Simon Montefiore - Stalin

Back at Ludendorff’s villa, Stalin, accompanied by Zhukov and Gromyko, immediately told Molotov about the conversation. But Stalin knew that, as yet, the Americans only possessed one or two Bombs—there was just time to catch up.

“They’re raising their price,” said Molotov, who was in charge of the nuclear project.

“Let them,” said Stalin. “We’ll have to talk it over with Kurchatov and get him to speed things up.” Professor Kurchatov told Stalin that he lacked electrical power and had not enough tractors. Stalin immediately ordered power to be switched off in several populated areas and gave him two tank divisions to act as tractors. The Bomb’s revolutionary importance was still percolating when the first device was dropped on Hiroshima. The scale of resources needed was just dawning on Stalin.

He then convened a meeting with Molotov and Gromyko at which he announced: “Our Allies have told us that the U.S.A. has a new weapon. I spoke with our physicist Kurchatov as soon as Truman told me. The real question is should countries which have the Bomb simply compete with one another or… should they seek a solution that would mean prohibition of its production and use?” He realized that America and Britain “are hoping we won’t be able to develop the Bomb ourselves for some time…” and “want to force us to accept their plans. Well that’s not going to happen.” He cursed them in what Gromyko called “ripe language,” then asked the diplomat if the Allies were satisfied with all the agreements.

“Churchill’s so riveted by our women traffic police in their marvellous uniforms that he dropped his cigar ash all over his suit,” replied Gromyko. Stalin smiled.

Next morning, Churchill and the Labour leader Clement Attlee flew back to London where they discovered that the warlord had been roundly defeated in the general election, thereby ending the triumvirate of Teheran and Yalta. Stalin preferred Roosevelt but he most admired Churchill: “A powerful and cunning politician,” he remembered him in 1950. “In the war years, he behaved as a gentleman and achieved a lot. He was the strongest personality in the capitalist world.”

During this interval, Stalin met up with his son Vasily, now stationed in Germany, who reported that Soviet aeroplanes were still inferior to the American’s, and dangerous to boot. Vasily’s denunciations may have been well-meaning but Stalin always found a deadly use for them. At lunchtime on the 25th, Stalin met Queen Victoria’s great-grandson, a cousin of Nicholas II, and Allied Supreme Commander, Southeast Asia, the ebullient Admiral Lord Louis Mountbatten who flattered him that he had diverted his trip from India to Britain “specially to meet the Generalissimo,” having long been “an admirer of the Generalissimo’s achievements not only in war but in peace as well.”

Stalin replied that he had done his best. “Not everything” had been “done well” but it was the Russian people “who achieved these things.” Mountbatten’s real motive was to wangle an invitation to visit Russia where he was convinced his Romanov connections would be appreciated, explaining that he had frequently visited the Tsar as a child for “three or four weeks at a time.”

Stalin inquired drily, with a patronising smile, whether “it was some time ago that he had been there.” Mountbatten “would find things had changed very considerably.” Mountbatten repeatedly asked for an invitation and returned to his imperial connections which he expected to impress Stalin. “On the contrary,” says Lunghi, Mountbatten’s interpreter, “the meeting was embarrassing because Stalin was so unimpressed. He offered no invitation. Mountbatten left with his tail between his legs.” [238] This may be the reason this story appears in none of Mountbatten’s biographies and is told here for the first time. I am grateful to Hugh Lunghi for both his interview on the episode and his generous gift of his unpublished official minutes.

Potsdam ended with an affable but increasingly chilly impasse: Stalin possessed Eastern Europe but Truman had the Bomb. Before he left on 2 August, he realized the Bomb would require a colossal effort and his most dynamic manager. He removed Molotov and commissioned Beria to create the Soviet Bomb. Sergo Beria noticed his father “making notes on a sheet of paper… organizing the future commission and selecting its members.” Beria included Malenkov and others in the list.

“What need have you to include these people?” Sergo asked Beria.

“I prefer that they should belong. If they stay outside they’ll put spokes in the wheels.” It was the climax of Beria’s career.

On 6 August 1945, America dropped its Bomb on Hiroshima. Stalin did not wish to miss out on the spoils, sending his armies against Japan, but the destruction of Hiroshima made a far greater impact than Truman’s warning. Svetlana visited Kuntsevo that day: “Everyone was busy and paid no attention to me,” she grumbled. “War is barbaric,” reflected Stalin, “but using the A-bomb is a superbarbarity. And there was no need to use it. Japan was already doomed!” He had no doubt that Hiroshima was aimed at himself: “A-bomb blackmail is American policy.”

Next day, Stalin held a series of meetings at Kuntsevo with Beria and the scientists. “Hiroshima has shaken the whole world. The balance has been destroyed,” he told them. “That cannot be.” Now Stalin understood that the project was the most important in his world; code-named “Task Number One,” it was to be run “on a Russian scale” by Beria’s

“Special Committee” that functioned like an “Atomic Politburo.” The scientists had to be coaxed and threatened. Prizes and luxuries were vital: “Surely it’s possible to ensure that several thousand people can live very well… and better than well.” Stalin was “bored” by the science but treated Kurchatov kindly: “If a child doesn’t cry, the mother does not know what she needs. Ask for whatever you like. You won’t be refused.” 1

Beria threw himself into Task Number One as if his life depended on it—which it did. The project was on a truly Soviet scale, with Beria managing between 330,000 and 460,000 people and 10,000 technicians. Beria was the pre-eminent Terror entrepreneur, telling one of his managers, “You’re a good worker but if you’d served six years in the camps, you’d work even better.” He controlled his scientists in the sharashki , special prisons for technical experts, described by Solzhenitsyn in The First Circle : when one expert suggested he might work better if he was free, Beria scoffed, “Certainly. But it would be risky. The traffic in the streets is crazy and you might get run over.”

Yet he could also be “ingratiating,” asking the physicist Andrei Sakharov charmingly, “Is there anything you want to ask me?” His handshake, “plump, moist and deathly cold,” reminded Sakharov of death itself: “Don’t forget we’ve plenty of room in our prisons!” His name was enough to terrify most people: “Just one remark like ‘Beria has ordered’ worked absolutely without fail,” remembered Mikoyan. When he called Vyshinsky, he “leapt out of his chair respectfully” and “cringed like a servant before a master.”

Task Number One, like all Beria’s projects, functioned “as smoothly and reliably as a Swiss clock.” Kurchatov thought Beria himself “unusually energetic.” But he also won the scientists’ loyalty by protecting them, appealing to Stalin who agreed: “Leave them in peace. We can always shoot them later.” Mephistophelian brutality, Swiss precision and indefatigable energy were the hallmarks of Beria who was “incredibly clever… an unusual man and also a great criminal.”