Around the time of Yakov’s capture, Stalin made his first approach to Hitler. He and Molotov ordered Beria to sound out the Bulgarian Ambassador, Ivan Stamenov. Beria gave the job to the assassination/intelligence specialist Sudoplatov, who told the story in his semi-reliable memoirs: his instructions were to ask why Germany had violated the Pact, on what conditions Hitler would end the war, and whether he would be satisfied with the Ukraine, Belorussia, Moldova and the Baltics, a second Brest-Litovsk? Beria told Sudoplatov this was to win time. Sudoplatov met Stamenov at Beria’s favourite Georgian restaurant, Aragvi, on 25 July but the Bulgarian never passed on the message to Berlin, saying:
“Even if you retreat to the Urals, you’ll still win in the end.”13
Meanwhile the German advance in the south was inexorable: the Panzer pincers of Army Group South, under Guderian and Kleist, swung round Kiev to encircle General Kirponos’s South-Western Front with hundreds of thousands more men. It was obvious that Kiev would have to be abandoned but on 29 July, Stalin summoned Zhukov to discuss all fronts. Poskrebyshev ominously said the meeting would not begin until Mekhlis had arrived. When “the gloomy demon” appeared with Beria and Malenkov, the Chief of Staff predicted, under the Medusan glare of this grim trio, that the Germans would crush the South-Western Front before turning back to Moscow. Mekhlis interrupted to ask, threateningly, how Zhukov knew so much about the German plans.
“What about Kiev?” asked Stalin. Zhukov proposed abandoning it.
“Why talk nonsense?” bawled Stalin.
“If you think the Chief of Staff talks nonsense, then I request you relieve me of my post and send me to the front,” Zhukov shouted back.
“Who gave you the right to speak to Comrade Stalin like that?” snarled Mekhlis.
“Don’t get heated,” said Stalin to Zhukov, but “since you mentioned it, we’ll get by without you.” Zhukov gathered his maps and left the room, only to be summoned back forty minutes later to be told that he was relieved as Chief of Staff, a blessing in disguise, which allowed this fighting general to return to his natural habitat. Stalin soothed him: “Calm down, calm down.” Shaposhnikov was recalled as Chief of Staff. Stalin knew he was ailing but “we’ll help him.” Zhukov asked to leave but Stalin invited him for tea: Stalin was drawn to Zhukov. The unfolding disaster around Kiev soon proved the wisdom of his “nonsense.” 14
The Panzer claws were closing around the South-Western Axis, commanded by Marshal Budyonny and Khrushchev who begged to be allowed to withdraw. Stalin was informed by the NKVD that Khrushchev was going to surrender Kiev and rang to threaten him. “You should be ashamed of yourself !… What’s the matter with you? [You have] given up half of Ukraine. You’re ready to give up the other half too… Do whatever it takes. If not… we’ll make short work of you!” In the alternation of roaring panic and becalmed anxiety that are the moods of a rout, Khrushchev found Budyonny drinking brandy with the front’s Operations chief, Bagramian, and affectionately telling him he should be shot.
On 11 September, with time running out, Budyonny, who was both braver and more competent than most of the “cavalrymen,” knew he might be dismissed or even arrested but he now insisted to Stalin that “delay [will] lead to losses in men and a huge quantity of equipment.” Stalin dismissed him next day. Appointing Timoshenko to the front, Stalin gave him a quaint gift of two pipes marked with a deer to symbolize his transfer from north to south, a rare gesture.
“You take command,” Budyonny told Timoshenko at the front. “But let’s call Stalin together and tell him to retreat from Kiev. We’re real Marshals and they’ll believe us.”
“I don’t want to put my head in the noose,” replied Timoshenko. Two days later, Kleist and Guderian’s Panzer Groups One and Two linked up at 18:20 hours a hundred miles east of Kiev, sealing five entire Soviet armies in a giant encirclement, the rotten fruit of Stalin’s obstinacy: 452,720 men were captured. By the 18th, Kiev had fallen. Stalin’s nerves held: “Plug the hole,” he ordered Shaposhnikov. “Quickly!” 15
Stalin and Beria stepped up both the repression and the redemption. More “lucky stiffs” were released to help the war effort. “There aren’t any people on whom one can rely,” Stalin murmured during one meeting on air defence at which the aircraft designer Yakovlev spoke up: “Comrade Stalin, it’s already more than a month since Balandin, our Deputy People’s Commissar, was arrested. We don’t know what he was arrested for but we can’t conceive he was an Enemy. He is needed… We ask you to examine his case.”
“Yes,” replied Stalin, “he’s already been in prison for forty days but he’s confessed nothing. Perhaps he’s not guilty of anything.” The next day, Balandin, “with hollow cheeks and shaven head” appeared for work “as though nothing had happened.” Beria and Mikoyan requested the freeing of Vannikov, arrested for arguing about artillery with Kulik. He was brought straight from his cell to Stalin who apologized, admitting that Vannikov had been right, and then promoted him to high office.
There was a certain awkwardness when the “lucky stiffs” met their torturers. Broad-faced, fair-haired General Meretskov, arrested during the first weeks of the war, had been horribly tortured by the debonair Merkulov, “the Theoretician,” with whom he had been friends before his arrest. As one of his interrogators later testified: “Brutal continuous torture was applied to Meretskov by high-ranking officials… he was beaten with rubber rods” until he was covered in blood. Now he was cleaned up and brought to Merkulov but Meretskov told his torturer that they could no longer be friends, a conversation unique to this strange time: “Vsevolod Nikolaievich, we used to meet on informal terms but I’m afraid of you now.” Merkulov smiled. Minutes later, in full uniform, General Meretskov reported for his next assignment to Stalin:
“Hello, Comrade Meretskov? How are you feeling?”
Beria also redoubled the Terror.16 As the NKVD retreated, the prisoners were not all released—even though Stalin had every opportunity to do so. Those “German spies” who had been so close to Stalin, Maria and Alyosha Svanidze, had been in prison since December 1937. Stalin remembered Alyosha who, as he himself told Mikoyan, “was sentenced to death. I ordered Merkulov to tell him before execution that if he asks the Central Committee for forgiveness, he will be pardoned.” But Svanidze proudly replied that he was innocent so “I can’t ask for pardon.” He spat in Merkulov’s face: “That’s my answer to him,” he cried. On 20 August 1941, he was shot. A few days later, at Kuntsevo, Stalin turned to Mikoyan: “Want to hear about Alyosha?”
“What?” Mikoyan, who had adored Svanidze, hoped he would be released. But Stalin matter-of-factly announced his death.
“He wouldn’t apologize. Such noble pride!” mused Stalin.
“When was this?” asked Mikoyan.
“He was shot just recently.” Maria Svanidze, who had so worshipped Stalin, was, with Alyosha’s sister, Mariko,[190] shot the following year.17
34. “FEROCIOUS AS A DOG”
While Molotov sat beside Stalin in the Little Corner, Zhdanov ruled beleaguered Leningrad like a mini-Stalin. But Stalin now turned his fury onto the commanders of the city of Lenin.[191] By 21 August 1941, a German north-easterly thrust almost cut off Leningrad’s link with the rest of Russia. Voroshilov, now sixty, took command alongside Zhdanov. Both men had much to prove but as Leningrad was gradually enveloped, they struggled to keep Stalin’s confidence.
Day by day, the Germans tightened their grip and Stalin smelt defeatism. In a stream of dictated anxiety, he accused them of failing to grasp “this fatal danger. Stavka cannot agree with the mood of doom, and impossibility of taking strong measures and conversations about how everything possible has been done and it’s impossible to do any more…”1 Then Stalin heard that Voroshilov, replaying his glory days of Tsaritsyn in 1918, was planning to raise morale by electing officers—but this time the outraged War Commissar was not Trotsky.
“Immediately stop the elections because it will paralyse the army and elect impotent leaders,” ordered Stalin, together with Molotov and Mikoyan. “We need all-powerful leaders. It will spread like a disease. This isn’t Vologda—this is the second city of the country!” He added: “We ask Voroshilov and Zhdanov to inform us about operations. They have not done so yet. That’s a pity.”
