Simon Montefiore: Stalin

Kaganovich was despised for not saving his brother but he buried him with honour as a Central Committee member in the Novodevichy Cemetery, not far from Nadya Stalin. Vannikov survived but remained in prison.

Krebs was Chief of Staff of the Wehrmacht during the last hours of the Third Reich in April 1945.

On 13 May 1941, Svetlana wrote to her father, “My dear little Secretary! Why have you recently been coming home so late?… Nevermind, I wouldn’t make my respected Secretaries miserable with my strictness. Eat as much as you like. You can drink too. I only ask you not to put vegetables or other food on the chairs in the hope that someone will sit on it. It will damage the chairs…” This was an early hint of the brutish games that characterised Stalin’s dinners after the war. “We obey,” replied Stalin. “Kisses to my little sparrow. Your little Secretary, Stalin.”

Dekanozov repeatedly told this story to his young son, Reginald, who recorded it in his Notes before his own recent death. It has never been published. The author is most grateful to Nadya Dekanozova of Tbilisi, Georgia, for making this source available.

But the speeches have spawned a grand debate about whether Stalin was planning a preemptive strike against Hitler: the so-called Suvorov Debate following Victor Suvorov’s article in June 1985. Suvorov argued that Stalin was about to attack Hitler because of the partial mobilization and build-up on Western borders, the proximity of airfields, and because General Zhukov produced such a plan of attack. His view is now discredited. It now seems that the real view of the General Staff, including General Vasilevsky, was that they would have to retreat much deeper into their territory—hence Vasilevsky’s proposal to move airfields and infrastructure back to the Volga, a proposal attacked as “defeatist” by Kulik and Mekhlis. However, Stalin always kept an offensive war as a real possibility as well as an ideological necessity. As for the speeches, they were designed purely to raise the morale of the army and display a measure of realism about the Soviet situation.

On 14 June, Hitler held his last military conference before the beginning of Barbarossa, with the generals arriving at the Chancellery at different times so as not to raise suspicion. On the 16th, he summoned Goebbels to brief him.

Perhaps Stalin had encouraged Zhdanov to bolster his own wavering confidence: when Dmitrov passed on an Austrian warning, Stalin replied that there could not be anything to worry about if Zhdanov, who ran the Leningrad Military District and the navy, had gone on holiday.

This account is based on the memoirs of Molotov, Mikoyan, Zhukov, Timoshenko, Hilger and others but the times are based on the Kremlin Logbook which is clearly incomplete but since the fear, uncertainty and chaos of that night ensured that everyone gave different times for their meetings, it at least provides a framework. Zhukov is not shown as attending the first meeting at 7:05 and Vatutin, who was deputy Chief of Staff and appears in Zhukov’s account, is not mentioned at all. Nor is Mikoyan. That does not mean they were not there: in the manic comings and goings, even Poskrebyshev could be forgiven a few mistakes.

At roughly the same time, Hitler decided to snatch an hour’s sleep before the invasion started: “The fortune of war must now decide.” Earlier, an overtired and anxious Hitler had been pacing up and down the office with Goebbels working out the proclamation to be read to the German people the next day. “This cancerous growth has to be burned out,” Hitler told Goebbels. “Stalin will fall.” Liskov, the German defector, was still being interrogated two and a half hours later when the invasion began: he was not shot. The events of that night were so dramatic that the participants all recall different times: Molotov thought he had left Stalin at midnight, Mikoyan at 3 a.m. Molotov claimed Zhukov, who is used as a source by most historians, placed events later to amplify his own role. At least some of the confusion is due to the hour difference between German and Russian times: this account is based on Russian time. But it is easier to pace events according to the Teutonic efficiency of the German invasion that started at 3:30 a.m. German summertime (4:30 a.m. Russian time) and the arrival of Schulenburg’s instructions from Berlin. It is clear from the three memoirs that the group moved from Stalin’s office to the apartment to Kuntsevo in the course of the hours between 9 p.m. and 3 a.m.

The telephone was ringing in Zhdanov’s dacha in Sochi that morning too: “My mother came into my room first thing,” recalled Yury Zhdanov, “and she said, ‘It’s war!’ and we headed back to Moscow with my father.”

Simultaneously, in Berlin, Soviet Ambassador Dekanozov was summoned to the Foreign Ministry. As he arrived, he noticed that the German press was present to record the moment. Adopting his most “freezing manner,” Ribbentrop received him in the office of Prince Bismarck, the statesman who had warned Germany against a war on two fronts and who had been quoted to this effect so often by Stalin and Zhdanov. Apparently drunk, “purple-faced” and “swaying a little,” Ribbentrop read his statement. “I deeply regret this…” replied Dekanozov. He departed without shaking hands. But as he was leaving, Ribbentrop trotted after him, whispering that he had tried to stop Hitler from launching this war but he would not listen to anyone. “Tell Moscow I was against the attack,” he hissed. Ribbentrop sensed the Soviet Pact had been the climax of his career.

Sometime that day, the Politburo secretly ordered Lenin’s body to be removed from the Mausoleum and despatched to Tyumen in Siberia.

Now that we have access to so many different sources on this remarkable episode, from Molotov’s and Mikoyan’s memoirs to those of Chadaev, the Sovnarkom assistant, who recorded Deputy Chief of Staff Vatutin’s account, we can reconstruct this heretofore obscure story. Mikoyan dates the scene at the Defence Commissariat 29 and Chadaev 27 June, an indication of the chaos of those days. In fact, it was the 28th since we know from his logbook that Stalin was in his office throughout the 28th but did not appear on the 29th or 30th. Zhukov says that Stalin visited the Commissariat twice that day but it is likely that the showdown was in the evening, as Mikoyan recalled it.

The versions used here are Molotov’s: “We fucked it up”; Mikoyan’s: “Lenin left us a great heritage and we his successors have shitted it all up”; Beria’s (via Khrushchev who was himself not in Moscow): “Everything’s lost. I give up. Lenin left us a proletarian state and now we’ve been caught with our pants down and let the whole thing go to shit”; and Chadaev’s: “Lenin founded our state and we’ve fucked it up.”

Beria’s son Sergo, whose memoirs are reliable on personal anecdotes and unreliable on political matters, claims it was Alexander Shcherbakov, the Moscow Party leader, who made this mistake and used to ask Beria if he would ever betray him to Stalin. Mikoyan, who was actually there, is much more trustworthy but Shcherbakov may have lost his nerve on another occasion, the threat to Moscow in October.

The see-saw between traditional “single command” by a general and “dual command” by generals and Party Commissars charted the progress of the Party: the Commissars were introduced three times—in 1918, 1937 and 1941—and abolished three times when the prestige of the soldiers needed to be raised—in 1925, 1940 and 1942.