The dacha at Zubalovo, damaged in the war, was rebuilt and Svetlana moved in there. Her brother Vasily was a frequent guest. His wife and child, and Yasha’s daughter with her nurse, shared the house with her. Vasily regularly brought friends home—fliers, athletes, actors. They drank recklessly, played music on the phonograph, and danced. “You wouldn’t have thought there was a war on,” Svetlana wrote.
PRINCE VASYA
After scraping through his lower and middle levels of school, the twenty-year-old Vasya had been sent where all Soviet youngsters dreamed of going in those days—to the Air Force Training School. Stalin preserved letters about Vasya’s “exploits” there in his personal file. We read in a report from Beria that “on the way [to Flying School] he told the senior staff members who went to welcome him that ‘Papa is supposed to be coming to Sevastopol for a holiday this year, he’ll probably look in on me.’ ” The terrified staff were put on the alert. “Vasya,” Beria wrote, “was quartered not in the trainees’ hostel but in a house reserved for visitors … his meals were prepared separately … he went around in a car put at his disposal by the school.” His father gave harsh instructions as to how the “crafty little brat” should be treated: “Nobody should show such consideration or concern as to create special conditions of any sort.”
Let us try to imagine what it was like to be a dictator’s son, for all practical purposes fatherless as well as motherless in adolescence. His mother’s suicide, the imprisonment of his relatives, the execution of family friends who had shown him so much affection—these were the horrors he had lived with in childhood.
Stalin kept Vasily’s graduation certificate from the Air Force Training School: “An excellent pilot, enjoys flying, promoted to rank of lieutenant.” But he knew what such scraps of paper were worth. In March 1941, after Vasily had graduated, his father sent him to summer training camp at Lyubertsy, with what was known as the Palace Garrison. This was an elite air force unit which took part in ceremonial flybys and aerobatic displays in front of the Leader. Only ace pilots were recruited to it.
At the Boss’s request, V. Tsukanov, commander of this famous unit, himself became Vasily’s instructor. He reported honestly that “Vasya is an able flier, but will always get into difficulties because of his drinking.”
Then came the war. After Yasha was taken prisoner, the Boss would not let Vasya fly. He became an air force inspector, sitting in a big office on Pirogov Street, with nothing much to do, except drink. The front line was the place for meteoric rises in careers. But, knowing how insanely ambitious his pipsqueak son was, the Boss saw to it that he didn’t fall far behind. Vasya quickly rose to be head of the air force inspectorate.
FALL FROM GRACE
Life at Zubalovo became jollier, and boozier, all the time. Vasya fell in with a fun-loving crowd of filmmakers, among them the scenario writer Alexei Kapler, Moscow’s champion lady-killer. One husband, told that his wife was having an affair with this legendary figure, famously observed that “mere husbands shouldn’t bear a grudge against Kapler.” I knew him well. He was a friend of my father. He was fat and ugly and not a very good writer. His talent lay elsewhere: he was a raconteur of genius. When he spoke, it was like the Siren’s song—you were spellbound. Another member of the group was the documentary filmmaker Roman Karmen, an equally famous playboy in his day Vasya plunged happily into the life of pleasure. When he was drunk he would shoot at chandeliers in restaurants—this was called “the cut-glass chimes.” He had endless brief affairs—his famous name gave him an immediate entrée to women’s hearts. One of his drinking companions later told this story: “One day I went home and found my wife, L. Tselikovskaya [a Soviet film star of the late thirties], with her friend V. Serova [also a film star] and an air force officer unknown to me. He persuaded us to go out to his dacha. On the way there Serova told me that this was V. Stalin. At the dacha he began making shameless advances to my wife, and tried to drag her off to some secluded spot. I intervened pretty sharply, he apologized, and nothing much happened during the rest of the meal except that after a few drinks Vasya took a cinder from the hearth and decorated the faces of Slutsky, the cameraman, and Karmen while they sat at a table.” And they, of course, put up with it.
It was during that time of carousing and conquests that Vasya took Alexei Kapler out to Zubalovo and introduced him to Svetlana.
Like many other writers at the time, Kapler was then working as a war correspondent. He had just come back from an assignment: he had been dropped behind German lines and taken part in sabotage operations with partisans in Belorussia. Now he was getting ready to leave for Stalingrad, where the bloody battle was reaching its critical stage.
Vasya brought him along during the October holidays. Kapler was bewitched as soon as he set eyes on the attractive and intelligent young girl. Half-dead with shyness, a little girl in the low-heeled shoes her father liked her to wear, Svetlana danced a foxtrot with him. It was fatal—once Kapler started talking. After her brother’s rambling anecdotage, her father’s silences, and the stuffiness of his colleagues, the spellbinder Kapler overwhelmed her. Her loneliness was at an end. She had found someone who understood her. That evening she told him everything—among other things that this was the tenth anniversary of her mother’s death, and how horrible it was that no one remembered it.
They began to meet regularly. Those were dangerous meetings. Kapler lent her an unpublished translation of a Hemingway novel, and praised the great disgraced poets—Gumilev, executed in 1921, and the semi-forbidden Akhmatova. In the language of the time, he was “ideologically corrupting” the Leader’s daughter. That alone could cost him his life.
She fell in love with him. She did not know what sort of world she was living in, or what sort of man her father was. But Kapler, a man of forty, knew these things only too well. How can he have been so rash? Quite simply—he too was in love. He delighted in her childlike enthusiasms. Nothing else mattered to him. The forty-year-old man waited for the schoolgirl in a doorway opposite her school. They went to the unheated Tretyakov Gallery, they went to hear The Queen of Spades. A hangdog NKVD man trailed after them along the blacked-out streets of wartime Moscow—and Kapler occasionally gave him a cigarette to relieve his boredom.
The Boss, of course, was told all about it. But he was completely absorbed in Stalingrad, where he was getting ready for his greatest victory. Nor did he realize how serious the situation was before Kapler left Moscow with all the other correspondents to await the great event at Stalingrad.
And then the Boss read in Pravda, his Pravda, which he had once edited, a piece by Kapler. This was an account in the form of a “letter from Lieutenant L.,” of events in Stalingrad, and also of the author’s recent visits with an unnamed sweetheart to the Tretyakov Gallery and their walks around Moscow by night. The obviously insane lover ended with the words “It must be snowing now in Moscow. From your window you can see the crenellated wall of the Kremlin.” Just so that there could be no possible doubt as to the identity of his sweetheart!
Stalin’s fury is easy to imagine. But he controlled it. For the first time in his life he did not know what to do. Shortly afterward, one of the officers of his bodyguard telephoned Kapler and suggested an assignment to somewhere more remote. Kapler told him to go to hell.
When Stalin was told Kapler’s answer, he must have realized how much the war had changed people. Familiarity with death was overcoming fear. Some people had ceased to fear altogether. There would be work to do after the war.
Throughout February Svetlana and Kapler continued their visits to the theater and their nocturnal strolls around Moscow, with the security man plodding behind them. On her seventeenth birthday, they turned up at Vasily’s apartment. They embraced in an empty room, trying not to make any noise. The unhappy NKVD man sat in an adjoining room straining his ears. He had to write some sort of report on each meeting.
Kapler was arrested two days later. Her father arrived with a savage glare in his yellow ey
es. She had never seen him like that. “I know everything. I’ve got your telephone calls here,” he said, tapping his pocket. “Your Kapler is an English spy, he has been arrested.” But she was her mother’s daughter. And his. She was not easily frightened. “I love him,” she said, and was slapped twice, for the first time in her life. He knew, though, that pain alone would not break her resistance. He had come armed with the most humiliating thing he could think of: “Just look at yourself. Who do you think would want you? He’s got women all over the place, you fool!”
She stopped talking to him for several months. But for him it was all over. He felt betrayed for the second time. Her mother’s death had been the first.
In fairy tales the tsar often cuts off the heads of those who try to carry off the princess. He had to control himself. He remembered her mother’s end. He knew how dangerous it was to reduce those crazy Alliluyevs to despair. The “spy” Kapler was banished to Vorkuta for five years. It could have been worse, but not much.
He was furious with Vasya too. Vasya had produced Kapler—it was at Vasya’s brothel of a dacha that they had met. It was about then that Vasya acquired his wound. Not at the front, like others, but as the result of a drunken prank: while stunning fish in a river with aviation shells, Vasya was wounded in the cheek and in one leg.
J. Stalin, People’s Commissar for Defense, ordered that “the regiment and its former commander Colonel V. Stalin be informed that he is hereby relieved of his command for drunken and disorderly behavior which tends to damage and corrupt the regiment.”
Vasya was sent to the front. But after what had happened to his half-brother he was seldom allowed to take part in aerial combat, and only with heavy cover. This infuriated him: he was brave and eager to show his prowess. The Boss nonetheless saw to it that his son rose in the service. Vasya was never kept in the same place for more than two years. He had begun the war as a twenty-year-old captain. He ended it as a twenty-four-year-old general.
24
ONWARD TO VICTORY
THE SECOND FRONT
A great deal has been written about the course of the war, and the opening of a second front by the Western allies. I shall touch on this crucial period only briefly.
After Hitler’s attack on Russia, Churchill became Stalin’s reluctant ally. The Boss understood his attitude very well: the ideal war for Churchill would be one in which the rival dictators bit through each other’s throats. But, as Churchill himself put it, “if Hitler occupies Hell I will ask the House of Commons for aid for the Devil.” Late in 1941, the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor brought the USSR another ally. Now Litvinov came to be useful. The disgraced Jew was appointed ambassador to the United States. To strengthen his arm, Stalin created in February 1942 a Jewish Antifascist Committee. The Yiddish theater in Moscow and the Yiddish poets were all drawn into it. It was headed by the great actor Mikhoels, director of the Yiddish theater. Their immediate task was to attract funds from wealthy American Jews. But a still more important objective was to influence Western public opinion in favor of the second front. Anti-Semitism was forgotten. Litvinov signed an agreement with the United States under which the Soviet Union would get aluminum for aircraft, gasoline, antiaircraft guns, machine guns, and rifles (as well as generous food parcels—I can still remember the taste of American chocolate in frost-bound, hungry Moscow).
Stalin desperately wanted the Allies to open a second front in the terrible months of 1941–1942, but Churchill was in no hurry. He preferred to watch the Soviet armies bleed. The Boss understood this way of thinking very well. In his place he would have done the same.
The Allies did not open a second front in 1942 or in 1943. Instead of invading the continent, Churchill flew to Moscow, to that “grim Bolshevik state, which I once tried hard to suffocate at birth and which until the emergence of Hitler I regarded as the worst enemy of civilized freedom.”
The Boss greeted Churchill like an old friend. They were alike in some ways. His intelligence service had told him that Churchill knew in advance about the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, but had kept it from his American friends to make sure of drawing them into the war. There, too, he would have done the same himself. Churchill went to the Bolshoi, was entertained by the Boss at home, was introduced to Svetlana, and told her that the hair which had vanished from his head had been as red as her own. But he refused to open a second front, saying that the Allies were not ready.
Churchill had in a way done Stalin a favor in leaving him to fight alone. With support from the Allies in weapons and food supplies his army acquired fantastic strength as it fought. Hitler’s generals and Europe’s strongest army were its teachers. By the end of 1943 Stalin had the greatest military machine that had ever existed, and Hitler’s fate was sealed. The Boss had already made plans for the mighty blows that would carry the war beyond Russia’s frontiers into Europe. The Great Dream was reborn. Stalin chose that time—spring 1943—to dissolve Comintern, in order, he told a Reuters correspondent, “to refute Hitler’s lie that Moscow intends to interfere in the lives of other states and to Bolshevize them.” In “in-depth language” this meant: Moscow will interfere in the lives of other states and will Bolshevize them. The personnel of the dissolved Comintern would become the rulers of Eastern Europe.
The dissolution of Comintern, the restoration of the Patriarchate in Russia, the reintroduction of tsarist ranks in the army—all these things seemed to signify the end of Bolshevism. Stalin assiduously cultivated this notion in the minds of his allies, in preparation for the decisive assault on Europe.
HONEYMOON
In 1943 the Big Three met in conference at Teheran. The Western Allies were now themselves in a hurry to open a second front, before Stalin arrived in Europe. He had not grown out of Koba’s youthful habit: he arrived a day late. Let them wait. He was the Boss now.
At Teheran he met Roosevelt for the first time. Roosevelt, whom Stalin saw as an idealist, and Churchill were comically incongruous partners. Which of them did he like better? Asked this by Molotov, he replied, “They’re both imperialists,” the appropriate answer to a person of Stone Arse’s limited understanding. The fact was that they were both very much to his liking. He saw at once how he could cause a collision between Roosevelt, with his avowed aversion to under-the-table deals, and Churchill, who felt sure that without such deals they stood no chance against the dread Uncle Joe. “If I had to pick a negotiating team, Stalin would be my first choice,” said Anthony Eden, the British Foreign Secretary.
During the Teheran honeymoon they exchanged protestations of eternal love. Churchill presented the Boss with the Stalingrad Sword. “Marshal Stalin,” he said, “can take his place beside the major figures in Russian history, and deserves to be known as ‘Stalin the Great.’ ” The Boss modestly replied that “it is easy to be a hero when you are dealing with people like the Russians.” The main subject of discussion was the second front. But Churchill couldn’t resist asking about territorial claims once the war was won. Stalin answered that “there’s no need to talk about that at present: when the time comes we shall have our say.”
He knew even then that Churchill would suggest a tradeoff. In 1944 the Western Allies landed in Normandy, while Stalin’s armies crossed the Soviet frontier and began rapidly overrunning Poland, Hungary, Romania, Yugoslavia, Czechoslovakia. Bulgaria and Finland withdrew from the war. The Balkans were at Russia’s mercy. The Communist-dominated National Liberation Army took control of the whole of mainland Greece. A partisan army led by the Communist Tito, helped by Soviet forces, was victorious in Yugoslavia.
Churchill made haste. On October 9, 1944, he and Eden were in Moscow, and that night they met Stalin in the Kremlin, without the Americans. Bargaining went on throughout the night. Churchill wrote on a scrap of paper that the Boss had a 90 percent “interest” in Romania, Britain a 90 percent “interest” in Greece, both Russia and Britain a 50 percent interest in Yugoslavia. When they got to Italy the Boss ceded that country to Churchill. The
crucial questions arose when the Ministers of Foreign Affairs discussed “percentages” in Eastern Europe. Molotov’s proposals were that Russia should have a 75 percent interest in Hungary, 75 percent in Bulgaria, and 60 percent in Yugoslavia. This was the Boss’s price for ceding Italy and Greece. Eden tried to haggle: Hungary 75/25, Bulgaria 80/20, but Yugoslavia 50/50. After lengthy bargaining they settled on an 80/20 division of interest between Russia and Britain in Bulgaria and Hungary, and a 50/50 division in Yugoslavia. U.S. Ambassador Harriman was informed only after the bargain was struck. This gentleman’s agreement was sealed with a handshake.
The percentages—the idea that the Boss would accept anything less than one hundred percent authority—were a comic fiction.
Churchill knew very well that Stalin could not be trusted, and he tried to act in the way they both favored. But the Boss was unconcerned. He knew that Roosevelt would not countenance any breach of faith, however compelling the arguments in favor of it. When Churchill tried to enter into secret negotiations with Germany, the Boss immediately informed Roosevelt. Roosevelt indignantly protested and the talks were broken off. (When Roosevelt died on April 12, 1945, too soon to see Uncle Joe’s new Europe, the Boss wrote to Churchill that “for my part I feel particularly the grievous loss of that great man, our common friend.”)
Hitler, in any case, had succeeded in consolidating the alliance of the Big Three by the end of 1944. The Germans made a sudden attack on the Allies in the Ardennes and inflicted heavy losses. Stalin nobly came to the rescue, and distracted the Germans by launching a premature offensive. The help he gave them was to be credited to his account when the time came to divide Europe.
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