Stalin: The Court of the Red Tsar

hours’ sleep, he visited the Defence Commissariat to find out more, probably accompanied by Molotov, Malenkov and Budyonny. The fall of Minsk would open the road to Smolensk and Moscow, but such was the rout that Timoshenko again lost contact with the armies. This infuriated Stalin who arrived back at the Little Corner at 7:35 p.m. While Timoshenko and Zhukov came and went with worsening news, Beria and Mikoyan arrived to join their comrades in an emergency Politburo. After midnight, Stalin called Timoshenko for some concrete news from Belorussia: there was none. This was the final straw.[185] Stalin stormed out of the office. Poskrebyshev and Chadaev watched Stalin, Molotov and Beria getting into their Packard outside.

“The Germans have obviously taken Minsk,” said Poskrebyshev.

Minutes later, the Five pulled up at the Defence Commissariat. Stalin led his men into Timoshenko’s office and announced that he wanted to acquaint himself personally with the reports from the front. Zhukov was about to leave but Timoshenko gestured for him to stay. The Five gathered around the operations map.

“What’s happening at Minsk?” asked Stalin.

“I’m not yet able to report on that,” replied Timoshenko.

“It’s your duty to have the facts clearly before you at all times and keep us up to date,” said Stalin. “At present, you’re simply afraid to tell us the truth.” At this, the fearless Zhukov interjected rudely: “Comrade Stalin, have we permission to get on with our work?”

“Are we perhaps in your way?” sneered Beria, who must have been shocked to see Stalin addressed in such a way. The meeting now degenerated into a row between Zhukov and Beria, with a bristling Stalin standing in the middle.

“You know that the situation on all fronts is critical. The front commanders await instructions and it’s better if we do it ourselves,” replied Zhukov.

“We too are capable of giving orders,” shouted Beria.

“If you think you can, do it!” retorted Zhukov.

“If the Party tells us to, we will.”

“So wait until it tells you to. As things are, we’ve been told to do the job.” Zhukov appealed to Stalin: “Excuse my outspokenness, Comrade Stalin, we shall certainly get it worked out. Then we’ll come to the Kremlin and report.” Zhukov was implying that the generals might be more competent than the Politburo.

Stalin, who had been quiet up to this point, could no longer contain his fury: “You’re making a crass mistake trying to draw a line between yourselves and us… We must all be thinking how to help the fronts.” Stalin, in Mikoyan’s words, now “erupted”: “What is General Headquarters? What sort of Chief of Staff is it who since the first day of the war has no connection with his troops, represents nobody, and commands nobody?”

The granite-faced Zhukov collapsed under this barrage and burst into tears, “sobbing like a woman” and “ran out into another room.” Molotov followed him. One of the harshest Bolsheviks comforted one of the most severe soldiers of that bloody century: did Molotov offer a handkerchief or put a hand on Zhukov’s shoulder? Five minutes later, that incongruous duo returned. Zhukov was “quiet but his eyes were moist.”

“We were all depressed,” admitted Mikoyan. Stalin suggested that Voroshilov or someone else be despatched to make contact with the Belorussian front. “Stalin was very depressed.” Then he looked at his comrades.

“There we are then,” said Stalin. “Let them get it sorted out themselves first. Let’s go, comrades.” Stalin led the way out of the office. As they climbed into the cars outside, Stalin uttered his first words of truth since the war began: “Everything’s lost. I give up. Lenin founded our state and we’ve fucked it up.” Stalin cursed all the way to Kuntsevo. “Lenin left us a great heritage and we his successors have shitted it all up…” Even when they had arrived at the house, Molotov remembered him swearing, “ ‘We fucked it up!’ The ‘we’ was meant to include all of us!” Stalin said he could no longer be the Leader. He resigned. At Kuntsevo, Molotov “tried to cheer him up.” They left the broken Stalin sulking at the dacha.[186]

Mikoyan was not impressed with this performance. On the way home, he discussed it with Molotov, whom he disliked but trusted: they knew Stalin as well as anyone. “We were struck by this statement of Stalin’s. What now, is everything irrevocably lost? We thought he said it for effect.” They were right that Stalin was partly performing but “he was a human being too,” in Molotov’s words. The fall of Minsk jolted Stalin, who lost face in front of his comrades and generals. This was the gravest crisis of his career.

The next day, they discovered it was not merely “for effect.” At midday, when Stalin usually arrived at the Kremlin, he did not come. He did not appear later in the day. The vacuum of power was palpable: the titan who, in fourteen-hour marathons, decided every tiny detail left a gaping hole. When Stalin’s phone rang, Poskrebyshev responded.

“Comrade Stalin’s not here and I don’t know when he will be.” When Mekhlis tried to ring Stalin at Kuntsevo, there was no reply. “I don’t understand it,” sighed Poskrebyshev. By the end of the day, Stalin’s chef de cabinet was saying: “Comrade Stalin is not here and is unlikely to be here.”

“Has he gone to the front?” asked young Chadaev.

“Why do you keep bothering me? I’ve told you he isn’t here and won’t be here.”

Stalin “had shut himself away from everybody, was receiving nobody and was not answering the phone.” Molotov told Mikoyan and the others that “Stalin had been in such a state of prostration for the last two days that he was not interested in anything, didn’t show any initiative and was in a bad way.” Stalin could not sleep. He did not even bother to undress but simply wandered around the dacha. At one point, he opened the door of the guardhouse where Vlasik’s deputy, Major-General Rumiantsev, leapt to attention, but Stalin did not say a word and just returned to his room. He later told Poskrebyshev, he had the taste of wormwood in his mouth. Yet Stalin had read his history: he knew that Ivan the Terrible, his “teacher,” had also withdrawn from power to test the loyalty of his boyars.

The Soviet boyars were alarmed but the experienced ones sensed danger. Molotov was careful not to sign any documents. As the Germans advanced, the government was paralysed for two long days.

“You’ve no idea what it’s like here,” Malenkov told Khrushchev.

On the evening of the 30th, Chadaev returned to the office to get Stalin’s signature as Premier but there was still no sign of him: “He wasn’t here yesterday either.”

“No, he wasn’t here yesterday either,” Poskrebyshev replied, without a trace of sarcasm. But something had to be done. The new boy, Voznesensky, appeared at Poskrebyshev’s desk like all the others. When Chadaev asked him to sign the documents, he refused and called Stalin himself but “No reply from the dacha.” So he called upstairs to Molotov who suggested meeting later but gave no clue that he was already closeted with Beria, Malenkov and Voroshilov, arranging what to do. Now the dynamic Beria devised a new super-war cabinet, an ultra-Politburo with a tiny membership and sweeping powers, chaired by Stalin, if he would accept it, and containing Molotov, Voroshilov, Malenkov and himself: three Old Bolsheviks and two ascendant meteors. The exclusion of many of the magnates was a triumph for Beria and Malenkov, who were not even full Politburo members.

Once this was fixed, Molotov called Mikoyan, who was talking to Voznesensky, and the Politburo gathered. The magnates had never been so powerful: these manoeuvres most resembled the intrigues just after Stalin’s stroke twelve years later, for this was the only real opportunity they had to overthrow Stalin since the revelation of Lenin’s damning Testament almost twenty years earlier. Molotov told them about Stalin’s breakdown but Mikoyan replied that even if the Vozhd was incapacitated, “the very name Stalin was a great force for rousing the morale of the people.” But bumptious Voznesensky made what ultimately proved to be a fatal mistake: “Vyacheslav!” he hailed Molotov. “You go ahead and we’ll follow you!” Molotov must have blanched at this deadly suggestion and turned to Beria[187] who proposed his State Defence Committee. They decided to go out to Kuntsevo.

When they arrived, they cautiously stepped into the gloomy, dark-green house, shrouded in pinewoods, and were shown into the little dining room. There, sitting nervously in an armchair, was a “thinner… haggard… gloomy” Stalin. When he saw the seven or so Politburo members entering, Stalin “turned to stone.” In one account, Stalin greeted them with more depressed ramblings: “Great Lenin’s no more… If only he could see us now. See those to whom he entrusted the fate of his country… I am inundated with letters from Soviet people, rightly rebuking us… Maybe some among you wouldn’t mind putting the blame on me.” Then, he looked at them searchingly and asked: “Why’ve you come?”

Stalin “looked alert, somewhat strange,” recalled Mikoyan, “and his question was no less strange. Actually he should have summoned us himself. I had no doubt: he decided we had arrived to arrest him.” Beria watched