Simon Montefiore - Stalin

It’s already 3:30… and you have not yet deigned to report… You cannot use the excuse that you have no time as Zhukov is doing just as much at the front as you yet he sends his report every day. The difference between you and Zhukov is that he is disciplined… whereas you lack discipline… I am warning you for the last time that if you allow yourself to forget your duty… once more, you will be removed as Chief of General Staff and sent to the front.

Malenkov was always punctilious in his reports but even the meticulous Zhdanov was sometimes distracted by battle, provoking another reprimand: “It’s extremely strange that Comrade Zhdanov feels no need to come to the phone or to ask us for mutual advice at this dangerous time for Leningrad.” Independence was dangerous in Stalin’s eyes.

At 4 p.m., General Alexei Antonov, “young, very handsome, dark and lithe,” who became his trusted Chief of Operations, after Vasilevsky’s promotion, and after trying a series of officers all of whom were swiftly sacked, arrived with the next report. Antonov was a “peerlessly able general and a man of great culture and charm,” wrote Zhukov. Stalin was a stickler for accurate reporting and would, recalled Shtemenko, “not tolerate the slightest… embellishment.” Antonov handled him deftly: always calm, “a master at assessing the situation,” he graded the urgency of his files by colour and “knew when to say, ‘Give me the green folder.’” Then Stalin smilingly replied: “Well now, let’s look at your ‘green file.’”

In the early evening, Stalin arrived in the Kremlin in his convoy of speeding Packards or else walked downstairs from his flat to the Little Corner where the “cosy” anteroom, with its comfortable armchairs, strictly policed by Poskrebyshev, was already full. Visitors found themselves in a world of control, sparseness and cleanliness. There was nothing unnecessary anywhere. Everyone had shown their papers repeatedly and been searched for weapons. Even Zhukov had to surrender his pistol. “The inspection was repeated over and over again.” Poskrebyshev, now in NKVD General’s uniform, greeted them at his desk. They waited in silence though regulars greeted one another before falling quiet. It was tense. Those who had never met Stalin before were full of anticipation but as one colonel recalled, “I noticed that those… not here for the first time, were considerably more perturbed than those… here for the first time.”

At around 8 p.m., when Stalin arrived, a murmur passed through the room. He said nothing, but nodded at some. The colonel noticed “my neighbour wiped drops of sweat from his brow and dried his hands on a handkerchief.” A small room, a cubbyhole, contained the last bodyguards at a desk before the office. Stalin entered that “bright spacious room,” with its long green table. At the other end of the room was his desk, on which there was always a heap of documents in their papki , a broad-frequency telephone, a line of different-coloured telephones, a pile of sharpened pencils. Behind the desk, there was a door that led to Stalin’s own lavatory and the signal room which contained easy chairs, all the Baudot and telegraph equipment to connect Stalin to the fronts, and the famous globe at which he had discussed Operation Torch with Churchill.

That night, Molotov, Beria and Malenkov, the perennial threesome, were waiting with Voroshilov and Kaganovich. Stalin nodded and opened the GKO with no chit-chat; its sessions continued until he left many hours later. Stalin sat at his desk and then paced up and down, returning to get his Herzogovina Flor cigarettes which he broke into pieces to fill his pipe. The civilians, as always, sat with their backs against the wall, looking up at the new portraits of Suvorov and Kutuzov while the generals sat on the other side of the table, looking up at Marx and Lenin, a deployment that reflected the constant war between them. The generals immediately spread their maps on the table and Stalin continued his pacing, waddling somewhat. “He would stop in front of the person he was addressing and look straight into his face” with what Zhukov called a “clear tenacious gaze that seemed to envelop and pierce through the visitor.”

Poskrebyshev began calling in the experts from the anteroom: “soon my neighbour also rose… the receptionist called him by name, he went livid, wiped his trembling hands on his handkerchief, picked up his file… and went with hesitant steps.” As he showed them in, Poskrebyshev advised: “Don’t get excited. Don’t think about disagreeing with anything. Comrade Stalin knows everything.” The visitor must report quickly, no small talk, then leave. Inside the room, the grim troika of Molotov, Beria and Malenkov swivelled to peer coolly at the newcomer.

Stalin exuded power and energy. “One felt oppressed by Stalin’s power,” wrote his new Railways Commissar who reported to him hundreds of times, “but also by his phenomenal memory and the fact that he knew so much. He made one feel even less important than one was.” Stalin drove the pace, restless, fidgeting, never far from an eruption. Most of the time he was laconic, tireless and icily cold. If he was displeased, wrote Zhukov, “he lost his temper and objectivity failed him.”

The visitors could always sense the danger, yet they were also surprised by the genuinely collegiate argument at these sessions. Mikoyan looked back on the “wonderfully friendly atmosphere” among the magnates during the first three years of the war. The country was run in the form of the GKO through Stalin’s meetings with key leaders in the presence of whoever was in his office—usually the GKO with Mikoyan and, later, Zhdanov, Kaganovich and Voznesensky.

“Sharp arguments arose,” recalled Zhukov, with “views expressed in definite and sharp terms” as Stalin paced up and down. Stalin would ask the generals’ opinions: “Stalin listened more” when “they disagreed. I suspect,” thought Admiral Kuznetsov, “he even liked people who had their own point of view and weren’t afraid to stand up for it.” Having created an environment of boot-licking idolatry, Stalin was irritated by it.

“What’s the point of talking to you?” he would shout. “Whatever I say, you reply, ‘Yes Comrade Stalin; of course, Comrade Stalin… wise decision, Comrade Stalin.’” The generals noticed how “his associates always agreed with him,” while the military could argue, though they had to be very careful. But Molotov and the brash newcomer Voznesensky did argue with him: “The discussions were frank,” recalled Mikoyan. When Stalin, reading one of Churchill’s letters, said the Englishman thought “he had saddled the horse and now he can enjoy a free ride… Am I right, Vyacheslav?” Molotov replied: “I don’t think so.”

Zhukov “witnessed arguments and… stubborn resistance… especially from Molotov when the situation got to the point where Stalin had to raise his voice and was even beside himself, while Molotov merely stood up with a smile and stuck to his point of view.” When Stalin asked Khrulev to take over the railways, he tolerated his refusal: “I don’t think you respect me, refusing my proposal,” he said, indulging the quartermaster, one of his favourites. Amid rows, Stalin insisted “Come to the point” or “Make yourself clear!”

Once Stalin had formed his opinion and argument had ceased, he appointed a man to do the job with the usual death threat as an added incentive. “This very severe man controlled the fulfillment of every order,” recalls Baibakov, the oil engineer, “When he gave the command, he always helped you to carry it out so you received every possible means necessary to do it. Hence I wasn’t scared of Stalin—we were direct with one another. I fulfilled my tasks.” But Stalin had a “knack for detecting weak spots in reports.” Woe betide anyone who appeared before him without mastery of their front. “He would at once drop his voice ominously and say, ‘Don’t you know? What are you doing then?’”