Stalin: The Court of the Red Tsar

When he heard that the Allies had not yet agreed on a commander, he growled: “Then nothing will come of these operations.” The Soviet Union had tried committee rule and found it had not worked. One man had to make the decisions. Finally, when Churchill would not give a date, Stalin suddenly got to his feet and turning to Molotov and Voroshilov, said, “Let’s not waste our time here. We’ve got plenty to do at the front.” Roosevelt managed to pour unction on troubled waters.

That night, it was Stalin’s turn to host a banquet in the usual Soviet style with an “unbelievable quantity of food.” A huge Russian “waiter” in a white coat stood behind the Supremo’s chair throughout the meal.[226] Stalin “drank little” but got his kicks by needling Churchill, exchanges in which Roosevelt seemed to take an undignified pleasure. Stalin sneered that he was glad Churchill was not a “liberal,” that most loathsome of creatures in the Bolshevik lexicon, but he then tested his severity by joking that 50,000 or perhaps 100,000 German officers should be executed. Churchill was furious: pushing his glass forward, knocking it over so brandy spread across the table, he growled: “Such an attitude is contrary to the British sense of justice. The British Parliament and public would never support the execution of honest men who had fought for their country.” Roosevelt quipped that he would like to compromise: only 49,000 should be shot. Elliott Roosevelt, the President’s ne’er-do-well son who was also present, jumped tipsily to his feet to josh: wouldn’t the 50,000 fall in battle anyway?

“To your health, Elliott!” Stalin clinked glasses with him. But Churchill snarled at Roosevelt fils.

“Are you interested in damaging relations between the Allies… How dare you!”[227] He headed for the door but as he reached it, “hands were clapped on my shoulders from behind, and there was Stalin, with Molotov at his side, both grinning broadly and eagerly declaring that they were only playing… Stalin has a very captivating manner when he chooses to use it.” Roosevelt’s deference to Stalin and shabbiness to Churchill were both unseemly and counterproductive but the heartiness was restored by Stalin tormenting Molotov: “Come here, Molotov, and tell us about your pact with Hitler.”

The finale was Churchill’s sixty-ninth birthday held in the dining hall of the British Legation which, Alan Brooke wrote in his diary, resembled “a Persian temple,” with the walls “covered in a mosaic of small pieces of looking glass” and “heavy deep red curtains. The Persian waiters were in blue and red livery” with oversized “white cotton gloves, the tips of the fingers of which hung limply and flapped about.” Sikhs guarded the doorways.

Beria, who was there incognito, insisted that the NKVD search the British Legation, which was supervised by him personally with that glossy ruffian Tsereteli. “There simply cannot be any doubt,” wrote a British security officer, Beria “was an extremely intelligent and shrewd man with tremendous willpower and ability to impress, command and lead other men.” He disdained anyone else’s opinion, becoming “very angry if anyone… opposed his proposals.” The other Russians “behaved like slaves in his presence.”

Once Beria had signed off, Stalin arrived, but when a valet tried to take his coat, a bodyguard overreacted by reaching for his pistol. Calm was quickly restored. A cake with sixty-nine candles stood on the main table. Stalin toasted “Churchill my fighting friend, if it is possible to consider Mr. Churchill my friend” and then walked round to clink glasses with the Englishman, putting his arm around his shoulders. Churchill answered: “To Stalin the Great!” When Churchill joked that Britain was “becoming pinker,” Stalin joked: “A sign of good health.”

At the climax, the chef of the Legation cuisine produced a creation that came closer to assassinating Stalin than all the German agents in all the souks of Persia. Stalin was making a toast when two mountainous ice-cream pyramids were wheeled in with “a base of ice one foot square and four inches deep,” a religious nightlight inside it and a tube rising ten inches out of the middle on which a plate supporting “a vast ice cream” had been secured with icing sugar. But as these creations approached Stalin, Brooke noticed that the lamp was melting the ice and “now looked more like the Tower of Pisa.” Suddenly the tilt assumed a more dangerous angle and the British Chief of Staff shouted to his neighbours to duck. “With the noise of an avalanche the whole wonderful construction slid over our heads and exploded in a clatter of plates.” Lunghi saw the nervous Persian waiter “stagger sideways at the last moment.” Pavlov in his new diplomatic uniform “came in for the full blast!… splashed from head to foot” but Brooke guessed “it was more than his life was worth to stop interpreting.” Stalin was unblemished.

“Missed the target,” whispered Air Marshal Sir Charles Portal.

At the final meetings next day, Roosevelt explained privately to Stalin that, since he had a presidential election coming up, he could not discuss Poland at this meeting. The subordination of the fate of the country for which the war was fought to American machine politics can only have encouraged Stalin’s plans for a tame Poland. At the last plenary meeting, it was a sign of the amateurism and immediacy of this intimate conference that Churchill and Stalin discussed Polish borders using a map torn out of The Times. The dangers of these meetings for Stalin’s entourage were underestimated by the Westerners until Churchill’s interpreter Birse presented his opposite number Pavlov with a set of Charles Dickens. Pavlov uneasily accepted the present.

“You’re getting VERY close to our Western friends,” smiled Stalin to Pavlov’s anxious discomfort.

On 2 December, Stalin, “satisfied” that the Allies had finally promised to launch Overlord in the spring, flew out of Teheran and changed out of his Marshal’s togs at Baku aerodrome, re-emerging in his old greatcoat, cap and boots. His train conveyed him to Stalingrad, his only post-battle visit to the city that had played such a decisive role in his life. He visited Paulus’s headquarters but his limousine drove too fast down the narrow streets strewn with heaps of German equipment. It collided with a woman driver who almost expired when she realized with whom she had crashed. She started crying: “It’s my fault.” Stalin got out and calmed her: “Don’t cry. It’s not your fault. Blame the war. Our car’s armoured and didn’t suffer. You can repair yours.” Afterwards he headed back to Moscow.¹

* * *

Stalingrad, Kursk and Teheran restored Stalin’s zealous faith in his own infallible greatness. “When victory became obvious,” wrote Mikoyan, “Stalin got too big for his boots and became capricious.” The long boozy dinners started again: Stalin began to drink again, playing the ringmaster of a circus of uncouth hijinks, but in the mass of information he received from Beria, there was always much to worry him.

Beria arrested 931,544 persons in the liberated territory in 1943. As many as 250,000 people in Moscow attended Easter church services. He delivered the phone intercepts and informer reports to Stalin who read them carefully. Here the Supremo learned how Eisenstein was cutting his new movie, Ivan the Terrible, Part Two, because the Tsar’s murders reminded him of Yezhov’s Terror “which he couldn’t recall without shuddering…” The message was clear: liberalism and ill-discipline threatened the State. The cost of Stalin’s victories were vast: almost 26 million were dead, another 26 million homeless. There was a raging famine, treason among the Caucasian peoples, a Ukrainian nationalist civil war, and dangerous liberalism among the Russians themselves. All these had to be solved with the traditional Bolshevik solution, Terror.

Before they turned to terrorizing Russia proper, Beria and the local boss, Khrushchev, were running a new war in the Ukraine where three nationalist armies were fighting Soviet forces. Then there was the dubious loyalty of the Caucasus and Crimea.

In February 1944, Beria proposed the deportation of the Moslem Chechen and Ingush. There had been cases of treason but most had been loyal. Nonetheless Stalin and the GKO agreed—though Mikoyan claimed that he objected to it. On 20 February, Beria, Kobulov and the deportations expert, Serov, arrived in Grozny along with 19,000 Chekists and 100,000 NKVD troops. On 23 February, the locals were ordered to gather in their squares, then suddenly arrested and piled into trains bound for the East. By 7 March, Beria reported to Stalin that 500,000 innocents were on their way.

Other peoples, the Karachai and Kalmyks, joined the Volga Germans who had been deported in 1941. Beria constantly expanded the net: “The Balkars are bandits and… attacked the Red Army,” he wrote to Stalin on 25 February. “If you agree, before my return to Moscow, I can take necessary measures to resettle the Balkars. I ask your orders.” Over 300,000 of these people were deported, but where to dump them all? Like the Nazis with their Jews, Stalin’s men had to distribute this unwanted human flotsam throughout their empire. Molotov suggested 40,000 in Kazakhstan, 14,000 somewhere else. Kaganovich found the trains. Andreyev, now running Agriculture, dealt with their farming equipment. Everyone was involved. When an official noticed that there were 1300 Kalmyks still living in Rostov, Molotov replied that they must be deported at once. Mikoyan may have disapproved but the capital of the Karachais, Karachaevsk, was now renamed after him. In the dry language of these bureaucratic notes, we can only glimpse the tragedy and suffering of this monumental crime.