As always, Stalin tried to take a hand in everything. Chadayev reports that “he concerned himself, for instance, with the choice of design for a sniper’s automatic rifle, and the type of bayonet which could most easily be fixed to it—the knife-blade or the three-edged kind.… When I went into Stalin’s office I usually found him with Molotov, Beria, and Malenkov.… They never asked questions. They sat and listened.” But he was now beginning to pay for the universal fear which he had inspired. “Reports coming in from the front as a rule understated our losses and exaggerated those of the enemy. All this helped to convince him that the enemy could not take such losses for long and would shortly suffer defeat.” The Germans, however, were advancing rapidly. Minsk was expected to fall at any moment, which meant that Smolensk would also fall, and the way to Moscow would lie open.
Chadayev writes: “Stalin often sent for the heads of People’s Commissariats, gave them heavy assignments, and insisted quite unrealistically that they should be carried out in a very short time. People left his office in a state of deep depression.” And he was quicker than ever to notice looks exchanged by members of the Politburo behind his back.
Chadayev reports:
On the morning of the 27th the members of the Politburo assembled as usual in Stalin’s office. When the meeting was over, I left the office and saw through the window Stalin, Molotov, and Beria getting into a car. Poskrebyshev hesitated for a moment and then said, “The Germans have obviously taken Minsk.” Shortly afterward the government telephone rang, and Poskrebyshev told me that the call was from Vlasik, chief of Stalin’s bodyguard, to say that “the Boss,” and also Malenkov, Molotov, and Beria, were at the People’s Commissariat for Defense. Vatutin told me later that their arrival at the Commissariat had caused great surprise. The staff of the Commissariat seeing Stalin for the first time couldn’t make up their minds whether they were really seeing the Leader or were dreaming. He went into Timoshenko’s office and said abruptly that they had to acquaint themselves on the spot with the reports coming in from the front, and with progress in planning further measures.… Stalin stood by the operations map without saying a word, obviously trying to control his fury. At a sign from Timoshenko, Zhukov and Vatutin remained in the office. Stalin asked, “What’s happening at Minsk? Isn’t the position stabilized yet?”
Timoshenko: “I am not yet able to report on that.”
Stalin: “It is your duty to have the facts clearly before you at all times and to keep us up to date. At present you are simply afraid to tell us the truth.”
Zhukov, who had been on edge before Stalin’s arrival, flared up. “Comrade Stalin, have we your permission to get on with our work?”
Beria butted in: “Are we perhaps in your way?”
“You know [Zhukov said in exasperation] that the situation on all fronts is critical, the front commanders are awaiting instructions from the Commissariat, and it’s better if we do it ourselves, the Commissariat and the General Staff.”
It degenerated into a squabble.
Beria (testily): “We too are capable of giving orders!”
Zhukov: “If you think you can—do it!”
Beria: “If the Party tells us to, we will.”
Zhukov (as angrily as before): “So wait till it tells you to. As things are, we’ve been told to do the job.”
There was a pause. Then Zhukov went up to Stalin and said, “Excuse my outspokenness, Comrade Stalin, we shall certainly get it all worked out and then we’ll come to the Kremlin and report on the situation.”
Stalin looked at Timoshenko, who said: “Comrade Stalin, our first priority must be to think how we can help the armies at the front. After that we can give you the information you want.”
Stalin: “You are making a crass mistake in trying to draw a line between yourselves and us.… We must all join in thinking how to help the fronts.”
Then he looked gloomily at each of the Politburo members in turn and said, “There we are then, let them get it sorted out themselves first. Let’s go, comrades.”
He was the first out of the office.
He had seen it with his own eyes. The most dreadful thing possible had happened: they were no longer afraid of him. And if they were no longer afraid of him—it could be the end. Chadayev writes: “As he left the Commissariat for Defense he said angrily: ‘Lenin founded our state, and we’ve fucked it up!’ ” Molotov has also described the visit to the Commissariat: “I went with Stalin to the Commissar for Defense. Stalin spoke rather rudely to Timoshenko and Zhukov, though he rarely lost control of himself. Then we went out to the dacha, where he said, ‘We’ve fucked it up!’ The ‘we’ was meant to include all of us!” Molotov was right. It included everybody and everything.
A MOMENT OF PANIC, OR A BRILLIANT MOVE
Chadayev describes the rest of that day and the next few crucial days at the start of the war:
In the latter half of June 27 I looked in on Poskrebyshev. The government telephone rang and Posk. answered: “Comrade Stalin is not here, and I don’t know when he will be.” The Vice-Commissar for Defense, Mekhlis, came in and asked whether he should ring Stalin at the dacha. Posk. told him to go ahead. Mekhlis dialed the number of the nearer dacha on the hot line and waited half a minute. No answer.
“I don’t understand it,” Poskrebyshev said.
“Maybe he’s on his way here, but if so the guard would have rung me.”
We waited a few minutes longer, then decided it wasn’t worth waiting and went to see Molotov.… While we were there the phone rang and Molotov told somebody that he didn’t know when Stalin would be in the Kremlin.… Next day, I went to Stalin’s outer office, but he hadn’t arrived. Nobody had any idea what could have happened. The following day, I went to the outer office again to sign papers, and Poskrebyshev told me at once and categorically, “Comrade Stalin is not here and is unlikely to be here.”
“Has he perhaps left for the front?”
“Why do you keep bothering me? I’ve told you he isn’t here and won’t be here.”
There have been many legends about Stalin’s disappearance in those dreadful first days of the war. Now we have Chadayev’s eyewitness account:
In the evening I went along to Poskrebyshev again with some papers, and yet again Stalin failed to appear. I had a great pile of papers for signature, and since Voznesensky was First Vice-Chairman of the Council of People’s Commissars I asked him to sign. Voznesensky rang Molotov, listened to him for quite a time, then put down the receiver and said: “Molotov asks you to wait one more day, and wants members of the Politburo to meet in his office in two hours’ time. So hang on to the documents for a bit.”
Voznesensky picked up the hot line phone, waited a minute, and said, “No reply from the dacha.” … It was a mystery; something must have happened to him at that critical moment.
Chadayev went back to Stalin’s outer office that evening.
“The Boss isn’t here, and won’t be here today,” Poskrebyshev said.
“He wasn’t here yesterday, either.”
“No, he wasn’t here yesterday either,” Poskrebyshev said, with a trace of sarcasm.
I assumed that Stalin was ill, but didn’t like to ask.… Stalin usually got to the Kremlin by 2:00 P.M. For half an hour black cars would drive out of the dacha gates one after another, with Stalin in one of them, no one knew which. Stalin’s workday went on till 3:00 or 4:00 A.M. All members of the Politburo, the top military men, and People’s Commissars had to observe this routine. And suddenly he had failed to turn up. His closest associates were alarmed, to say the least. We all knew that he usually summoned one official after another, with not much of an interval in between. But now the telephones were silent. We knew only that he was at the nearer dacha, but nobody felt bold enough to go and see him. During the days of his seclusion members of the Politburo met in Molotov’s office, trying to decide what to do. According to the dacha staff Stalin was alive and well, but had shut himself up, away from everybody, was r
eceiving nobody, and wasn’t answering the phone. The members of the Politburo decided unanimously to visit him in a body
What, then, had really happened? Stalin’s great hero was Ivan the Terrible. One curious work in his personal library was A. N. Tolstoy’s play Ivan the Terrible, published in Moscow in 1942, the most terrible year of the war, and read by Stalin while the Soviet Union was suffering one heavy defeat after another. He read it carefully, amending the style in bold handwriting, and crossing out expressions of grief. His favorite tsar’s speech must be like his own, clipped and laconic. The cover of the book, with his pensive doodles, is particularly interesting.
One word written over and over again on the cover is “teacher.” Others include “We’ll hold out.” “We’ll hold out”—that was what then filled his thoughts. But let us not forget the word “teacher,” which he inscribed on the play about the terrible tsar.
No, the Man of Steel was not behaving like a highly strung person. In the Commissariat for Defense that day he had seen a change in attitude, and drawn his conclusions. He knew that Minsk would fall any day, and that the German avalanche would roll on toward Moscow. If it did, his pathetic slaves might take fright and rebel. So Stalin emulated his teacher: Ivan the Terrible’s favorite trick was to pretend that he was dying, watch how the hapless boyars behaved, then rise from his sickbed and cruelly punish them, to discourage all the others. Ivan also made a habit of disappearing from the capital, to show the boyars how helpless they were without their tsar. The Boss was behaving as his teacher had. Poskrebyshev and Beria, the head of the NKVD, were, I am convinced, in on the secret, and took note of what his comrades said in his absence. The experienced courtier Molotov saw through his game immediately, and was wary of signing important papers. Not signing was a proof of loyalty. The Boss had chosen his comrades-in-arms well. Without him they were “blind kittens” (as he would one day call them). By leaving them to themselves he made them feel their insignificance and reminded them that, without him, the military would sweep them away. Molotov quickly organized a pilgrimage to the dacha. There the great actor performed a well-known play called “The Retirement Game.”
Chadayev records what happened, as described to him by Marshal Bulganin (a Politburo member):
We were all struck by Stalin’s appearance. He was thinner.… His sallow, pockmarked face was haggard. He looked gloomy. He said: “The great Lenin is no more.… If only he could see us now. See those to whom he entrusted the fate of his country.… I am inundated with letters from Soviet people, rightly rebuking us, saying surely you can halt the enemy. Maybe some among you wouldn’t mind putting all the blame on me.”
Molotov: “Thank you for your frankness, but I tell you here and now that if some idiot tried to turn me against you I’d see him damned. We are asking you to come back to work, and for our part we will do all we can to help you.”
“Yes, but think about it: can I live up to people’s hopes anymore, can I lead the country to final victory? There may be more deserving candidates.”
Voroshilov: “I believe I shall be voicing the unanimous opinion: there is none more worthy.” There was an immediate chorus of “right!”
They earnestly pleaded with him. They knew that the less insistent would be doomed. The game was over: now they had begged him yet again to be their Leader, as if they had reinvested him with power.
Consulting the visitors’ book, I see that Chadayev’s memory has misled him by only a day. On June 28 Stalin was still receiving visitors. But for the 29th and 30th there are no more entries. On those two days Stalin was indeed absent from the Kremlin. He reappeared there only on July 1.
SOSO’S BRIEF REAPPEARANCE
On July 3 Stalin at last made his long-awaited appeal to the people: “Comrades, citizens! Brothers and sisters! Warriors of the army and the fleet! I call upon you, my friends.” That was how he began. Together with the standard revolutionary form of address—“comrades”—the Christian form of address—“brothers and sisters”—had resurfaced from his seminary days. “Brothers and sisters”—they, the people, were the ones who would have to defend their Motherland. In films made at this time church bells were sometimes heard.
He declared the war a Great Patriotic War, a holy war fought by the people against aggressors, like Tsar Alexander I’s war against the aggressor Napoleon. As if to support this idea, Hitler had launched his campaign on the anniversary of Napoleon’s invasion—June 22. The analogy was bound to inspire hope. In 1812 too the Russians had retreated, and even surrendered Moscow to the enemy, but they had emerged victorious.
The Party, of course, figured in his speech. He called on everyone to “rally round the Party of Lenin and Stalin,” and no one saw anything strange in these words, coming from Stalin himself.
During his mysterious retreat the ex-seminarist had decided to involve the aid of the God he had rejected. He had already heard that the Patriarch of Antioch had appealed to all Christians to come to Russia’s aid.
A note scribbled in the play Ivan the Terrible reads: “Speak to Shaposhin”—Boris Shaposhnikov, then Chief of the General Staff. In his memoirs, Zhukov recalled that “Stalin always called him by his first name and patronymic, and never raised his voice to him.… He was the only person allowed to smoke in Stalin’s office.” Boris Mikhailovich Shaposhnikov was a former colonel in the tsarist army who never disguised his religious beliefs. Another of the senior people on the General Staff, Vasilievsky, was a priest’s son. In the early days of the war both of them were very close to the Boss. Presumably from them he heard of an incident that shook the Orthodox world. Ilya, Metropolitan of the Lebanon Mountains, had shut himself up in an underground cell and gone without food or sleep while he knelt in prayer for Russia to the Mother of God. And he had a miraculous vision, which he described in a letter to the leaders of the Orthodox Church in Russia. On the third day the Mother of God had appeared to him in a pillar of fire and given him God’s sentence: “The churches and monasteries must be reopened throughout the country. Priests must be brought back from imprisonment, Leningrad must not be surrendered, but the sacred icon of Our Lady of Kazan should be carried around the city boundary, taken on to Moscow, where a service should be held, and thence to Stalingrad [Tsaritsyn].”
These words must have sounded like something from Stalin’s forgotten childhood. A little while before he had proclaimed a “Godless Five-Year Plan,” by the end of which (in 1943) the last church was to be closed and the last priest destroyed. But now the Boss decided to act on Ilya’s vision. This was the beginning of his remarkable, and shortlived, return to God.
Was it that? Had he seen the light? Had fear made him run to his Father? Had the Marxist God-Man simply decided to exploit belief in God? Or was it all of these things at once? Whatever the reason, after his mysterious retreat, he began making his peace with God. Something happened which no historian has yet written about. On his orders many priests were brought back from the camps. In Leningrad, besieged by the Germans and gradually dying of hunger, the inhabitants were astounded, and uplifted, to see the wonder-working icon of Our Lady of Kazan brought out into the streets and borne in procession. From Leningrad the icon went to Moscow, and was then sent to besieged Stalingrad. It was displayed in each of the three great cities which had not surrendered to the enemy. Twenty thousand churches were reopened, including those of the Monastery of the Trinity and St. Sergius, and the Monastery of the Caves in Kiev. He and his generals sent troops into battle with the words “God go with you.” On October 17 Pravda reported that the head of the Bolshevik Party had met the interim head of the Patriarchate, Metropolitan Sergei—the first occasion of its kind since October 1917. In the course of their meeting, it was said, Stalin had “reacted sympathetically to the proposal to elect a Patriarch, and said that no obstacles would be put in its way by the government.”
Once back at work, Stalin was tireless in his efforts to concentrate power in his own hands. On July 1 he created the State Committee for D
efense. This was now the supreme authority in the state, and he was its chairman. Ten days later he also appointed himself Chief of Staff and, shortly afterward, Commander-in-Chief, People’s Commissar for the Defense, and Chairman of the Council of Ministers. He remained, of course, Leader of the Party.
Now that he held all the levers of power, he resolved to open negotiations with the steadily advancing Hitler. According to information given by Marshal Zhukov to the historian Y. Pavlenko, Stalin instructed Beria to make an attempt via the Bulgarian embassy in Berlin to start peace talks with the Germans. Marshal K. Moskalenko, who heard it from Beria himself, has told the same story.
He was most probably only trying to slow down the lightning German advance and give his armies a breather. The Brest-Litovsk Treaty could serve as a precedent, and an excuse. Hitler, of course, was not interested.
FATHER AND SON
In those days of military disaster he was fated to suffer his cruelest humiliation. On July 19, 1941, he was handed a monitored news flash from Berlin. His older son, Yakov, had been taken prisoner by the Germans. Yakov, it was reported, had in his own words “realized that resistance was pointless and voluntarily come over to the German side.”
Stalin kept the following report among his private papers: “A leaflet was dropped by fascist aircraft.… It showed a group of German officers talking to Yakov. Yakov was wearing his tunic, without belt. The caption read: ‘Stalin’s son, Yakov Dzhugashvili, full lieutenant, battery commander, has surrendered. That such an important Soviet officer has surrendered proves beyond doubt that all resistance to the German army is completely pointless. So stop fighting and come over to us.’ ” On August 7, 1941, he was sent another leaflet. The Germans were showering such leaflets upon his army. One of them included the text of a letter written by Yakov: “Dear Father, I am quite well and shall shortly be sent to one of the camps for officers in Germany I wish you good health. Greetings to everybody. Yasha.” It was his son’s handwriting. He was a traitor. There could be no doubt about it.
Stalin Page 59