“Well now, let’s look at your ‘green file.’”
In the early evening, Stalin arrived in the Kremlin in his convoy of speeding Packards or else walked downstairs from his flat to the Little Corner where the “cosy” anteroom, with its comfortable armchairs, strictly policed by Poskrebyshev, was already full. Visitors found themselves in a world of control, sparseness and cleanliness. There was nothing unnecessary anywhere. Everyone had shown their papers repeatedly and been searched for weapons. Even Zhukov had to surrender his pistol. “The inspection was repeated over and over again.” Poskrebyshev, now in NKVD General’s uniform, greeted them at his desk. They waited in silence though regulars greeted one another before falling quiet. It was tense. Those who had never met Stalin before were full of anticipation but as one colonel recalled, “I noticed that those…
At around 8 p.m., when Stalin arrived, a murmur passed through the room. He said nothing, but nodded at some. The colonel noticed “my neighbour wiped drops of sweat from his brow and dried his hands on a handkerchief.” A small room, a cubbyhole, contained the last bodyguards at a desk before the office. Stalin entered that “bright spacious room,” with its long green table. At the other end of the room was his desk, on which there was always a heap of documents in their
That night, Molotov, Beria and Malenkov, the perennial threesome, were waiting with Voroshilov and Kaganovich. Stalin nodded and opened the GKO with no chit-chat; its sessions continued until he left many hours later. Stalin sat at his desk and then paced up and down, returning to get his Herzogovina Flor cigarettes which he broke into pieces to fill his pipe. The civilians, as always, sat with their backs against the wall, looking up at the new portraits of Suvorov and Kutuzov while the generals sat on the other side of the table, looking up at Marx and Lenin, a deployment that reflected the constant war between them. The generals immediately spread their maps on the table and Stalin continued his pacing, waddling somewhat. “He would stop in front of the person he was addressing and look straight into his face” with what Zhukov called a “clear tenacious gaze that seemed to envelop and pierce through the visitor.”
Poskrebyshev began calling in the experts from the anteroom: “soon my neighbour also rose… the receptionist called him by name, he went livid, wiped his trembling hands on his handkerchief, picked up his file… and went with hesitant steps.” As he showed them in, Poskrebyshev advised: “Don’t get excited. Don’t think about disagreeing with anything. Comrade Stalin knows everything.” The visitor must report quickly, no small talk, then leave. Inside the room, the grim
Stalin exuded power and energy. “One felt oppressed by Stalin’s power,” wrote his new Railways Commissar who reported to him hundreds of times, “but also by his phenomenal memory and the fact that he knew so much. He made one feel even less important than one was.” Stalin drove the pace, restless, fidgeting, never far from an eruption. Most of the time he was laconic, tireless and icily cold. If he was displeased, wrote Zhukov, “he lost his temper and objectivity failed him.”
The visitors could always sense the danger, yet they were also surprised by the genuinely collegiate argument at these sessions. Mikoyan looked back on the “wonderfully friendly atmosphere” among the magnates during the first three years of the war. The country was run in the form of the GKO through Stalin’s meetings with key leaders in the presence of whoever was in his office—usually the GKO with Mikoyan and, later, Zhdanov, Kaganovich and Voznesensky.
“Sharp arguments arose,” recalled Zhukov, with “views expressed in definite and sharp terms” as Stalin paced up and down. Stalin would ask the generals’ opinions: “Stalin listened more” when “they disagreed. I suspect,” thought Admiral Kuznetsov, “he even liked people who had their own point of view and weren’t afraid to stand up for it.” Having created an environment of boot-licking idolatry, Stalin was irritated by it.
“What’s the point of talking to you?” he would shout. “Whatever I say, you reply, ‘Yes Comrade Stalin; of course, Comrade Stalin… wise decision, Comrade Stalin.’” The generals noticed how “his associates always agreed with him,” while the military could argue, though they had to be very careful. But Molotov and the brash newcomer Voznesensky did argue with him: “The discussions were frank,” recalled Mikoyan. When Stalin, reading one of Churchill’s letters, said the Englishman thought “he had saddled the horse and now he can enjoy a free ride… Am I right, Vyacheslav?” Molotov replied: “I don’t think so.”
Zhukov “witnessed arguments and… stubborn resistance… especially from Molotov when the situation got to the point where Stalin had to raise his voice and was even beside himself, while Molotov merely stood up with a smile and stuck to his point of view.” When Stalin asked Khrulev to take over the railways, he tolerated his refusal: “I don’t think you respect me, refusing my proposal,” he said, indulging the quartermaster, one of his favourites. Amid rows, Stalin insisted “Come to the point” or “Make yourself clear!”
Once Stalin had formed his opinion and argument had ceased, he appointed a man to do the job with the usual death threat as an added incentive. “This very severe man controlled the fulfillment of every order,” recalls Baibakov, the oil engineer, “When he gave the command, he always helped you to carry it out so you received every possible means necessary to do it. Hence I wasn’t scared of Stalin—we were direct with one another. I fulfilled my tasks.” But Stalin had a “knack for detecting weak spots in reports.” Woe betide anyone who appeared before him without mastery of their front. “He would at once drop his voice ominously and say, ‘Don’t you know? What are you doing then?’”
Operation Uranus seemed to refresh Stalin who, observed Khrushchev, started to act “like a real soldier,” considering himself “a great military strategist.” He was never a general let alone a military genius but, according to Zhukov, who knew better than anyone, this “outstanding organizer… displayed his ability as Supremo starting with Stalingrad.” He “mastered the technique of organizing front operations… and guided them with skill, thoroughly understanding complicated strategic questions,” always displaying his “natural intelligence… professional intuition” and a “tenacious memory.” He was “many-sided and gifted” but had “no knowledge of all the details.” Mikoyan was probably right when he summed up in his practical way that Stalin “knew as much about military matters as a statesman should—but no more.”1
At about 10 p.m., Antonov made his second report. There were limits to the friendly spirit that Mikoyan described. War was the natural state of the Bolsheviks and they were good at it. Terror and struggle, the ruling Bolshevik passions, pervaded these meetings. Stalin liberally used fear but he himself lived on his nerves: when the new Railways Commissar arrived, Stalin simply said, “Transport is a matter of life and death… Remember, failure to carry out… orders means the Military Tribunal” at which the young man felt “a chill run down my spine.” When a train was lost in the spaghetti of fronts and railways, Stalin threatened, “If you don’t find it as general, you’ll be going to the front as a private.” Seconds later the Commissar, “white as a sheet,” was being shown out by Poskrebyshev who added, “See you don’t slip up. The Boss’s at the end of his tether.”
Stalin was always pacing up and down. There were various warning signals of a black temper: if the pipe was unlit, it was a bad omen. If Stalin put it down, an explosion was imminent. Yet if he stroked his moustache with the mouthpiece of the pipe, this meant he was pleased. The pipe was both a prop and a weather vane.[210] His tempers were terrifying: “he virtually changed before one’s eyes,” wrote Zhukov, “turning pale, a bitter expression in his eyes, his gaze heavy and spiteful.” When some armies complained that they had not received their supplies, Stalin berated Khrulev: “You’re worse than the enemy: you work for Hitler.”
The three guard dogs of the Little Corner, Molotov, Malenkov and Beria, “never asked questions, just sat there and listened, sometimes jotting a note… and looking at either Stalin or whoever came in. It was as if Stalin needed them either to deal with anything that came up or as witnesses to history.” Their purpose was to preserve the illusion of collective rule and terrorize the generals. Stalin and the magnates all regarded themselves as amateur commanders and shared their Civil War suspicion of “military experts.”
“Look at an old coachman,” Mekhlis explained. “They love and pity the animals but the whip is always ready. The horse sees it and draws its own conclusions.” There in a nutshell, from one of Stalin’s mini-dictators, was the essence of the Supremo’s style of command. “We could all remember 1937,” said Zhukov. If anything went wrong, they knew “you’d end up in Beria’s hands and Beria was always present during my meetings with Stalin.” The
