Simon Montefiore - Stalin

The Soviet boyars were alarmed but the experienced ones sensed danger. Molotov was careful not to sign any documents. As the Germans advanced, the government was paralysed for two long days.

“You’ve no idea what it’s like here,” Malenkov told Khrushchev.

On the evening of the 30th, Chadaev returned to the office to get Stalin’s signature as Premier but there was still no sign of him: “He wasn’t here yesterday either.”

“No, he wasn’t here yesterday either,” Poskrebyshev replied, without a trace of sarcasm. But something had to be done. The new boy, Voznesensky, appeared at Poskrebyshev’s desk like all the others. When Chadaev asked him to sign the documents, he refused and called Stalin himself but “No reply from the dacha.” So he called upstairs to Molotov who suggested meeting later but gave no clue that he was already closeted with Beria, Malenkov and Voroshilov, arranging what to do. Now the dynamic Beria devised a new super-war cabinet, an ultra-Politburo with a tiny membership and sweeping powers, chaired by Stalin, if he would accept it, and containing Molotov, Voroshilov, Malenkov and himself: three Old Bolsheviks and two ascendant meteors. The exclusion of many of the magnates was a triumph for Beria and Malenkov, who were not even full Politburo members.

Once this was fixed, Molotov called Mikoyan, who was talking to Voznesensky, and the Politburo gathered. The magnates had never been so powerful: these manoeuvres most resembled the intrigues just after Stalin’s stroke twelve years later, for this was the only real opportunity they had to overthrow Stalin since the revelation of Lenin’s damning Testament almost twenty years earlier. Molotov told them about Stalin’s breakdown but Mikoyan replied that even if the Vozhd was incapacitated, “the very name Stalin was a great force for rousing the morale of the people.” But bumptious Voznesensky made what ultimately proved to be a fatal mistake: “Vyacheslav!” he hailed Molotov. “You go ahead and we’ll follow you!” Molotov must have blanched at this deadly suggestion and turned to Beria [187] Beria’s son Sergo, whose memoirs are reliable on personal anecdotes and unreliable on political matters, claims it was Alexander Shcherbakov, the Moscow Party leader, who made this mistake and used to ask Beria if he would ever betray him to Stalin. Mikoyan, who was actually there, is much more trustworthy but Shcherbakov may have lost his nerve on another occasion, the threat to Moscow in October. who proposed his State Defence Committee. They decided to go out to Kuntsevo.

When they arrived, they cautiously stepped into the gloomy, dark-green house, shrouded in pinewoods, and were shown into the little dining room. There, sitting nervously in an armchair, was a “thinner… haggard… gloomy” Stalin. When he saw the seven or so Politburo members entering, Stalin “turned to stone.” In one account, Stalin greeted them with more depressed ramblings: “Great Lenin’s no more… If only he could see us now. See those to whom he entrusted the fate of his country… I am inundated with letters from Soviet people, rightly rebuking us… Maybe some among you wouldn’t mind putting the blame on me.” Then, he looked at them searchingly and asked: “Why’ve you come?”

Stalin “looked alert, somewhat strange,” recalled Mikoyan, “and his question was no less strange. Actually he should have summoned us himself. I had no doubt: he decided we had arrived to arrest him.” Beria watched Stalin’s face carefully. “It was obvious,” he later told his wife, “Stalin expected anything could happen, even the worst.”

The magnates were frightened too: Beria later teased Mikoyan for hiding behind the others. Molotov, who was the most senior and therefore the most exposed to Stalin’s vengeance, stepped forward.

“Thank you for your frankness,” said Molotov, according to a possibly secondary source, “but I tell you here and now that if some idiot tried to turn me against you, I’d see him damned. We’re asking you to come back to work…”

“Yes but think about it,” answered Stalin. “Can I live up to people’s hopes anymore? Can I lead the country to final victory? There may be more deserving candidates.”

“I believe I shall be voicing the unanimous opinion,” interjected Voroshilov. “There’s none more worthy.”

“ Pravilno! Right!” repeated the magnates. Molotov told Stalin that Malenkov and Beria proposed to form a State Defence Committee.

“With whom at its head?” Stalin asked.

“You, Comrade Stalin.” Stalin’s relief was palpable: “the tension left his face”—but he did not say anything for a while, then: “Well…”

Beria took a step and said: “You, Comrade Stalin, will be the head” and he listed the members.

Stalin noted Mikoyan and Voznesensky had been excluded but Beria suggested they should run the government. The pragmatic Mikoyan, knowing that his responsibilities for army supply were relevant, asked to be a special representative. Stalin assigned industries—Malenkov took over aeroplanes; Molotov, tanks; Voznesensky, armaments. Stalin was back in power.

So had Stalin really suffered a nervous breakdown or was this simply a performance? Nothing was ever straightforward with this adept political actor. The breakdown was real enough: he was depressed and exhausted. It was not out of character: he had suffered similar moments on Nadya’s death and during the Finnish War. His collapse was an understandable reaction to his failure to read Hitler, a mistake which could not be hidden from his courtiers who had repeatedly heard him insist there would be no invasion in 1941. But that was only the first part of this disaster: the military collapse had revealed the damage that Stalin had done and his ineptitude as commander. The Emperor had no clothes. Only a dictator who had killed any possible challengers could have survived it. In any other system, this would have brought about a change of government but no such change was available here.

Yet Molotov and Mikoyan were right: it was also “for effect.” The withdrawal from power was a well-tried pose, successfully employed from Achilles and Alexander the Great to Ivan. Stalin’s retreat allowed him to be effectively re-elected by the Politburo, with the added benefit of drawing a line under the bungles up to that point. These had been forgiven: “Stalin enjoyed our support again,” Mikoyan wrote pointedly. So it was both a breakdown and a political restoration.

“We were witnesses to Stalin’s moments of weakness,” said Beria afterwards. “Joseph Vissarionovich will never forgive that move of ours.” Mikoyan had been right to hide.

Next afternoon, Stalin reappeared in the office, “a new man” committed to play the role of warlord for which he believed himself specially qualified. On 1 July, the newspapers announced that Stalin was the Chairman of the State Defence Committee, the GKO. Soon afterwards he sent Timoshenko to command the Western Front defending Moscow: on 19 July, Stalin became Commissar of Defence and, on 8 August, Supreme Commander-in-Chief: henceforth, the generals called him Verkhovnyi , Supremo. On 16 July, he restored the dual command of political commissars that the army so hated, abolished after Finland: the commissars, led by Mekhlis, were to conduct “ceaseless struggles against cowards, panic-mongers and deserters” but these overweening amateurs often took actual command, like their master. “The Defence Commissariat,” said Khrushchev, “was like a kennel of mad dogs with Kulik and Mekhlis.” [188] The see-saw between traditional “single command” by a general and “dual command” by generals and Party Commissars charted the progress of the Party: the Commissars were introduced three times—in 1918, 1937 and 1941—and abolished three times when the prestige of the soldiers needed to be raised—in 1925, 1940 and 1942. Meanwhile Stalin reunited the security forces, the NKVD and NKGB, under Beria. On 3 July, Stalin spoke to the people in a new voice, as a Russian national leader.