Stalin: A Biography

were abundantly supplied; and, in the case of fighter planes, Stalin was sufficiently keen that the aircraft should be properly handled that he provided his own aviators dressed in Chinese uniforms.

Stalin after some vacillation had complied. What had started as a war fought on the far edge of Asia had the potential to explode into a global conflict with the victorious members of the Grand Alliance at each other’s throats. Stalin did not reveal his calculations but probably he was exercised by a mixture of factors. He did not want an American puppet state of Korea on his borders. He did not wish the USSR to lose prestige in the world communist movement when the People’s Republic of China aided a fellow communist power. He may also have felt that Mao had a serious chance of pulling off what Kim had failed to do. The logistics of military supply were easier for China and the USSR than for the USA. Perhaps Stalin was also guessing that American forces would be tied down and exhausted in Korea even if they were not defeated outright. Stalin’s basic assumption was that world war could be postponed but not made avoidable. Whatever he may have calculated about the Korean situation, though, he let on to nobody what it was. He was in a position, as in August 1939 when Ribbentrop came a-courting to the Kremlin, to ignore the opinions of others; and he made it a habit to leave few traces of his mental pathway to each important decision. This helped him to go on keeping the rest of the world guessing. The more enigmatic he was in global politics, the less likely he was to be taken for granted.

Events in Korea increased in difficulty as Stalin and his associates pondered what to do. Broader factors came into play. Stalin the pragmatist was also a man of ideological assumptions, and he genuinely believed that the treaties signed at the end of the Second World War were documents destined to be ripped up when the world descended into a Third World War. Chances to expand communist influence in the meantime had to be seized. Stalin’s spies led him to conclude that Truman would not intervene to save the unpopular southern government.¹³ The USSR had acquired effective nuclear weapons in August 1949 and had to be handled more carefully by the USA. The Sino-Soviet alliance boosted Moscow’s global weight still further — and indeed Stalin had to take account of the fact that Mao Tse-tung was fully capable of offering active support to Kim Il-Sung regardless of Stalin’s wishes: Mao had greater freedom of choice than even Tito.

The Chinese entry into the Korean War turned the scales in favour of the communist cause. Mao’s People’s Liberation Army crossed the Yalu river into Korea on 19 October 1950 and MacArthur’s campaign hit serious trouble, especially after the arrival of the Soviet air units in the following month.¹⁴ The movement towards a world war shifted up another notch on 31 December when Chinese forces thrust south and crossed the 38th Parallel. Seoul was taken the next month. MacArthur demanded permission to carry the fighting on to Chinese soil. At this time neither Stalin nor Mao was in the mood for compromise. Mao’s own son was mobilised for the war. (He was killed in action.)¹⁵ It looked as if the Americans were about to lose the war on the Korean peninsula.¹⁶

Meanwhile Stalin had to deal with Europe, and he was especially concerned about Italy and France. Greece was already settled in Stalin’s mind: he had not intervened in the Civil War there, had resented Greek communist demands for permission to operate as if a socialist seizure of power was possible and had left Athens to the repressive zeal of the Alexandros Diomidis government. Italy and France were a different matter: their communist parties gave him much less trouble and it had been easy to quell those of their leaders who seriously contemplated insurrection in Rome and Paris. As relations worsened with the Western Allies, they became pawns in Stalin’s European game. Although his strategy remained the avoidance of war with the USA, he did not mind making things awkward for the Americans wherever he could. For this reason he demanded a more boisterous policy for the Italian Communist Party and the French Communist Party. This was explained to the representatives from Italy and France at the Second Conference of the Cominform in June 1948. As usual, Stalin and the Soviet leaders admitted no mistake on their part. Instead Togliatti, Thorez and their subordinates were blamed for not seeing the need for more radical measures than the Kremlin had previously stipulated.

By the beginning of the 1950s Stalin’s grip on world affairs was weaker than in previous years. The Korean War was raging and, with Soviet pilots and military equipment involved, was capable of spiralling into a Third World War. The Chinese People’s Republic complicated everything by urging Stalin to fight to the bitter end; Mao Tse-tung by his behaviour showed he could be just as independent of Moscow as Tito — and the stakes of China’s foreign adventures were very high indeed. Stalin could not even control all the communist parties in Europe. When he summoned Palmiro Togliatti to leave Italy and take the leading position in the Cominform, he received a brisk refusal. Togliatti wanted to guide the Italian Communist Party through the complications of post-war Italian politics and had no interest in putting his life at risk by working in proximity to Stalin. Meanwhile Tito stayed imperturbably in supreme office in Belgrade. Elsewhere in eastern Europe there was the silence of the political graveyard; but the People’s Democracies were far from quiet below the surface: resentment of the communist seizure of power in these countries was deep, and only the threat of unconditional repression kept order for Stalin.

Yet it was the Korean War which constituted the most deadly danger to Soviet interests. Stalin could not overlook the Americans’ advantage in the number of nuclear weapons and in the proximity of their foreign airbases to the USSR. Perhaps, though, he knew more about Truman’s intentions than anyone realised at the time. Soviet agents existed in the British establishment. Among them were Kim Philby and Donald Maclean. When Prime Minister Clement Attlee flew to Washington in early December 1950 to protest at confidential American discussions on using nuclear bombs in the Korean War, he was given an assurance by President Truman that only conventional weaponry would be deployed. It is highly probable that Maclean, head of the American desk at the Foreign Office, dispatched the news to Moscow. Stalin would thereby have known that Truman was not looking for a fight.¹⁷ Even so, there could still have been a world war with conventional weaponry; and there was no way of guaranteeing that one side or the other would not, in a desperate moment, resort to its nuclear arsenal. Although he was not a totally reckless gambler, Stalin was not a cautious one either. He risked much, much more than he should have done if he really regarded peace around the world as a supreme priority.

The Third World War did not break out. But the situation developed in a manner perilously close to all-out global conflict; and much responsibility lay on Stalin’s shoulders. If he had not financed and equipped Kim Il-Sung, the civil war in Korea could not have been resumed with the intensity it attained.

52. VOZHD AND INTELLECTUAL

The Vozhd retained his cerebral interests. He told people he read up to five hundred pages a day,¹ and the books he chose were of the kind he had enjoyed for years. Among them was Germinal by Emile Zola, whom he had discovered as an adolescent.² He continued to love Shota Rustaveli’s medieval Georgian epic, Knight in the Panther’s Skin.³ Having found his favourites early in life, he did not abandon them in old age and his resumed support for the fraudulent geneticist Timofei Lysenko continued to prevent progress in Soviet biology and threaten the lives and careers of Lysenko’s academic and political opponents.⁴

Marxism, architecture, linguistics, genetics and international relations were among Stalin’s intellectual interests. Historical works especially attracted him. He kept up with writings on both the Russian past and the annals of Mesopotamia, ancient Rome and Byzantium.⁵ When the fancy took him, he held conversations with physicists, biologists and other scientists. He examined the novels winning his annual Stalin Prize and listened to gramophone records of folk and classical music before they appeared in the shops (and gave them ratings from ‘good’ to ‘awful’). In Moscow he attended ballets, operas and concerts. He had his dachas equipped so that he could vet Soviet films before their public release. Volga! Volga! was his favourite film.⁶ He read, listened and watched mainly for personal delight and self-instruction. Foreign contemporary writers failed to attract him. Living writers had to be Soviet. Not that this saved them from his anger if he disapproved of one of their books. He had never been slow to say what he thought about cultural artefacts regardless of whether he knew much about the subject. Nobody in the USSR was in a position to ignore his predilections. If ever an obsessive intellectual dilettante existed, Stalin was that person.

Yet he made only three public speeches from 1946 onwards and two of these lasted just a few minutes.⁷ His articles were few and he published no booklets after the war until Marxism and Problems of Linguistics in 1950.⁸ Not since the end of the Civil War had he written less for the press. The consequence was that his infrequent smaller pieces functioned as the guidelines for what others in communist public life at home and abroad could print or broadcast.