When he visited Tiflis, he got drunk, took a fighter-plane up over the city and caused havoc by swooping over the streets. If he did not get his way, he denounced officers to Abakumov or Bulganin. The only escape was to denounce him to Stalin himself: “Dear Joseph Vissarionovich, I ask you to tell Vasily Josephovich not to touch me,” wrote the air-force officer N. Sbytov, who had spotted the first German tanks approaching Moscow. “I could help him.”
Sbytov revealed that Vasily was constantly name-dropping: “When my father approved this job, he wanted me to have an independent command,” he whined.
Vasily certainly behaved like a boy brought up by Chekists: when some “Enemies” were found in his command, he set up an impromptu torture chamber in his own apartment and started “beating the soles of the man’s feet with a thin rod” until this ersatz-Lubianka broke up into a party.4
Days after Zhukov’s exile, President Kalinin, who was ill with stomach cancer, started to deteriorate. Stalin was fond of Papa Kalinin, personally arranging to send him down to recuperate in Abkhazia, calling the local boss to demand “maximum care,” and later ordering his bodyguards to look after him tenderly. Yet he also tormented the half-blind Kalinin, remembering Papa’s dissent in the twenties for which he had excluded him from active government for two decades. When Tito offered Kalinin some cigarettes at a banquet, Stalin quipped: “Don’t take any of those Western cigarettes!” Kalinin “confusedly dropped them from his trembling fingers.”
The 71-year-old Kalinin lived with his housekeeper and two adopted children while his adored wife festered in the camps. Emboldened by his imminent death, Kalinin appealed to Stalin: “I look calmly on the future of our country… and I wish only one thing—to preserve your power and strength, the best guarantee of the success of the Soviet State,” he started his letter. “Personally I turn to you with two requests—pardon Ekaterina Ivanovna Kalinina and appoint my sister to bring up the two orphans living with me. With all my soul, a last goodbye. M. Kalinin.”
Stalin, Malenkov and Zhdanov voted to pardon Kalinin’s wife after she had admitted her guilt, the usual condition for forgiveness: “I did bad things and was severely punished… but I was never an enemy to the Communist Party—pardon me!”
“It’s necessary to pardon and free at once, and bring the pardoned to Moscow. J Stalin.”
Before he died, on 24 June, Kalinin wrote an extraordinary but pathetic letter to Stalin, inspired by his bitter need of Bolshevik redemption: “Waiting for death… I must say that during all the time of the oppositions, no one from the opposition ever proposed hostility to the Party line. This might surprise you because I was friendly with some of them… Yet I was criticized and discredited… because Yagoda worked hard to imply my closeness to the oppositions.”
Now he revealed a secret he had kept for twenty-two years: “In the year after Lenin’s death, after the row with Trotsky, Bukharin invited me to his flat to admire his hunting trophies and asked—would I consider ‘ruling without Stalin?’; I replied I couldn’t contemplate such a thing. Any combination without Stalin was incomprehensible… After the death of Lenin, I believed in Stalin’s policy… I thought Zinoviev most dangerous.” Then he again requested that Stalin care for his sister and the orphans, and “commit this letter to the archive.”
At the funeral, when photographers hassled Stalin, he pointed at the coffin, growling: “Photograph Kalinin!”5
On 8 September, Stalin headed off on his holiday while Molotov shuttled around the world to attend meetings with the Allies to negotiate the new Europe. In Paris, he defended Soviet interests in Germany while still trying to win a protectorate over Libya, against the ever-hardening opposition of the Western Allies. It seems that Stalin still hoped to consolidate his position by negotiations with his former allies.
Stalin, writing in code as “Druzhkov” or
“You behaved absolutely correctly,” replied Stalin. “The dignity of the Soviet Union must be defended not only in great matters but in minutiae.”
“Dear Polinka honey,” the vain Molotov wrote exultantly. “I send greetings and newspaper pictures as I left the parade on Sunday! I enclose
While Molotov was triumphant at having signed the peace treaties with the defeated nations, Stalin contrived another humiliation. Stalin was already a member of the Academy of Sciences and now Molotov was offered the same honour, with the Vozhd’s blessing. Molotov dutifully sent the Academy a grateful cable, upon which Stalin swooped with aquiline spite: “I was struck by your cable… Are you really so ecstatic about your election as an honorary Academician? What does this signature ‘truly yours, Molotov’ mean? I never thought you could become so emotional about such a second-rate matter… It seems to me that you, a statesman of the highest type, must care more about your dignity.”
Stalin continued to seethe about the inconvenience of his people starving, Hungry Thirty-Three all over again.[270] First he tried to joke about it, calling one official “Brother Dystrophy.” Then, when even Zhdanov reported the famine, Stalin blamed Khrushchev, his Ukrainian viceroy as he had done in 1932: “They’re deceiving you…” Yet 282,000 people died in 1946, 520,000 in 1947. Finally he turned on the Supply maestro, Mikoyan. He ordered Mekhlis, resurgent as Minister of State Control, to investigate: “Don’t trust Mikoyan in any business because his lack of honest character has made Supply a den of thieves!”
Mikoyan was clever enough to apologize: “I saw so many mistakes in my work and surely you see it all clearly,” he wrote to Stalin with submissive irony. “Of course neither I nor the rest of us can put the issue as squarely as you can. I will do my best to study from you how to work as necessary. I’ll do everything to learn lessons… so it will serve me well in my subsequent work under your fatherly leadership.” Like Molotov, Mikoyan’s old intimacy with Stalin was over.
Khrushchev too fell into disfavour about his attitude to the famine: “Spinelessness!” Stalin upbraided him and, in February 1947, sacked him as Ukrainian First Secretary (he remained Premier). Kaganovich, who now resembled “a fat landowner,” replaced him and arrived in Kiev to batter him into shape.
Stalin’s disfavour always brought debilitating stress to his grandees: Khrushchev collapsed with pneumonia. His name vanished from Ukrainian newspapers, his cult withered. But Kaganovich ordered doctors to treat Khrushchev with penicillin, one of the Western medicines of which Stalin so disapproved. Even if he recovered, was Stalin’s “pet” doomed?6
50. “THE ZIONISTS HAVE PULLED ONE OVER YOU!”
In 1947, the American Secretary of State, George Marshall, unveiled a massive programme of economic aid to Europe that initially sounded attractive to the shattered Imperium. Molotov was immediately despatched to Paris to find out more. At first the leaders thought of the Plan like Lend-Lease with no strings attached, but Stalin soon grasped that it would resuscitate Germany and undermine his East European hegemony. Molotov initially favoured the Plan and still leaned towards a negotiated settlement but Stalin rejected Marshall.
Stalin and Zhdanov resolved to tighten their control over Eastern Europe. Simultaneously, Stalin supported the foundation of the Jewish state, which he hoped would become a Middle Eastern satellite. On 29 November, he voted for it at the UN and was the first to recognize Israel. He gave Mikhoels the Stalin Prize. But it soon became clear Israel was going to be an American ally, not a Russian one.
In the cauldron of Stalin’s irrational prejudices, razor-sharp political instincts and aggressively Russian
