Simon Montefiore - Stalin

Stalin abruptly ordered his most trusted cronies to travel to the fronts and find out what was happening. When they hesitated, Stalin shouted: “Immediately.” Chief of Staff Zhukov headed for the South-Western Front but asked who would run things in his absence.

“Don’t waste time,” scoffed Stalin. “We’ll manage somehow.” Malenkov and Budyonny, a strange coupling, the bloodless bureaucrat and the swashbuckling Cossack, flew to Briansk; Kulik to the Western Front.

The whirlwind almost consumed them: in a series of semi-farcical fiascos, all were lucky to escape with their lives. Meanwhile, in the Little Corner, Stalin’s hours were as inconsistent as the performance of his armies. Stalin and Beria were the last two to leave at 4:45 that afternoon, having been up since dawn. They still believed their counter-offensives would throw the battle onto enemy territory. They must have grabbed some sleep but Stalin was back in the office at 3:20 on the morning of 23 June to meet Molotov, Mekhlis and Beria until the early hours. By the 25th, faced with the free fall of the fronts, Stalin was spending the whole night, from 1:00 to 5:50 a.m., in the office in a state of rising outrage as one by one his special envoys disappeared into the cataclysm.

“That good-for-nothing Kulik needs a kick in the arse,” he said. 1

Only Zhukov, brutal, courageous and energetic, managed to counter-attack on the South-Western Front, brandishing the Stalinist ruthlessness that distinguished him throughout the war: “Arrest immediately,” reads one of his typical orders to the Special Departments about retreating officers. “And bring them to trial urgently as traitors and cowards.” 2

The boozy buffoon Marshal Kulik, whose war was to be a chronicle of tragicomical blunders, outfitted himself in a pilot’s fetching leathers, cap and goggles and arrived on the Western Front like a Stalinist Biggles on the evening of 23 June. Bewildered by the rout of the Tenth Army, he was cut off, surrounded and almost captured. He had to escape in fancy dress. “The behaviour of Marshal Kulik was incomprehensible,” the regimental Commissar denounced Kulik to Mekhlis. “He ordered everyone to take off their regalia, throw out documents and then change into peasant garb,” a disguise he was more than capable of carrying off. Burning his marshal’s uniform (and his Biggles outfit), “he proposed to throw away our arms and he told me personally to throw away my medals and documents… Kulik rode on a horse-drawn cart along the very road just taken by German tanks…” 3The Western Front itself was disintegrating. Ailing Marshal Shaposhnikov collapsed from the strain. Headquarters lost him too.

Like a game of hide-and-seek, in which more and more children are sent to find the ones hiding, Stalin sent Voroshilov to find Kulik and Shaposhnikov. On 26 June, the “First Marshal” arrived in Mogilev on a special train but was unable to find either the Western Front or the two marshals. Eventually his adjutant came upon a pitiful sight that looked more like a “gypsy encampment” than a headquarters and espied Shaposhnikov on the ground covered by a coat, looking very dead. Then he saw Pavlov, the commander, lying alone beneath a tree eating kasha out of a mess-tin in the pouring rain which he did not seem to have noticed. Shaposhnikov stirred. The adjutant realized he was alive and introduced himself. Shaposhnikov, wincing with pain, thanked God that Voroshilov had come and started to shave. Pavlov, who had now finished his kasha , was dazed and desperate: “I’m done for!”

Voroshilov descended on the camp with an explosion of threats, while sending his adjutant to hunt for Kulik. Then the two marshals retired to the special train to decide what to do about poor Pavlov. Voroshilov ordered dinner: a cook brought in ham, bread and tea, a repast that evidently disappointed the Marshal because he became furious, screaming for his cook, Comrade Franz, who emerged and stood to attention. Voroshilov demanded to know how he dared serve such a meal for two marshals.

“Why’ve you sliced the ham? Do people cut ham this way? In a god-damn inn, they serve better ham!” Voroshilov summoned Pavlov, berating him for his failures. In another of those moments that reveal the importance of personal vendetta, he reminded Pavlov that he had once complained to Stalin about him. Pavlov fell to his knees, begged for forgiveness and kissed the Marshal’s boots. Voroshilov returned to Moscow. 4

At dawn on 4 July, Mekhlis arrested Pavlov for treason: “We ask you to confirm arrest and prosecution,” Mekhlis reported. Stalin welcomed it “as one of the true ways to improve the health of the Front.” Under torture, Pavlov implicated General Meretskov who was immediately arrested too. Before Pavlov’s “trial,” Poskrebyshev brought Stalin the “[Draft] Sentence.” Seeing that it contained the traditional inventions, Stalin told Poskrebyshev: “I approve the sentence but tell Ulrikh to get rid of all that rubbish about ‘conspiratorial activity.’ The case shouldn’t drag out. No appeal. And then inform the fronts so that they know that defeatists will be punished without mercy.” Mikoyan (and presumably the rest of the Politburo) approved of the sentence and still did so thirty years later when he wrote his memoirs: “It was a pity to lose him but it was justified.” On 22 July, the four commanding officers of the Western Front were shot. So many telegrams flooded in asking permission to shoot traitors, they blocked up the wires in Mekhlis’s office. That day, he told them to sentence and shoot their own traitors. 5

Stalin was absorbing the scale of the catastrophe. The fronts were out of control: the Nazis were approaching Minsk, the air force decimated, thirty divisions shattered. On the 26th, Stalin urgently recalled Zhukov from the South-Western Front: the Chief of Staff found Timoshenko and General Vatutin standing to attention before Stalin, their “eyes red from lack of sleep.” Stalin ordered: “Put your heads together and tell me what can be done.” [184] Sometime that day, the Politburo secretly ordered Lenin’s body to be removed from the Mausoleum and despatched to Tyumen in Siberia. He gave them forty minutes to propose new lines of defence. 6

Yet even in these frantic times, Stalin remembered his own family. On 25 June, Stalin was meeting with Timoshenko to discuss a “situation that was extremely serious on all fronts” when the Defence Commissar plucked up the courage to ask if Yakov Djugashvili, the Leader’s oldest son by his first marriage who had always disappointed him and whom he had treated callously, should be sent to the front, as he requested. Stifling his anger, Stalin replied, “Some, to put it mildly, inordinately zealous officials are always trying too hard to please their superiors. I don’t include you in that number but I advise you never to ask me questions like that again.” Stalin said nothing else about it but later, he checked that the boys, Yakov and Artyom, both artillerymen, were to be sent to the front line. After Vasily threw a goodbye party, Yakov’s wife, Julia, saw off her beloved Yasha in her red dress, which she later believed was cursed.

One night during the first ten days of the war, Stalin called Zhenya Alliluyeva whom he had cut ever since her remarriage. Visiting Kuntsevo, she had “never seen Joseph so crushed.” He asked her to take Svetlana and the children to the dacha in Sochi and then gave her a stunningly honest précis of the war situation that shocked her since the propaganda was still claiming that the heroic Red Army was about to crush the Fascist invader: “The war will be long. Lots of blood will be shed… Please take Svetlana southwards.” It was a mark of Zhenya’s force of personality, the very thing that made her so attractive and irritating, that she refused. She must accompany her husband. Stalin was “upset and angry.” He never saw Zhenya again.