“No, no, Joseph Vissarionovich, you do the talking. I’m sure you’ll do a better job than I.” They swiftly agreed to the terms of their pact which was designed to divide Poland and eastern Europe into spheres of influence— Stalin got Eastern Poland, Latvia, Estonia, Finland and Bessarabia in Romania, though Hitler kept Lithuania.
But when Ribbentrop proposed a paean to German–Soviet friendship, Stalin snorted: “Don’t you think we have to pay a little more attention to public opinion in our two countries? For many years now, we have been pouring buckets of shit over each other’s heads and our propaganda boys could not do enough in that direction. Now all of a sudden, are we to make our peoples believe all is forgotten and forgiven? Things don’t work so fast.” With so much agreed so fast, Ribbentrop returned to the embassy to telegraph Hitler.
At 10 p.m., he arrived back at the Little Corner, accompanied by a much larger delegation and two photographers. When Ribbentrop announced that Hitler approved the terms, “a sudden tremor seemed to go through Stalin and he did not immediately grasp the hand proffered by his partner. It was as if he had first to overcome a moment of fear.”
Stalin ordered vodka and toasted: “I know how much the German nation loves its Führer. He’s a good chap. I’d like to drink to his health.” Molotov then toasted Ribbentrop who toasted Stalin. One of the young Germans, a six-foot SS officer named Richard Schulze, noticed Stalin was drinking his vodka from a special flask and managed to fill his glass from it, only to discover it contained water. Stalin smiled faintly as Schulze drank it, not the last guest to sample this little secret.
By 2 a.m. on 24 August, the treaty was ready. The photographers—the Germans with up-to-date equipment, the Russians with ancient wooden tripod and wood-and-brass camera—were escorted into the room. The Red Army Chief of Staff, the ailing Shaposhnikov, respected by Stalin, took notes in a small notebook. When it came to the photograph, Stalin noticed the towering SS man who had sampled his flask and beckoned him into the picture where he positioned him between Ribbentrop and Shaposhnikov. Molotov signed.
A maid brought in champagne and snacks. When one of the German photographers flashed as Stalin and Ribbentrop raised their glasses, the former shook his finger and told him he did not want such a photograph published. The photographer offered to hand over his film but Stalin said he could trust the word of a German. At 3 a.m., as the excited leaders parted, Stalin told Ribbentrop: “I can guarantee on my word of honour that the Soviet Union will not betray its partner.”
Stalin headed to Kuntsevo where the hunters awaited. Voroshilov, Khrushchev, Malenkov and Bulganin had already brought their ducks to be cooked in Stalin’s kitchen. When Stalin and Molotov arrived jubilantly with a copy of their treaty, Khrushchev boasted about out-shooting Voroshilov, the vaunted “First Marksman,” before the laughing Vozhd told them how they had signed the world-shattering Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact: “Stalin seemed very pleased with himself” but he was under no illusions about his new friendship. As they feasted on duck, Stalin boasted:
“Of course it’s all a game to see who can fool whom. I know what Hitler’s up to. He thinks he’s outsmarted me but actually it’s I who’s tricked him.” War, he explained, “would pass us by a little longer.”154 Zhdanov mocked Ribbentrop’s pear-shaped figure: “He’s got the biggest and broadest pair of hips in all of Europe,” he announced as the magnates laughed about Ribbentrop’s preposterous girdle: “Those hips! Those hips!”
“The Great Game,” as Molotov called the tournament of nerves between Stalin and Hitler, had begun.3
At 2 a.m. on 1 September, Poskrebyshev handed Stalin a telegram from Berlin informing him that early that evening “Polish” troops (in fact German security forces in disguise) had attacked the German radio station in Gleiwitz. Stalin left for the dacha and went to bed. A few hours later, Poskrebyshev called again: Germany had invaded Poland. Stalin monitored the campaign as Britain and France declared war on Germany, honouring their guarantees. “We see nothing wrong in their having a good, hard fight and weakening each other,” he told Molotov and Zhdanov. Stalin planned the Soviet invasion of Poland with Voroshilov, Shaposhnikov and Kulik, who was to command the front along with Mekhlis, but waited until he had secured an end to the war with Japan first. At 2 a.m. on 17 September, Stalin, accompanied by Molotov and Voroshilov, told Schulenburg: “At 6 a.m., four hours from now, the Red Army will cross into Poland.” Premier Molotov took to the radio to announce the “sacred duty to proffer help to . . . Ukrainian and Belorussian brothers.” Mekhlis claimed to Stalin that the West Ukrainians welcomed the Soviet troops “like true liberators” with “apples, pies, drinking water . . . Many weep with joy.”
Khrushchev, Ukrainian First Secretary, donned a military uniform and, accompanied by his NKVD boss, Ivan Serov, joined the forces of Semyon Timoshenko, commander of the Kiev Military District. Timoshenko was a tough, shaven-headed veteran of the First Cavalry Army in Tsaritsyn; he was a competent officer, yet in the Terror, he had both denounced Budyonny and been denounced himself. Khrushchev claimed to have saved his life. Khrushchev’s advance into Poland was an adventure for him, but even more so for his wife Nina Petrovna who, also sporting a military uniform and a pistol, liberated her own parents who had remained in Poland since 1920. Khrushchev, ensconced in Lvov, celebrated at the sight of her and her parents but lost his temper when he saw her pistol.155
If the invasion was joyous for the Khrushchevs, it unleashed depredations on the Polish population every bit as cruel and tragic as those of the Nazis. Khrushchev ruthlessly suppressed any sections of the population who might oppose Soviet power: priests, officers, noblemen, intellectuals were kidnapped, murdered and deported to eliminate the very existence of Poland. By November 1940, one-tenth of the population or 1.17 million innocents had been deported. Thirty percent of them were dead by 1941; 60,000 were arrested and 50,000 shot. The Soviets behaved like conquerors. When some soldiers were arrested for stealing treasures from a Prince Radziwill, Vyshinsky consulted Stalin.
“If there’s no ill will,” he wrote on the note, “they can be pardoned. J.St.”4
At 5 p.m. on Wednesday 27 September, Ribbentrop flew back to negotiate the notorious protocols, so secret that Molotov was still denying their existence thirty years later. By 10 p.m., he was at the Kremlin in talks with Stalin and Molotov around the green baize table. Stalin wanted Lithuania. Ribbentrop telegraphed Hitler for his permission so the talks were delayed until 3 p.m. the next day. But Hitler’s message had not arrived by the time Ribbentrop returned to negotiate the cartographic details.
That night, while Stalin held a gala dinner for the Germans to celebrate the carve-up of Europe, the Russians were meeting the unfortunate Estonian Foreign Minister to force him to allow Soviet troops into his country, the first step to outright annexation. The Nazis were greeted at the door of the Great Kremlin Palace, led through the dull wooden Congress Hall which looked like a giant schoolroom, and then dazzled by the scarlet and gold reception room where Stalin, Molotov and the Politburo, including Jewish Kaganovich, awaited them. Stalin’s manner was “simple and unpretentious,” beaming with “paternal benevolence” that could turn to “icy coldness” as he “rapped out orders,” though he used a “jocular and kind manner with his junior assistants.” The Germans noticed how respectful the Russians were to Stalin: Commissar Tevosian, the “lucky stiff” who had narrowly avoided execution in 1938, rose “like a schoolboy” whenever Stalin addressed him. The fear surrounding Stalin had become intense since 1937. But he was cordial with Voroshilov, friendly with Beria and Mikoyan, matter-of-fact with Kaganovich, chatty with Malenkov. Only Molotov “would talk to his chief as one comrade to another.”
Their swagger was so raffish that Ribbentrop said he felt as at ease as he did among old Nazi comrades. While the guests were chatting, Stalin went into the sumptuous Andreevsky Hall to check the seating plan, which he enjoyed doing, even at Kuntsevo.156 The twenty-two guests were dwarfed by the grandeur of the hall
, the colossal flower arrangements, the imperial gold cutlery and, even more, by the twenty-four courses that included caviar, all manner of fishes and meats, and lashings of pepper vodka and Crimean champagne. The white-clad waiters were the same staff from the Metropol Hotel who would serve Churchill and Roosevelt at Yalta. Before anyone could eat, Molotov started to propose toasts to each guest. Stalin stalked over to clink glasses. It was an exhausting rigmarole that would become one of the diplomatic tribulations of the war. When Molotov had run through every guest, the Germans sighed with relief until he announced: “Now we’ll drink to all members of the delegations who couldn’t attend this dinner.”
Stalin took over, joking: “Let us drink to the new anti-Comintern Stalin,” and he winked at Molotov. Then he toasted Kaganovich, “our People’s Commissar of Railways.” Stalin could have toasted the Jewish magnate across the table but he deliberately rose and circled the table to clink glasses so that Ribbentrop had to follow suit and drink to a Jew, an irony that amused Stalin. Forty years on, Kaganovich was still telling the story to his grandchildren.
When Molotov embarked on another toast to his Vozhd, Stalin chuckled: “If Molotov really wants to drink, no one objects but he really shouldn’t use me as an excuse.” Stalin himself drank almost nothing and when Ribbentrop noticed how well he was bearing the toasts, he cheerfully revealed that he was drinking white wine. But Beria, who had transformed the Georgian tradition of forced hospitality into a despotic trial of submission, delighted in making his guests drink. The German diplomat Hilger, who wrote vivid memoirs of the evening, refused another vodka. Beria insisted, drawing the attention of Stalin himself who was sitting opposite them.
“What’s the argument about?” he asked, adding, “Well if you don’t want to drink, no one can force you.”
“Not even the chief of the NKVD himself?” smiled the German.
“Here at this table,” replied Stalin, “even the NKVD chief has no more say than anyone else.” At the end of the dinner, Stalin and Molotov excused themselves as the Germans were despatched off to the Bolshoi to watch Swan Lake. As he left, Stalin whispered to Kaganovich, “We must win time.” They then walked upstairs where the Estonian Foreign Minister miserably waited for Stalin to emasculate his little Baltic nation. Molotov demanded a Soviet garrison of 35,000 troops, more than the entire Estonian army.
“Come on, Molotov, you’re rather harsh on our friends,” said Stalin, suggesting 25,000, but the effect was much the same. Having swallowed a country during the first act of Swan Lake, Stalin returned to the Germans at midnight for a final session during which Hitler telephoned his agreement to the Lithuanian concession.
“Hitler knows his business,” muttered Stalin. Ribbentrop was so excited that he declared the two countries must never fight again:
“This ought to be the case,” replied Stalin, shocking Ribbentrop who asked for it to be retranslated. When the German suggested Russia joining a military alliance against the West, Stalin just said, “I shall never allow Germany to become weak.” He obviously believed that Germany would be restrained in the West by Britain and France. When the maps were finally ready in the early hours, Stalin signed them in blue crayon, with a massive signature ten inches long, an inch high, and a tail eighteen inches long. “Is my signature clear enough for you?”
By 3 October, all three Baltic States had agreed to Soviet garrisons. Stalin and Molotov turned their guns and threats on the fourth Baltic country in their sphere of influence, Finland, which they expected to buckle like the others.5
29
The Murder of the Wives
As the world watched Stalin and Hitler carve up the East, the Vozhd was probing the submission of his comrades by investigating and sometimes killing their wives. His fragile trust in women was irreparably undermined by Nadya’s suicide but this had been exacerbated by his own destruction of the wives of Enemies. As Khrushchev said, he became interested in other men’s wives for the unusual reason that they were possible spies rather than mistresses.
Stalin had always shown a minute interest in the wives. When he received the 1939 census, he ticked the names of some magnates’ wives and children in red pen. The meaning of the ticks was a mystery but it is tempting to regard everything about him as sinister. Maybe he was just working out how many cars the family needed. Wives now sat apart from their husbands at Kremlin dinners. Stalin’s attitude to old favourites, Polina and Dora, had become malicious and suspicious, partly reflecting their relationship with Nadya. But he had always been obsessed with wives knowing too much. As early as 1930, he suggested to Molotov that some comrade’s wife “should be checked . . . she could not help but know about the outrageous goings-on at their house.” This burning suspicion of uxoriousness partly derived from Stalin’s dislike of anything that interfered with blind devotion to the Party and himself. “Stalin did not recognize personal relations,” said Kaganovich. “The love of one person for another did not exist.” He saw the wives as hostages for his comrades’ good behaviour and punishment for bad: “No one who contradicts Stalin,” Beria told Nina, “keeps his wife.” But the slaughter of wives coincided with Beria’s arrival.
Polina Molotova, the First Lady, was in danger. She was now Commissar of Fishing, a CC candidate member and mistress of her perfume empire. Yet Beria now started investigating her, discovering “vandals” and “saboteurs” secreted in her staff. She had “unknowingly facilitated their espionage.”157 Stalin may have been sending another anti-Semitic signal to Hitler.
On 10 August, when Stalin and Molotov were plotting their diplomatic somersaults, the Politburo indicted Polina. Stalin proposed her expulsion from the Central Committee. Molotov bravely abstained, showing his ability to disagree with Stalin, confidence—and love of Polina. On 24 October, she was relieved of her Commissariat, reprimanded for “levity and hastiness” but declared innocent of “calumnies.” Promoted to run Soviet haberdashery, she returned to her accustomed magnificence: her daughter Svetlana was already notorious as the ultimate Soviet “princess” in her furs and French fashions but the family was constantly watched.158 Stalin forgot neither Molotov’s defiance nor Polina’s sins, which would return to haunt her. Stalin and Beria had considered kidnapping and murdering her. She was lucky to be alive.
On 25 October 1938, Beria arrested President Kalinin’s wife. In a land where the Head of State’s wife was in prison, no one was safe from the Party. The ineffectual Kalinin, who had not dared resist Stalin since the warnings of 1930 and balletomanic romantic entanglements, though he seethed about his ill treatment, actually lived with another woman, his aristocratic housekeeper, Alexandra Gorchakova. His wife, a snub-nosed Estonian, Ekaterina Ivanovna, set off with a lady friend to arrange an anti-illiteracy campaign in the Far East. When she and this possibly Sapphic lady friend returned to Kalinin’s apartment, they were bugged grumbling about Stalin’s bloodlust. The lady friend was executed, Kalinina sent into exile, like Budyonny’s wife before her. When petitioners asked the President’s help, Kalinin used the same excuse as Stalin himself: “My dear chap, I’m in the same position! I can’t even help my own wife—there’s no way I can help yours!” Not everyone was as lucky as Molotova and Kalinina.1
In April 1937, Dr. Bronka Poskrebysheva, twenty-seven, pretty wife of the chef de cabinet, rang Stalin and asked to see him alone at Kuntsevo, putting on her best dress, perhaps the polka-dot which appears in all her family photographs. Her husband did not know about this appointment and would have been furious if he had. Vlasik alone knew of this secret meeting. She came to ask for the release of her arrested brother Metalikov, the Kremlin doctor, indirectly related through his wife to Trotsky. After Stalin’s death, Vlasik revealed it to the family and hinted, according to Poskrebyshev and Bronka’s daughter Natalya, that the two started an affair. This is unlikely since Stalin hated women pleading for relatives though one of the tragedies of Soviet life at this time was that women did beg potentates for the lives of their loved ones, offering anythi
ng they could, even their bodies. Bronka’s mission failed.159 She was terrified of being tarred with the Trotskyite brush.
Before his promotion to Moscow, Beria had groped Bronka at Kuntsevo and she slapped him. “I won’t forget it,” he said. But Bronka did not give up. On 27 April 1939, she called Beria and asked if she could come to discuss her brother. She was never seen again.
Poskrebyshev waited until midnight, then called Beria at home, who revealed that she was in custody but would not discuss it. In the morning, without having slept at all, Poskrebyshev complained to Stalin who said, “It doesn’t depend on me. I can do nothing. Only the NKVD can sort it out,” a line that could not have convinced Poskrebyshev.
Stalin phoned Beria who reminded him of Bronka’s Trotskyite connections. The three met, possibly around midnight on 3 May, when Beria was next in the Little Corner. Beria produced a confession implicating Bronka. Poskrebyshev begged Stalin to release her, using the most un-Bolshevik argument which would have moved anyone but these flinthearts: “What am I to do with my girls? What will happen to them?” and then thinking of his wife’s child by her first marriage: “Will Galia go to an orphanage?”
“Don’t worry, we’ll find you another wife,” Stalin supposedly replied. This was typical Stalin, the man who had threatened Krupskaya that if she did not obey the Party, they would appoint someone else as Lenin’s widow. By the standards of the time, Poskrebyshev made a fuss but he could do no more. After two years, Bronka was shot, aged just thirty-one, as the Germans approached Moscow.160
Her daughter Natalya was told she had died naturally. Poskrebyshev brought up the girls himself with loving devotion. He kept photographs of Bronka around the house. When Natalya pointed at one of the photos and said “Mama,” Poskrebyshev burst into tears and ran out of the room. It was typical of the tragedies of the time that Natalya only discovered her mother had been shot when she was told at school by the daughter of Kozlovsky the singer. She sobbed in the lavatories. Poskrebyshev remarried.
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