Simon Montefiore - Stalin

“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] This was far from the only such madness: on other occasions, Stalin commissioned a tank based on a crazy principle that “in being destroyed, it protects.” 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.