42
On 26 November 1943, Colonel-General Golovanov, the bomber commander who was to be Stalin’s pilot, drove out to Kuntsevo to begin their long voyage to Persia. When he arrived, he heard shouting and found Stalin “giving Beria a good dressing-down” while Molotov watched, perched on the window-sill. Beria sat in a chair “with his ears all red” as Stalin sneered at him: “Look at him Comrade Golovanov! He’s got snake’s eyes!”
Molotov had jokingly complained that he could not read Beria’s spidery handwriting. “Our Vyacheslav Mikhailovich can’t see very well. Beria keeps sending him messages and he insists on wearing his pince-nez with blank glasses!” This marked Stalin’s growing disdain for the dynamic Georgian.
Afterwards, they boarded their train that arrived in Baku at 8 a.m., driving straight to the aerodrome where four SI-47s were gathered under the command of Air Marshal Novikov. Stalin had never flown before—and did not like the sound of it. But there was no other way from Baku. As he approached his plane with Golovanov, he glanced at Beria’s plane standing next door with his pilot, Colonel Grachev, and decided to switch planes.
“Colonel-Generals don’t often pilot aircraft,” he said, “we’d better go with the Colonel,” reassuring Golovanov: “Don’t take it badly”—and he climbed into Beria’s own plane. Guarded by twenty-seven fighters, Stalin was terrified when the plane hit an air pocket.
A few hours later, Stalin arrived in warm, dusty Teheran (“very dirty place, great poverty,” wrote Roosevelt) where he was speeded the five miles to the Soviet Embassy which was separated from the British Legation by two walls and a narrow road. Only the American Legation was out of town.
Teheran was the cosiest of the Big Three meetings: Stalin himself travelled with a tiny delegation. There were only Molotov and Voroshilov, his official deputies in the negotiations, Beria as security overlord, Vlasik as head of personal security and his physician Professor Vinogradov. Stalin’s bodyguard of twelve Georgians was led by Tsereteli, whom Westerners found “good-looking, highly intelligent and courteous.” Nonetheless there was something appropriate about the master of this Eastern Empire being protected by a guard of his fellow countrymen led by a cut-throat Prince. Perhaps Churchill thought the same way for his bodyguard there was made up of turbaned Sikhs with tommy-guns.
The Soviet Embassy was an elegant estate, built for some Persian magnate, surrounded by a high wall. There were several cottages and villas in the grounds: Stalin lived in one house while Molotov and Voroshilov shared the two-storey ambassador’s residence. The advance guard of the NKVD had been frantically preparing the embassy for two weeks. “No one dared disobey” Beria, wrote Zoya Zarubina, a young NKGB officer in Teheran.221
As soon as Roosevelt arrived, Stalin invited him to move into the Soviet compound. The drive from the Soviet complex to the U.S. Legation along narrow Oriental streets was impossible to guard—and no doubt Beria was more concerned about Stalin’s security than Roosevelt’s. Soviet intelligence had allegedly uncovered a Nazi plot to assassinate the leaders. Stalin was also determined to separate the Westerners, whom he expected to gang up on him. It happened that this also suited Roosevelt’s strategy to engage Stalin directly, without the British, to prove his suspicions groundless. Harriman hurried over. Molotov explained their security worries. Molotov later ordered Zarubina to call and find out when FDR would be moving in. Admiral William Leahy, White House Chief of Staff, replied: “We’ll come tomorrow.”
When Zarubina reported this back to Molotov, he exploded: “What do you think you’re doing? Who the hell are you anyway? Who commanded you to do this job? Are you sure? What am I going to say to Stalin?”
Meanwhile, in one of those forgotten meetings between potentates who seem to belong to different epochs, Stalin called on the proud Mohammed Pahlavi, the 21-year-old Shah of an occupied Iran, whose father Reza Shah, a former Cossack officer and founder of the dynasty, had been deposed for pro-German leanings in 1941. Stalin believed he could charm this imperial boy, whose Empire had once embraced Georgia, into granting him an Iranian foothold. Molotov, already a master of the diplomatically possible, was sceptical. Beria advised against this excursion for security reasons. Stalin insisted. The King of Kings was pleasantly “surprised” by the feline Stalin who was “particularly polite and well-mannered and he seemed intent on making a good impression on me.” His offer of “a regiment of T-34 tanks and one of our fighter planes” impressed the Shah too. “I was most tempted,” he later wrote, but he sensed danger in this Georgian bearing gifts. Molotov grumbled that Stalin “did not understand the Shah and got into a bit of an awkward situation. Stalin thought he could impress him but it didn’t work.” The gifts were to come with Soviet officers. “I declined with thanks,” wrote the Shah.
Next morning, Beria personally patrolled the gates, waiting for Roosevelt who finally arrived at the Soviet Embassy with the Secret Service riding on the running boards and brandishing tommy guns in a gangsterish manner that the NKVD thought unprofessional. A jeep-load of Roosevelt’s Filipino mess-boys confused the NKVD but they finally admitted them too.
Stalin sent word that he would call on the President, a meeting he had prepared for carefully. Naturally Beria bugged the presidential suite. Beria’s handsome scientist son, Sergo, whom Stalin knew well, was among the Soviet eavesdroppers. Stalin summoned him: “How’s your mother?” he asked, Nina Beria being a favourite. Small talk out of the way, he ordered Sergo to undertake the “morally reprehensible and delicate” mission of briefing him every morning at 8 a.m. Stalin always quizzed him, even on Roosevelt’s tone: “Did he say that with conviction or without enthusiasm? How did Roosevelt react?” He was surprised at the naïvety of the Americans: “Do they know we are listening to them?”222 Stalin rehearsed strategies with Molotov and Beria, even down to where he would sit.223 He did the same for his meetings with Churchill, according to Beria’s son, saying, “You can expect absolutely anything from him.”
Just before three, on this “beautiful Iranian Sunday afternoon, gold and blue, mild and sunny,” Stalin, accompanied by Vlasik and Pavlov, his interpreter, and surrounded by his Georgian bodyguards, who walked ten metres ahead and behind, as they did in the Kremlin, strode “clumsily like a small bear” out of his residence in his Marshal’s mustard-coloured summer tunic, with the Order of Lenin on his chest, and across the compound, to call on Roosevelt in the mansion. A young U.S. officer met Stalin with a salute and led him into the President’s room but then found himself inside the meeting room with just the two leaders and their interpreters. The officer was about to panic until Bohlen, acting as interpreter, whispered that he should leave.
“Hello Marshal Stalin,” said Roosevelt as the men shook hands. His “round tubby figure,” with swarthy pock-marked face, grey hair, broken stained teeth and yellow Oriental eyes, was worlds away from the aristocratic blue-suited President sitting erect in his wheelchair: “If he’d dressed in Chinese robes,” wrote Bohlen, “he would be the perfect subject for a Chinese ancestor portrait.”
Stalin stressed his need for the Second Front before Roosevelt established a rapport by undermining the British Empire. India was ripe for a revolution “from the bottom,” like Russia, said FDR, who was as ill-informed about Leninism as he was about the untouchables. Stalin showed that he knew more about India, replying that the question of castes was more complicated. This short tour d’horizon established the unlikely partnership between the crippled New York Brahmin and the Georgian Bolshevik. Both of legendary charm when they wished to be, Stalin’s fondness for Roosevelt was as genuine a diplomatic friendship as he ever managed with any imperialist. Stalin left Roosevelt to rest.
At 4 p.m., the Big Three gathered around the specially constructed “wedding feast table” in a big hall decorated in heavy imperial style with striped silk armchairs and armrests: Stalin sat next to Molotov and Pavlov. Voroshilov often sat in a chair in the second row. Stalin and Churchill agreed that Roosevelt was to chair the meeting: “As the youngest!” joked the President.
“In our hands,” declaimed Churchill, “we have the future of mankind.” Stalin completed this declamatory triumvirate: “History has spoiled us,” he said. “She’s given us very great power and very great opportunities . . . Let’s begin our work.”
When they turned to the question of Operation Overlord, the invasion of France, Stalin complained that he had not expected to discuss military issues so he had no military staff. “I’ve only got Marshal Voroshilov,” he said rudely. “I hope he’ll do.” He then ignored Voroshilov and handled all military matters himself. A young British interpreter, Hugh Lunghi,224 was shocked to see that Stalin treated Voroshilov “like a dog.” Stalin insisted on the earliest preference for Overlord, the cross-Channel invasion—and then quietly filled his pipe. Churchill was still unconvinced, preferring a preliminary Mediterranean operation, using troops already in the area. However, FDR was already committed to the Channel. As a flustered Churchill realized he was outvoted, Roosevelt winked at Stalin, the start of his gauche flirtation that greatly enhanced the Marshal’s position as arbiter of the Grand Alliance. Churchill handled Stalin much better by being himself.
Stalin was expansively charming to the foreigners but grumpy with his own delegates. When Bohlen approached him from behind, mid-session, Stalin snapped without turning, “For God’s sake, allow us to finish this work.” He was embarrassed when he found it was the young American. That night, Roosevelt held a dinner at his residence. His mess-boys prepared steaks and baked potatoes while the President shook up his cocktails of vermouth, gin and ice. Stalin sipped and winced: “Well, it’s all right but cold on the stomach.” Roosevelt suddenly turned “green and great drops of sweat began to bead off his face.” He was wheeled to his room. When Churchill said God was on the side of the Allies, Stalin chaffed, “And the Devil’s on my side. The Devil’s a Communist and God’s a good Conservative!”
On the 29th, Stalin and Roosevelt met again: the Supremo knew from his briefing from Sergo Beria that his charm had worked. “Roosevelt always expressed a high opinion of Stalin,” recalled Sergo, which allowed him to put pressure on Churchill. That morning, the President proposed the creation of an international organization that became the United Nations. Meanwhile the generals were meeting with Voroshilov who, according to Lunghi, absolutely refused to understand the amphibious challenge of an invasion of France, thinking it was like crossing a Russian river on a raft.
Before the next session, Churchill, the only British Prime Minister to sport military uniforms in office, arrived in a blue RAF uniform with pilot’s wings, to open a solemn ceremony to celebrate Stalingrad. At 3:30 p.m., all the delegations assembled in the hall of the embassy. Then the Big Three arrived. A guard of honour formed up of British infantry with bayonets and NKVD troops in blue uniforms, red tabs and slung tommy guns. An orchestra played their national anthems, in the Soviet case, the old one. The music stopped. There was silence. Then the officer of the British guard approached the large black box on the table and opened it. A gleaming sword lay on a bed of “claret-coloured velvet.” He handed it to Churchill, who, laying the sword across his hands, turned to Stalin: “I’ve been commanded by His Majesty King George VI to present to you . . . this sword of honour . . . The blade of the sword bears the inscription: ‘To the steel-hearted citizens of Stalingrad, a gift from King George VI as a token of the homage of the British People.’ ”
Churchill stepped forward and presented the sword to Stalin who held it reverently in his hands for a long moment and then, with tears in his eyes, raised it to his lips and kissed it. Stalin was moved.
“On behalf of the citizens of Stalingrad,” he answered in “a low husky voice,” “I wish to express my appreciation . . .” He walked round to Roosevelt to show him the sword. The American read out the inscription: “Truly they had hearts of steel.” Stalin handed the sword to Voroshilov. There was a crash as Voroshilov let the scabbard slip off the sword and on to his toes. The bungling cavalryman, who had charged waving his sabre many a time, had managed to introduce comedy in the most solemn moment of Stalin’s international career. His cherubic cheeks blushing a bright scarlet, Klim remastered the sword. The Supremo, noticed Lunghi, frowned with irritation then gave “a frosty, grim, forced-looking smile.” The NKVD lieutenant held the sword aloft and carried it away. Stalin must have snarled that Voroshilov should apologize because when he returned, he chased after Churchill, recruiting Lunghi to interpret. Flushed, he “stammered his apologies” but then suddenly wished Churchill “a happy birthday” for the following day. A special birthday banquet was being planned at the British Legation. “I wish you a hundred more years of life,” said the Marshal, “with the same spirit and vigour.” Churchill thanked him but whispered to Lunghi: “Isn’t he a bit premature? Must be angling for an invitation.”225 Then the Big Three went outside for the famous photograph of the conference.
After a short interval, the delegations moved back to the round table for the next session. As ever, Stalin made sure that he always arrived last. When everyone was ready the Chekist Zoya Zarubina, on duty outside, was sent on an errand. She ran headlong down the steps and “hit someone on the shoulder.” To her horror, it was Stalin. “I stood frozen, stiff at attention . . .” she wrote. “I thought they’d surely shoot me on the spot.” Stalin did not react and walked on, followed by Molotov. But Voroshilov, always kind to the young and with more reason than most to indulge bunglers, “patted me on the hand and said, ‘It’s all right, kid, it’s all right.’ ”
Stalin, “always smoking and doodling wolf heads on a pad with his red pencil,” was never agitated, rarely gestured and seldom consulted Molotov and Voroshilov. But he kept up the pressure on Churchill for the Second Front: “Do the British really believe in Overlord or are you only saying so to reassure the Russians?”
When he heard that the Allies had not yet agreed on a commander, he growled: “Then nothing will come of these operations.” The Soviet Union had tried committee rule and found it had not worked. One man had to make the decisions. Finally, when Churchill would not give a date, Stalin suddenly got to his feet and turning to Molotov and Voroshilov, said, “Let’s not waste our time here. We’ve got plenty to do at the front.” Roosevelt managed to pour unction on troubled waters.
That night, it was Stalin’s turn to host a banquet in the usual Soviet style with an “unbelievable quantity of food.” A huge Russian “waiter” in a white coat stood behind the Supremo’s chair throughout the meal.226 Stalin “drank little” but got his kicks by needling Churchill, exchanges in which Roosevelt seemed to take an undignified pleasure. Stalin sneered that he was glad Churchill was not a “liberal,” that most loathsome of creatures in the Bolshevik lexicon, but he then tested his severity by joking that 50,000 or perhaps 100,000 German officers should be executed. Churchill was furious: pushing his glass forward, knocking it over so brandy spread across the table, he growled: “Such an attitude is contrary to the British sense of justice. The British Parliament and public would never support the execution of honest men who had fought for their country.” Roosevelt quipped that he would like to compromise: only 49,000 should be shot. Elliott Roosevelt, the President’s ne’er-do-well son who was also present, jumped tipsily to his feet to josh: wouldn’t the 50,000 fall in battle anyway?
“To your health, Elliott!” Stalin clinked glasses with him. But Churchill snarled at Roosevelt fils.
“Are you interested in damaging relations between the Allies . . . How dare you!”227 He headed for the door but as he reached it, “hands were clapped on my shoulders from behind, and there was Stalin, with Molotov at his side, both grinning broadly and eagerly declaring that they were only playing . . . Stalin has a very captivating manner when he chooses to use it.” Roosevelt’s deference to Stalin and shabbiness to Churchill were both unseemly and counterproductive but the heartiness was restored by Stalin tormenting Molotov: “Come here, Molotov, and tell us about your pact with Hitler.”
The finale was Churchill’s sixty-ninth birthday held in the dining hall of the British Legation which, Alan Brooke wrote in his diary, resembled “a Persian temple,” with the walls “covered in a mosaic of small pieces of looking glass” and “heavy deep red curtains. The Persian waiters were in blue and red livery” with oversized “white cotton gloves, the tips of the fingers of which hung limply and flapped about.” Sikhs guarded the doorways.
Beria, who was there incognito, insisted that the NKVD search the British Legation, which was supervised by him personally with that glossy ruffian Tsereteli. “There simply cannot be any doubt,” wrote a British security officer, Beria “was an extremely intelligent and shrewd man with tremendous willpower and ability to impress, command and lead other men.” He disdained anyone else’s opinion, becoming “very angry if anyone . . . opposed his proposals.” The other Russians “behaved like slaves in his presence.”
Once Beria had signed off, Stalin arrived, but when a valet tried to take his coat, a bodyguard overreacted by reaching for his pistol. Calm was quickly restored. A cake with sixty-nine candles stood on the main table. Stalin toasted “Churchill my fighting friend, if it is possible to consider Mr. Churchill my friend” and then walked round to clink glasses with the Englishman, putting his arm around his shoulders. Churchill answered: “To Stalin the Great!” When Churchill joked that Britain was “becoming pinker,” Stalin joked: “A sign of good health.”
At the climax, the chef of the Legation cuisine produced a creation that came closer to assassinating Stalin than all the German agents in all the souks of Persia. Stalin was making a toast when two mountainous ice-cream pyramids were wheeled in with “a base of ice one foot square and four inches deep,” a religious nightlight inside it and a tube rising ten inches out of the middle on which a plate supporting “a vast ice cream” had been secured with icing sugar. But as these creations approached Stalin, Brooke noticed that the lamp was melting the ice and “now looked more like the Tower of Pisa.” Suddenly the tilt assumed a more dangerous angle and the British Chief of Staff shouted to his neighbours to duck. “With the noise of an avalanche the whole wonderful construction slid over our heads and exploded in a clatter of plates.” Lunghi saw the nervous Persian waiter “stagger sideways at the last moment.” Pavlov in his new diplomatic uniform “came in for the full blast! . . . splashed from head to foot” but Brooke guessed “it was more than his life was worth to stop interpreting.” Stalin was unblemished.
“Missed the target,” whispered Air Marshal Sir Charles Portal.
At the final meetings next day, Roosevelt explained privately to Stalin that, since he had a presidential election coming up, he could not discuss Poland at this meeting. The subordination of the fate of the country for which the war was fought to American machine politics can only have encouraged Stalin’s plans for a tame Poland. At the last plenary meeting, it was a sign of the amateurism and immediacy of this intimate conference that Churchill and Stalin discussed Polish borders using a map torn out of The Times. The dangers of these meetings for Stalin’s entourage were underestimated by the Westerners until Churchill’s interpreter Birse presented his opposite number Pavlov with a set of Charles Dickens. Pavlov uneasily accepted the present.
“You’re getting VERY close to our Western friends,” smiled Stalin to Pavlov’s anxious discomfort.
On 2 December, Stalin, “satisfied” that the Allies had finally promised to launch Overlord in the spring, flew out of Teheran and changed out of his Marshal’s togs at Baku aerodrome, re-emerging in his old greatcoat, cap and boots. His train conveyed him to Stalingrad, his only post-battle visit to the city that had played such a decisive role in his life. He visited Paulus’s headquarters but his limousine drove too fast down the narrow streets strewn with heaps of German equipment. It collided with a woman driver who almost expired when she realized with whom she had crashed. She started crying: “It’s my fault.” Stalin got out and calmed her: “Don’t cry. It’s not your fault. Blame the war. Our car’s armoured and didn’t suffer. You can repair yours.” Afterwards he headed back to Moscow.1
Stalingrad, Kursk and Teheran restored Stalin’s zealous faith in his own infallible greatness. “When victory became obvious,” wrote Mikoyan, “Stalin got too big for his boots and became capricious.” The long boozy dinners started again: Stalin began to drink again, playing the ringmaster of a circus of uncouth hijinks, but in the mass of information he received from Beria, there was always much to worry him.
Beria arrested 931,544 persons in the liberated territory in 1943. As many as 250,000 people in Moscow attended Easter church services. He delivered the phone intercepts and informer reports to Stalin who read them carefully. Here the Supremo learned how Eisenstein was cutting his new movie, Ivan the Terrible, Part Two, because the Tsar’s murders reminded him of Yezhov’s Terror “which he couldn’t recall without shuddering . . .” The message was clear: liberalism and ill-discipline threatened the State. The cost of Stalin’s victories were vast: almost 26 million were dead, another 26 million homeless. There was a raging famine, treason among the Caucasian peoples, a Ukrainian nationalist civil war, and dangerous liberalism among the Russians themselves. All these had to be solved with the traditional Bolshevik solution, Terror.
Before they turned to terrorizing Russia proper, Beria and the local boss, Khrushchev, were running a new war in the Ukraine where three nationalist armies were fighting Soviet forces. Then there was the dubious loyalty of the Caucasus and Crimea.
In February 1944, Beria proposed the deportation of the Moslem Chechen and Ingush. There had been cases of treason but most had been loyal. Nonetheless Stalin and the GKO agreed—though Mikoyan claimed that he objected to it. On 20 February, Beria, Kobulov and the deportations expert, Serov, arrived in Grozny along with 19,000 Chekists and 100,000 NKVD troops. On 23 February, the locals were ordered to gather in their squares, then suddenly arrested and piled into trains bound for the East. By 7 March, Beria reported to Stalin that 500,000 innocents were on their way.
Other peoples, the Karachai and Kalmyks, joined the Volga Germans who had been deported in 1941. Beria constantly expanded the net: “The Balkars are bandits and . . . attacked the Red Army,” he wrote to Stalin on 25 February. “If you agree, before my return to Moscow, I can take necessary measures to resettle the Balkars. I ask your orders.” Over 300,000 of these people were deported, but where to dump them all? Like the Nazis with their Jews, Stalin’s men had to distribute this unwanted human flotsam throughout their empire. Molotov suggested 40,000 in Kazakhstan, 14,000 somewhere else. Kaganovich found the trains. Andreyev, now running Agriculture, dealt with their farming equipment. Everyone was involved. When an official noticed that there were 1300 Kalmyks still living in Rostov, Molotov replied that they must be deported at once. Mikoyan may have disapproved but the capital of the Karachais, Karachaevsk, was now renamed after him. In the dry language of these bureaucratic notes, we can only glimpse the tragedy and suffering of this monumental crime.
Then Beria reported the treason of Tatars in the Crimea and soon 160,000 were on their way eastwards in forty-five trains: he listed their food allowance to Stalin but given the thousands who died, it is unlikely that they received most of it. Throughout the year, Beria kept finding more pockets of these poor people: on 20 May, there were “still German supporters in the Kabardin Republic after resettlement of Balkars” and he asked if he could “remove” another 2,467 people: “Agreed. J. Stalin” is written at the bottom. By the time he had finished, a triumphant Beria had removed 1.5 million people. Stalin approved 413 medals for Beria’s Chekists. More than a quarter of the deportees died, according to the NKVD, but as many as 530,000 perished en route or on arrival at the camps. For each of these peoples, this was an apocalypse that approached the Holocaust.
While these cattle cars of human cargo trundled eastwards, famine was raging in Russia, Central Asia and the Ukraine. In a replay of collectivization, Stalin sensed weakness in his Politburo. There are hints of disturbing things in the archives: in November 1943, Andreyev reported to Malenkov from Saratov that “things are very bad here . . . Yesterday driving from Stalingrad . . . I saw terrible sights . . .” On 22 November 1944, Beria reported to Stalin another case of cannibalism in the Urals when two women kidnapped and ate four children. Mikoyan and Andreyev suggested giving the peasants seeds.
“To Molotov and Mikoyan,” Stalin scrawled on their note, “I vote against. Mikoyan’s behaviour is anti-state . . . he has absolutely corrupted Andreyev. Patronage over Narkomzag [Commissariat of Supply] should be taken away from Mikoyan and given to Malenkov . . .” This was the beginning of a growing iciness between Stalin and Mikoyan that was to become increasingly dangerous.2
On 20 May 1944, Stalin met his generals to coordinate the vast summer offensive that would finally toss the Germans off Soviet territory. Much of the Ukraine was already liberated and the Leningrad siege finally lifted. Stalin proposed a single thrust towards Bobruisk to Rokossovsky, who knew two thrusts were required to avoid senseless casualties. But Stalin was set on just one. Rokossovsky, the tall and graceful half-Polish general who was favoured by Stalin yet had been tortured just before the war, was brave enough to insist on his own view.
“Go out and think it over again,” said Stalin, who later summoned him back: “Have you thought it through, General?” asked Stalin again.
“Yes sir, Comrade Stalin.”
“Well then . . . a single thrust?”—and Stalin marked it on the map. There was silence until Rokossovsky replied: “Two thrusts are more advisable, Comrade Stalin.” Again silence fell.
“Go out and think it over again. Don’t be stubborn, Rokossovsky.” The general again sat next door until he realized he was not alone: Molotov and Malenkov loomed over him. Rokossovsky stood up.
“Don’t forget where you are and with whom you’re talking, General,” Malenkov threatened him. “You’re disagreeing with Comrade Stalin.”
“You’ll have to agree, Rokossovsky,” added Molotov. “Agree—that’s all there is to it!” The general was summoned back into the study: “So which is better?” asked Stalin.
“Two,” answered Rokossovsky. Silence descended until Stalin asked:
“Can it be that two blows are really better?” Stalin accepted Rokossovsky’s plan. On 23 June, the offensive shattered the German forces. Minsk and then Lvov were recaptured. On 8 July, Zhukov found Stalin at Kuntsevo in “great gaiety.” As he ordered the advance on the Vistula, Stalin was determined to impose his own government on Poland so that it would never again threaten Russia: on 22 July, he established a Polish Committee under Boleslaw Bierut to form the new government.
“Hitler’s like a gambler staking his last coin!” exulted Stalin.
“Germany will try to make peace with Churchill and Roosevelt,” said Molotov.
“Right,” said Stalin, “but Roosevelt and Churchill won’t agree.” Then the Poles threw a spanner into the works of the Grand Alliance.3
The Red Army offensive ground to an exhausted halt on the Vistula just east of Warsaw when, on 1 August, General Tadeusz Bor-Komorowski and the 20,000 patriots of the Polish Home Army rose against the Germans in the Warsaw Rising. But the patriots, in the words of one distinguished historian, aimed “not to help the Soviet advance but to forestall it.” Hitler ordered that Warsaw be razed, deploying a ghoulish crew of SS fanatics, convicts and Russian renegades to slaughter 225,000 civilians in one merciless inferno.
The extermination of the Home Army completed the “black work” of Katyn Forest for Stalin who had no interest in coming to their rescue. Yet the rising and, more particularly, the Western sympathy for it, sent Stalin into a spin. If its success threatened his Polish plans, then Anglo-American fury about its failure threatened the Grand Alliance.
On 1 August, Zhukov and Rokossovsky arrived to find Stalin “agitated,” pacing up to the maps and then striding off again, even putting down his unlit pipe, always a storm petrel. Stalin pressured the generals— could their armies advance? Zhukov and Rokossovsky said they must rest. Stalin seemed angry. Beria and Molotov threatened them. Stalin sent the generals into the library next door where they nervously discussed their plight. Rokossovsky thought Beria was inciting Stalin. Things could end badly: “I know very well what Beria is capable of,” whispered Rokossovsky, ultra-cautious as the son of a Polish officer. “I’ve been in his prisons.” Twenty minutes later, Malenkov appeared and claimed he was supporting the generals. There would be no rescue of Warsaw.
Zhukov suspected the Supremo had set up this charade as an alibi. But Soviet forces were exhausted: as Rokossovsky told a Western journalist, “The rising would have made sense only if we were on the point of taking Warsaw. That point had not been reached at any stage . . . We were pushed back.” Meanwhile, as Churchill and Roosevelt exerted intense pressure on their ally to aid the Poles, Stalin coolly claimed that their account of the rising was “greatly exaggerated.” By the time his armies pushed into Poland, Hungary and Romania, it was much too late for the patriots of Warsaw.4
Seven days after the surrender of the Home Army, Churchill arrived in Moscow to divide up the spoils of Eastern Europe. Stalin had stated his real view to Molotov in 1942: “The question of borders will be decided by force.” At Stalin’s Kremlin flat, Churchill, who was this time staying in a town house, proposed a “naughty document” to list their interests in the small countries by percentage. The Soviet record in Stalin’s own archives showed that, just as Roosevelt had undermined Churchill at Teheran, so now the Englishman opened this conversation by saying that the “Americans including the President would be shocked by the division of Europe into spheres of influence.” In Romania, Russia had 90 percent, Britain 10 percent; in Greece, Britain had 90 percent, Russia 10 percent. Stalin ticked it.
“Might it not be thought cynical if it seemed we’d disposed of these issues, so fateful to millions of people, in such an offhand manner?” said Churchill, half guilty at, and half revelling in, the arrogance of the Great Powers.
“No, you keep it,” replied Stalin. The document was taken seriously enough for Eden and Molotov to negotiate for two more days about the percentage of Soviet influence in Bulgaria and Hungary, both raised to 80 percent, and Stalin did stick to his part of the deal on Greece but that was because it suited him. The percentages agreement was, from Stalin’s point of view, surely a bemusing attempt to negotiate what was already a fait accompli.
The climax of the visit was Stalin’s first public appearance at the Bolshoi since the war began, accompanied by Churchill, Molotov, Harriman and his daughter Kathleen. When they arrived at the theatre, the lights were already dimmed—Stalin usually slipped in after the play had started. When the lights went up and the audience saw Stalin and Churchill, there were “thunderous cheers and clapping.” Stalin withdrew modestly but Churchill sent Vyshinsky to bring him back. The two stood there together, beaming amid cheering so loud it was “like a cloudburst on a tin roof.” Stalin and Molotov then shepherded their guests into the avant-loge where a dinner for twelve was laid out. Quaffing champagne, Stalin performed like a roguish old satyr, charming and chilling his guests in equal parts. When Molotov raised his glass to the “great leader,” Stalin quipped: “I thought he was going to say something new about me.” Someone joked that the Big Three were like the Trinity.
“If that’s so,” said Stalin, “Churchill must be the Holy Ghost. He flies about so much.”228 When Churchill finally left on 19 October, having made little progress over Poland, Stalin personally came to the airport to see him off, waving his handkerchief. 5
Stalin was now enjoying the power of victory—and the bullying showman who emerged was not a pretty sight. His respectful gaiety with Churchill metamorphosed into threatening drunkenness with the less powerful such as Charles de Gaulle. In December, the Frenchman visited Moscow to sign a treaty of alliance and mutual assistance. In return, Stalin wanted French recognition of Bierut’s Polish government which de Gaulle refused to give. By the time of the banquet, the negotiations were stuck. This did not stop Stalin getting swaggeringly drunk, to the horror of the gloomy de Gaulle. Stalin complained to Harriman that de Gaulle was “an awkward and clumsy man,” but that did not matter because they “must drink more wine and then everything will straighten out.”
Stalin, swigging champagne, took over the toasts from Molotov. After praising Roosevelt and Churchill, while pointedly ignoring de Gaulle, Stalin embarked on a terrifying gallows tour of his entourage: he toasted Kaganovich, “a brave man. He knows that if the trains do not arrive on time”—he paused—“we shall shoot him!” Then: “Come here!” Kaganovich rose and they clinked glasses jovially. Then Stalin lauded Air Force Commander Novikov, this “good Marshal, let’s drink to him. And if he doesn’t do his job properly, we’ll hang him.” (Novikov would soon be arrested and tortured.) Then he spotted Khrulev: “He’d better do his best, or he’ll be hanged for it, that’s the custom in our country!” Again: “Come here!” Noticing the distaste on de Gaulle’s face, Stalin chuckled: “People call me a monster, but as you see, I make a joke of it. Maybe I’m not horrible after all.”
Molotov collared his French opposite number, Bidault, with whom he began arguing over the treaty. Stalin gestured at them, calling out to Bulganin: “Bring the machine guns. Let’s liquidate the diplomats.” Leading his guests out for coffee and movies, Stalin “kept hugging the French and lurching around,” noticed Khrushchev who was also present but had avoided a threatening toast. He was “completely drunk.” While the diplomats negotiated, Stalin drank more champagne. Finally in the early hours, when de Gaulle had gone to bed, the Russians suddenly agreed to sign the treaty without recognition of Bierut. De Gaulle was rushed back into the Kremlin where Stalin first asked him to sign the original treaty. When de Gaulle angrily retorted: “France has been insulted,” Stalin cheerfully called for the new draft which was then signed at 6:30 a.m.
As the fastidious Frenchman left, Stalin called for his interpreter and laughed: “You know too much. I’d better send you to Siberia!” De Gaulle looked back one last time: “I saw Stalin sitting alone at a table. He had started eating again.”
The same exuberant victor presided over a series of dinners and banquets for the visiting Yugoslavs that winter. Stalin was outraged that the Yugoslav Politburo member Milovan Djilas had complained about the rape and pillage of the Red Army. Stalin regarded any criticism of the army as an attack on himself. He drunkenly lectured the Yugoslavs about his army “which pushed its way across thousands of miles” only to be attacked “by none other than Djilas! Djilas whom I received so well!” In the absence of the man himself, Djilas’s wife, Mitra Mitrovic, one of the delegates, caught his eye and he “proposed toasts, joked, teased, wept” before kissing her repeatedly, jesting salaciously: “I’ll kiss you even if the Yugoslavs and Djilas accuse me of having raped you!”
When Stalin invited some American officials to the Kremlin cinema, he moved to sit between the leading Westerners but then he turned round to Kavtaradze: “Come on, boy, sit next to me!”
“How can I?” answered Kavtaradze. “You’ve guests.”
Stalin waved his hand, adding in Georgian: “Fuck them!”
That New Year’s Eve, Stalin and his magnates, along with General Khrulev, saw in 1945 with an all-night, singing and dancing Bacchanal. 6