Stalin: A Biography

by Robert Service

  The Big Three kept in contact by means of telegrams and embassies. Direct negotiations, however, were also desirable. The problem was that Roosevelt was physically disabled, and frequent long air-trips were too gruelling for him. Churchill, though, was an enthusiastic voyager. The British Prime Minister crossed the Atlantic to meet Roosevelt in Placentia Bay in August 1941 and in Washington the same December. He made still more dangerous flights to hold talks with Stalin in Moscow in August 1942 and October 1944 (which involved stop-overs in Gibraltar, Cairo, Tehran and the airfield at Kuibyshev).

  Stalin, obsessively wishing to control everything in Moscow and being unwilling to risk journeys by air, held out against any such trips whenever he could possibly avoid them. Molotov as People’s Commissar of External Affairs had been dispatched to Berlin in 1940. He also flew to the UK over the Baltic and across the North Sea in May 1942; such was his distrust of perfidious Albion that he slept with a revolver under his pillow. Stalin egocentrically expected others to take the risks. His immobility exasperated Roosevelt and Churchill. Roosevelt described the splendours of the Ghiza pyramids to persuade the Soviet leader to fly to Cairo.1 As he pointed out, he himself was willing to travel even though the USA Constitution restricted the time a president could spend abroad.2 Stalin could not put off a meeting of the Big Three indefinitely; and after turning down Cairo, Baghdad and Basra, he agreed to Tehran in November 1943. It was not far from the USSR and he had assured himself that the Soviet embassy in the Iranian capital could guarantee safety. Otherwise he refused to travel outside the territory of Soviet jurisdiction. The next conference was held at Yalta in the south of the RSFSR in February 1945. Stalin had got used to working at night and sleeping for most of the day. He had to go back to a more conventional schedule for meetings with Roosevelt and Churchill.3

  Stalin had made his own preparations for travel. In 1941 he ordered the fitting out of a special railway carriage which would enable him to carry on working while travelling. At eighty-three tons, it was heavily armoured. Inside it had every facility — study, sitting room, toilet, kitchen and bodyguards’ compartment — fitted out in the solid style he favoured. There was nothing luxurious about the carriage; the heavy wood and metal of its interior bespoke a leader who disliked frippery and demanded to be guaranteed conditions of regular work. Carriage FD 3878 was like a mobile Kremlin office.4

  Agreements with the Western Allies were put into place long before Stalin used his new facility. The USSR urgently needed supplies. Churchill had offered assistance after the start of Operation Barbarossa and military convoys were sent to the Arctic Ocean. But the British themselves relied on American supply ships. It was therefore important for the Soviet government, once Hitler had declared war on the USA, to seek help from Roosevelt. In fact it was in the American interest to comply with such requests if this meant that the Wehrmacht would be weakened by the strengthened resistance of the Red Army. The Lend– Lease arrangement already in place with the United Kingdom was extended to the USSR. Loans, military equipment and food were earmarked for Soviet use. Shipments to the USSR were made by Arctic convoys to Murmansk or else across the frontier with Iran. The war with Japan in the Pacific ruled out the other routes. Steadily, though, American jeeps, spam, sugar and gunpowder filled vital gaps in production. Destruction of British vessels was frequent under attack from German submarines but Stalin took the rate of loss as undeserving of comment when the Red Army was giving up the lives of millions of its troops against the Germans.

  The other thing agitating Stalin left him even less satisfied. He wanted the Western Allies to organise the opening of a second front in Europe as a means of relieving the pressure on his own armed forces. He never lost a chance to demand greater urgency from the USA and the UK. Fresh to the anti-Hitler military struggle, the Americans talked airily about managing this by the end of 1942. Churchill was more circumspect and, on his Moscow visit in August 1942, pulled out a map of western Europe to explain the vast logistical difficulties of a seaborne invasion from Britain. Stalin continued to bait him: ‘Has the British navy no sense of glory?’5 Churchill was on the point of leaving for London without further discussion. He had had enough of the Soviet leader’s angry demands. Seeing that he had gone too far, Stalin invited him to yet another convivial dinner and the crisis faded. Roosevelt and his advisers, when they acquainted themselves with the military logistics, accepted the cogency of Churchill’s argument; and Stalin had to recognise that until they were ready and willing to launch their ships across the English Channel, there was nothing he could do to make them hurry.

  Although Stalin went on rebuking Churchill and Roosevelt in his correspondence, he could also be tactful. To Roosevelt, on whom he was dependent for finance and military supplies, he wrote on 14 December 1942:6

  Permit me also to express confidence that time has not passed in vain and that the promises about opening the second front in Europe, which were given to me by you, Mr President, and Mr Churchill in relation to 1942, will be fulfilled and will anyway be fulfilled in relation to spring 1943…

  It made no difference. The Americans and the British refused to rush their preparations.

  Their stubbornness increased the urgency for Stalin to accede to their invitation to a meeting of the Big Three. Thus the Tehran Conference was organised. Churchill knew his Allied partners well by that time but Stalin and Roosevelt had never met. The Soviet and American leaders set about charming each other. They hit it off well. Stalin was on his best behaviour, impressing the President as someone he could have dealings with. Both Stalin and Roosevelt wanted to see the British Empire dissolved, and Roosevelt said this when they were alone together. Roosevelt prided himself on understanding how to handle Stalin, who appeared to him a crude but reliable negotiator; it did not occur to him that Stalin was capable of turning on his own bonhomie to suit his purposes. Roosevelt was ailing by the middle of the war. His energy and intellectual acumen were running out. At the Tehran and Yalta Conferences Stalin made the most of his friendly relationship with Roosevelt and tried to hammer a wedge between him and Churchill. He did not always succeed. But he did well enough to prevent Churchill from insisting on a firmer line being taken against Soviet pretensions in eastern Europe.

  Yet Churchill too had to be conciliated. Churchill had been the world’s loudest advocate of a crusade against Soviet Russia in the Civil War. He had referred to the Bolsheviks as baboons and had called for the October Revolution to be ‘strangled’ in its cradle. Stalin brought up the matter in a jovial fashion. Churchill replied: ‘I was very active in the intervention, and I do not wish you to think otherwise.’ As Stalin contrived a smile, Churchill ventured: ‘Have you forgiven me?’ Stalin’s diplomatic comment was that ‘all that is in the past, and the past belongs to God’.7

  The Western leaders of the Grand Alliance could at any rate count on royal treatment à la sovíetique when they made journeys to meet Stalin. It was Churchill who got the most sumptuous welcome by dint of going to Moscow. In October 1944 Molotov as People’s Commissar for External Affairs put on an enormous party at which the tables heaved with food and wine. The British official group ate heartily before leaving for a concert in the Chaikovski Hall. The orchestra played Chaikovski’s Fifth Symphony and Rakhmaninov’s Third. Stalin had agreed to dine that night at the British embassy. Churchill and he were getting on well at the dinner party, and such was Stalin’s bonhomie that he came through to the lower rooms so that the rest of the visiting Britons could see him. They toasted him before he went back to a further bout of eating and drinking. Usually Stalin staved off inebriation by drinking a vodka-coloured wine while others drank spirits. He had admitted this stratagem to Ribbentrop in 1939.8 But that night he allowed himself to become well oiled before leaving the den of Anglo-Saxon capitalist reaction at four o’clock in the morning.9 By custom Stalin was wide awake at that hour; but his British hosts did not know that: they were left with the impression of a genial guest who had shared in the mood of the
occasion.

  There had been similar hospitality at the Tehran Conference and this created the atmosphere among the Big Three for agreement on large decisions. Stalin, Roosevelt and Churchill were determined to prevent Germany from ever again becoming a menace to world peace. The most effective step, they concurred, would be to break up the state,10 and some in Roosevelt’s entourage wished to go as far as the compulsory deindustrialisation of the country. Borders in eastern and central Europe also attracted attention at Tehran. Stalin’s concern with Soviet security induced Churchill to propose a redrawing of the European map. He demonstrated this with the aid of three matchsticks. Apparently he thought that without a visual aid he would not get his point across to the Caucasian. Churchill wanted to shift both Poland and Germany westward.11 The western edge of the USSR in his estimation should end at the line proposed in mid-1920 by Lord Curzon (which, as Anthony Eden pointed out, was virtually the same as what was known in the West as the Ribbentrop–Molotov frontier — Molotov did not demur).12 The USSR would be expanded at Poland’s expense. Poland would be compensated by acquisitions in eastern Germany.13 To guarantee his continental security Stalin also demanded that the city-port of Königsberg should pass into the possession of the USSR, and Roosevelt and Churchill agreed.14

  Stalin had to adjust his daily timetable to achieve his goals; for whereas he could intimidate all leading Soviet politicians and commanders into adopting his nocturnal work-style, he could not expect Roosevelt and Churchill to negotiate by candlelight. Stalin played his hand with an aplomb sustained by a secret advantage he held over his interlocutors in Tehran: he had their conversations bugged. Beria’s son Sergo wrote about this:15

  At 8 a.m. Stalin, who had changed his habits for the occasion (usually he worked at night and got up at 11 a.m.), received me and the others. He prepared himself carefully for each of our sessions, having at hand files on every question that interested him. He even went so far as to ask for details of the tone of the conversations: ‘Did he say that with conviction or without enthusiasm? How did Roosevelt react? Did he say that resolutely?’ Sometimes he was surprised: ‘They know that we can hear them and yet they speak openly!’ One day he even asked me: ‘What do you think, do they know that we are listening to them?’

  Even though the Western delegations worked from the premise that Soviet intelligence agencies might be listening to them, Stalin may have been less baffled about Roosevelt and Churchill than they were by him.

  On Churchill’s trip to Moscow in October 1944 there was an acute need to talk further about the future of Europe. Churchill broached the matter deftly: ‘The moment was apt for business, so I said: “Let us settle our affairs in the Balkans.”’ Churchill took the bull by the horns and scribbled out his proposal on a blank sheet of paper. He suggested an arithmetical apportionment of zones of influence between the USSR on one side and the United Kingdom and the USA on the other. This was the notorious ‘percentages agreement’:16

  - % -

  Rumania 90 Russia

  10 The others

  Greece 90 Great Britain (in accord with USA)

  10 Russia

  Yugoslavia 50–50 -

  Hungary 50–50 -

  Bulgaria 75 Russia

  25 The others

  Stalin waited for the translation, glanced at the paper and then took his blue pencil from a bronze pot and inscribed a large tick. There followed a long pause: both men sensed they were deciding something of historic importance. Churchill broke the silence: ‘Might it not be thought rather cynical if it seemed we had disposed of these issues, so fateful to millions of people, in such an offhand manner? Let us burn the paper.’ But Stalin was untroubled, and said: ‘No, you keep it.’17

  Churchill, talking later to the British ambassador, referred to his proposal as the ‘naughty document’. Stalin had second thoughts about details and asked for greater influence in Bulgaria and Hungary. In both cases he demanded 80 per cent for the USSR. British Foreign Secretary Anthony Eden, with Churchill’s consent, agreed to this amendment in a session with Molotov.18 Mythology has descended upon the agreement on percentages. The legend grew, for example, that Stalin and Churchill had carved up all Europe between them and that their conversation predetermined all the territorial and political decisions subsequently taken by the Allies. In reality the ‘naughty document’ was a provisional bilateral accord for action in the immediate future. It left much undiscussed. No mention was made of Germany, Poland or Czechoslovakia. Nothing was said about the political and economic system to be installed in any country after the war. The intended post-war order in Europe and Asia had yet to be clarified, and the percentages agreement did not bind the hands of the USA. Unconsulted, President Roosevelt could accept or reject it as he wished. Yet such in fact was his desire to keep the USSR sweet until Germany’s defeat that he welcomed the ‘naughty document’ without demur.

  By the time the Big Three met at Yalta on 4 February 1945 it was urgent for them to grasp the nettle of planning post-war Europe and Asia. For Stalin it was also an occasion for the Soviet authorities to show off their savoir faire. Each delegation stayed in a palace built for the tsars. This cut no mustard with the aristocratic British Prime Minister. Churchill said that ‘a worse place in the world’ would not have been discovered even with a decade’s exploration. The length of the journey can hardly have annoyed this inveterate traveller. Yalta is on the Crimean peninsula. Before 1917 it was one of the favourite spots for holidaying dignitaries of the Imperial state. Stalin loved the entire shore from Crimea down to Abkhazia — and it is hard to resist the observation that Churchill was indulging in English snobbery.

  The Yalta Conference took decisions of enormous importance and Stalin was at his most ebullient. He asked to be rewarded for promising to enter the war against Japan after the coming victory over Germany. In particular, he demanded reparations to the value of twenty billion dollars from Germany. This was controversial, but the Western leaders conceded it to Stalin. More hotly debated was the treatment of Poland. At the insistence of Roosevelt and Churchill the future Polish government was to be a coalition embracing nationalists as well as communists. Yet they failed to pin down Stalin on the details. The wily Stalin wanted a free hand in eastern and east-central Europe. Roosevelt and he were on friendly terms and sometimes met in Churchill’s absence. As the junior partner of the Western Allies Churchill had to put up with the situation while making the best of it; and when Stalin demanded south Sakhalin and the Kurile Islands — known to the Japanese as their Northern Territories — in return for joining the war in the Pacific, Churchill was as content as the American President to oblige. Stalin and Churchill also acceded to Roosevelt’s passionate request for the establishment of a United Nations Organisation at the war’s end. For Roosevelt, as for Woodrow Wilson after the First World War, it was crucial to set up a body which would enhance the prospects for global peace.

  The Western Allies were not in an enviable position. Although Germany was on the brink of defeat, there was no telling how long Japan might hold out. The American and British forces in Europe, moreover, had been told they were fighting in alliance with the Red Army. Not only Pravda but also the Western establishments buffed up Stalin’s personal image. No sooner had the USSR entered the war with the Third Reich than the British press replaced criticism with praise. On the occasion of Stalin’s birthday in December 1941 the London Philharmonic Orchestra, not previously known as a communist front organisation, played a concerto in his honour.19 Public opinion more widely in the West was acutely grateful to the Red Army (as well it might have been) and, less justifiably, treated Stalin as its brave and glorious embodiment. A military confrontation by the Western Allies with the USSR would have been politically as well as militarily difficult. More could have been done nevertheless to put pressure on Stalin; and although Churchill was firmer than Roosevelt, even he was too gentle.

  In fact the worst contretemps among the Big Three at Yalta occurred not during the for
mal negotiations. Roosevelt after a drink at lunch told Stalin that in the West he was known as Uncle Joe.20 The touchy Soviet leader felt himself the object of ridicule: he could not understand that his nickname indicated a high degree of grudging respect. Needled by the revelation, he had to be persuaded to remain at table. The use of nicknames was anyway not confined to Stalin: Churchill called himself ‘Former Naval Person’ in telegrams to the American President.21 Stalin was not averse to taking a dig at Churchill. At one of the Big Three’s meals together he proposed that to prevent a resurgence of German militarism after the war the Allies should shoot fifty thousand officers and technical experts. Churchill, knowing Stalin’s bloody record, took him at his word and growled that he would rather be shot himself than ‘sully my own and my country’s honour by such infamy’. Roosevelt tried to lighten the atmosphere by saying that the execution of forty-nine thousand members of the German officer corps would be quite sufficient. Churchill, nauseated by the banter, made for the door and had to be brought back by Stalin and Molotov, who apologised for what they claimed had been a joke.22

  The British Prime Minister remained unconvinced that Stalin had been jesting; but not for a moment did he contemplate withdrawal from the Yalta Conference. As at previous meetings, he — like Stalin and Roosevelt — saw that the Allies had to stick together or hang separately. When personal insults, however intentionally, were delivered to one of them, the others had to smooth ruffled feathers. In fact it was one of Churchill’s entourage, General Alan Brooke, who had the worst verbal exchange with Stalin. This had happened at a banquet at the Tehran Conference when Stalin rose to accuse Brooke of failing to show friendship and comradeship towards the Red Army. Brooke was ready for him and replied in kind that it seemed that ‘truth must have an escort of lies’ in war; he went on to assert that he felt ‘genuine comradeship’ towards the men of the Soviet armed forces. Stalin took the riposte on the chin, remarking to Churchill: ‘I like that man. He rings true.’23