Stalin’s face carefully. “It was obvious,” he later told his wife, “Stalin expected anything could happen, even the worst.”
The magnates were frightened too: Beria later teased Mikoyan for hiding behind the others. Molotov, who was the most senior and therefore the most exposed to Stalin’s vengeance, stepped forward.
“Thank you for your frankness,” said Molotov, according to a possibly secondary source, “but I tell you here and now that if some idiot tried to turn me against you, I’d see him damned. We’re asking you to come back to work…”
“Yes but think about it,” answered Stalin. “Can I live up to people’s hopes anymore? Can I lead the country to final victory? There may be more deserving candidates.”
“I believe I shall be voicing the unanimous opinion,” interjected Voroshilov. “There’s none more worthy.”
“
“With whom at its head?” Stalin asked.
“You, Comrade Stalin.” Stalin’s relief was palpable: “the tension left his face”—but he did not say anything for a while, then: “Well…”
Beria took a step and said: “You, Comrade Stalin, will be the head” and he listed the members.
Stalin noted Mikoyan and Voznesensky had been excluded but Beria suggested they should run the government. The pragmatic Mikoyan, knowing that his responsibilities for army supply were relevant, asked to be a special representative. Stalin assigned industries—Malenkov took over aeroplanes; Molotov, tanks; Voznesensky, armaments. Stalin was back in power.
So had Stalin really suffered a nervous breakdown or was this simply a performance? Nothing was ever straightforward with this adept political actor. The breakdown was real enough: he was depressed and exhausted. It was not out of character: he had suffered similar moments on Nadya’s death and during the Finnish War. His collapse was an understandable reaction to his failure to read Hitler, a mistake which could not be hidden from his courtiers who had repeatedly heard him insist there would be no invasion in 1941. But that was only the first part of this disaster: the military collapse had revealed the damage that Stalin had done and his ineptitude as commander. The Emperor had no clothes. Only a dictator who had killed any possible challengers could have survived it. In any other system, this would have brought about a change of government but no such change was available here.
Yet Molotov and Mikoyan were right: it was also “for effect.” The withdrawal from power was a well-tried pose, successfully employed from Achilles and Alexander the Great to Ivan. Stalin’s retreat allowed him to be effectively re-elected by the Politburo, with the added benefit of drawing a line under the bungles up to that point. These had been forgiven: “Stalin enjoyed our support again,” Mikoyan wrote pointedly. So it was both a breakdown and a political restoration.
“We were witnesses to Stalin’s moments of weakness,” said Beria afterwards. “Joseph Vissarionovich will never forgive that move of ours.” Mikoyan had been right to hide.
Next afternoon, Stalin reappeared in the office, “a new man” committed to play the role of warlord for which he believed himself specially qualified. On 1 July, the newspapers announced that Stalin was the Chairman of the State Defence Committee, the GKO. Soon afterwards he sent Timoshenko to command the Western Front defending Moscow: on 19 July, Stalin became Commissar of Defence and, on 8 August, Supreme Commander-in-Chief: henceforth, the generals called him
“Comrades, citizens,” he began conventionally, his voice low, his breathing audible across the radio waves of the Imperium, along with his sips of water and the clink of his glass. “Brothers and sisters! Warriors of the army and the fleet! I call upon you, my friends.” This was a patriotic war but patriotism stiffened by terror: “Cowards, deserters, panic-mongers” would be crushed in a “merciless struggle.” 8 A couple of nights later, Stalin and Kalinin walked out of the Kremlin at 2 a.m. under heavy guard, commanded by Vlasik, and entered Lenin’s Mausoleum to bid goodbye to the mummy of their late leader before it set off by secret sealed train to Siberia.9
Stalin’s new resolve hardly improved the plight of the fronts. Within three weeks of war, Russia had lost around 2,000,000 men, 3,500 tanks, and over 6,000 aircraft. On 10 July, the German Panzers renewed their advance on the gateway to Moscow, Smolensk, which fell six days later. The Germans broke through to take another 300,000 Red Army prisoners and capture 3,000 guns and 3,000 tanks—but Timoshenko’s hard fighting temporarily sapped their momentum. Hitler ordered Army Group Centre to regroup at the end of July. As he pressed his advance, in the south towards Kiev, and in the north towards Leningrad, Hitler had won astounding victories, yet none of Barbarossa’s objectives—Moscow, Leningrad and the Donets Basin—had fallen. The Soviet army had not been obliterated. While German generals begged him to throw their Panzers against Moscow, Hitler, perhaps recalling Napoleon’s empty conquest, wanted to seize the oil and grain of the south. Instead he compromised with a new strategy, “Moscow and Ukraine.”
The new Stalin even took some lip from the Politburo. Just after the fall of Smolensk, Stalin summoned Zhukov and Timoshenko to the dacha, where they found him wearing an old tunic, pacing, pipe unlit, always a sign of trouble, accompanied by some of the Politburo. “The Politburo has discussed dismissing Timoshenko…What do you think of that?” Timoshenko said nothing but Zhukov objected.
“I rather think he’s right,” said old Kalinin who had barely disagreed with Stalin since 1930. Stalin “unhurriedly lit the pipe and eyed the Politburo.”
“What if we agree with Comrade Zhukov?” he asked.
“You’re right, Comrade Stalin,” they replied in one voice. But Zhukov did not always get his way.10
Faced with the threat of more giant encirclements in the south, Stalin devised draconian measures to terrorize his men into fighting. In the first week, he approved NKGB Order No. 246 that stipulated the destruction of the families of men who were captured, and now he made this public in his notorious Order No. 270. He ordered it to be signed by Molotov, Budyonny, Voroshilov and Zhukov, even though some of them were not present, but it was, after all, a traditional method of Bolshevik rule.11 These measures ruined the lives of millions of innocent soldiers and their families, including Stalin’s own.[189]
On 16 July, in one of the encirclements, this one at Vitebsk, an artillery lieutenant of the 14th Howitzer Regiment of the 14th Armoured Division, found himself overrun by German forces. Feeling himself special, he did not withdraw: “I am Stalin’s son and I won’t allow my battery to retreat,” but nor did he honourably commit suicide. On 19 July, Berlin announced that, among the teeming mass of Soviet prisoners, was Yakov Djugashvili. Zhdanov sent Stalin a sealed package that contained a photograph of Yakov that his father examined closely, tormented by the thought of his weak son breaking and betraying him. For the second time in Yakov’s life, Stalin cursed that his own son could not kill himself: “The fool—he couldn’t even shoot himself!” he muttered to Vasily. Stalin was immediately suspicious of Yakov’s wife Julia. “Don’t say anything to Yasha’s wife for the time being,” Stalin told Svetlana. Soon afterwards, under Order No. 270, Julia was arrested. Her three-year-old daughter Gulia did not see her mother for two years. Yet we now know how Stalin fretted about Yakov’s fate and how he mulled over it for the rest of his life.
He quickly banned Vasily from flying on active missions: “One prisoner’s more than enough for me!” But he was irritated when the “Crown Prince” (as Svetlana called Vasily) phoned to ask for more pocket money for a new uniform and more food:
“1. As far as I know [wrote Stalin] the rations in the air force are quite sufficient. 2. A special uniform for Stalin’s son is not on the agenda.”12
