in the early years of the new state for “generating the most shameful bureaucratism and the most stupid.” “His leadership style,” Yuli Khariton reports, “and correspondingly, its results, were not terribly effective.” Born in northwestern Russia in 1890 and one of the few Old Bolsheviks to survive the purges, Molotov was square and dark, with close-cropped curly hair and a strip of black mustache pasted across his upper lip. Like Beria, he affected pince-nez; when he grimaced at Stalin in devotion, baring his teeth, he looked like Teddy Roosevelt, but a Russian poet who had occasion to work with him found him not exuberant but “modest, precise and thrifty,” the kind of man who could not pass an empty room without turning off the lights.
If Molotov told Kurchatov not to be shy and to order all he needed, the vice-premier did not yet give the new project carte blanche. The atomic-bomb program in the United States, which the US Army Corps of Engineers was now administering and had code-named the Manhattan Engineer District, was awarded first priority for materials and personnel over any other program of the war. In the Soviet Union, to the contrary, atomic-bomb research began ad hoc, Kurchatov and his colleagues pulling together whatever resources they could find.
The vicissitudes of war partly determined the Soviet program's modest initial priority. Molotov had assigned chemical industry commissar Mikhail Pervukhin to work with Kurchatov and with Sergei Kaftanov of the State Defense Committee. “It was difficult to organize the works to the desired scale,” Pervukhin recalls, “because the country was in the heaviest period of the war; the nation's full potential was already mobilized to defeat the enemy.” Research institutes had been evacuated to the east, Pervukhin adds; the cyclotron under construction in Leningrad had to be moved with its big magnet to Moscow; Kurchatov needed time to prepare a feasibility study.
But bureaucratic politics interfered as well. Kurchatov's lack of scientific rank, which Stalin had counted in his favor, worked against him in council. “Our suggestion to the State Defense Committee was to form an institute,” says Pervukhin, “but we were told that we should start in a more modest way, with a laboratory, since Kurchatov had been only a laboratory director up to that time. Start with a laboratory, they said, and develop a program of works to be done.”
Nor was it easy to corral the necessary organizations and personnel. “There were many difficulties in those years,” Pervukhin continues:
For instance, we had problems drawing institutes into our work. We asked Academician Ilia Iliich Chernyayev of the Institute for Inorganic Chemistry to develop some chemical methods for us, but he refused: “Why should we do it? It's not our work. We have our own job to do.” We couldn't agree to that and we got a decision obliging the institute to do the work. Then… along came the deputy director of the institute and the secretary of its Party organization, complaining that we were interfering with their scientific programs and ruining the institute's specialization. We had to explain to these comrades that they were wrong.
Bureaucrats similarly resisted aiding the new enterprise. “It was very difficult to negotiate with Ministers,” complains Pervukhin. “They said, ‘You're taking our people from us when we have our own state plans to fulfill. We won't give our people away!’” Pervukhin had to invoke the State Defense Committee to enforce his requisitions. “Until 1945,” Khariton confirms, “this program was carried out by only a few researchers who had scarce resources.”
Everyone was preoccupied with the Battle of Stalingrad, which raged through the autumn and early winter. “Stalingrad was the key to the rest of the country still in Russian hands,” comments Alexander Werth — “the whole of European Russia east of Moscow, the Urals and Siberia.” Blocked in the north at Leningrad, stopped and pushed back before Moscow, the Germans had launched a major summer offensive up through the Crimea and eastward through central Russia southeast of Moscow intended to capture or destroy Stalingrad and then turn south to claim the vital oil areas of the Caucasus at Maikop, Grozny and Baku. Soviet industry had not yet revived sufficiently to supply the Red Army with the equipment it needed to match the German onslaught; “with 1,200 planes in this area of the front,” writes a Soviet historian, “the enemy had great superiority in aircraft, as well as in guns and tanks.”
On August 23,1942, a raid of six hundred German bombers on Stalingrad killed forty thousand civilians. The Wehrmacht began a major ground assault on September 13- “Whole columns of tanks and motorized infantry were breaking into the center of the city,” writes the commander of one of the defending Soviet armies. “The Nazis were now apparently convinced that the fate of Stalingrad was sealed, and they hurried towards the Volga… Our soldiers — snipers, anti-tank gunners, artillerymen, lying in wait in houses, cellars and firing-points, could watch the drunken Nazis jumping off the trucks, playing mouth organs, bellowing and dancing on the pavements.” Stalingrad with its suburbs and factories, war correspondent Konstantin Simonov wrote back from the front, was one “whole, huge, thirty-seven-mile-long strip along the Volga”:
This city is no longer as we saw it from the Volga steamer [before the war]. It has no white buildings climbing the mountain in a merry throng, no little landing piers on the Volga, no quays with rows of baths, kiosks, and small buildings running along the river. At present this city is smoke-filled and grey and the fire dances about it and the soot whirls day and night. This is a soldier-city, scorched in battle, with strongholds of self-made bastions built from the stones of its heroic ruins…
The Wehrmacht pushed the Soviets back east across the river — the Soviets were able to maintain only about twenty thousand troops on bridgeheads on the west bank — but “the other side of the Volga,” says a Red Army lieutenant who fought there, “was a real ant-heap. It was there that all the supply services, the artillery, air force, etc., were concentrated. And it was
In November, the Red Army was able at last to mount a great counteroffen-sive. Forces from the Don and Northwest Fronts pushed down from the north while Stalingrad Front armies pushed up from the south; in four days they sealed off the Germans in what they named a “cauldron.” It was cold by then and it got bitterly colder in December, as much as forty degrees below zero. Until too late the German high command had withheld winter clothing from its armies in Stalingrad, afraid the realization that they would have to fight through the winter would damage the soldiers’ morale. A Luftwaffe attempt to airlift supplies foundered on bad weather and poor organization. But the starving Germans refused to surrender and in January 1943 Soviet forces liquidated the cauldron, barraging the ruined city from seven thousand mortars and guns, bombing, crashing in with tanks and infantry. They had encircled 330,000 men; they took fewer than 100,000 prisoners. They stacked up the frozen German bodies like cordwood. “Funny blokes,” a boy told Werth. “… Coming to conquer Stalingrad, wearing patent- leather shoes.” Werth heard that children in a nearby village were using one dead German for a sled.
One night after the liquidation of the cauldron, when it was minus forty-four degrees, Werth drove shivering toward Stalingrad in a van full of journalists through the victorious armies:
All the forces in Stalingrad were now being moved… About midnight we got stuck in a traffic jam. And what a spectacle that road presented… [There were] lorries, and horse sleighs and guns, and covered wagons, and even camels pulling sleighs… Thousands of soldiers were… walking in large irregular crowds, to the west, through this cold deadly night. But they were cheerful and strangely happy, and they kept shouting about Stalingrad and the job they had done… In their
Stalingrad was the turn of the tide.
