Stalin: The Court of the Red Tsar

Sebastopol. Should I or shouldn’t I tell Stalin?”

“Inform him immediately!”

“You call him,” beseeched Timoshenko. “I’m afraid.”

“No, you call him,” retorted Budyonny. “You’re Defence Commissar!” Finally, Budyonny agreed and started calling Kuntsevo. Timoshenko, who could not spread this task widely enough, ordered Zhukov to telephone Stalin too.

Zhukov was still waiting on the line to Kuntsevo as Stalin was roused. Three minutes later, he came to the phone. Zhukov reported and asked permission to counter-attack. There was silence. He could just hear Stalin breathing.

“Did you understand me?” asked Zhukov. “Comrade Stalin?” He could still only hear heavy breathing. Then Stalin spoke: “Bring Timoshenko to the Kremlin. Tell Poskrebyshev to summon the Politburo.” Mikoyan and the Politburo were already being rung:

“It’s war!” Now Budyonny reached Stalin at the dacha and added that Riga was being bombed as well. Stalin called Poskrebyshev, who was sleeping in his study: “The bombing’s started.” [182]

Stalin sped into town: he had banned the Politburo from staying in their dachas so they were already there. Stalin rode up in the lift to the second floor, hurried along the red-carpeted corridors with their wooden panelling and snapped at Poskrebyshev as he walked into his office: “Get the others here now.” Zhukov claimed the Politburo assembled at 4:30 a.m. but Molotov thought it was earlier. However, Stalin’s office logbook shows the meeting started at 5:45 a.m. just over an hour after the full German attack. Molotov, who lived in the same building, not far from Stalin’s flat, arrived first, swiftly joined by Beria, Timoshenko, Zhukov and Mekhlis.

Stalin did not collapse: Mikoyan thought he was “subdued.” Zhukov noticed he was “pale” and “bewildered” sitting at the green baize table, “a pipe in his hand.” Voronov thought him “depressed and nervy,” but he was in command of his office at least. Outside the fronts were in anarchy. But here, Chadaev, the Sovnarkom assistant, remembered that Stalin “spoke slowly, choosing his words carefully, occasionally his voice broke down. When he had finished, everybody was silent for some time and so was he.” But amazingly, he still persisted in the idea that the war might be “a provocation by the German officers,” convinced that Hitler might have a Tukhachevsky among the high command of the Wehrmacht. “Hitler simply does not know about it.” Stalin would not order resistance until he had heard from Berlin.

“That scoundrel Ribbentrop tricked us,” he said to Mikoyan several times, still not blaming Hitler. Stalin ordered Molotov: “We have to call the German Embassy immediately.” Molotov called from Stalin’s desk, laden with telephones, and stammered, “Tell him to come.” Schulenburg had already contacted Molotov’s office, asking to see the Foreign Commissar. “I started from Stalin’s office upstairs to my own office” which took about three minutes. Schulenburg, accompanied by Hilger, arrived in the office overlooking Ivan the Terrible’s church for the second time that night—and the last time in his career. The summery Kremlin was bathed in the first light and fragrant with the acacias and roses of the Alexandrovsky Gardens.[183]

Schulenburg read out the telegram that had arrived at 3 a.m. Berlin time: the concentrations of Soviet forces had forced the Reich to take military “counter measures.” He finished. Molotov’s face twitched with disbelief and anger. Finally, he stammered: “Is this supposed to be a declaration of war?” Schulenburg could not speak either: he shrugged sadly.

Molotov’s anger overcame his shock: “The message I have just been given couldn’t mean anything but a declaration of war since German troops have already crossed the border and Soviet cities like Odessa, Kiev and Minsk have been bombed by German aircraft for an hour and a half.” Molotov was shouting now. This was “a breach of confidence unprecedented in history.” Now Germany had unleashed a terrible war. “Surely we haven’t deserved that.” There was nothing more to say: Count von der Schulenburg, who would be executed by Hitler for his part in the July 1944 plot, shook hands and departed, passing limousines rolling into the Kremlin bearing generals. Molotov rushed to Stalin’s office where he announced: “Germany’s declared war on us.”

Stalin subsided into his chair, “lost in thought.” The silence was “long and pregnant.” Stalin “looked tired, worn out,” recalled Chadaev. “His pock-marked face was drawn and haggard.” This, recalled Zhukov, “was the only time I saw Stalin depressed.” Then he roused himself with a wildly optimistic slogan: “The enemy will be beaten all along the line”—and he turned to the generals: “What do you recommend?”

Zhukov suggested that the frontier districts must “hold up” the Germans—

“Annihilate,” interrupted Timoshenko, “not ‘hold up.’”

“Issue a directive,” said Stalin, still under the spell of his grand delusion. “Do not cross the border.” Timoshenko, not Stalin, signed the series of directives that were issued throughout the morning. Chadaev noticed the mood improve: “on that first day of war, everyone was… quite optimistic.”

Yet despite everything, Stalin persisted in clinging on to shards of his shattered illusion: he said he hoped to settle things diplomatically. No one dared contradict this absurdity except Molotov, his comrade since 1912 who was one of the last who could openly argue with him.

“No!” replied Molotov emphatically. It was war and “nothing could be done about it.” The scale of the invasion and Molotov’s stark insistence managed to shake the reality into Stalin.

When Dmitrov, the Comintern leader, arrived, the outer office was a hive of activity, with Poskrebyshev, Mekhlis (in uniform again), Marshal Timoshenko, and Admiral Kuznetsov at work—and Beria “giving orders on the phone.” Inside, he noticed Stalin’s “striking calmness, resoluteness, confidence…” “They fell on us, without making any claims, making a vile attack like bandits,” Stalin told Dmitrov. The “bandits” had the advantage of total surprise. The Soviet front line had been overwhelmed. Stalin’s armies were strongest in the south. However, while the Germans thrust towards Leningrad and the Ukraine, Hitler’s strongest army group was meant to take Moscow. Army Group Centre’s two pincers shattered the Soviet Western Front, under Colonel-General Pavlov whose counter-attack was tossed aside as the Panzers charged towards Minsk and the road to Moscow.

Stalin reacted with a steady stream of orders that admittedly bore little relation to the disaster at the front: nonetheless, Beria, Malenkov, Mikoyan, Kaganovich and Voroshilov came, went and returned to the Little Corner throughout the morning so that by midday, all of them had been there at least twice, Beria thrice. Mekhlis was one of the first to arrive, Kulik came later. The Vozhd ordered Kaganovich to prepare the trains to remove factories and 20 million people from the front—nothing was to fall into German hands. Mikoyan was to supply the armies.

Stalin retained minute control over everything, from the size and shape of bayonets to the Pravda headlines and who wrote the articles, losing neither his jealousy of others’ glory nor his flawless instinct for self-preservation. When General Koniev received several mentions in the newspapers during the first week, Stalin found the time to telephone the editor and snap: “You’ve printed enough on Koniev.” When the same editor asked if he could publish one writer whom Stalin had savagely denounced before the war, he replied: “You may print. Comrade Adveenko has atoned.” Meanwhile he himself deliberately disappeared from the public eye. His appearances on the front page of Pravda fell dramatically. Amazingly, the USSR possessed no Supreme Command: at nine that morning, Stalin created an early version, the Stavka. Naturally, the decree named Stalin as Commander-in-Chief but he crossed it out and put Timoshenko’s name instead.

Everyone agreed that the government had to announce the war. Mikoyan and the others proposed Stalin should do it but he refused: “Let Molotov speak.” After all, Molotov had signed the treaty with Ribbentrop. The entourage disagreed—surely the people would not understand why they were not hearing from the Premier. Stalin insisted that he would speak another time. “He didn’t want to be first to speak,” said Molotov. “He needed a clear picture… He couldn’t respond like an automaton to everything… He was a human being after all.”

Molotov, who still regarded himself as a political journalist, immediately set to work on the announcement but Stalin dominated the drafting for he possessed the gift of distilling complex ideas into the simple and stirring phrases that henceforth characterized his war speeches. At midday, Molotov drove to the Central Telegraph Office on Gorky Street, just up from the Kremlin. He mastered his stammer and delivered the famous speech in his flat but quavering voice: “Our cause is just. The enemy will be crushed. Victory will be ours.”

When Molotov returned, Stalin walked up to his office to congratulate him: “Well, you sounded a bit flustered but the speech went well.” Molotov needed praise: he was much vainer than he looked. Just then the vertushka rang: it was Timoshenko reporting on the chaos of the frontier where the commanders, especially Pavlov on the vital Western Front that covered Minsk and the road to Moscow, had lost