167
A muscular paragon of peasant masculinity, typical of Stalin’s cavalrymen, Timoshenko had been a divisional commander in the Polish War of 1920: he appears as the “captivating Savitsky” in the
168
No papers of formal charges were ever filed so the kidnapping was illegal even by Bolshevik standards. When Beria was arrested after Stalin’s death, this kidnapping and murder was one of the crimes on the indictment.
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In November 1941, the Polish Ambassador Stanislaw Kot quizzed Stalin on the whereabouts of these men. Stalin made a show of setting up a phone call to Beria and changed the subject. In December 1941, he told General Anders they had escaped to Mongolia. As we have seen, these sort of sniggering acts of concern were part of his game with Beria. Mikoyan’s son Stepan wrote graciously that his father’s signature on this order was “the heaviest burden for our family.”
170
At the Eighteenth Party Conference in February 1941, Stalin divided Beria’s NKVD into two commissariats. Beria retained the NKVD while State Security (NKGB) was hived off under his protege Merkulov. This was not yet a direct demotion for Beria: he was promoted to Deputy Premier and remained overlord or
171
When Admiral Kuznetsov got to know him on their trip to the Far East, Zhdanov chatted about how much he enjoyed working with the navy. “I’d love to go [on a cruiser]. But it’s not always so easy to get away,” he said, adding with a smile, “I am more a river man than a seaman. A freshwater sailor as they say. But I love ships.” Kuznetsov admired Zhdanov who “did a great deal for the Navy.” But he was less helpful to the other services.
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This was far from the only such madness: on other occasions, Stalin commissioned a tank based on a crazy principle that “in being destroyed, it protects.”
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Kaganovich was despised for not saving his brother but he buried him with honour as a Central Committee member in the Novodevichy Cemetery, not far from Nadya Stalin. Vannikov survived but remained in prison.
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Krebs was Chief of Staff of the
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On 13 May 1941, Svetlana wrote to her father, “My dear little Secretary! Why have you recently been coming home so late?… Nevermind, I wouldn’t make my respected Secretaries miserable with my strictness. Eat as much as you like. You can drink too. I only ask you not to put vegetables or other food on the chairs in the hope that someone will sit on it. It will damage the chairs…” This was an early hint of the brutish games that characterised Stalin’s dinners after the war. “We obey,” replied Stalin. “Kisses to my little sparrow. Your little Secretary, Stalin.”
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Dekanozov repeatedly told this story to his young son, Reginald, who recorded it in his Notes before his own recent death. It has never been published. The author is most grateful to Nadya Dekanozova of Tbilisi, Georgia, for making this source available.
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But the speeches have spawned a grand debate about whether Stalin was planning a preemptive strike against Hitler: the so-called Suvorov Debate following Victor Suvorov’s article in June 1985. Suvorov argued that Stalin was about to attack Hitler because of the partial mobilization and build-up on Western borders, the proximity of airfields, and because General Zhukov produced such a plan of attack. His view is now discredited. It now seems that the real view of the General Staff, including General Vasilevsky, was that they would have to retreat much deeper into their territory—hence Vasilevsky’s proposal to move airfields and infrastructure back to the Volga, a proposal attacked as “defeatist” by Kulik and Mekhlis. However, Stalin always kept an offensive war as a real possibility as well as an ideological necessity. As for the speeches, they were designed purely to raise the morale of the army and display a measure of realism about the Soviet situation.
