Simon Montefiore - Stalin

Molotov frowned, Churchill noticed, not realizing he may have been sowing the seeds of mistrust that almost cost Molotov his life. But Stalin’s face lit with merriment: “It was not to New York he went. He went to Chicago where the other gangsters live.”

“Have the stresses of this war been as bad to you personally as carrying through the policy of collective farms?” Churchill asked.

“Oh no,” replied Stalin revealingly. That had been “a terrible struggle.”

Churchill invited Stalin to London and the Vozhd recalled his visit in 1907 with Lenin, Gorky and Trotsky. On the subject of great historical figures, Churchill praised his ancestor the Duke of Marlborough as an inspiration for he, “in this time, put an end to the danger to European freedom during the War of Spanish Succession.” Churchill got “carried away” praising Marlborough’s military brilliance. But a roguish “smile loomed on Stalin’s face”: “I think Britain had a more talented military leader,” teased Stalin, “in the person of Wellington who crushed Napoleon who presented the greatest danger in History.”

By 1:30 a.m., they had not yet started eating but Stalin popped out, probably to hear the latest dire news from the Caucasus. When Sir Alexander Cadogan, Permanent Under-Secretary at the Foreign Office, arrived with a draft of the press release, Stalin offered him the suckling pig. “When my friend excused himself,” wrote Churchill, “our host fell upon the victim single-handedly.” The dinner finally ended around 3 a.m. Churchill begged Molotov not to see him off at dawn for he “was clearly tired out.”

“Do you really think I would fail to be there?” replied Molotov urbanely.

Back at Kuntsevo, Churchill lay full length on Stalin’s sofa, “started to chuckle and to stick a pair of gay legs in the air: Stalin had been splendid… What a pleasure it was to work with ‘that great man.’” As Churchill, undressed to reveal a “skimpy crumpled vest” whence “a pair of wrinkled creamy buttocks protruded,” he continued to rave, as he finally climbed into a bath, “Stalin this, Stalin that.” It was already dawn; the alliance was saved; Molotov arrived to take him to the airport. 4

Stalin recuperated from his Churchillian carousal at home but at 11:30 p.m., he arrived at the office to face the deteriorating crisis in the North Caucasus where the Germans were approaching Ordzhonikidze and Grozny. Budyonny, commander of the North Caucasus Front, had just been joined by Kaganovich who had demanded the right to redeem himself at the front after being sacked as railway boss. Stalin agreed, saying he “knows the North Caucasus well and got on well with Budyonny in the Civil War.” The bow-legged Cossack and the Jewish Iron Commissar struggled to stop the Germans. Budyonny lost none of “his dash and sense of irony,” refusing to go into his shelter during raids: “Never mind: let them bomb!” but “the Locomotive” at war was not a pretty sight.

Surrounded by a “suite of officers from his personal bodyguard and consultants from Moscow… toadies, wranglers and intriguers,” working all night in a permanent state of bellowing hysteria, always playing with his trademark worry beads or a key chain, Kaganovich fancied himself “a great strategist… issuing orders all on his own” and insisted on interfering in every military plan, setting impossible deadlines, shouting, “Report personally… on the fulfillment of the order—or else!” When some trucks blocked the path of his limousine, “Lazarus,” as his officers nicknamed him, went berserk, bellowing: “Demote! Arrest! Court martial! Shoot!” But these bawlings did not stop the Germans.

“What’s the good of a defence ridge if it isn’t defended?” Stalin reprimanded Kaganovich. “And it seems you have not managed to turn the situation around even where there is no panic and the troops fight quite well.”

Kaganovich however came closer to war than many others. He was hit by shrapnel in the hand, a badge of honour of which he was deeply proud. He was the only Politburo member to be wounded. [206] He received an engraved clock from the Front to show its gratitude: it is now in the Kaganovich archive at RGASPI. Interestingly, both Leonid Brezhnev and Mikhail Suslov, who together ruled the Soviet Union for almost two decades after 1964, got to know Kaganovich on this front. When Kaganovich flew back to Moscow for meetings, Stalin, whom he regarded as “our father,” tenderly inquired about his health and then toasted his wound. However, he was also incensed that one of his closest comrades had risked his life in this way. 1

As the Germans pushed southwards, Stalin feared the Transcaucasus Front would collapse, yielding the oil fields, possibly bringing Turkey into the war, and tempting the restless Caucasian peoples to rebel. Four days after Churchill’s departure, Stalin turned to Beria: “Lavrenti Pavlovich,” he respectfully addressed him. “Take with you whoever you like and all the armaments you think necessary, but please stop the Germans.”

As the Germans took Mount Elbrus, Beria and Merkulov recruited Stalin’s staff officer, Shtemenko, ordered Sudoplatov to bring 150 Georgian Alpinists, assembled his flashy entourage, as well as his son Sergo, aged eighteen—and all flew down in a fleet of American C-47s stopping in Tiflis on the way. The generals were contemplating a strategic abandonment of Ordzhonikidze but on the 22nd, Beria, accompanied by his posse, arrived there to terrorize the Transcaucasus commanders. Charkviani, the Georgian boss, was in the room when Beria “peered coldly round the table with a piercing stare” and told them: “I’ll break your back if you mention a word of this retreat again. You WILL defend the town!”

When one general suggested placing 20,000 NKVD troops in the front line, Beria exploded into “foul abuse and threatened to break my back if I ever mentioned it again.” Though Charkviani (no great admirer of Beria) thought the NKVD chief saved the day, the generals, all writing after his downfall, complained that his progress along the front was simply “showiness and noise” which seriously disrupted their work.

Beria also had to destroy any oil that might fall into Nazi hands. Back in Moscow, Stalin summoned Nikolai Baibakov, thirty, Deputy Commissar of Oil Production, to his office. He was alone: “Comrade Baibakov, you know Hitler wants the oil of the Caucasus. That’s why I’m sending you there—you’re responsible on the pain of losing your head for ensuring no oil is left behind.” But he would also “lose his head” if he DID destroy the oil too early. As he left, with his head spinning, Stalin added: “Do you know that Hitler has declared that without oil, he’ll lose the war?”

Beria added more gruesome threats. “I was just weighed down by the great responsibility,” says Baibakov who was not afraid but perhaps should have been. “I underestimated the danger of my personal position.” The correct oil fields were dynamited with minutes to spare. Baibakov kept his head. [207] Baibakov’s interview for this book has been invaluable as he is one of the last of Stalin’s Ministers still living. Baibakov became a perennial member of the Soviet government: Stalin appointed him Commissar for Oil in 1944 and later he ran Gosplan, the main economic agency, except for a short interval, until being sacked by Gorbachev in the eighties. It is a mark of the obsolescence of Soviet economics that the young men Stalin appointed were still running it forty years later. At the time of writing, this tireless nonagenerian is working in the oil industry, taking conference calls with Stalinist dynamism while wearing his medals, beneath a portrait of Lenin.