Simon Montefiore - Stalin

“You don’t even know Kulik,” roared Stalin. “I know him from the Civil War when he commanded the artillery in Tsaritsyn. He understands artillery.”

“But how many cannons did you have there? Two or three? And now he’s in charge of all the artillery in the land?” Stalin told Khrushchev to mind his own business. Higher than all of them, Zhdanov was now Stalin’s artillery and naval expert. 5“There were competent people,” wrote Mikoyan, “but Stalin was increasingly distrustful of people so trust was more important than anything.” Stalin wavered, meandered and reversed his own decisions. It is remarkable any correct decisions were made at all.

In May, Stalin ordered the kidnapping of Kulik’s wife, Kira, at whose house he had been a guest in November. In the name of the Instantsiya , Beria commissioned “the Theoretician” Merkulov to arrange it. On 5 May, Kobulov, the prince-assassin Tsereteli and a favoured torturer Vladzimirsky trailed Kira on her way to the dentist, then bundled the beauty into a car and took her to the Lubianka. Stalin and Beria evidently shared a playful sadism and perverse taste for these depraved games. The reason for the kidnapping is a mystery because no charges were made against her, but Mekhlis built a file against the Kuliks which catalogues Kira’s nobility as well as Grigory’s drunken indiscretions, incompetence, anti-Semitism, Social Revolutionary past, complaints about the Terror, and connections with Trotskyites. Was she kidnapped for appealing to Stalin or was she denounced by her latest lover, another victim of prudery? The most suspicious mark against her in Stalin’s eyes may have been Kulik’s dangerous tendency to give “orders in front of” his various wives. [168] No papers of formal charges were ever filed so the kidnapping was illegal even by Bolshevik standards. When Beria was arrested after Stalin’s death, this kidnapping and murder was one of the crimes on the indictment.

Two days after Kira’s kidnapping, on 7 May, Stalin promoted her husband to Marshal, along with Timoshenko and Shaposhnikov, in what can only be called a stroke of ironical sadism. Next day, Kulik’s delight at his Marshalate was tempered by worry about his wife. He called Beria, who invited him to the Lubianka.

While Kulik sipped tea in his office, Beria called Stalin: “Marshal Kulik’s sitting in front of me. No, he doesn’t know any details. She left and that’s all. Certainly, Comrade Stalin, we’ll announce an all-Union search and do everything possible to find her.” They both knew that Kira was in the cells beneath Beria’s office. A month later, Countess Simonich-Kulik, mother of an eight-year-old daughter, was moved to Beria’s special prison, the Sukhanovka, where Blokhin murdered her in cold blood with a shot to the head. Kobulov complained that Blokhin killed her before he arrived. Stalin perhaps took comfort or pleasure in the promotion of cronies such as Kulik while knowing, as they did not, the fate of their beloveds.

The public search for Kira Kulik continued for twelve years but the Marshal himself had long since realized that her dubious connections had destroyed her. He soon married again. 6

Meanwhile Stalin and his magnates debated the fate of the Polish officers, arrested or captured in September 1939 and held in three camps, one of which was close to Katyn Forest. When Stalin was undecided about an issue, there was surprisingly frank discussion. Kulik, commander of the Polish front, proposed freeing all the Poles. Voroshilov agreed but Mekhlis was adamant there were Enemies among them. Stalin stopped the release but Kulik persisted. Stalin compromised. The Poles were released—except for about 26,000 officers whose destiny was finally decided at the Politburo on 5 March 1940.

Beria’s son claimed that his father argued against a massacre, not out of philanthropy, but because the Poles might be useful later. There is no evidence for this, except that Beria often took a practical rather than ideological approach. If so, Beria lost the argument. He dutifully reported that the 14,700 officers, landowners and policemen and 11,000 “counter-Revolutionary” landowners were “spies and saboteurs… hardened… enemies of Soviet power” who should be “tried by… Comrades Merkulov, Kobulov and Bashtakov.” Stalin scrawled his signature first and underlined it, followed by Voroshilov, Molotov and Mikoyan. Kalinin and Kaganovich were canvassed by phone and voted “For.”

This massacre was a chunk of “black work” for the NKVD who were accustomed to the Vishka of a few victims at a time, but there was a man for the task: Blokhin travelled down to the Ostachkov camp where he and two other Chekists outfitted a hut with padded, soundproofed walls and decided on a Stakhanovite quota of 250 shootings a night. He brought a butcher’s leather apron and cap which he put on when he began one of the most prolific acts of mass murder by one individual, killing 7,000 in precisely twenty-eight nights, using a German Walther pistol to prevent future exposure. 7The bodies were buried in various places—but the 4,500 in the Kozelsk camp were interred in Katyn Forest. [169] In November 1941, the Polish Ambassador Stanislaw Kot quizzed Stalin on the whereabouts of these men. Stalin made a show of setting up a phone call to Beria and changed the subject. In December 1941, he told General Anders they had escaped to Mongolia. As we have seen, these sort of sniggering acts of concern were part of his game with Beria. Mikoyan’s son Stepan wrote graciously that his father’s signature on this order was “the heaviest burden for our family.”

That June, the Führer unleashed his Blitzkrieg against the Low Countries and France. Stalin still had a profound respect for the power of France and Britain, whom he counted on holding up Hitler in the West. On 17 June 1940, France sued for peace, a shock that should have made Stalin reassess his alliance with Hitler though it was also now the only game in town. Molotov congratulated Schulenburg “warmly” but through gritted teeth, “on the splendid success of the German Wehrmacht .”

A rattled Stalin “cursed” the Allies: “Couldn’t they put up any resistance at all?” he asked Khrushchev. “Now Hitler’s going to beat our brains in!” 8

Stalin rushed to consume the Baltic States and Bessarabia, part of Romania. As troops moved across the borders, Soviet bombers flew Stalin’s proconsuls to their fiefdoms: Dekanozov to Lithuania, Deputy Premier (the former “shoot the mad dogs” Procurator) Vyshinsky to Latvia, and Zhdanov to Estonia. Zhdanov drove through the Estonian capital, Tallinn, in an armoured car flanked by two tanks and then nominated a puppet “Prime Minister,” lecturing the Estonians “that everything will be done in accordance with democratic parliamentary rules… We’re not Germans!” For some Baltic citizens, they were worse. A total of 34,250 Latvians, almost 60,000 Estonians and 75,000 Lithuanians were murdered or deported. “Comrade Beria,” said Stalin, “will take care of the accommodation of our Baltic guests.” The NKVD put icing on Stalin’s cake on 20 August, when Beria’s agent Ramon Mercader shattered Trotsky’s skull with an icepick. Trotsky might have undermined Stalin’s foreign policy but really his death simply closed the chapter of the Great Terror. Vengeance was Stalin’s. 9

Stalin had seized a buffer zone from the Baltic to the Black Sea but he now started to receive intelligence of Hitler’s intention to attack the USSR. He redoubled his attentions to the Germans. Yet he also laughed at the Nazis with Zhdanov by putting on Wagner’s Flight of the Valkyries directed by the Jewish Eisenstein.