the same was done to Stalin’s old comrades Voroshilov and Budenny. His suspicions were boundless.21 Having ordered Dmitri Pavlov’s execution in the early days of the war, Stalin was little more satisfied with Ivan Konev, Pavlov’s successor on the Western Front. Konev’s failure to bring an immediate halt to the German advance was reason enough to question his loyalty. Stalin was all for shooting him. Zhukov was no friend of Konev’s but thought such a fate completely undeserved. He had had to plead with Stalin to relent.22 Zhukov was being taught that absolutely no commander was secure in post and life.
Stalin knew he could not do without Zhukov from October 1941. German tank corps had reached the outskirts of Moscow and German bombers flew over the city. Soviet regular forces were hurried out to meet the threat. Panic seized the minds of ordinary citizens, and the NKVD rounded up those who tried to flee. The factories and offices hardly shut for the duration of the battle. Stalin and Zhukov conferred:23
Having assured the Supreme Commander that Moscow would not fall, Zhukov had to fulfil his commitment regardless of difficulties.
When sending telegrams to Stalin and phoning him from the field, Zhukov addressed him as ‘Comrade Supreme Commander’.24 The nomenclature was a typical Soviet mishmash: Zhukov had to refer to him as a fellow communist as well as a commander. Stalin kept up the proprieties in return. Even in emergencies he often avoided giving orders in his own name. Phoning through to his generals on the various fronts, he was inclined to say some such phrase as ‘the Committee of Defence and Stavka very much request the taking of all possible and impossible measures’.25 Zhukov remembered these evasive niceties many years later.
He also recalled how Stalin delighted in using pseudonyms. There were patches of comradeliness between them when the fighting was going in the USSR’s favour and he held Zhukov in esteem (despite keeping him under surveillance). Zhukov and he worked out an agreed code for their exchanges by land line or telegram: Stalin was ‘Vasilev’ and Zhukov ‘Konstantinov’. Stalin had used this pseudonym before 1917, and perhaps it signalled some kind of self-identification with Russia. False names were in any case a bit of a game: there was little chance of the German intelligence agencies being fooled by a pseudonym, especially one which had been used by Stalin in the past. Yet Stalin ought not to be judged too harshly. (There are abundant other reasons to indict him without artificially inflating the number.) The pressures on the two of them were immense, and it is no surprise that ‘Comrade Supreme Commander’ consoled himself with nicknames. In his lighter moments he knew how to encourage as well as how to terrify his military subordinates.
He would not be induced, however, to witness conditions at the front; indeed he scarcely left Moscow apart from completely unavoidable trips to the Allied conferences at Tehran and Yalta. While urging audacity upon his commanders, he took no risks with his personal security. There was one exception and it was much trumpeted in the press. In 1942 he made a journey to the front, ostensibly to monitor the progress of the campaign. When he got to within thirty or forty miles of active hostilities, he was greeted by military commanders on the Minsk Chaussee who advised him that they could not guarantee his safety if he travelled further. Stalin must have known that they would say this. This was the nearest he approached to any point of direct action in the war. He never saw a shot fired. But he made much of the conversation with his commanders and, after due display of disappointment, returned to the Kremlin. Much was made of the journey in official propaganda.
Mikoyan told a less flattering tale of the journey. ‘Stalin himself,’ he wrote, ‘was not the bravest of men.’ Allegedly Stalin, as he talked with his commanders, felt an urgent call of nature. Mikoyan speculated that it might have been mortal fear rather than the normal effects of digestion. Stalin anyway needed to go somewhere fast. He asked about the bushes by the roadside, but the generals — whose troops had not long before liberated the zone from German occupation — could not guarantee that landmines had not been left behind. ‘At that point,’ Mikoyan recorded with memorable precision, ‘the Supreme Commander in sight of everyone dropped his trousers and did his business on the asphalt. This completed his “reconnoitring of the front” and he went straight back to Moscow.’26
Avoidance of unnecessary risk was one thing, and Stalin took this to an extreme. But it is scarcely fair on Stalin to claim that he was a coward. Probably his behaviour stemmed rather from an excessive estimate of his own indispensability to the war effort. He looked on his military and political subordinates and thought they could not cope without him. Nor was he afraid of personal responsibility once he had got over the shock of 22 June 1941. He lived or died by his success in leading army and government. He exhausted every bone in his body for that purpose. And Zhukov credited Stalin with making up for his original military ignorance and inexperience. He went on studying during the fighting, and with his exceptional capacity for hard work he was able to raise himself to the level where he could understand most of the military complexities in Stavka. Khrushchev later caricatured Stalin as having tried to follow the campaigns on a small globe he kept in his office, and this image has been reproduced in many subsequent accounts. In fact Stalin, while scaring his commanders and often making wholly unrealistic demands upon them, earned their professional admiration.
Not only military dispositions but also arrangements about the entire civilian sector of society and economy were in Stalin’s hands. He kept a watch on all resources and wrote down details in a little notebook. He was always keen that his subordinates should husband the resources already in their possession. Everything from tank production to foreign currency reserves was recorded by him, and he was miserly in making additions to what was already assigned to institutions. His leading associates were instructed to take the same approach to their own underlings: Molotov for tanks, Mikoyan for food supplies, Kaganovich for transport, Malenkov for aircraft and Voznesenski for armaments. The little notebook ruled their lives.27 Stalin was the linchpin of the Soviet war effort. The two sides of that effort, the military and civilian, were kept separate. Stalin did not want the commanders to interfere in politics and the economy nor the intervention of politicians in Stavka; and when he held meetings of the State Committee of Defence it was he who brought the two sides together.
42. THE BIG THREE
Vital interests of the USSR, the USA and the United Kingdom coincided after the events of June and December 1941. Churchill offered assistance to Stalin as soon as the German–Soviet war broke out. An agreement was signed on 12 July 1941. A British delegation headed by Lord Beaverbrook and accompanied by American diplomat Averell Harriman flew out for talks with Stalin in September. Negotiations ensued between Washington and Moscow when war started between Germany and the USA in December. A Combined Chiefs of Staff committee was created to co-ordinate American and British operations. The leaders of the Allied countries — Churchill, Roosevelt and Stalin — were soon as known as the Big Three.
The Grand Alliance was racked by mutual suspicions. A global war was being fought and the distribution of resources between the battlefields of Europe and Asia had yet to be agreed. There also had to be consultation about strategic operations. As the fighting continued between the Third Reich and the USSR, the Americans and British needed to decide when to open a ‘second front’ in western Europe. There was also the question of mutual assistance. Both the USSR and the UK looked to the USA, the world’s largest economic power, as a source of equipment, food and financial credit. The governments had to agree on the terms for this. War aims too had to be clarified. There was ceaseless tension between the Americans and the British since Washington had no desire to prop up the British Empire in the event of Allied victory. Similarly neither the Americans nor the British wished to give Stalin a free hand in his dealings with eastern Europe. Nor had the Allies discussed what to do with Germany after Hitler. Such were the dilemmas which would eventually necessitate the involvement of the supreme leaders.
The Big Three kept in contact by means of telegrams and embassies. Direct negotiations, however, were also desirable. The problem was that Roosevelt was physically disabled, and frequent long air-trips were too gruelling for him. Churchill, though, was an enthusiastic voyager. The British Prime Minister crossed the Atlantic to
