the inner Buro. At thirty-eight, Voznesensky’s rise had been meteoric and this angered the others: Mikoyan, who was particularly sore, thought he was “economically educated but a professor-type without practical experience.” This good-looking, intelligent but arrogant Leningrader was “naïvely happy with his appointment,” but Beria and Malenkov already resented the acerbic technocrat: Stalin’s “promoting a teacher to give us lessons,” Malenkov whispered to Beria. Henceforth, Stalin ruled as Premier through his deputies as Lenin had, balancing the rivalry between Beria and Malenkov, on the one hand, and Zhdanov and Voznesensky, on the other. Stalin expressed his emergence on the world stage sartorially, discarding his baggy trousers and boots. He “started wearing well-ironed, untucked ones with lace-up bootkins.”12
Finally, Stalin prepared the military for the possibility of war. On 5 May, he saw only one visitor: Zhdanov, just promoted to Stalin’s Party Deputy, visited him for twenty-five minutes. At 6 p.m., the two men walked from the Little Corner to the Great Kremlin Palace where two thousand officers awaited them: Stalin entered with Zhdanov, Timoshenko and Zhukov. President Kalinin introduced a “severe” Stalin who praised the modern mechanization of his “new army.” Then he eccentrically attributed the French defeat to amorous disappointment: the French were “so dizzy with self-satisfaction” that they disdained their own warriors to the extent that “girls wouldn’t even marry soldiers.” Was the German army unbeatable? “There are no invincible armies in the world” but war was coming. “If VM Molotov . . . can delay the start of war for 2–3 months, this’ll be our good fortune.” At the dinner, he toasted: “Long live the dynamic offensive policy of the Soviet State,” adding, “anyone who doesn’t recognize this is a Philistine and a fool.” This was a relief to the military: Stalin was not living in cloud cuckoo land. 13 The State was ready to fight, or was it? The State was not sure.177
The magnates tried to steer a path between Stalin’s infallibility and Hitler’s reality: the absurdity of explaining how the army had to be ready to fight an offensive war which was definitely not going to happen, while claiming this was not a change of policy, was so ridiculous that they tied themselves in knots of Stalinist sophistry and Neroesque folly. “We need a new type of propaganda,” declared Zhdanov at the Supreme Military Council. “There is only one step between war and peace. So our propaganda can’t be peaceful.”
“We ourselves designed the propaganda this way,” Budyonny exploded, so they had to explain why it was changing.
“We’re only altering the slogan,” claimed Zhdanov.
“As if we were going to war tomorrow!” sneered the pusillanimous Malenkov, eighteen days before the invasion.14
On 7 May, Schulenburg, secretly opposed to Hitler’s invasion, breakfasted with the Soviet Ambassador to Berlin, Dekanozov, whom he ambiguously tried to warn. They met thrice but “he did not warn,” said Molotov later, “he hinted and pushed for diplomatic negotiations.” Dekanozov informed Stalin who was becoming ever more bad-tempered and nervous. “So, disinformation has now reached ambassadorial level,” he growled. Dekanozov disagreed.
“How could you allow yourself to argue with Comrade Stalin! He knows more and can see further than all of us!” Voroshilov threatened Dekanozov during a recess.15
On 10 May, Stalin learned of Deputy Führer Hess’s quixotic peace flight to Scotland. His magnates, remembered Khrushchev who was in the office that day, were all understandably convinced that Hess’s mission was aimed at Moscow. But Stalin was finally willing to prepare for war, admittedly in a manner so timid that it was barely effective. On 12 May, Stalin allowed the generals to strengthen the borders, calling up 500,000 reserves, but was terrified of offending the Germans. When Timoshenko reported German reconnaissance flights, Stalin mused, “I’m not sure Hitler knows about those flights.” On the 24th, he refused to take any further measures.
The paralysis struck again. Stalin never apologized but he very indirectly acknowledged his mistakes when he later thanked the Russian people for their “patience.” But he blamed most of his blunders on others, admitting that he “trusted too much in cavalrymen.” Zhukov confessed his own failures: “Possibly I did not have enough influence.” This was not the real reason for his quiescence. If he had demanded mobilization, Stalin would have asked: “On what basis? Well, Beria, take him to your dungeons!” Kulik caught the attitude of most soldiers: “This is high politics. It’s not our business.”16
The intelligence was now flooding in. Earlier it had been presented in an ambiguous way but now it was surely clear that something ominous was darkening the Western border. Merkulov daily reported to Stalin who was now defying an avalanche of information from all manner of sources. On 9 June, when Timoshenko and Zhukov mentioned the array of intelligence, Stalin tossed their papers at them and snarled, “And I have different documents.” He mocked Richard Sorge, the masterspy in Tokyo who used his amorous and sybaritic appetites to conceal his peerless intelligence gathering: “There’s this bastard who’s set up factories and brothels in Japan and even deigned to report the date of the German attack as 22 June. Are you suggesting I should believe him too?”