Simon Montefiore - Stalin

Stalin himself presented an air of solitary inscrutability, revealing his plans to no one, while the magnates prepared for evacuation. As the air raids on Moscow intensified, Stalin climbed up onto the sunroof at Kuntsevo and watched the dogfights. Once some shrapnel fell near him as he watched from his garden and Vlasik handed him the warm fragments. Vasily Stalin arrived one night to visit his father. When a German plane passed over the house, the guards did not open fire since they did not want to draw attention to Stalin’s residence.

“Cowards!” shouted Vasily, firing the guns himself.

Stalin came out: “Did he hit anything?” he asked.

“No, he didn’t.”

“Winner of the Voroshilov Marksman Prize,” he said drily. But the stress was telling on him: no one could believe how much he had aged. Stalin was now a “short man with a tired haggard face… his eyes had lost their old steadiness, his voice lacked assurance.” Khrushchev was appalled to see this “bag of bones.” When Andreyev and his daughter Natasha walked around the freezing Kremlin, they saw Stalin strolling up and down beside the battlements, quite alone and, as usual, under-dressed, with no gloves on and his face blue with the chill. In his spare moments, he kept reading history: it was now that he scribbled on a new biography of Ivan the Terrible: “teacher teacher” and then: “We shall overcome!” His moods swung between Spartan grit and hysterical rantings. Koniev was amazed to receive a call in which Stalin cried:

“Comrade Stalin’s not a traitor. Comrade Stalin’s an honourable man; his only mistake was that he trusted too much in cavalrymen.” He was harassed by constant “sightings” of Nazi parachutists landing in the middle of Moscow: “Parachutist? How many? A company?” Stalin was barking into the phone when one general arrived to report. “And who saw them? Did you see them? And where did they land? You’re insane… I tell you I don’t believe it. The next thing you’ll be telling me is that they have already landed on your office!” He slammed down the phone. “For several hours now they’ve been tormenting me with wails about German parachutists. They won’t let me work. Blabbermouths!” 6

Stalin’s staff prepared for his departure, without actually checking with him. The dachas were dynamited. A special train was prepared, standing in a hidden siding, packed with belongings from his houses such as his beloved library. Four American Douglas DC-3 aeroplanes stood ready.

At the end of 15 October, Stalin ordered his guards to drive him out to Kuntsevo, which had been closed down and mined. The commandant told him he could not go in but Stalin ordered: “Clear the mines in two or three hours, stoke the stove in the little house and I’ll work there.”

The next morning, he headed into the Kremlin earlier than usual. On the way, this worshipper of order was amazed to see mobs looting the shops along his route. His guards claimed that he ordered the car to stop on Smolensk Square, where he was surrounded by a crowd who asked rather pertinent questions such as: “When will the Soviet Army stop the enemy?”

“That day’s near,” he replied before driving on to the Kremlin. 7

At 8 a.m., Mikoyan, who had been working as usual until six in the morning, was woken up and summoned. At nine, the magnates gathered in Stalin’s flat to debate the great decision of the war. Stalin proposed to evacuate the whole government to Kuibyshev, to order the army to defend the capital and keep the Germans fighting until he could throw in his reserves. Molotov and Mikoyan were ordered to manage the evacuation, with Kaganovich providing the trains. Stalin proposed that all the Politburo leave that day and, he added sensationally, “I will leave tomorrow morning.”

“Why do we have to leave today if you’re leaving tomorrow?” Mikoyan indignantly asked Stalin. “We can also go tomorrow. Shcherbakov and Beria shouldn’t leave until they’ve organized the underground resistance. I’m staying and I’ll go tomorrow with you.” Stalin agreed. Molotov and Mikoyan began to brief the commissars: the Foreign Commissariat was called at 11 a.m. and ordered to report to Kazan Station at once. In the lift from Stalin’s office, Kaganovich said to Mikoyan: “Listen, when you leave, please tell me so I don’t get left behind.” As the leaders rushed in and out of Stalin’s office, their families were given just an hour’s notice to evacuate the city. [197] In distant Kuibyshev, the ancient city of Samara on the Volga that had been chosen as the new capital should Moscow have to be abandoned, several buildings, including the local Party headquarters and a mansion in a narrow gully beside the steep banks of the Volga, surrounded by paved walks overlooking the river, were prepared for Stalin. A special air-raid shelter, reached by a lift, was constructed whence he could rule what was left of Russia. Svetlana Stalin was set up in a small town house with a courtyard along with her housekeeper Alexandra Nakashidze, and Galina, Vasily’s pregnant wife and Yakov’s daughter, Gulia (without her arrested mother). Kalinin and his mistress shared a small house with the Mikoyans; the Khrushchevs shared with the Malenkovs. The Poskrebyshevs, Litvinovs and others lived in the local sanatorium.

At 7 p.m. the next day, Ashken Mikoyan and the three younger Mikoyanchiks, along with President Kalinin and other top families, boarded the CC train. In the heavily guarded station, women in fur coats stood chatting with their well-dressed children amid the steam of the trains while soldiers carefully loaded crates marked “handle with care—crystal.” Poskrebyshev sobbed as he put three-year-old Natasha on the train with her nanny, unaware that her mother, Bronka, had been executed three days earlier. He promised to visit his daughter as soon as possible—and hurried back to Stalin. As he waited, Valentin Berezhkov, Molotov’s interpreter, noticed that the puddles of melted snow were freezing. The German Panzers could advance again.

Zhukov resolved to hold the line. But he could sense the panic at the top. He was convinced he could save Moscow, he told a visiting editor, “but are THEY, there?” he asked, meaning Stalin in the Kremlin. 8

That evening, the leaders arrived in an eerily deserted Kremlin. As one commissar entered his apartment, Stalin appeared from his bedroom, smoking and pacing, in his old tunic and baggy, booted trousers. They noticed that the bookcases were empty, books all loaded onto the train. No one sat down. Then Stalin stopped pacing. “What’s the situation like in Moscow?” The magnates remained silent but a junior commissar spoke up: the Metro was not running, the bakeries were closed. The factories thought the government had fled. Half of them had not been paid. Workers believed the boss of the State Bank had run off with the money.

“Well, it’s not so bad. I thought it would be worse.” Stalin ordered the money be flown back from Gorky. Shcherbakov and Pronin, Moscow’s Party chief and Mayor, must restore order and broadcast the fact that Moscow would be held to the last drop of blood: Stalin remained in the Kremlin. The leaders headed out into the town: Mikoyan appeared before five thousand restless, unpaid workers at the Stalin Automobile Works. But the panic continued: stragglers and thieves patrolled the streets. Even the British Embassy across the Moskva from the Kremlin was looted, its guards having fled. Demolition units mined Moscow’s sixteen bridges. 9

Stalin hesitated for two long days. No one knows his exact movements but he no longer appeared in his office. At the height of the legendary struggle for Moscow, the Supremo actually dossed down in his greatcoat on a mattress in the subterranean halls of the Metro, not unlike an omnipotent tramp. Stalin’s working arrangements reveal the dire lack of preparation for war. There were frequent air raids but there were no bunkers at either the Kremlin or Kuntsevo. While Kaganovich supervised the urgent construction of bunkers precisely modelled on Stalin’s study, the Supremo moved to work in the only proper command post available, the air defence HQ in the town house at 33 Kirov Street (Myasnitskaya Street), where he had a bedroom. During air raids, he descended by elevator to work in the Kirov Metro Station (now Chistye Prudy) until, on 28 October, a bomb fell in the courtyard of the house. Then Stalin started to work permanently in the station, where he also slept.