Simon Montefiore - Stalin

“Is Voronov at your place?” Beria replied that he would be back in two days. The generals are said to have coined a euphemism for these terrifying interludes: “Going to have coffee with Beria.” His minions watched the soldiers on every front, their reports pouring in to Beria and often to Stalin himself. In 1942, Stalin raised the surveillance another step by ordering Kobulov to bug Voroshilov, Budyonny—and Zhukov himself whose officers were harassed and arrested.

Yet Stalin was wary of Beria’s empire-building. When Beria got Kaganovich dismissed from the railways, he tried to nominate his successor.

“Do you think I’d agree to the candidate… Beria imposes on me? I’ll never agree to it…” But the railways were a constant headache and only Kaganovich, that “real man of iron” in Stalin’s admiring words, could perform the necessary miracles. 3

For sixteen hours, Stalin never ceased “issuing instructions, talking on the phone, signing papers, calling in Poskrebyshev and giving him orders.” When he heard from Mikoyan and Khrulev that the soldiers were short of cigarettes, he made time during the battle of Stalingrad to telephone Akaki Mgeladze, Party boss of Abkhazia, where the tobacco was grown: “Our soldiers have nothing to smoke! Tobacco’s absolutely necessary at the front!” He personally drafted every press release, a master of succinct yet rousing phrases such as “Blood for blood!,” inserting quotations from Suvorov. Yet while jealously checking the kudos of his generals, he was punctilious in giving them credit for their victories. 4

Stalin’s hours of pressure and work were awesome but his commissars and generals had invariably been up since dawn, a life that demanded “enormous physical and moral resources” with “nervous exhaustion” a real danger. Stalin legislated the lives of his generals, personally decreeing their rota of work and rest. Vasilevsky had to sleep from 4 a.m. to 10 a.m. without fail. Stalin sometimes rang Vasilevsky like a strict nanny to check he was asleep. If he answered the phone, Stalin cursed him. Yet Vasilevsky found it impossible to attend Stalin’s nocturnal dinners and films and then do all his work, so he had to break the rules, stationing his adjutant at the telephone to reply: “Comrade Vasilevsky’s resting until ten.” Stalin’s other workhorses, Beria and Mikoyan, were expected to spend most nights with him while achieving a Herculean workload, yet they managed it, running sprawling and sleepless administrative empires on the adrenalin of war and patriotism, Bolshevik threats and the talent to survive.

Stalin drank little and expected others to be sober. Artillery general Yakovlev once arrived to report, fortified with cognac. Without raising his head from his desk, Stalin said: “Come closer, Comrade Yakovlev.” Yakovlev stepped forward. “Come closer.” Then: “You’re a little drunk, aren’t you?”

“Yes slightly, Comrade Stalin.” Stalin said no more about it. 5

At midnight, Vasilevsky reported jubilantly from Stalingrad: Hitler’s Romanian allies were crumbling. As he listened, Stalin called Poskrebyshev and ordered tea. When the tea arrived in a glass in a silver ornamental holder, the commissar or general, usually Antonov, fell silent. All watched Stalin’s ritual as he squeezed his lemon into the tea, then slowly got up, opened the door behind his desk into the restroom, opened the cupboard, built into the wall, and took out a bottle of Armenian brandy. Then he returned, poured a half a teaspoon of this into the tea, replaced the brandy, sat, stirred it and said: “Carry on.”

In high spirits at this instant success, Stalin and his companions left the Little Corner and probably headed over to Kuntsevo for dinner and then a film, but these dinners were not the drunken carousals of later years. When the exhausted Berias and Molotovs staggered home with only a few hours until they had to start work again, Stalin read his history books on his divan until he fell asleep in the early hours. 6

Within four days of the launch of Operation Uranus, the German Sixth Army, 330,000 men, was encircled in what Stalin called the “decisive moment of the war.” As the Russians tightened their grip, Manstein’s counter-attack failed to break through. The Luftwaffe proved incapable of supplying from the air. The encircled Germans suffered a cruel slow death from starvation, ice and dynamite. On 16 December, the Russians counter-attacked into Manstein’s rear, threatening to cut off Army Group Don and break through towards Rostov. In the Little Corner, the impatient Stalin chose General Rokossovsky, not the Stalingrad commander Yeremenko, to oversee Operation Ring, the liquidation of the Sixth Army.

“Why don’t you say anything?” he asked Zhukov, who had frowned.

“Yeremenko will be very hurt,” replied Zhukov.

“It’s no time for feeling hurt,” said Stalin. “We’re not schoolgirls. We’re Bolsheviks!”

On 10 January, Rokossovsky attacked the benighted Germans, slicing their pocket in half. The Sixth Army diminished daily. The military defeat became a human struggle for survival, as the Germans ate horsemeat, cats, rats, each other, and finally nothing. On 31 January, Field Marshal Paulus surrendered and 92,000 starving, frostbitten scarecrows, barely recognizable as men let alone soldiers, became prisoners. Stalin himself wrote out this news flash: “Today our armies trapped the commander of the Sixth Army near Stalingrad with all his staff…” 7

Now a confident, preening Stalin and a gold-braided, bemedalled, imperial Bolshevik Russia emerged, blood-spattered but swaggering with pride, from behind the iron mask of Soviet austerity, to fight their way into Europe. [212] This confidence was immediately reflected in Stalin’s ungrateful treatment of his Western allies despite their gallantry in risking their lives to deliver aid to Russia: Mikoyan reported that the British had brought radio equipment on their Naval Mission in Murmansk “without documentation. Either we should ask them to take it back or give it to us. I ask directions.” Molotov simply wrote “Agreed.” But Stalin grumpily scribbled in his blue crayon: “Comrade Molotov agreed—while Mikoyan suggested nothing!” As for the Royal Navy’s radio: “I propose confiscate the equipment as contraband!”

On 6 January 1943, Stalin, having consulted two old comrades Kalinin and Budyonny, overturned the Bolshevik slogan “Down with the golden shoulder boards!” and restored the auric epaulettes and braid of Tsarist officers. He teased Khrulev “for suggesting we restore the old regime” but personally instructed the media how to spin it: the gold braid was not “just decoration but also about order and discipline: tell about this.”

Two weeks later, he promoted Zhukov to Marshal. On 23 February, the omniscient military amateur himself joined the Marshalate: during the next two years, Stalin rarely appeared out of its uniform.

Simultaneously, he slightly clipped Beria’s powerful wings: in April, [213] On 16 April 1943, Stalin once again split the huge NKVD into two separate agencies—the NKGB under Merkulov, containing the State Security police, and the NKVD under Beria that controlled the normal police and the huge slave labour camps. However, Beria remained curator or overlord of both “Organs.” he brought military counter-intelligence, with its dreaded Special Departments, under his own aegis as Defence Commissar. He renamed it Smersh , an acronym for “Death to Spies” that he coined himself, but kept Abakumov in charge. This slick but vicious secret policeman of thirty-five had worked closely with Beria but Stalin, the ultimate patron, now took him under his wing.