Simon Montefiore - Stalin

Stalin sensed the army was concealing the scale of the disaster. Trusting only Mekhlis, he wrote: “The White Finns published their operations report that claims ‘the annihilation of the 44th Division… 1,000 Red Army soldiers as prisoners, 102 guns, 1,170 horses and 43 tanks.’ Tell me first—is this true? Second—where is the Military Council and Chief of Staff of the 44th Division? How do they explain their shameful conduct? Why did they desert their division? Third, why does the Military Council of the 9th Army not inform us… ? We expect an answer. Stalin.”

Mekhlis arrived in Suomussalmi to find chaotic scenes which he made worse. He confirmed the losses and shot the whole command: “the trial of Vinogradov, Volkov and chief of Political Department took place in the open air in the presence of the division… The sentence of shooting was performed publicly… The exposure of traitors and cowards continues.” On 10 December, Mekhlis himself was almost killed when his car was ambushed, as he proudly recounted to Stalin: unlike many of Stalin’s commissars, Mekhlis was personally courageous, if not suicidally reckless, under fire, partly because, as a Jew, he wanted to be “purer than crystal.” Indeed, he took command of fleeing companies and led them at the enemy. Mekhlis and Kulik did not conceal the mess: “We lack bread in the army,” Mekhlis reported. Kulik agreed: “rigidity and bureaucracy are everywhere.” When Kulik rushed into a Politburo meeting to report yet more defeats, Stalin lectured him: “You’re lapsing into panic… The pagan Greek priests were intelligent… When they got disturbing reports, they’d adjourn to their bathhouses, take baths, wash themselves clean, and only afterwards assess events and take decisions…”

Yet Stalin was saddened by these disasters: “The snows are deep. Our troops are on the march… full of spirit… Suddenly there’s a burst of automatic fire and our men fall to the ground.” At times, he looked helplessly depressed. Khrushchev saw him lying on a couch, despondent, a rehearsal of his collapse in the early days of the Nazi invasion. The pressure made Stalin ill with his usual streptococcus and staphylococcus, a temperature of 38°C and an agonizing sore throat. On 1 February, his health improved as Timoshenko probed Finnish defences, launching his great offensive on the 11th. Soviet superiority finally took its toll on the plucky Finns. When the doctors re-examined Stalin, he showed them the maps: “We’ll take Vyborg today.” The Finns sued for peace. On 12 March, Zhdanov signed a treaty in which Finland ceded Hango, the Karelian Isthmus, and the north-eastern shore of Ladoga, 22,000 square miles, to insulate Leningrad. Finland lost around 48,000 soldiers, Stalin over 125,000.

“The Red Army was good for nothing,” Stalin later told Churchill and Roosevelt. 2Stalin was incandescent and he was not alone: Khrushchev later blamed Voroshilov’s “criminal negligence,” sneering that he spent more time in the studio of Gerasimov, the court painter, than in the Defence Commissariat. At Kuntsevo, Stalin’s anger boiled over. He started shouting at Voroshilov, who gave as good as he got. Turning red as a turkey-cock, Voroshilov shrieked at Stalin, “You have yourself to blame for all of this. You’re the one who annihilated the old guard of our army, you had our best generals killed.”

Stalin rebuffed him, at which Voroshilov “picked up a platter of roast suckling pig and smashed it on the table.” Khrushchev admitted, “It was the only time in my life I witnessed such an outburst.” Voroshilov alone could have got away with it.

On 28 March 1940, Voroshilov, who became Stalin’s “whipping boy” for the Finnish disasters, confessed, at the Central Committee, “I have to say neither I nor General Staff… had any idea of the peculiarities and difficulties involved in this war.” Mekhlis, who hated Voroshilov and coveted his job, declared: he “cannot simply leave his post—he must be severely punished.” But Stalin could not afford to destroy Voroshilov.

“Mekhlis made a hysterical speech,” he said, restraining his creature. Instead he held a uniquely frank, sometimes comical, Supreme Military Council in mid-April. One commander admitted that the army had been surprised to find forests in Finland, at which Stalin sneered: “It’s time our army knew there were forests there… In Peter’s time, there were forests. Elizabeth… Catherine… Alexander found forests! And now! That’s four times!” (Laughter) He was even more indignant when Mekhlis revealed that the Finns often attacked during the Red Army’s afternoon nap. “Afternoon nap?!” spat Stalin.

“An hour’s nap,” confirmed Kulik.

“People have afternoon naps in rest homes!” growled Stalin, who went on to defend the campaign itself: “Could we have avoided the war? I think the war was inevitable… A delay of a couple of months would have meant a delay of twenty years.” He won more territory there than Peter the Great but he warned against the “cult of the traditions of the Civil War. It brings to mind the Red Indians who fought with clubs against rifles… and were all killed.” On 6 May, Voroshilov was sacked as Defence Commissar and succeeded by Timoshenko. [167] A muscular paragon of peasant masculinity, typical of Stalin’s cavalrymen, Timoshenko had been a divisional commander in the Polish War of 1920: he appears as the “captivating Savitsky” in the Red Cavalry stories of Isaac Babel who praises the “beauty of his giant’s body,” the power of his decorated chest “cleaving the hut as a standard cleaves the sky” and his long cavalryman’s legs which were “like girls sheathed to the neck of shining jackboots.” The less poetical Mikoyan simply calls him a “brave peasant.” Shaposhnikov was sacked as Chief of Staff even though Stalin admitted he had been right in the first place, “but only we know that!” He raised military morale, restoring the rank of General and the single command by soldiers, whose tasks had been made incomparably harder by sharing control with interfering commissars. He freed 11,178 purged officers who officially returned “from a long and dangerous mission.” Stalin asked one of them, Konstantin Rokossovsky, perhaps noticing his lack of fingernails, “Were you tortured in prison?”

“Yes, Comrade Stalin.”

“There’re too many yes-men in this country,” sighed Stalin. But some did not come back: “Where’s your Serdich?” Stalin asked Budyonny about a mutual friend.

“Executed!” reported the Marshal.

“Pity! I wanted to make him Ambassador to Yugoslavia…” 3

Stalin attacked his military “Red Indians” but then turned to his own tribe of primitive braves who remained obsessed with cavalry and oblivious to modern warfare. Budyonny and Kulik believed tanks could never replace horses. “You won’t convince me,” Budyonny had recently declared. “As soon as war comes, everyone will shout, ‘Send for the cavalry!’” Stalin and Voroshilov had abolished special tank corps. Fortunately, Timoshenko now persuaded the Vozhd to reverse his folly. 4

Nonetheless, Mikoyan called the dominance of these incompetents “the triumph of the First Cavalry Army” since they were veterans of Stalin’s favoured Civil War unit. Despite the tossing of the suckling pig, Voroshilov was promoted to Deputy Premier for “cultural matters” which Mikoyan regarded as a joke, given the Marshal’s love of being painted.

Mekhlis, who also became Deputy Premier, fancied himself a great captain: he harassed Timoshenko to ask Stalin to reappoint him as Deputy Defence Commissar. Stalin mocked Timoshenko’s naïvety: “We want to help him but he doesn’t understand. He wants us to leave him Mekhlis. But after three months, Mekhlis will chuck him out. Mekhlis wants to be Defence Commissar himself.” Mekhlis enjoyed Stalin’s “unbounded confidence.” Kulik, the buffoonish artillery chief, who encouraged his subordinates by shrieking “Prison or medal,” was an ignorant Blimp. He despised anti-tank artillery: “What rubbish—no rumble, no shell holes…” He denounced the invaluable new Katyusha rockets: “What the hell do we need rocket artillery for? The main thing is the horse-drawn gun.” He delayed the production of the outstanding T-34 tank. Khrushchev, whom Stalin liked for his cheek, questioned Kulik’s credentials.