41
At about 11 p.m. on 1 August 1943, Stalin and Beria arrived at Kuntsevo Station and boarded a special train, camouflaged with birch branches, armed with howitzers and packed with specially tested provisions. The train, which, with its theatrical shrubbery poking out of its guns, must have resembled a locomotive Birnam Wood, puffed westwards. The Kursk counter-attacks, Operations Rumiantsev, to the north, and Kutuzov, to the south, both named after Tsarist heroes, were so successful that Stalin felt safe to embark on this preposterously staged visit to the front.
Stalin slept at Gzhatsk, then headed towards Rzhev on the Kalinin Front. Transferring into his Packard, he set up his headquarters in a self-consciously humble wooden cottage with a picturesque veranda (still a museum today) in the hamlet of Khoroshevo where he received his generals. Knowing from Zhukov that Orel and Belgorod would fall imminently, Stalin ate “a cheerful supper” with his entourage.
The old lady who lived there was on hand to provide a touch of folksy authenticity until Stalin, who prided himself on his popular touch, unexpectedly insisted that he must pay her for his stay. He was unable to work out a sensible sum because he had not handled money since 1917 but, in any case, he had no cash on him. Stalin asked his flunkies for the money. Here was a classic moment in the farce of the workers’ State when, with much tapping of tunic pockets, jiggling of medals and rustling of gold braid, not one of the boozy, paunchy commissars could find a single kopeck to pay her. Stalin cursed the “spongers.” Since he could not pay in cash, he compensated the crone with his own provisions.
Then Stalin peered grumpily out at the village which he immediately noticed was teeming with ill-concealed Chekists: he asked how many there were, but the NKVD tried to conceal the real number. When Stalin exploded, they admitted there was an entire division. Indeed, the generals noticed that the village itself had been completely emptied: there was no one except the NKVD for miles around.
He slept on the old lady’s bed in his greatcoat. Yeremenko briefed him. Voronov was summoned, covering miles to make it to the mysterious meeting. “Finally we came to a beautiful grove where small wooden structures nestled among the trees.” Led into the cottage, Stalin stood in front of a “wretched wooden table that had been hastily dashed together” and two crude benches. A special telephone had been fixed to link Stalin to the fronts, with the wires going out of the window. Waiting to report to the Supremo, the generals were unimpressed with this mise-en-scène.
“Well, this is some situation!” whispered one general to Voronov who suddenly realized: “It’s intentional—to resemble the front.” Stalin cut off the briefing, contenting himself with giving some orders, then dismissed the generals who had to slog back to the real fray. Stalin asked if he could go further towards the fighting but Beria forbade him. He visited the hospital at Yukono, according to his bodyguards, and was depressed by so many amputees. Afterwards, he felt ill and his arthritis played up.218 Stalin returned by road in his armoured Packard and a convoy of security cars.
Suddenly the cars stopped. “He needed to defecate,” wrote Mikoyan, who heard the story from someone who was there. Stalin got out of the car and asked “whether the bushes along the roadside were mined. Of course no one could give such a guarantee . . . Then the Supreme Commander-in-Chief pulled down his trousers in everyone’s presence.” In a metaphorical commentary on his treatment of the Soviet people, and his performance as military commander, he “shamed himself in front of his generals and officers . . . and did his business right there on the road.”
On his return, Stalin was immediately able to deploy his heroic journey in a letter to President Franklin D. Roosevelt, with whom he was discussing the venue for the first meeting of the three leaders of the Grand Alliance: “Having just returned from the front, I am only now able to reply to your letter . . .” He could not meet FDR and Churchill at Scapa Flow in Orkney—“I have to make personal visits to . . . the front more and more often.” He proposed they meet in a more convenient place—Teheran, the capital of Iran, occupied by British-Soviet forces.
Stalin’s courtiers knew the significance of this visit to the front. A month later, Yeremenko, his host, prodded by Beria and Malenkov, proposed that Stalin receive the Order of Suvorov First Class for Stalingrad, and for giving “such valuable orders that guaranteed victory on the Kalinin Front, . . . inspired by the visit to the front of the Supreme Commander-in-Chief . . .”
On 5 August, when Orel and Belgorod fell, Stalin jovially asked Antonov and Shtemenko: “Do you read military history?” Shtemenko admitted he was “confused, not knowing how to answer.” Stalin, who had been rereading Vipper’s History of Ancient Greece, went on: “In ancient times, when troops won victories, all the bells would be rung in honour of the commanders and their troops. It wouldn’t be a bad idea for us to signify victories more impressively . . . We”—and he nodded at his comrades, “we’re thinking of giving artillery salutes and arranging some kind of fireworks . . .” That day, the guns of the Kremlin fired the first victory salvo. Henceforth, Stalin punctiliously worked out the salutes to be given for each victory and the staff had to get every detail correct. Just before 11 p.m. the messages were rushed to the stentorian newsreader Levitan who telephoned Poskrebyshev for Stalin’s approval. Then the salvoes resounded across the Motherland.
“Let’s listen to it,” Stalin often suggested in the Little Corner. The generals now competed to be the first to give Stalin good news. On the 28th, Koniev phoned to announce he had taken Kharkov but was told that Stalin always slept in in the mornings. Koniev daringly phoned Kuntsevo directly. A delighted Stalin answered it himself. But when there was a mistake in the victory announcements, Stalin yelled: “Why did Levitan omit Koniev’s name? Let me see the message!” Shtemenko had left it out. Stalin was “dreadfully furious.” “What kind of anonymous message is this? What have you got on your shoulders? Stop that broadcast and read everything over again. You may go!”
The next time, he asked Shtemenko to bring the communiqué on his own, asking, “You didn’t leave out the name?” Shtemenko was forgiven.1
As he massed fifty-eight armies, from Finland to the Black Sea, to embark on a colossal wave of offensives, an elated Stalin, having closed down the Comintern and enlisted the support of the Church by appointing a Patriarch, decided to create a new national anthem to replace theInternationale. It was to catch Russia’s new euphoric confidence. Stalin decided the quickest way to find the tune and words was to hold a competition that resembled a dictatorial Eurovision Song Contest, with Molotov and Voroshilov contributing to the lyrics, and Shostakovich and Prokofiev to the music.
In one week in late October, while the Allied Foreign Ministers were in Moscow preparing for the Big Three meeting, the anthem was forged in the white-hot frenzy of musical Stakhanovitism to be ready for the 7th November celebrations. In late September, Stalin invited composers from all over the Soviet Union to put forward their offerings. In mid-October, fifty-four composers, including Uzbeks, Georgians and some singing Jews, in traditional costume, arrived in Moscow to perform round one in the Stalin song contest. Before the music was even decided, Stalin appointed the lyricists, Sergei Mikhalkov and El-Registan, whose notes in the archives tell this story. They handed in their first draft. At lunchtime on the 23rd, the lyricists were summoned from the Moskva Hotel, that colossal Stalinist pile, across to the Kremlin where Molotov and Voroshilov received them. “Come in,” they said. “He is reading the lyrics.” They did not need to ask who “he” was. Two minutes later, Stalin called. Voroshilov, who was “cheerful and smiling,” took El-Registan’s hands: “Comrade Stalin,” he announced, “has made some corrections.” These were words they would hear often during the next two weeks. Meanwhile the dour Molotov was suggesting changes of his own.
“You must add some thoughts about peace, I don’t know where, but it must be done.”
“We’ll give you a room,” said Voroshilov. “It has to be warm. Give ’em tea or they’ll start drinking! And don’t let them out until they’ve finished.” They worked for four hours.
“We need to think about this overnight,” said Mikhalkov.
“Think all you like,” snapped Molotov, “but we can’t wait.” As they left, they heard him order: “Send it to Stalin!”
At a quarter to midnight, Stalin tinkered with the new draft in his red pencil, changing the words of the verses, sending it to Molotov and Voroshilov: “Look at this. Do you agree?” On 26 October, Voroshilov, the Marshal demoted to song judge, was diligently listening to another thirty anthems in the Bolshoi’s Beethoven Hall, when suddenly “Stalin arrived and all was done very fast.” It was now a remarkable gathering, with Stalin, Voroshilov and Beria sitting down with Shostakovich and Prokofiev to discuss the composition. When the lyricists arrived, they found Stalin, “very grey and very energetic” in his new Marshal’s uniform. Walking around as he listened to the melodies, Stalin asked Shostakovich and Prokofiev which orchestra was best—should it be an ecclesiastical one? It was hard to choose without an orchestra. Stalin gave them five days to prepare some more anthems, said goodbye and left the hall.
At three the following morning, Poskrebyshev called the lyricists, putting through the Supreme Songwriter who said that he now liked the text, but it was too “thin” and short. They must add one verse, one rousing verse about the Red Army, power, “the defeat of the Fascist hordes.”219
Stalin celebrated the Allied conference with a banquet on 30 October and then returned to music. At 9 a.m. on 1 November, flanked by Molotov, Beria and Voroshilov, he arrived at the Beethoven Hall and listened to forty anthems in four hours. Over dinner afterwards, the magnates finally came to a decision: Voroshilov telephoned the two lyricists in the middle of the night to announce that they liked the anthem of A. V. Alexandrov. He then handed the phone to Stalin who was still tinkering.
“You can leave the verses,” he said, “but rewrite the refrains. ‘Country of Soviets’—if it’s not a problem, change it to ‘country of socialism.’ Status: secret!” The lyricists worked all night, now with Alexandrov’s music. Voroshilov sent it to Stalin and invited the composers to his dacha where he presided like “a very funny and cheerful uncle” over a sumptuous feast.
At nine the next evening, Stalin was ready. The composers arrived. Beria, Voroshilov and Malenkov sat round the table. Stalin formally shook their hands, that special sign of battles won and songs written.
“How’s everything?” he asked warmly, but had not yet finished his tinkering. He wanted to emphasize the role of “the Motherland! Motherland’s good!” The writers rushed off to type in the changes. Stalin wanted Shostakovich involved in the orchestration.
“All right. Done!” snapped Beria. Then Malenkov sensibly piped up that they should listen once to the entire anthem. Stalin assigned this to Voroshilov who, demonstrating his rambunctious disrespect that belonged in another era, retorted: “Let someone else do it—I’ve heard it a hundred times until I’m foaming at the mouth!”
The new Soviet national anthem, Stalin raved, “parts the sky and heaven like a boundless wave.” At its first playing at the Bolshoi Theatre, Stalin arrived to toast the composers who were invited up to the box and then to a dinner in the avant-loge. When Mikhalkov220 and El-Registan downed their vodkas, Stalin bantered: “Why drain your glasses? You won’t be interesting to chat to!”2
The elation spread from the top down. As the national anthem was unveiled, Molotov presided over a 7 November party that few would ever forget. The élite emerged that night from the grimness of the thirties and the austerity of years of defeat. “The whole party,” noted the journalist Alexander Werth, “sparkled with jewels, furs, gold braid and celebrities . . . The party had something of that wild and irresponsible extravagance which one usually associates with pre-Revolution Moscow.” The dress was white tie and tails, which made Shostakovich look “like a college boy who had put it on for the first time.” Henceforth, Stalin’s court began to behave more like the rulers of an empire than dour Bolsheviks. Molotov sported the new diplomatic uniform that, like the gold braid, marked the new imperial era: it was “black, trimmed in gold, with a small dagger at the belt . . . much like Hitler’s élite SS,” thought the U.S. diplomat Chip Bohlen.
Molotov, Vyshinsky and Stalin’s old friend Sergo “Tojo” Kavtaradze greeted the guests in a receiving line. Kavtaradze’s companion was his beautiful daughter Maya, now eighteen and wearing the long flowing ball gown of the era. She caught the eye of Vyshinsky who “oiled his way across the floor” to ask her to open the dancing with him.
A “jovial” Molotov proceeded to become uproariously drunk, tottering up to Averell Harriman’s daughter Kathleen and slurringly asking why she alone had failed to compliment him on his gorgeous uniform. Didn’t she like it? She thought the Russians were as excited about their regalia “as a little boy all dressed up in his new Christmas-present fireman’s suit.” When he spotted the Swedish Ambassador, Molotov staggered up to him and declared that he did not like neutrals.
The Politburo members then each hit on a Western ambassador whom they tried to get as drunk as they were: Mikoyan, “famous for his ability to put any guy under the table” according to Kathleen Harriman, worked on her father along with Shcherbakov, himself in the later stages of alcoholism. Molotov, who “carried his liquor better than others,” managed to remain on his feet while Clark Kerr, the British Ambassador “fell flat on his face onto a table covered with bottles and wineglasses,” cutting his face. Maya Kavtaradze saw an American general arrive accompanied by two prostitutes. Later in the evening, she noticed that all the potentates had disappeared and went to look for her father. She found him in a red hall, the Bolshevik equivalent of the VIP room, with the dashing and exuberant Mikoyan who was serenading the hussies on one knee.
The next day, Roosevelt finally agreed to meet at Teheran twenty days later: “The whole world is watching for this meeting of the three of us . . .”3