Stalin: A Biography

meet Roosevelt in Placentia Bay in August 1941 and in Washington the same December. He made still more dangerous flights to hold talks with Stalin in Moscow in August 1942 and October 1944 (which involved stop-overs in Gibraltar, Cairo, Tehran and the airfield at Kuibyshev).

Stalin, obsessively wishing to control everything in Moscow and being unwilling to risk journeys by air, held out against any such trips whenever he could possibly avoid them. Molotov as People’s Commissar of External Affairs had been dispatched to Berlin in 1940. He also flew to the UK over the Baltic and across the North Sea in May 1942; such was his distrust of perfidious Albion that he slept with a revolver under his pillow. Stalin egocentrically expected others to take the risks. His immobility exasperated Roosevelt and Churchill. Roosevelt described the splendours of the Ghiza pyramids to persuade the Soviet leader to fly to Cairo.¹ As he pointed out, he himself was willing to travel even though the USA Constitution restricted the time a president could spend abroad.² Stalin could not put off a meeting of the Big Three indefinitely; and after turning down Cairo, Baghdad and Basra, he agreed to Tehran in November 1943. It was not far from the USSR and he had assured himself that the Soviet embassy in the Iranian capital could guarantee safety. Otherwise he refused to travel outside the territory of Soviet jurisdiction. The next conference was held at Yalta in the south of the RSFSR in February 1945. Stalin had got used to working at night and sleeping for most of the day. He had to go back to a more conventional schedule for meetings with Roosevelt and Churchill.³

Stalin had made his own preparations for travel. In 1941 he ordered the fitting out of a special railway carriage which would enable him to carry on working while travelling. At eighty-three tons, it was heavily armoured. Inside it had every facility — study, sitting room, toilet, kitchen and bodyguards’ compartment — fitted out in the solid style he favoured. There was nothing luxurious about the carriage; the heavy wood and metal of its interior bespoke a leader who disliked frippery and demanded to be guaranteed conditions of regular work. Carriage FD 3878 was like a mobile Kremlin office.⁴

Agreements with the Western Allies were put into place long before Stalin used his new facility. The USSR urgently needed supplies. Churchill had offered assistance after the start of Operation Barbarossa and military convoys were sent to the Arctic Ocean. But the British themselves relied on American supply ships. It was therefore important for the Soviet government, once Hitler had declared war on the USA, to seek help from Roosevelt. In fact it was in the American interest to comply with such requests if this meant that the Wehrmacht would be weakened by the strengthened resistance of the Red Army. The Lend– Lease arrangement already in place with the United Kingdom was extended to the USSR. Loans, military equipment and food were earmarked for Soviet use. Shipments to the USSR were made by Arctic convoys to Murmansk or else across the frontier with Iran. The war with Japan in the Pacific ruled out the other routes. Steadily, though, American jeeps, spam, sugar and gunpowder filled vital gaps in production. Destruction of British vessels was frequent under attack from German submarines but Stalin took the rate of loss as undeserving of comment when the Red Army was giving up the lives of millions of its troops against the Germans.

The other thing agitating Stalin left him even less satisfied. He wanted the Western Allies to organise the opening of a second front in Europe as a means of relieving the pressure on his own armed forces. He never lost a chance to demand greater urgency from the USA and the UK. Fresh to the anti-Hitler military struggle, the Americans talked airily about managing this by the end of 1942. Churchill was more circumspect and, on his Moscow visit in August 1942, pulled out a map of western Europe to explain the vast logistical difficulties of a seaborne invasion from Britain. Stalin continued to bait him: ‘Has the British navy no sense of glory?’⁵ Churchill was on the point of leaving for London without further discussion. He had had enough of the Soviet leader’s angry demands. Seeing that he had gone too far, Stalin invited him to yet another convivial dinner and the crisis faded. Roosevelt and his advisers, when they acquainted themselves with the military logistics, accepted the cogency of Churchill’s argument; and Stalin had to recognise that until they were ready and willing to launch their ships across the English Channel, there was nothing he could do to make them hurry.

Although Stalin went on rebuking Churchill and Roosevelt in his correspondence, he could also be tactful. To Roosevelt, on whom he was dependent for finance and military supplies, he wrote on 14 December 1942:⁶

Permit me also to express confidence that time has not passed in vain and that the promises about opening the second front in Europe, which were given to me by you, Mr President, and Mr Churchill in relation to 1942, will be fulfilled and will anyway be fulfilled in relation to spring 1943…

It made no difference. The Americans and the British refused to rush their preparations.

Their stubbornness increased the urgency for Stalin to accede to their invitation to a meeting of the Big Three. Thus the Tehran Conference was organised. Churchill knew his Allied partners well by that time but Stalin and Roosevelt had never met. The Soviet and American leaders set about charming each other. They hit it off well. Stalin was on his best behaviour, impressing the President as someone he could have dealings with. Both Stalin and Roosevelt wanted to see the British Empire dissolved, and Roosevelt said this when they were alone together. Roosevelt prided himself on understanding how to handle Stalin, who appeared to him a crude but reliable negotiator; it did not occur to him that Stalin was capable of turning on his own bonhomie to suit his purposes. Roosevelt was ailing by the middle of the war. His energy and intellectual acumen were running out. At the Tehran and Yalta Conferences Stalin made the most of his friendly relationship with Roosevelt and tried to hammer a wedge between him and Churchill. He did not always succeed. But he did well enough to prevent Churchill from insisting on a firmer line being taken against Soviet pretensions in eastern Europe.

Yet Churchill too had to be conciliated. Churchill had been the world’s loudest advocate of a crusade against Soviet Russia in the Civil War. He had referred to the Bolsheviks as baboons and had called for the October Revolution to be ‘strangled’ in its cradle. Stalin brought up the matter in a jovial fashion. Churchill replied: ‘I was very active in the intervention, and I do not wish you to think otherwise.’ As Stalin contrived a smile, Churchill ventured: ‘Have you forgiven me?’ Stalin’s diplomatic comment was that ‘all that is in the past, and the past belongs to God’.⁷

The Western leaders of the Grand Alliance could at any rate count on royal treatment a la sovietique when they made journeys to meet Stalin. It was Churchill who got the most sumptuous welcome by dint of going to Moscow. In October 1944 Molotov as People’s Commissar for External Affairs put on an enormous party at which the tables heaved with food and wine. The British official group ate heartily before leaving for a concert in the Chaikovski Hall. The orchestra played Chaikovski’s Fifth Symphony and Rakhmaninov’s Third. Stalin had agreed to dine that night at the British embassy. Churchill and he were getting on well at the dinner party, and such was Stalin’s bonhomie that he came through to the lower rooms so that the rest of the visiting Britons could see him. They toasted him before he went back to a further bout of eating and drinking. Usually Stalin staved off inebriation by drinking a vodka-coloured wine while others drank spirits. He had admitted this stratagem to Ribbentrop in 1939.⁸ But that night he allowed himself to become well oiled before leaving the den of Anglo-Saxon capitalist reaction at four o’clock in the morning.⁹ By custom Stalin was wide awake at that hour; but his British hosts did not know that: they were left with the impression of a genial guest who had shared in the mood of the occasion.

There had been similar hospitality at the Tehran Conference and this created the atmosphere among the Big Three for agreement on large decisions. Stalin, Roosevelt and Churchill were determined to prevent Germany from ever again becoming a menace to world peace. The most effective step, they concurred, would be to break up the state,¹⁰ and some in Roosevelt’s entourage wished to go as far as the compulsory deindustrialisation of the country. Borders in eastern and central Europe also attracted attention at Tehran. Stalin’s concern with Soviet security induced Churchill to propose a redrawing of the European map. He demonstrated this with the aid of three matchsticks. Apparently he thought that without a visual aid he would not get his point across to the Caucasian. Churchill wanted to shift both Poland and Germany westward.¹¹ The western edge of the USSR in his estimation should end at the line proposed in mid-1920 by Lord Curzon (which, as Anthony Eden pointed out, was virtually the same as what was known in the West as the Ribbentrop–Molotov frontier — Molotov did not demur).¹² The USSR would be expanded at Poland’s expense. Poland would be compensated by acquisitions in eastern Germany.¹³ To guarantee his continental security Stalin also demanded that the city-port of Konigsberg should pass into the possession of the USSR, and Roosevelt and Churchill agreed.¹⁴

Stalin had to adjust his daily timetable to achieve his goals; for whereas he could intimidate all leading