Stalin: The Court of the Red Tsar

Ambassador, “standing on a bench, waved his handkerchief and cried in a strident voice, ‘Thank you thank you!’”

* * *

The celebration was not over for Stalin and Molotov. As he got into the car, Stalin ordered Vlasik to call the dacha at Zubalovo and tell Svetlana, now fifteen, that she was to assemble the family for a party: “Stalin’s arriving any minute.”

Svetlana ran to tell her aunt, Anna Redens, who was there with her children and Gulia Djugashvili, aged three, Yakov’s daughter: “Father’s coming!”

Anna Redens had not seen Stalin since the row about her husband’s arrest and certainly not since his execution. All of them gathered on the steps. Minutes later, the tipsy, unusually cheerful Stalin arrived. Throwing open the car door, he hailed the twelve-year-old Leonid Redens: “Get in—let’s go for a drive!” The driver sped them round the flower bed. Then Stalin got out and hugged the apprehensive Anna Redens, who was holding her younger son Vladimir, now six. Stalin admired this angelic nephew: “For the sake of such a wonderful son, let’s make peace. I forgive you.” Little Gulia, Stalin’s first grandchild, was brought out to be admired but she waved her arms and screamed and was swiftly taken to her room. Stalin sat at the table where he had once presided with Nadya over their young family. Cakes and chocolates were brought. Stalin took Vladimir on to his lap and started opening the chocolates: the little boy noticed his “very beautiful long fingers.”

“You’re spoiling the children by buying them presents they don’t even want,” Stalin reprimanded the staff but, Vladimir says, “in his gentle way that made him very loved by them.”

After tea, Stalin went upstairs for a catnap. He had not slept the previous night. Then Molotov, Beria and Mikoyan arrived for dinner[175] at which “Stalin threw orange peel at everyone’s plates. Then he threw a cork right into the ice cream” which delighted Vladimir Alliluyev. The family could not know that Hitler’s imminent invasion, and Stalin’s exhaustion and paranoia, would make this the end of an era. ⁹

* * *

This was an oasis of exhilaration in a darkening sky. Torn between the wishful thinking of his powerful will —and the mounting evidence—Stalin persisted in believing that a diplomatic breakthrough with Hitler was just round the corner, even though he now knew the date of Operation Barbarossa from his spymasters. When Stafford Cripps, the British Ambassador, delivered a letter from Winston Churchill warning of the invasion, it backfired, convincing Stalin that Britain was trying to entrap Russia: “We’re being threatened with the Germans, and the Germans with the Soviet Union,” Stalin told Zhukov. “They’re playing us off against each other.” ¹⁰

Yet he was not completely oblivious: in the contest that Molotov called “the great game,” Stalin thought Russia might manage to stay out of the war until 1942. “Only by 1943 could we meet the Germans on an equal footing,” he told Molotov. As ever, Stalin was trying to read himself out of the problem, carefully studying a history of the German-French War of 1870. He and Zhdanov repeatedly quoted Bismarck’s sensible dictum that Germany should never face war on two fronts: Britain remained undefeated hence Hitler would not attack. “Hitler’s not such a fool,” Stalin said, “that he’s unable to understand the difference between the USSR and Poland or France, or even England, indeed all of them put together.” Yet his entire career was a triumph of will over reality.

He persisted in believing that Hitler, the reckless gambler and world-historical “sleepwalker,” was a rational Bismarckian Great Power statesman, like himself. After the war, talking to a small group that included Dekanozov, his Ambassador to Berlin in 1941, Stalin, thinking aloud about this time, obliquely explained his behaviour: “When you’re trying to make a decision, NEVER put yourself into the mind of the other person because if you do, you can make a terrible mistake.”[176]

Military measures were agonizingly slow. Zhdanov and Kulik proposed removing the old armaments from the Fortified Areas and putting them in the unfinished new ones. Zhukov objected: there was no time. Stalin backed his cronies, so the fortifications were unfinished when the onslaught came.

On 20 April, Ilya Ehrenburg, the Jewish novelist whom Stalin admired, learned that his anti-German novel, The Fall of Paris, had been refused by the censors who were still following Stalin’s orders not to offend Hitler. Four days later, Poskrebyshev called, telling him to dial a number: “Comrade Stalin wants to talk to you.” As soon as he got through, his dogs started barking; his wife had to drive them out of the room. Stalin told him he liked the book: did Ehrenburg intend to denounce Fascism? The novelist replied that it was hard to attack the Fascists since he was not allowed to use the word. “Just go on writing,” said Stalin jocularly, “you and I will try to push the third part through.” It was typical of this strangely literary dictator to think this would alarm the Germans: Hitler was beyond literary nuances.

Even Stalin’s inner circle could smell war now. It was so pervasive that Zhdanov suggested they cancel the May Day Parade in case it was too “provocative.” Stalin did not cancel it but he placed Dekanozov, the Ambassador to Germany, right next to him on the Mausoleum to signal his warmth towards Berlin.¹¹

On 4 May, he sent another signal to Hitler that he was ready to talk: Stalin replaced Molotov as Premier, promoting Zhdanov’s protege, Nikolai Voznesensky, the brash economic maestro, as his deputy on the inner Buro. At thirty-eight, Voznesensky’s rise had been meteoric and this angered the others: Mikoyan, who was particularly sore, thought he was “economically educated but a professor-type without practical experience.” This good-looking, intelligent but arrogant Leningrader was “naively happy with his appointment,” but Beria and Malenkov already resented the acerbic technocrat: Stalin’s “promoting a teacher to give us lessons,” Malenkov whispered to Beria. Henceforth, Stalin ruled as Premier through his deputies as Lenin had, balancing the rivalry between Beria and Malenkov, on the one hand, and Zhdanov and Voznesensky, on the other. Stalin expressed his emergence on the world stage sartorially, discarding his baggy trousers and boots. He “started wearing well-ironed, untucked ones with lace-up bootkins.”¹²

Finally, Stalin prepared the military for the possibility of war. On 5 May, he saw only one visitor: Zhdanov, just promoted to Stalin’s Party Deputy, visited him for twenty-five minutes. At 6 p.m., the two men walked from the Little Corner to the Great Kremlin Palace where two thousand officers awaited them: Stalin entered with Zhdanov, Timoshenko and Zhukov. President Kalinin introduced a “severe” Stalin who praised the modern mechanization of his “new army.” Then he eccentrically attributed the French defeat to amorous disappointment: the French were “so dizzy with self-satisfaction” that they disdained their own warriors to the extent that “girls wouldn’t even marry soldiers.” Was the German army unbeatable? “There are no invincible armies in the world” but war was coming. “If VM Molotov… can delay the start of war for 2–3 months, this’ll be our good fortune.” At the dinner, he toasted: “Long live the dynamic offensive policy of the Soviet State,” adding, “anyone who doesn’t recognize this is a Philistine and a fool.” This was a relief to the military: Stalin was not living in cloud cuckoo land. ¹³ The State was ready to fight, or was it? The State was not sure.[177]

The magnates tried to steer a path between Stalin’s infallibility and Hitler’s reality: the absurdity of explaining how the army had to be ready to fight an offensive war which was definitely not going to happen, while claiming this was not a change of policy, was so ridiculous that they tied themselves in knots of Stalinist sophistry and Neroesque folly. “We need a new type of propaganda,” declared Zhdanov at the Supreme Military Council. “There is only one step between war and peace. So our propaganda can’t be peaceful.”

“We ourselves designed the propaganda this way,” Budyonny exploded, so they had to explain why it was changing.

“We’re only altering the slogan,” claimed Zhdanov.

“As if we were going to war tomorrow!” sneered the pusillanimous Malenkov, eighteen days before the invasion.¹⁴

On 7 May, Schulenburg, secretly opposed to Hitler’s invasion, breakfasted with the Soviet Ambassador to Berlin, Dekanozov, whom he ambiguously tried to warn. They met thrice but “he did not warn,” said Molotov later, “he hinted and pushed for diplomatic negotiations.” Dekanozov informed Stalin who was becoming ever more bad- tempered and nervous. “So, disinformation has now reached ambassadorial level,” he growled. Dekanozov disagreed.

“How could you allow yourself to argue with Comrade Stalin! He knows more and can see further than all of us!” Voroshilov threatened Dekanozov during a recess.¹⁵

On 10 May, Stalin learned of Deputy Fuhrer Hess’s quixotic peace flight to Scotland. His magnates, remembered Khrushchev who was in the office that day, were all understandably convinced that Hess’s mission was aimed at Moscow. But Stalin was finally willing to prepare for war, admittedly in a manner so timid that it was