Stalin: A Biography

by Robert Service

  Pravda continued to mention him with cultic reverence. Photographers were seldom allowed to take his picture; it was mainly old photos which were published in the press, and even these were used sparingly.8 It was as if the decision was taken to treat him as a disembodied symbol of the USSR’s war effort rather than the living Supreme Commander. Posters, busts and flags continued to be produced. Booklets of his best-known articles and speeches were on sale at cheap prices. Commissars in the armed forces gave lectures on political policies and military strategy as well as on Stalin’s personal leadership. He let no details of his activities be aired in the mass media. He continued to handle his public image on his own terms, and he had never felt comfortable with the frequent communing with society which the leaders of the Western Allies found congenial. Nor did he change his mind on letting a subordinate — as Hitler did with Goebbels — manufacture a public image for him. As before the war, Stalin kept direct control of what was said on his behalf.

  Yet his reclusive tendency retained at least some advantages and was not as harmful to the regime as it would have been elsewhere. Many Soviet citizens inferred that a wise patriarch commanded the political and military agencies of the state. This may have helped more than it hindered the war effort. Stalin was inept at tasks of self-endearment or public reassurance. His characteristic inclination at large gatherings and in radio broadcasts was to project ferocity. If people had seen him more often, the illusion of his well-meaning sagacity could have been dispelled. His seclusion allowed them to believe in the sort of Stalin they wanted. They might persuade themselves that all the troubles of the inter-war period would be resolved once the Germans had been defeated. There was immense popular expectation that a victorious Stalin would sanction a relaxation of the Soviet order. People in their millions had got him wrong. But their mistake helped them to fight on for victory despite the horrific rigours.

  Abroad his re clusiveness worked even better. Little was known about him. He had baffled even many Moscow-based diplomats before the war.9 Interest had been greatest among communists, but loyal members of the Comintern did not stray beyond the pieties offered in the official biography; and renegades such as the Trotskyists, who knew a lot more, were a vociferous but ignored minority. The general public in the West were hardly better informed after the Nazi–Soviet pact in August 1939. David Low, cartoonist for London’s Evening Standard, produced wonderful images of Stalin and Hitler embracing while each hold a dagger behind the other’s back. Stalin was represented as a baleful tyrant. Yet it was Hitler rather than Stalin who held the attention of Western commentators. This remained the situation until Operation Barbarossa. It was then that Stalin became the hero of the anti-Nazi belligerent countries. The same fact reduced the incentive to pry into the dark corners of Stalin’s career. If his Red Army was fighting back, he had to be supported and his communist loyalists in Western countries needed to be treated as patriots rather than subversives. British diplomats and journalists ceased any criticism. Stalin was their new idol.

  When the USA entered the war in December 1941, the adulation crossed the Atlantic. In the following year Time magazine named Stalin its Man of the Year. The commendation noted brightly:10

  The trek of world dignitaries to Moscow in 1942 brought Stalin out of his inscrutable shell, revealed a pleasant host and an expert at playing his cards in international affairs. At banquets for such men as Winston Churchill, W. Averell Harriman and Wendell Wilkie, Host Stalin drank his vodka straight, talked the same way.

  More generally the editorial declared:

  The man whose name means steel in Russian, whose few words of English include the American expression ‘tough guy’, was the man of 1942. Only Joseph Stalin fully knew how close Russia stood to defeat in 1942, and only Joseph Stalin fully knew how he brought Russia through.

  This comment set the tone for Western descriptions of him for the rest of the war. He had already won Time magazine’s accolade as Man of the Year at the beginning of 1940.11 But whereas earlier he had been praised as a master of clever, pragmatic manoeuvres, the current emphasis was upon straightforwardness and steadfastness. He was being hailed as a statesman with whom the West could do business. Churchill kept his reservations to himself in the interests of the Grand Alliance. The cult at home acquired its affiliate shrines in the lands of capitalism — and it was just as vague and misleading in the West as it was in its homeland.12

  Beyond the public gaze Stalin was as complex an individual as ever. An accomplished dissembler, he could assume whatever mood he thought useful. He could charm a toad from a tree. The younger public figures promoted in the late 1930s were particularly susceptible. One such was Nikolai Baibakov. What struck Baibakov was Stalin’s ‘businesslike approach and friendliness’. While discussion took place in his office, he would pace around and occasionally direct a penetrating gaze at his interviewees. He had several tricks up his sleeve. One of them was to set up a debate between experts without revealing his preference in advance. Baibakov also recalled that Stalin never held discussions until he had studied the available material. He was well informed about many matters. He seldom raised his voice and scarcely ever bawled at anyone or even expressed irritation.13

  Baibakov was looking back through rose-tinted spectacles; the rest of his account indicates that interviews could be terrifying affairs. Stalin, when putting him in charge of the oil installations of the Caucasus, spelled out his terms:14

  Comrade Baibakov, Hitler is bursting through to the Caucasus. He’s declared that if he doesn’t seize the Caucasus, he’ll lose the war. Everything must be done to prevent the oil falling into German hands. Bear in mind that if you leave the Germans even one ton of oil, we will shoot you. But if you destroy the installations prematurely and the Germans don’t grab them and we’re left without fuel, we’ll also shoot you.

  This was hardly the most ‘businesslike and friendly’ of injunctions; but Baibakov in retrospect thought that circumstances required such ferocity. Plucking up courage in Stalin’s presence, he had quietly replied: ‘But you leave me no choice, comrade Stalin.’ Stalin walked across to him, raised his hand and tapped his forehead: ‘The choice is here, comrade Baibakov. Fly out. And think it over with Budënny and make your decision on the spot.’15

  Another incident was overheard by General A. E. Golovanov in October 1941. He was at Stavka when Stalin took a phone call from a certain Stepanov, Army Commissar on the Western Front. Stalin’s telephone receiver had a built-in amplifier and Golovanov was able to listen to the exchange. Stepanov, on behalf of the Western Front generals, asked permission to withdraw staff headquarters to the east of Perkhushkovo because of the proximity of the front line. This was the sort of request which enraged Stalin, and the conversation went as follows:16

  Stalin: Comrade Stepanov, find out whether your comrades have got spades.

  Stepanov: What’s that, comrade Stalin?

  Stalin: Do the comrades have spades?

  Stepanov: Comrade Stalin, what kind of spades do you mean: the type used by sappers or some other?

  Stalin: It doesn’t matter which type.

  Stepanov: Comrade Stalin, they’ve got spades! But what should they do with them?

  Stalin: Comrade Stepanov, pass on to your comrades that they should take their spades and dig their own graves. We here are not leaving Moscow. Stavka will remain in Moscow. And they are not going to move from Perkhushkovo.

  He did not usually have to bother with sarcasm. The memory of the Great Terror was enough to discourage most military and political personnel from making such an approach to him.

  The atmosphere of fear and unpredictability choked nearly everyone into compliance with whatever Stalin was demanding. Just a few Soviet leaders dared to object to what he said. Two of these were Georgi Zhukov and Nikolai Voznesenski. Yet Stalin intimidated even Zhukov. He also exasperated him. Stalin, Zhukov noted, had taken time to understand the need for careful preparation of military operations by professional comman
ders. He was like a ‘fist-fighter’ in discussion when better results could have been obtained by more comradely methods.17 He was also arbitrary in his appointment and replacement of commanders, acting on the basis of partial information or of mischievous suggestions. The morale of commanding officers would have been higher if he had not meddled in this way.18

  Stalin’s other subordinates had learned to keep their heads down. ‘When I went to the Kremlin,’ said Ivan Kovalëv about his wartime experience in the post of People’s Commissar of Communications,

  Molotov, Beria and Malenkov would usually be in Stalin’s office. I used to feel they were in the way. They never asked questions, but sat there and listened, sometimes jotting down a note. Stalin would be busy issuing instructions, talking on the phone, signing papers… and those three would go on sitting there.19

  Stalin’s visitors’ diary makes it clear that these three saw him more frequently than any other politicians. Mikoyan had a theory about this. He hypothesised that Stalin kept Molotov in his office because he feared what Molotov might get up to if he was allowed to be by himself.20 Mikoyan had a point even if he exaggerated it. Stalin had to include others in affairs of state and they in turn had to know what was afoot. Needless to add, he did not give a damn that the main state leaders would be dog-tired by the time they got to their People’s Commissariats and started at last to deal with their own business.

  He trusted none of his politicians and commanders. Even Zhukov, his favourite military leader, was the object of his disquiet: Stalin instructed Bogdan Kobulov in the NKVD to put a listening device in his home. Seemingly the same was done to Stalin’s old comrades Voroshilov and Budënny. His suspicions were boundless.21 Having ordered Dmitri Pavlov’s execution in the early days of the war, Stalin was little more satisfied with Ivan Konev, Pavlov’s successor on the Western Front. Konev’s failure to bring an immediate halt to the German advance was reason enough to question his loyalty. Stalin was all for shooting him. Zhukov was no friend of Konev’s but thought such a fate completely undeserved. He had had to plead with Stalin to relent.22 Zhukov was being taught that absolutely no commander was secure in post and life.

  Stalin knew he could not do without Zhukov from October 1941. German tank corps had reached the outskirts of Moscow and German bombers flew over the city. Soviet regular forces were hurried out to meet the threat. Panic seized the minds of ordinary citizens, and the NKVD rounded up those who tried to flee. The factories and offices hardly shut for the duration of the battle. Stalin and Zhukov conferred:23

  Stalin: Are you convinced that we’ll hold on to Moscow? I ask you this with a pain in my soul. Tell me honestly as a communist.

  Zhukov: We will definitely hold on to Moscow.

  Having assured the Supreme Commander that Moscow would not fall, Zhukov had to fulfil his commitment regardless of difficulties.

  When sending telegrams to Stalin and phoning him from the field, Zhukov addressed him as ‘Comrade Supreme Commander’.24 The nomenclature was a typical Soviet mishmash: Zhukov had to refer to him as a fellow communist as well as a commander. Stalin kept up the proprieties in return. Even in emergencies he often avoided giving orders in his own name. Phoning through to his generals on the various fronts, he was inclined to say some such phrase as ‘the Committee of Defence and Stavka very much request the taking of all possible and impossible measures’.25 Zhukov remembered these evasive niceties many years later.

  He also recalled how Stalin delighted in using pseudonyms. There were patches of comradeliness between them when the fighting was going in the USSR’s favour and he held Zhukov in esteem (despite keeping him under surveillance). Zhukov and he worked out an agreed code for their exchanges by land line or telegram: Stalin was ‘Vasilev’ and Zhukov ‘Konstantinov’. Stalin had used this pseudonym before 1917, and perhaps it signalled some kind of self-identification with Russia. False names were in any case a bit of a game: there was little chance of the German intelligence agencies being fooled by a pseudonym, especially one which had been used by Stalin in the past. Yet Stalin ought not to be judged too harshly. (There are abundant other reasons to indict him without artificially inflating the number.) The pressures on the two of them were immense, and it is no surprise that ‘Comrade Supreme Commander’ consoled himself with nicknames. In his lighter moments he knew how to encourage as well as how to terrify his military subordinates.

  He would not be induced, however, to witness conditions at the front; indeed he scarcely left Moscow apart from completely unavoidable trips to the Allied conferences at Tehran and Yalta. While urging audacity upon his commanders, he took no risks with his personal security. There was one exception and it was much trumpeted in the press. In 1942 he made a journey to the front, ostensibly to monitor the progress of the campaign. When he got to within thirty or forty miles of active hostilities, he was greeted by military commanders on the Minsk Chaussée who advised him that they could not guarantee his safety if he travelled further. Stalin must have known that they would say this. This was the nearest he approached to any point of direct action in the war. He never saw a shot fired. But he made much of the conversation with his commanders and, after due display of disappointment, returned to the Kremlin. Much was made of the journey in official propaganda. Pravda reported it as if Stalin really had reached the front and given much needed orders on strategy and tactics to the frontal command.

  Mikoyan told a less flattering tale of the journey. ‘Stalin himself,’ he wrote, ‘was not the bravest of men.’ Allegedly Stalin, as he talked with his commanders, felt an urgent call of nature. Mikoyan speculated that it might have been mortal fear rather than the normal effects of digestion. Stalin anyway needed to go somewhere fast. He asked about the bushes by the roadside, but the generals — whose troops had not long before liberated the zone from German occupation — could not guarantee that landmines had not been left behind. ‘At that point,’ Mikoyan recorded with memorable precision, ‘the Supreme Commander in sight of everyone dropped his trousers and did his business on the asphalt. This completed his “reconnoitring of the front” and he went straight back to Moscow.’26

  Avoidance of unnecessary risk was one thing, and Stalin took this to an extreme. But it is scarcely fair on Stalin to claim that he was a coward. Probably his behaviour stemmed rather from an excessive estimate of his own indispensability to the war effort. He looked on his military and political subordinates and thought they could not cope without him. Nor was he afraid of personal responsibility once he had got over the shock of 22 June 1941. He lived or died by his success in leading army and government. He exhausted every bone in his body for that purpose. And Zhukov credited Stalin with making up for his original military ignorance and inexperience. He went on studying during the fighting, and with his exceptional capacity for hard work he was able to raise himself to the level where he could understand most of the military complexities in Stavka. Khrushchëv later caricatured Stalin as having tried to follow the campaigns on a small globe he kept in his office, and this image has been reproduced in many subsequent accounts. In fact Stalin, while scaring his commanders and often making wholly unrealistic demands upon them, earned their professional admiration.

  Not only military dispositions but also arrangements about the entire civilian sector of society and economy were in Stalin’s hands. He kept a watch on all resources and wrote down details in a little notebook. He was always keen that his subordinates should husband the resources already in their possession. Everything from tank production to foreign currency reserves was recorded by him, and he was miserly in making additions to what was already assigned to institutions. His leading associates were instructed to take the same approach to their own underlings: Molotov for tanks, Mikoyan for food supplies, Kaganovich for transport, Malenkov for aircraft and Voznesenski for armaments. The little notebook ruled their lives.27 Stalin was the linchpin of the Soviet war effort. The two sides of that effort, the military and civilian, were kept separate. Stalin did not
want the commanders to interfere in politics and the economy nor the intervention of politicians in Stavka; and when he held meetings of the State Committee of Defence it was he who brought the two sides together.

  42. THE BIG THREE

  Vital interests of the USSR, the USA and the United Kingdom coincided after the events of June and December 1941. Churchill offered assistance to Stalin as soon as the German–Soviet war broke out. An agreement was signed on 12 July 1941. A British delegation headed by Lord Beaverbrook and accompanied by American diplomat Averell Harriman flew out for talks with Stalin in September. Negotiations ensued between Washington and Moscow when war started between Germany and the USA in December. A Combined Chiefs of Staff committee was created to co-ordinate American and British operations. The leaders of the Allied countries — Churchill, Roosevelt and Stalin — were soon as known as the Big Three.

  The Grand Alliance was racked by mutual suspicions. A global war was being fought and the distribution of resources between the battlefields of Europe and Asia had yet to be agreed. There also had to be consultation about strategic operations. As the fighting continued between the Third Reich and the USSR, the Americans and British needed to decide when to open a ‘second front’ in western Europe. There was also the question of mutual assistance. Both the USSR and the UK looked to the USA, the world’s largest economic power, as a source of equipment, food and financial credit. The governments had to agree on the terms for this. War aims too had to be clarified. There was ceaseless tension between the Americans and the British since Washington had no desire to prop up the British Empire in the event of Allied victory. Similarly neither the Americans nor the British wished to give Stalin a free hand in his dealings with eastern Europe. Nor had the Allies discussed what to do with Germany after Hitler. Such were the dilemmas which would eventually necessitate the involvement of the supreme leaders.