199
No one else was ever invited to join Stalin in his constant smoking. This honour to Shaposhnikov resembles Queen Victoria graciously permitting the old Disraeli to sit during their audiences, the only Prime Minister to receive such a privilege.
200
In 1760, during the Seven Years War, Empress Elizabeth’s General Todtleben took Berlin. Alexander I took the Prussian capital in 1813.
201
This description certainly complimented Arthur Lee, the colourful adventurer and Conservative MP who bought the house with the fortune of his American heiress wife. He was ennobled as Baron (later Viscount) Lee of Fareham by Lloyd George.
202
Stalin’s nephew, Leonid Redens, met the crestfallen Marshal bathing affably with children in the Volga at Kuibyshev.
203
Timoshenko’s letters to Stalin, scribbled on pages torn out of a notebook, which are in the newly opened Stalin archive, shed light on the Kharkov offensive and Khrushchev’s near breakdown.
204
Kuntsevo’s furniture was “stylish ‘Utility,’ sumptuous and brightly coloured,” thought a young British diplomat, John Reed, “vulgarly furnished and possessed of every convenience a Soviet commissar’s heart could desire. Even the lavatories were modern and… clean.” A hundred yards from the house was Stalin’s new air-raid shelter of the “latest and most luxurious type,” with lifts descending ninety feet into the ground where there were eight or ten rooms inside a concrete box of massive thickness, divided by sliding doors. “The whole air-conditioned and execrably furnished… like some monstrous… Lyons Corner House,” wrote Reed.
205
The bathrooms in all Stalin’s dachas were capacious with the baths specially constructed to fit his precise height.
206
He received an engraved clock from the Front to show its gratitude: it is now in the Kaganovich archive at RGASPI. Interestingly, both Leonid Brezhnev and Mikhail Suslov, who together ruled the Soviet Union for almost two decades after 1964, got to know Kaganovich on this front.
207
Baibakov’s interview for this book has been invaluable as he is one of the last of Stalin’s Ministers still living. Baibakov became a perennial member of the Soviet government: Stalin appointed him Commissar for Oil in 1944 and later he ran Gosplan, the main economic agency, except for a short interval, until being sacked by Gorbachev in the eighties. It is a mark of the obsolescence of Soviet economics that the young men Stalin appointed were still running it forty years later. At the time of writing, this tireless nonagenerian is working in the oil industry, taking conference calls with Stalinist dynamism while wearing his medals, beneath a portrait of Lenin.
208
When Khrushchev was in power, he ordered his cronies like Yeremenko to inflate his heroic role at Stalingrad, just like Stalin himself.
209
Simultaneously with Stalingrad’s Operation Uranus, Zhukov launched the forgotten Operation Mars against the Rzhev salient facing Moscow, probably his greatest defeat: hundreds of thousands of men were lost in just two days of an operation that illustrated his bold but crude style.
210
As the war went on, it became a symbol of his avuncular image in the West—Uncle Joe—and statesmen tended to send him pipes as presents. Maisky, Ambassador to London, for example, wrote to Stalin: “After Mr. Kerr [British Ambassador] gave you a pipe and it was reported in the press, I was presented with pipes for you from two firms… and I send herewith an example for you…”
