designer. Yakovlev arrived in the study to find Stalin and Vasilevsky examining fragments of the wing of his Yak-9 fighter.
Stalin pointed to the pieces… and asked: “Do you know anything about this?” He then exploded in a frenzied rant: “I had never seen Stalin in such a rage,” remembered Yakovlev. Stalin demanded to know when this fault had been discovered. When he heard that it had only been noticed “in the face of the enemy,” he “lost his composure even more.”
“Do you know that only the most cunning enemy could do such a thing—turn out planes in such a way that they would seem good at the plant and no good at the front. This is working for Hitler! Do you know what a service you’ve rendered Hitler? You Hitlerites!”
“It was difficult to imagine our condition at that moment… I was shivering,” admitted Yakovlev. The silence was “tomb-like” as Stalin paced the room until he asked: “What are we going to do?”
At dawn on 5 July, the Germans threw 900,000 men and 2,700 tanks into this colossal battle of machines in which fleets of metallic giants clashed, helm to helm, barrel to barrel. By the 9th, the Germans had reached their limit. On the 12th, Zhukov unleashed the costly but highly successful counter-attack. The Battle of Kursk was the climax of the Panzer era, the “mechanized equivalent of hand-to-hand combat,” which left a graveyard of 700 tanks and burnt flesh. Agreeing to cancel Citadel, Hitler had lost his last chance to win the war.
On the afternoon of 24 July, Stalin welcomed Antonov and Shtemenko to the Little Corner in a “joyously jubilant mood.” Stalin did not even want to hear their report—just tinkered cheerfully with the victory communique, adding the words: “Eternal glory to the heroes who fell on the battlefield in the struggle for the liberty and honour of our Motherland!”3
Stalin was not alone in finding it difficult to control his own children during wartime: Khrushchev and Mikoyan played stellar roles in the Kursk triumph, the former as Front Commissar, the latter as Supply maestro, but simultaneously they both found their children embroiled in dangerous crises. Stalin was both sympathetic and heartless in dealing with the tragedies of the Politburo families.
Leonid Khrushchev, Nikita’s eldest son from his first marriage, was already notorious as a ne’er-do-well. Now he became a Stalinist William Tell. Reprimanded by Komsomol for “drunkenness,” he had settled down, married Lyubov Kutuzova, with whom he had a little girl, Julia, and shown courage as a bomber pilot, though he remained a drunken brawler.[216] Leonid boasted boozily of his marksmanship and was challenged to balance a bottle on a pilot’s head. He shot off the neck of the bottle. This did not satisfy these daredevils. Leonid shot again, fatally wounding the officer in the forehead. He was court-martialled.
Khrushchev may have appealed to Stalin for clemency, citing the boy’s bravery. But Stalin who would not save Yakov, “did not want to pardon Khrushchev’s son,” as Molotov recalled. However, he was not condemned but allowed to retrain as a fighter pilot. On 11 March 1943, he was shot down during a dogfight with two FockeWulf 190s near Smolensk. He was never found. Rumours spread that he had turned traitor—which, in Stalin’s system, cast doubt on his widow, Lyubov, who had visited the theatre in Kuibyshev with an “amazingly attractive” French military attache. Lyubov was probably denounced by Khrushchev’s chief bodyguard. She was arrested and interrogated by Abakumov himself, and condemned.
In another of those tragedies of Stalinist family life, little Julia was told her mother was dead. The memory of her parents was obliterated and she was adopted by her grandfather, Khrushchev himself, whom she called “Papa.”[217] The Khrushchevs were cold parents. Nikita himself seemed to believe the charges against Lyubov. “Stalin played this game,” recalls Julia, “and Khrushchev was playing for his life” but “Nikita never spoke about it and even as a pensioner, he spoke only in general terms. This was very humiliating and painful for him.” Perhaps, says Julia Khrushcheva, it contributed to his later decision to denounce Stalin.4
That summer, it was Mikoyan’s turn. Two of his sons were pilots. Stepan was wounded, then during Stalingrad, 18-year-old Vladimir was killed. So Stalin “expressly ordered” his son Vasily to take Stepan into his own division and “make sure not to lose any more Mikoyans.” On Vasily’s orders, Stepan’s engineer claimed the plane was not ready for him to fly whenever possible. This indulgence did not last.
Among all the other children in Kuibyshev, Mikoyan’s younger boys Vano, fifteen, and Sergo, fourteen, were friends with the unhinged son of Shakhurin, the Aircraft Production Commissar. Volodya Shakhurin played a silly but risky game in which he pretended to “appoint” a mock government with the teenage Mikoyans as ministers, all recorded in his exercise book. When they returned to Moscow, this Volodya Shakhurin fell in love with Nina, daughter of Ambassador Umansky who was just leaving for his next posting.
“I won’t let you go,” young Shakhurin told Nina. The schoolchildren were walking across the Kamennyi Most, close to the Kremlin, when Shakhurin borrowed Vano Mikoyan’s pistol which he had been lent by his father’s bodyguards. The boy ran ahead with Nina then, on the bridge, shot her dead and killed himself. A horrified Vano Mikoyan ran back to the Kremlin to tell his mother. The NKGB discovered the gun belonged to the young Mikoyans who were also “ministers” in the schoolboy “government,” which was obviously a conspiracy. Vano was arrested.
“Vano just disappeared,” remembers Sergo. “My mother was frantic and they called the police stations.” Mikoyan, working down the corridor from Stalin himself, rang Beria, then called his wife Ashken: “Don’t worry. Vano’s in the Lubianka.”
Mikoyan knew that this could only happen with Stalin’s permission. The shrewd Armenian decided not to appeal to Stalin “so as not to make things worse.” Ten days later, Sergo was also arrested at Zubalovo and taken to the Lubianka in his pyjamas: “I must tell Mama.”
“It’ll only take an hour,” they replied. Twenty-six schoolboys were arrested and imprisoned, including Stalin’s nephew, Leonid Redens, whose father had been shot in 1940.
The secret police reported the children’s innocence but Stalin replied: “They must be punished.” This was so vague that no one was quite sure what to do with the young prisoners. The boys were interrogated by Lieutenant- General Vlodzirmirsky, one of Beria’s cruellest torturers, “tall and handsome in his uniform,” who was, says Sergo, “very nasty. He shouted at us.” Sergo was placed in solitary for a week. In December, after six months in the Lubianka, the interrogations ceased and the children became really frightened. Sergo’s interrogator showed him a confession that he had been “a participant in an organization… to overthrow the existing government.”
“Just sign and you can see your mother again!”
“I won’t sign, it’s not true,” said Sergo.
“It doesn’t make any difference,” bellowed the general. “Sign—you go home. If not, back to your cell. Listen!” He could hear his mother’s voice in the next room. All the children signed their confessions. “Of course this could have been used against my father.” Sergo and Vano were driven with their mother back to the Kremlin. “I was very glad my father wasn’t there—I was afraid of his anger,” says Sergo.
Mikoyan told the elder boy: “If you’re guilty, I’d strangle you with my own hands. Go and rest.” He never mentioned it to the youngest. But the matter was not closed: after three days at home, the children had to go into exile. The Mikoyans spent a year in Stalinabad, cared for by their house-maid. Stalin never forgot the case and later considered using it against Mikoyan.5
41. STALIN’S SONG CONTEST
At about 11 p.m. on 1 August 1943, Stalin and Beria arrived at Kuntsevo Station and boarded a special train, camouflaged with birch branches, armed with howitzers and packed with specially tested provisions. The train, which, with its theatrical shrubbery poking out of its guns, must have resembled a locomotive Birnam Wood, puffed westwards. The Kursk counter-attacks, Operations Rumiantsev, to the north, and Kutuzov, to the south, both named after Tsarist heroes, were so successful that Stalin felt safe to embark on this preposterously staged visit to the front.
Stalin slept at Gzhatsk, then headed towards Rzhev on the Kalinin Front. Transferring into his Packard, he set up his headquarters in a self-consciously humble wooden cottage with a picturesque veranda (still a museum today) in the hamlet of Khoroshevo where he received his generals. Knowing from Zhukov that Orel and Belgorod
