Stalin: The Court of the Red Tsar

  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”: Zhdanov and the Siege of Leningrad

  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.”

  “All’s clear,” replied Leningrad. “Goodbye Comrade Stalin. That helps. Great gratitude!”2

  Zhdanov took control of every facet of Leningrad life, declaring famously: “the enemy is at the gates.” Now plump, asthmatic and exhausted, always chain-smoking his Belomor cigarettes, clad in an olive-green belted tunic, pistol in holster, Zhdanov ran the front from the third floor of the right wing of the Smolny Institute from an office hung with pictures of Stalin, Marx and Engels. His long table was covered in red baize just as Stalin’s was in green. His desk was set with Urals stone, a present from some Leningrad factory. He drank tea, like Stalin, from a glass held in a silver holder, chewing sugar lumps and, like him, slept on his office divan. He wrote the newspaper editorials, personally allocated every volt of electricity, threatened “panic-mongers” with instant death, and shared command of the front.3

  Voroshilov meanwhile displayed the admirable courage that he had shown at Tsaritsyn. When he appeared at the front at Ivanovskoye, the soldiers watched as the First Marshal pranced around under heavy shellfire:

  “That’s him! Voroshilov! Klim!” gasped the soldiers. “Look how he stands as if he grew out of the earth!” A few miles away, the Marshal came upon some troops who had broken under a German attack. He stopped his staff car, pulled out his pistol and led the troops against the Germans to the shout of “Hurrah!” The old cavalryman could buckle his swash but was unable to stabilize the front.4

  Stalin was unmoved by the heroic ineptitude of this beau sabreur . His warmth towards Zhdanov was cooling fast. When the Leningraders referred respectfully to their boss as “Andrei Alexandrovich,” Stalin answered icily: “Andrei Alexandrovich? Now which Andrei Alexandrovich do you mean?” The terrified agreement to his own orders did not help matters: “If you don’t agree,” he told Zhdanov, “say it straight.” But he also showed his sarcastic irritation, scribbling in his red pencil: “You didn’t answer the proposal. You didn’t answer? Why not? . . . Is it understood? When do you begin the attack? We demand an immediat
e answer in two words: “Yes” will mean a positive answer and swift implementation and “No” will mean a negative. Answer yes or no. Stalin.” Nonetheless he resisted any attempt to dismiss Zhdanov even though he was staggering under the burden of Leningrad’s plight. 5

  On the 21st, Stalin, realizing the desperate situation, ordered Molotov and Malenkov, armed with his full authority, to descend on Leningrad and designate a scapegoat, marking Zhdanov’s fall from grace. “To Voroshilov, Malenkov, Zhdanov . . . Leningrad Front thinks of only one thing: any way to retreat . . . Isn’t it time you got rid of these heroes of retreat?”6 But they also had a bigger unspoken mission: should Leningrad be abandoned?

  Their journey itself was an adventure: they flew to Cherepovets where they took a special train westward but suddenly the train could go no further and stopped at the little station of Mga, twenty-five miles east of the city. The magnates could see a German bombing raid up ahead but they did not realize this was the beginning of the German advance that would encircle Leningrad only two days later: Mga had been the last way in. Molotov and Malenkov were unsure what to do. They walked along the tracks towards Leningrad until they found a suburban trolleybus which they boarded like commuters. They were met further up the line by an armoured train.

  They found Zhdanov just about holding things together, but comforting himself with drink and struggling against his asthma. Zhdanov was never the strongest of Stalin’s men: “a bit spineless,” thought Molotov. Alcohol became the one flaw in this perfect Stalinist. He was now close to collapse, admitting openly to Stalin that he had at one point lost his nerve, panicked during the bombardment and hidden, drinking, in the Smolny bunker. But the very confession helped keep Stalin’s favour. He worked like a man possessed but his health never recovered.

  Malenkov enjoyed spreading the story of Zhdanov’s alcoholic cowardice while boasting that he never reported it to Stalin, which is hard to believe. Zhdanov got on well with Molotov but had despised Malenkov since the late thirties. It was he who had coined the nickname for that fat, eunuch-like bureaucrat: “Malanya.” The mutual hatred of these two noble scions of the provincial intelligentsia would seethe until it ended in a massacre. Malenkov probably proposed Zhdanov’s arrest but Beria, knowing Stalin’s fondness for “the Pianist,” said this was no time for courtmartialling Politburo members. Molotov agreed: “Zhdanov was a good comrade” but he was “very dejected.”

  Apart from hunting scapegoats, Stalin’s plenipotentiaries hardly improved matters: “I fear,” Stalin wrote hysterically to Molotov and Malenkov, “Leningrad will be lost through imbecilic folly, and all Leningrad risks encirclement. What are Popov [front commander] and Voroshilov doing? They don’t even tell us of the measures they’re taking against the danger. They’re busy looking for new lines of retreat. As far as I can see, this is their only purpose . . . This is pure peasant fatalism ... What people! I can’t understand anything. Don’t you think someone’s opening the road to the Germans in this important direction? On purpose? What’s this man Popov? What’s Voroshilov doing? How’s he helping Leningrad? I write about this because I’m disturbed by the lack of activity of Leningrad’s commander . . . return to Moscow. Don’t be late. Stalin.”7

  On their return, the emissaries advised Stalin to scrap Voroshilov’s North-Western Axis and sack the First Marshal who spent “all his time in the trenches.” Meanwhile Schlüsselberg, the fortress on the Neva, and Mga, fell. Voroshilov did not tell Moscow, and when Stalin discovered these prevarications, he was outraged.

  “We’re so indignant about your conduct,” he told Voroshilov and Zhdanov. “You tell us only of losses but no word of measures to save towns . . . and the loss of Schlüsselberg? What’ll be the end of our losses? Have you decided to surrender Leningrad?”8

  On 8 September, Stalin summoned Zhukov to his flat where he was dining with his usual companions—Molotov, Malenkov and the Moscow boss, Alexander Shcherbakov.192

  “Where will you be off to now?” Stalin asked casually.

  “Back to the front,” replied Zhukov.

  “Which front?”

  “The one you consider most necessary.”

  “Then go to Leningrad at once . . . The situation is almost hopeless there . . .” and he handed Zhukov a note to Voroshilov that read: “Hand over command to Zhukov and fly to Moscow immediately.” Stalin scrawled to Zhdanov: “Today Voroshilov’s recalled!” 9

  Zhukov took command at Leningrad’s Smolny headquarters, combining professionalism with draconian ruthlessness, shouting at the staff: “Don’t you understand that if Antonov’s division doesn’t occupy the line . . . the Germans’ll break into the city? And then I’ll have you shot in front of the Smolny as a traitor.” Zhdanov, standing beside his new partner in command, frowned: he disapproved of swearing.

  The crestfallen Voroshilov addressed his staff: “Goodbye comrades,” he said. “Stavka’s recalled me back.” He paused. “That’s what an old man like me deserves. This isn’t the Civil War. Now we have to fight differently . . . But don’t doubt for a minute that we’ll smash the Fascist scum!”10

  Back in Moscow, Stalin admitted, “We might have to abandon ‘Peter.’ ” But Zhukov stiffened resistance to the German attack and then counter-attacked.11 Zhdanov, working closely with Zhukov, now showed his steel, complaining that his “tribunals are being inactive against spreaders of false and provocative rumours . . . The Special Departments should arrange trials of provocateurs and rumour-mongers. The public should know how we regard these bastards.”12 Whatever Stalin suggested was put into action.193 On 13 November, Stalin told him that the Germans were constructing strongholds in the cellars of ordinary homes: “People’s Commissar of Defence Comrade Stalin gives the following instructions,” wrote Zhdanov. “When moving forward don’t try to capture one or other point but . . . burn to ashes these populated areas. So the German staffs and units will be buried . . . Toss away any sentiment and destroy all populated areas you meet on your way!”13

  Zhukov and Zhdanov succeeded in making the storming of Leningrad very costly for the Germans. Hitler hesitated, cancelled the assault and ordered instead that Leningrad be starved into submission and then razed to the ground: the 900-day siege of the city had begun. Zhdanov had not lost the habit of writing Stalin personal letters with a fine ink pen: “The main cause of our failure was the weak performance of our infantry . . . We remembered what you told us during the Finnish War” but “our people have a bad habit of not finishing things and analysing them—and then running in different directions . . . Today we’re working strongly to change our style of attack . . . The worst is that the hunger is spreading.” 14

  There were 2.2 million people trapped in Leningrad. That December alone, 53,000 died and there would be many more to follow. People dropped dead in the streets, in their beds, whole families died one by one. There were too many bodies and everyone was too weak to bury them. Cannibalism flourished: it was not rare to find a body lying in the hall of an apartment block with thighs and breasts carved off. Between the start of the siege and July 1942, it is estimated that a million people died in Leningrad.

  Zhdanov, assisted by his respected Second Secretary, Alexei Kuznetsov, won back Stalin’s respect and that of the Leningraders. They gradually became heroes as they shared the plight of their citizens, personally living on a full military ration of a pound of bread a day plus a bowl of meat or fish soup and some kasha. While hundreds of thousands were dying in the streets, the leaders worked day and night. Kuznetsov, a tall, gangly young man with a long handsome face, kept Leningrad together during Zhdanov’s moments of weakness, touring the trenches accompanied by his little son. Stalin himself praised Kuznetsov: “The Motherland won’t forget you!” he wrote.

  In November, they ordered the building of the “Road of Life” across the ice of Lake Ladoga which became the city’s only channel for the supply of food. During the famine, Zhdanov assigned food supplies in such detail that, at one point, he was the only man allowe
d to replace a lost ration card. He sometimes displayed flashes of human decency: when dysentery broke out in a school, he suspected the staff of stealing the children’s food and sent in a general who reported that the children were taking the food in jars to their families—but he did not stop them.

  “I’d have done the same thing,” Zhdanov admitted and ordered the evacuation of the children. After the war, Zhdanov was quoted as saying that “people died like flies” but “history would never have forgiven me had I given up Leningrad.”15

  Still Stalin became furious when Zhdanov showed dangerous independence: “Do you imagine Leningrad under Zhdanov is not situated in the USSR but is somewhere on an island in the middle of the Pacific?”

  “We admit our mistake,” replied Zhdanov, who then reported a problem with the operations on Lake Ladoga which he blamed on the “cowardice and betrayal” of the commanders of the 80th Division. “We send a demand to let us . . . shoot the chief of 80th Frolov and his commissar Ivanov . . . The Council needs to fight panic and cowardice even among officers.”

  “Frolov and Ivanov should be shot and tell the media,” replied Stalin.

  “Understood. All will be done.”

  “Don’t waste time,” said Stalin. “Every moment’s dear. The enemy concentrates power against Moscow. All other fronts have the chance to counter-attack. Seize the moment!”16