Simon Montefiore - Stalin

Order No. 270 is written very much in Stalin’s personal style: “I order that (1) anyone who removes his insignia… and surrenders should be regarded as a malicious deserter whose family is to be arrested as a family of a breaker of the oath and betrayer of the Motherland. Such deserters are to be shot on the spot. (2) Those falling into encirclement are to fight to the last… those who prefer to surrender are to be destroyed by any available means while their families are to be deprived of all assistance.”

Mariko Svanidze had been Yenukidze’s secretary and was arrested soon after her boss. Their other sister, Sashiko, had died of cancer in the late 1930s.

The opening of Stalin’s and Zhdanov’s papers allows us for the first time to listen in on their frantic efforts to save Leningrad.

Shcherbakov was one of those New Men who had risen over the bodies of the dead of the thirties. “With his impassive Buddha face, with thick horn-rimmed glasses resting on the tiny turned-up button of a nose,” Shcherbakov, who was Zhdanov’s brother-in-law, another example of the intermarriage of the élite, had made his name managing cultural questions, then succeeded Khrushchev as Moscow First Secretary, becoming a candidate member of the Politburo in 1941 with Malenkov and Voznesensky. A coarse alcoholic anti-Semite, Shcherbakov was described by Khrushchev as “a snake… one of the worst.”

When, on 31 October, Stalin heard that the Nazis were using “delegations” of Russian men and women as human shields, he ordered Zhdanov: “It’s said that among the Leningrad Bolsheviks there are those who thought it impossible to use arms against these ‘delegates.’ If there are such people… they must be liquidated first of all because they are more dangerous than German soldiers. My advice—no sentiment… Destroy the Germans and their delegates!”

Perhaps as a reward for his ferocity, on 11 December, Zhdanov, who had not seen Stalin since 24 June, flew to Moscow and began to climb back to the top.

Even Stalin admitted how this Western assistance decisively aided his war effort. Mikoyan reported to him in detail as the aid arrived, whether trucks via Persia or weapons via Archangel. Such was the urgency that in November 1941, Stalin totted up the number of planes (432) in his red pen on Mikoyan’s notes.

In 1966, when Zhukov’s memoirs were published in Moscow, this was regarded as too dangerous to be included. It was only in 1990, when the full version was published, that this account appeared.

In distant Kuibyshev, the ancient city of Samara on the Volga that had been chosen as the new capital should Moscow have to be abandoned, several buildings, including the local Party headquarters and a mansion in a narrow gully beside the steep banks of the Volga, surrounded by paved walks overlooking the river, were prepared for Stalin. A special air-raid shelter, reached by a lift, was constructed whence he could rule what was left of Russia. Svetlana Stalin was set up in a small town house with a courtyard along with her housekeeper Alexandra Nakashidze, and Galina, Vasily’s pregnant wife and Yakov’s daughter, Gulia (without her arrested mother). Kalinin and his mistress shared a small house with the Mikoyans; the Khrushchevs shared with the Malenkovs. The Poskrebyshevs, Litvinovs and others lived in the local sanatorium.

Zhukov recalled him asking this again in mid-November but V. P. Pronin, Chairman of the Moscow Soviet (Mayor), remembered the question being asked on “16 or 17 October.” He surely asked it several times.

No one else was ever invited to join Stalin in his constant smoking. This honour to Shaposhnikov resembles Queen Victoria graciously permitting the old Disraeli to sit during their audiences, the only Prime Minister to receive such a privilege.

In 1760, during the Seven Years War, Empress Elizabeth’s General Todtleben took Berlin. Alexander I took the Prussian capital in 1813.

This description certainly complimented Arthur Lee, the colourful adventurer and Conservative MP who bought the house with the fortune of his American heiress wife. He was ennobled as Baron (later Viscount) Lee of Fareham by Lloyd George.

Stalin’s nephew, Leonid Redens, met the crestfallen Marshal bathing affably with children in the Volga at Kuibyshev.

Timoshenko’s letters to Stalin, scribbled on pages torn out of a notebook, which are in the newly opened Stalin archive, shed light on the Kharkov offensive and Khrushchev’s near breakdown.

Kuntsevo’s furniture was “stylish ‘Utility,’ sumptuous and brightly coloured,” thought a young British diplomat, John Reed, “vulgarly furnished and possessed of every convenience a Soviet commissar’s heart could desire. Even the lavatories were modern and… clean.” A hundred yards from the house was Stalin’s new air-raid shelter of the “latest and most luxurious type,” with lifts descending ninety feet into the ground where there were eight or ten rooms inside a concrete box of massive thickness, divided by sliding doors. “The whole air-conditioned and execrably furnished… like some monstrous… Lyons Corner House,” wrote Reed.

The bathrooms in all Stalin’s dachas were capacious with the baths specially constructed to fit his precise height.

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.

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.

When Khrushchev was in power, he ordered his cronies like Yeremenko to inflate his heroic role at Stalingrad, just like Stalin himself.

Simultaneously with Stalingrad’s Operation Uranus, Zhukov launched the forgotten Operation Mars against the Rzhev salient facing Moscow, probably his greatest defeat: hundreds of thousands of men were lost in just two days of an operation that illustrated his bold but crude style.

As the war went on, it became a symbol of his avuncular image in the West—Uncle Joe—and statesmen tended to send him pipes as presents. Maisky, Ambassador to London, for example, wrote to Stalin: “After Mr. Kerr [British Ambassador] gave you a pipe and it was reported in the press, I was presented with pipes for you from two firms… and I send herewith an example for you…”