Simon Montefiore - Stalin

Stalin was also astonishingly tolerant when Timoshenko asked for more men, having squandered so many: “Maybe the time has come for you to wage war by losing less blood, as the Germans are doing? Wage war not by quantity but by skill. If you won’t learn how to fight better, all the armaments produced in our whole country won’t be enough for you…” This was highly ironic from the most wasteful Supremo in history. Even as they retreated, Stalin remained sarcastically mild to Timoshenko: “Don’t be afraid of Germans—Hitler’s not as bad as they say.”

Khrushchev thought they were spared because Mikoyan and Malenkov had witnessed his call to Kuntsevo but it was perhaps simpler: life and death was Stalin’s prerogative, and he liked [203] Timoshenko’s letters to Stalin, scribbled on pages torn out of a notebook, which are in the newly opened Stalin archive, shed light on the Kharkov offensive and Khrushchev’s near breakdown. Khrushchev and Timoshenko. Either way, this was Khrushchev’s greatest crisis until, as Stalin’s successor, he blundered into the Cuban Missile Crisis twenty years later. Later, Stalin humiliatingly emptied his pipe on Khrushchev’s head: “That’s in accordance with Roman tradition,” he said. “When a Roman commander lost a battle, he poured ashes on his own head… the greatest disgrace a commander could endure.” 7

On 19 June, a Luftwaffe aircraft crashed beyond German lines, containing a briefcase bearing the plans for Hitler’s summer offensive to exploit the Kharkov disaster and push towards Stalingrad and the North Caucasus. But Stalin decided that the information was either incomplete or a plant. A week later, the Germans attacked exactly as the plans warned, smashing a hole between the Briansk and South-Western Fronts, heading towards Voronezh and then Stalingrad. But it was the oil fields that Hitler really coveted. When he flew into headquarters at Poltava, he told Field Marshal von Bock: “If we don’t take Maikop and Grozny, then I must put an end to the war.”

Timoshenko and Khrushchev fell back towards Stalingrad. When Timoshenko asked for more divisions, Stalin replied sharply: “If they sold divisions in the market, I’d buy you one or two but unfortunately they don’t.” Once again, Timoshenko’s front was in free fall. On 4 July, Stalin sarcastically quizzed the Marshal: “So is it a fact that the 301st and 227th Divisions are now encircled and you’re surrendering to the enemy?”

“The 227th is retreating,” replied Timoshenko pathetically, “but the 301st—we can’t find it…”

“Your guesses sound like lies. If you continue to lose divisions like this, you’ll soon be commander of nothing. Divisions aren’t needles and it’s a very complicated matter to lose them.” 8

Dizzy with over-confidence, Hitler divided his forces into two: one pushed across the Don to Stalingrad while the other headed southwards towards those Caucasian oil fields. When Rostov-on-Don fell, Stalin drafted another savage order: “Not One Step Backwards,” decreeing that “panic-mongers and cowards must be liquidated on the spot” and “blocking units” must be formed behind the lines to kill waverers. Nonetheless, Hitler’s southern Army Group A broke into the Caucasus. On 4 and 5 August, Stalin, Beria and Molotov spent most of the nights in the office as the Germans took Voroshilovsk (Stravropol), racing towards Grozny and Ordzhonikidze (Vladikavkaz) in the Caucasus and, on the Volga, approached Stalingrad. Paulus’s Sixth Army was poised to take the city and split Russia in two. 9

On 12 August, amid the calamitous stirrings of the decisive battle of the entire war, Winston Churchill arrived in Moscow to tell Stalin that there would be no Second Front soon, a mission he compared to “carrying a lump of ice to the North Pole.” Molotov met him at the airport and then escorted him to the residence he had been assigned. On the way, Churchill noticed that the Packard’s windows were over two inches thick.

“It’s more prudent,” said Molotov. Stalin and Beria took Churchill’s visit very seriously, assigning him a bodyguard of 120. The defences around the Kremlin were redoubled. Stalin gave up his own house, Kuntsevo, dacha No. 7. It is a mark of Soviet obscurity that the British were never told and it has taken sixty years to emerge. Perhaps Stalin was repaying Churchill in kind for lending his dacha, Chequers, to Molotov.

Astrapping aide-de-camp of a princely family, according to Churchill, acted as his host at Kuntsevo. Churchill was shown into Stalin’s dining room, where the long table was laden with “every delicacy and stimulant that supreme power can command.” The British curiously explored. [204] Kuntsevo’s furniture was “stylish ‘Utility,’ sumptuous and brightly coloured,” thought a young British diplomat, John Reed, “vulgarly furnished and possessed of every convenience a Soviet commissar’s heart could desire. Even the lavatories were modern and… clean.” A hundred yards from the house was Stalin’s new air-raid shelter of the “latest and most luxurious type,” with lifts descending ninety feet into the ground where there were eight or ten rooms inside a concrete box of massive thickness, divided by sliding doors. “The whole air-conditioned and execrably furnished… like some monstrous… Lyons Corner House,” wrote Reed. Without realizing it, Churchill described Stalin’s home: surrounded by a stockade, fifteen feet high, guarded on both sides, it was a “fine large house standing in its own extensive lawns and gardens in a fir wood of about twenty acres. There were agreeable walks… fountains… and a large glass tank with… goldfish. I was conducted through a spacious reception room to a bedroom and bathroom [205] The bathrooms in all Stalin’s dachas were capacious with the baths specially constructed to fit his precise height. of almost equal size. Blazing almost dazzling electric lights displayed the spotless cleanliness.”

Within three hours, Churchill, Harriman, and the British Ambassador Sir Archibald Clark Kerr were driven into the Kremlin to meet with Stalin, Molotov and Voroshilov who, banned from front-line commands, now became the Vozhd ’s diplomatic gimp, a comedic sideshow to Stalin’s diplomatic double act with Molotov. Churchill decided to declare the bad news first: no Second Front that year. Stalin, faced with a fight for his life on the Volga, reacted sarcastically: “You can’t win wars without taking risks,” he said and later: “You mustn’t be so afraid of the Germans.”

Churchill growled that Britain had fought alone in 1940. Having got the worst bit out of the way, Churchill revealed that the British and Americans were about to launch Operation Torch to seize North Africa, which he illustrated with the drawing of a soft-bellied crocodile and the big globe that stood in the room adjacent to Stalin’s office. In an impressive demonstration of his geopolitical instincts, Stalin immediately rattled off the reasons that this operation made sense. This, wrote Churchill, “showed the Russian Dictator’s swift and complete mastery” of military strategy. Then Stalin surprised them more: “Let God help the success of this enterprise!” 1

The next morning, Churchill met that “urbane, rigid diplomatist” Molotov alone to warn him: “Stalin will make a great mistake to treat us roughly when we have come so far.”

“Stalin’s a very wise man,” Molotov replied. “You may be sure that, however he argues, he understands all.”

At eleven, Stalin and Molotov, accompanied by the usual interpreter Pavlov, received Churchill in the Little Corner where the Vozhd handed his guest a memorandum attacking the West for not launching a Second Front, and again mocked British cowardice.