The Third Reich was within months of its end when the Allied powers met at Yalta. Roosevelt and Churchill were Stalin’s guests in the Livadia Palace, the favorite home of the Last Tsar and his family. The Conference adopted high-sounding decisions on the peaceful Europe of the future, on the establishment of the UN, on the demilitarization of Germany. But its main business was to complete the partition of Europe, and help to give substance to the Great Dream. This time Stalin was able to include Poland in his maneuvers.
The monstrous Katyn affair caused complications. After the collapse of Poland more than twenty thousand captured Polish officers had been quartered in prison camps near the Soviet frontier. When Stalin was getting ready to attack Germany, the thought of keeping so many potential enemies within the Soviet Union alarmed him. He remembered the mutiny of the Czechoslovak prisoners of war in 1918. As usual, he found a quick and drastic solution: the prisoners were “liquidated.” When General Anders began forming the Polish army in the West, Stalin released some two thousand Poles from the camps. But Poles abroad asked where so many thousands of officers had disappeared to. The answer given was that they had run away from the camps at the beginning of the war. The Polish government in exile was not satisfied, and persisted in asking about the missing officers.
A little play-acting was called for. In the presence of the Polish representative Stalin telephoned Molotov and Beria to ask whether all Poles had been released from Soviet jails. They both said yes. But when the Germans occupied Smolensk they had found in the nearby Katyn forest a gruesome burial ground containing row upon row of corpses with bullet holes in the backs of the neck, the remains of the Polish officers. Stalin of course accused Hitler of a grotesque provocation. He changed his story: the Poles had not run away, but had been transferred to the Smolensk area to work on building sites. There the Germans had captured them, shot them, and blamed the USSR for it. A special Soviet commission was set up, with the Boss’s own writers, academics, and clergy as members. The commission, of course, confirmed his story. Roosevelt and Churchill had to take their ally’s word. The monstrous scale of the tragedy has only recently become known. A. Krayushkin, head of one of the directorates of the Federal Security Service (as the former KGB is now called), at a press conference in Smolensk in April 1995, informed the Russian and Polish journalists present that the number of Polish prisoners killed in various camps was 21,857.
The documents concerning those shot were destroyed, with Khrushchev’s consent, in 1959. What remains is a letter from A. Shelepin, then head of the KGB, informing Khrushchev that “in all, 21,857 people were shot on orders from the KGB, including 4,421 in the Katyn forest, 6,311 in the Ostashkovo camp (Kaliningrad oblast), and 3,820 in the Starobel camp near Kharkov.”
Shelepin’s letter then asks Khrushchev for permission to destroy the records of those shot, since they have “neither operational nor historical importance.”
On the site of the terrible mass grave in the Katyn forest there now stands a dacha built by one of the “new Russians”—a rich businessman.
August 1944 was the month of the Warsaw rising, organized by the Polish government in exile. Stalin’s armies had halted in sight of Warsaw, but he ordered them not to advance, and they stood there watching while the Germans destroyed the city. His main objective now was to get rid of the émigré Polish government. Repeated Allied attempts to talk to good old Uncle Joe about a democratic Poland were met with a sharp “no.” The logic of his position was simple. He had won the war in order to have good next-door neighbors. He would allow the Western Allies to surrender Poland by easy stages: Roosevelt, he knew, had to think of the Polish vote at home. But that was as far as he would go. He had, then, in the final stages of the war erected the framework of a future Communist Eastern Europe.
He also had plans for Asia. At Yalta they had discussed the part Russia might yet play in the war against Japan. Stalin had of course consented to join in. It would enable his armies to move into China and onward, toward realization of the Great Dream.
At the very end of 1944 yet another ally arrived in Moscow—General de Gaulle, now Prime Minister of liberated France. The French visitors’ rooms were bugged, and the Boss was kept informed of their regular conversations about the bloodthirsty Stalin.
At the Kremlin banquet lanky de Gaulle and the diminutive Boss made a comic duo. Stalin proposed a toast to Kaganovich—“a brave man. He knows that if the trains do not arrive on time”—he paused, and then concluded affectionately—“we shall shoot him.” Then he proposed a toast to Air Marshal Novikov—“a good marshal, let’s drink to him. And if he doesn’t do his job properly”—with a kindly smile—“we shall hang him.” The French no longer found him such a comic figure. He finished his teasing by saying laughingly, “People call me a monster, but as you see I make a joke of it. Maybe I’m not so horrible after all.”
On the train de Gaulle said incredulously, “And these are the people we shall be dealing with for the next hundred years!” The French visitors, however, also carried away another impression. “In his behavior you caught a glimpse of something resembling the despair of a man who has reached such heights of power that he has nowhere else to go,” one of them wrote. On that same occasion in the Kremlin, Hitler’s conqueror had suddenly remarked to de Gaulle that “in the long run death is the only victor.” It was December, and his sixty-fifth birthday was drawing near.
PREPARING THE COUNTRY FOR VICTORY
Stalin had every right to call himself a “monster.”
De Gaulle can have had no idea what was then happening in the jocular dictator’s country. For that matter, the monster’s own soldiers, who were finalizing their victory, did not know all that had happened deep in the rear, in many cases to their own families.
Terror had almost vanished from the land by 1944. On the threshold of victory, Stalin began reviving it. What troubled him most were reawakened nationalist aspirations. At the beginning of the war his commissars could speak of a Ukrainian, a Georgian, a Moldavian, an Armenian, an Azerbaijani “fatherland.” While the country stood on the brink of the abyss he had encouraged such talk, to stiffen the morale of the non-Russians. Now he needed to eradicate these ideas, to burn them out of people’s minds. He had always known that nationalism was dynamite. (Dynamite indeed. Half a century later it would blow his empire to bits.)
Late in 1943, when the war was at its most critical stage, Stalin had convened the Politburo to lecture them for over an hour on a screenplay written by Dozchenko.
Dozchenko, a great filmmaker, was also a Ukrainian. His Earth was at the time one of the most famous films ever made. Before the war the Boss had condescended to take a stroll with him after a conference. They walked along the Arbat, which was deserted except for security men and NKVD cars parked along the sides of the street. Dozchenko talked incessantly, as artists will, while his companion listened. That evening told the Boss all that he needed to know. From then on he watched Dozchenko closely. One day he was told that the director had written a new screenplay and had read it to Khrushchev, then in charge of the Ukraine. Khrushchev, who was relaxing at his dacha, no doubt with the help of a few drinks, liked the script. The Boss asked to see it, and realized immediately that he had been right about Dozchenko. The cunning director had used a device to which writers would often resort in the post-Stalin period. His most challenging ideas, those he prized most, had all been put into the mouths of negative characters. A German officer, for instance, was made to say, “Your nation has a fatal Achilles’ heel: people are incapable of forgiving each other for their differences of opinion. They have been living for twenty-five years with negative slogans—rejection of God, property, the family, friendship. The word nation no longer exists except in the adjectival form.” And so on. Such sallies of course met with the orthodox answers, but how feeble the answers looked compared with those insidious criticisms. Stalin noted in particular Dozchenko’s central idea: “Whichever front we fight on, it’s the Ukraine we are
fighting for. For a people forty million strong which has never found itself. For a people lacerated and fragmented.” He quoted this passage to the Politburo, in a meeting to which Dozchenko was invited, and commented that “there is no separate Ukraine! It does not exist! In fighting for the USSR you are fighting for the Ukraine also.” He had shot hundreds of thousands to teach them this lesson so that they would never forget it. And here he was again. The Boss savaged Dozchenko unmercifully: “He is trying to criticize our Party.… If we were to publish this story Soviet people would give him such a going-over there’d be nothing left but a damp patch on the ground.” Dozchenko sat there pale and helpless.
The Boss gave Khrushchev a chance to correct his own mistake. He set to work with a will. Dozchenko was lambasted at innumerable meetings and was driven out of the Kiev Film Studio. As he wrote in his diary, he was “hacked to pieces, and the bloody remains were distributed for desecration wherever an ugly mob could be gathered.”
As soon as he glimpsed victory in 1944, the Boss decided to hit nationalism hard, hard enough to draw blood. They must never forget that they belonged to the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. Beria took the hint and quickly provided the country with an object lesson. During their occupation of the Caucasus the Germans had promised independence to the Chechens, the Ingush, the Balkars, and the Kalmyks. Members of these ethnic groups did sometimes collaborate with the Germans. The same was true of the Crimean Tartars. Beria knew the rules: the Boss could not be seen as the initiator of reprisals. He himself had to seek the Leader’s permission.
I saw one of Stalin’s top-secret “special files,” a file that bore witness to a bloodbath of which the army, the country, and the world at large knew nothing. I saw a note from Beria to Stalin: “The Balkars gave a friendly welcome to the German occupation of the Caucasus. As they retreated before the blows of the Red army, the Germans organized Balkar detachments.” Nationalism leads to treason—that was the ideological lesson to be learned. And if these people had betrayed, how could they possibly deserve to go on living in the Caucasus, that earthly paradise? The birthplace of the Living God of communism? Stalin had his solution ready. On March 11, 1944, Beria reported that “37,103 Balkars have been loaded onto special trains and dispatched to their new areas of settlement in the Kazakh and Kirghiz republics. There were no incidents requiring attention during the operation.”
He continued punishing errant ethnic groups and rooting out nationalism throughout the spring and summer of 1944, that year of victories.
While the Allies were singing his praises and discovering a new Stalin unlike their old picture of him, thousands of soldiers wearing NKVD uniforms arrived in the mountainous regions of the Caucasus, with the February snows falling. The local inhabitants were summoned to a meeting—it was the anniversary of the foundation of the Red army. They arrived, and found their hosts ready for them. Beria reported: “On February 23 there was a heavy snowfall, which caused difficulties in transporting people, especially in mountainous regions.” But by February 25, in spite of frost and snow, settlements in which people had lived for thousands of years were deserted. The inhabitants had been driven out under escort. Cattle trucks were waiting down in the valley. They were crammed full of people and sent off to Siberia.
On the same day, Beria reported that “the eviction of the Chechens and Ingush is proceeding normally: 342,647 people were loaded onto special trains on February 25 and by [February 29] the number had risen to 478,479 of whom 91,250 were Ingush and 387,229 Chechens.… The operation proceeded in an organized fashion, with no serious instances of resistance, or other incidents. There were only isolated cases of attempted flight.”
There were of course “no incidents” in a report meant for Stalin, but in reality the NKVD had found it hard work. Ruslan G., a bank manager, recalled how “they combed the huts to make sure there was no one left behind. It was cold, and the floor was coated with hoarfrost. The soldier who came into the house didn’t want to bend down. He raked the hut with a burst from his tommy gun. Blood trickled out from under the bench where a child was hiding. The mother screamed and hurled herself at the soldier. He shot her too. There was not enough rolling stock. Those left behind were shot. The bodies were covered with earth or sand, carelessly. The shooting had also been careless, and people started wriggling out of the sand like worms. The NKVD men spent the whole night shooting them all over again.”
“Incidents” there were. But no resistance—there Beria had spoken the truth. The country had not altogether forgotten its earlier lessons. Fear was rapidly returning. One ethnic group after another was driven out of the Caucasus. “The operation to resettle persons of Kalmyk nationality in eastern regions (the Altai, the Krasnoyarsk Krai, the Amur, Novosibirsk, and Omsk oblasts) proceeded successfully. In all 93,139 people were entrained. The operation was conducted without excesses—People’s Commissar Beria.”
Beria had also exerted himself in the Crimea: “To Comrade Stalin. In compliance with our decree an operation to cleanse the Crimea of anti-Soviet elements was carried out in the period April–June, and Crimeans, Tartars, Bulgars, Greeks, Armenians, and persons of foreign nationality have been deported to the eastern regions of the USSR. Altogether 225,009 persons have been evacuated.… 23,000 officers and other ranks of the NKVD took part in the operation. The NKVD hereby applies for the award of medals to those who have distinguished themselves.”
Jewish nationalism also had to be dealt with.
By the end of the war, Stalin was getting ready to play the Jewish card. Almost all of the well-known Jews in the Soviet Union were on the Jewish Antifascist Committee which he had set up. As well as Mikhoels, its members included the poets Fefer and Markish, and the academician Lina Stern, director of the Institute of Physiology. Stalin appointed Lozovsky, the head of the Soviet Information Bureau, to the committee as, to all intents and purposes, its political commissar. He also found a use for Molotov’s wife, Polina Zhemchuzina, a fanatical Communist, as patroness of the committee.
In 1944 the committee wrote to Stalin on behalf of all Soviet Jews, recommending the establishment of a Jewish Socialist Republic in the Crimea, on vacant land from which the Tartars had been evicted. The letter was, of course, written by Lozovsky, but a man of his experience would never have risked writing such a thing without the Boss’s agreement. One of the initiators of the letter was Zhemchuzina. But would Molotov’s wife have gone so far without consulting the Boss? He was obviously somewhere in the wings. “A California in the Crimea”—just the thing to win the hearts of American Jews and, of course, untie their purse strings. Besides, the rumor that good old Uncle Joe was going to give the Crimea to the Jews would help divert attention from the fate of the deported peoples.
The Crimean Jewish Republic was, however, just another Trojan horse. The members of the Antifascist Committee did not realize what a dangerous position they had strayed, or rather been inveigled, into. The enticer had their future mapped out. The long game was always his preference.
VICTORY
His armies met those of the Allies on the Elbe. They fraternized, they got drunk together … this boozy display of brotherly love might have gone on forever, had the Boss not known his history. The Russian officers who defeated Napoleon had brought back from Europe the spirit of freedom, and founded secret societies. Stalin was particularly annoyed with Zhukov. The marshal was busy giving interviews to foreign news agencies, more often than not forgetting the obligatory refrain about “the greatest war leader of all times, Comrade Stalin.”
Victory had arrived. Stalin allowed Zhukov the supreme privilege of formally accepting Germany’s unconditional surrender. Zhukov was also allowed to inspect the victory parade. Such honors bestowed by the Boss were dangerous. If Zhukov’s head had not been turned by victory, the shades of vanished marshals might have told him so.
During the victory parade, on a rainy day when “even the skies wept for the fallen,” as his poets wrote, Stalin’s mind was on tomorrow,
on the day after victory.
His cities lay in ruins. The face of the country was pitted with the graves of his soldiers. Half of Europe was seeded with their bodies. When he got around to it he would think of a number which was not too frightening—around seven million. After his death the numbers would grow from year to year. At an international conference held in the Russian Academy of Sciences in 1994 the majority of experts present agreed on the following figures: the army had lost around 8,668,000 men, and the civilian population 18 million: 26 million in all.
For the present—let the soldiers who had survived this cruelest of all wars march over Red Square and fling the banners of Hitler’s defeated army at the foot of the Mausoleum. At his feet. But he must soon give some thought to the future, after demobilization of these soldiers who had learned to kill skillfully and without compunction. He was well aware that criminal gangs had sprung up in the capital. As his daughter wrote to him early in 1945: “It’s getting so that even in the central districts people are afraid to go out after dark.”
While they were fighting, they had forgotten how to work, and how to be afraid. Or rather, they had forgotten what work was because they had forgotten what fear was.
“I heard today,” his daughter wrote, “a rumor that Stalin had returned to Moscow and decreed that gangsterism and thieving are to be liquidated by New Year. People are always crediting you with something good.” He lived up to expectations, and gave his favorite order: shoot them all. Not just the looters, but those who could not put a stop to the looting.
The gangs were swollen by hundreds of homeless and destitute people. Many of them were war cripples, men who had lost arms or legs or been disfigured and were afraid or reluctant to return to their families. Those who did return often found that their wives had received a “burial chit” and had married again. So these men would join one of the tribes of beggars or gangsters.
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