Days later, Vasily and his retinue flew up to the North-Western Front where he finally flew one or two combat missions, but his outrages continued. In May, he set off on a drunken fishing expedition in which the pilots caught fish by tossing aircraft rockets into a pond with delayed fuses. One of the rockets exploded, killing a Hero of the Soviet Union.
On 26 May, Stalin ordered air-force Commander Novikov to “1. dismiss Colonel VJ Stalin immediately from . . . command of air regiment; 2. announce to the regimental officers and VJ Stalin that Colonel Stalin is dismissed for hard drinking, debauchery and corrupting the regiment.” But it was impossible to keep a dictator’s son down: by the end of the year, the scapegrace had once again been promoted and he was soon driving his Rolls-Royce along the front, borrowing official planes whenever it suited him. One of his boon companions was alarmed when he insisted on trying to overtake an army lorry on the crowded roads of the Baltic front. When the lorry refused to give way, Vasily simply shot out the tyres.
As for Svetlana, she was soon in love with someone whose name was so dreaded that, in two published memoirs and many interviews over fifty years, she has still never revealed his identity.2
Not until March 1943, shortly after the Kapler affair, did Stalin finally contain Manstein’s counter-attack, leaving a swollen Soviet salient bulging into the German lines around Kursk. Hitler approved Operation Citadel to cut off the bulge while Stalin and his generals debated what to do. His instincts were always to attack, but Zhukov and Vasilevsky managed to persuade him to wait and break the Germans in a defensive position. This made Stalin even more agitated and nervous, but he had learned the great lesson of Stalingrad: he took their advice on what would become the world’s greatest tank battle, Kursk.
After a dinner with Stalin that lasted from 3 to 7 a.m., Zhukov and Vasilevsky rushed to the front to plan the battle. Malenkov supervised the generals, Mikoyan amassed the reserves, Beria provided 300,000 slave labourers to dig an unbreachable 3,000 miles of trenches. Over a million men and, including reserves, around 6,000 tanks waited.
The waiting was agony for the jittery Supremo who let off steam in a volcanic tantrum with his aircraft designer. Yakovlev arrived in the study to find Stalin and Vasilevsky examining fragments of the wing of his Yak-9 fighter.
Stalin pointed to the pieces . . . and asked: “Do you know anything about this?” He then exploded in a frenzied rant: “I had never seen Stalin in such a rage,” remembered Yakovlev. Stalin demanded to know when this fault had been discovered. When he heard that it had only been noticed “in the face of the enemy,” he “lost his composure even more.”
“Do you know that only the most cunning enemy could do such a thing—turn out planes in such a way that they would seem good at the plant and no good at the front. This is working for Hitler! Do you know what a service you’ve rendered Hitler? You Hitlerites!”
“It was difficult to imagine our condition at that moment . . . I was shivering,” admitted Yakovlev. The silence was “tomb-like” as Stalin paced the room until he asked: “What are we going to do?”
At dawn on 5 July, the Germans threw 900,000 men and 2,700 tanks into this colossal battle of machines in which fleets of metallic giants clashed, helm to helm, barrel to barrel. By the 9th, the Germans had reached their limit. On the 12th, Zhukov unleashed the costly but highly successful counter-attack. The Battle of Kursk was the climax of the Panzer era, the “mechanized equivalent of hand-to-hand combat,” which left a graveyard of 700 tanks and burnt flesh. Agreeing to cancel Citadel, Hitler had lost his last chance to win the war.
On the afternoon of 24 July, Stalin welcomed Antonov and Shtemenko to the Little Corner in a “joyously jubilant mood.” Stalin did not even want to hear their report—just tinkered cheerfully with the victory communiqué, adding the words: “Eternal glory to the heroes who fell on the battlefield in the struggle for the liberty and honour of our Motherland!”3
Stalin was not alone in finding it difficult to control his own children during wartime: Khrushchev and Mikoyan played stellar roles in the Kursk triumph, the former as Front Commissar, the latter as Supply maestro, but simultaneously they both found their children embroiled in dangerous crises. Stalin was both sympathetic and heartless in dealing with the tragedies of the Politburo families.
Leonid Khrushchev, Nikita’s eldest son from his first marriage, was already notorious as a ne’er-do-well. Now he became a Stalinist William Tell. Reprimanded by Komsomol for “drunkenness,” he had settled down, married Lyubov Kutuzova, with whom he had a little girl, Julia, and shown courage as a bomber pilot, though he remained a drunken brawler.216 Leonid boasted boozily of his marksmanship and was challenged to balance a bottle on a pilot’s head. He shot off the neck of the bottle. This did not satisfy these daredevils. Leonid shot again, fatally wounding the officer in the forehead. He was court-martialled.
Khrushchev may have appealed to Stalin for clemency, citing the boy’s bravery. But Stalin who would not save Yakov, “did not want to pardon Khrushchev’s son,” as Molotov recalled. However, he was not condemned but allowed to retrain as a fighter pilot. On 11 March 1943, he was shot down during a dogfight with two FockeWulf 190s near Smolensk. He was never found. Rumours spread that he had turned traitor—which, in Stalin’s system, cast doubt on his widow, Lyubov, who had visited the theatre in Kuibyshev with an “amazingly attractive” French military attaché. Lyubov was probably denounced by Khrushchev’s chief bodyguard. She was arrested and interrogated by Abakumov himself, and condemned.
In another of those tragedies of Stalinist family life, little Julia was told her mother was dead. The memory of her parents was obliterated and she was adopted by her grandfather, Khrushchev himself, whom she called “Papa.”217 The Khrushchevs were cold parents. Nikita himself seemed to believe the charges against Lyubov. “Stalin played this game,” recalls Julia, “and Khrushchev was playing for his life” but “Nikita never spoke about it and even as a pensioner, he spoke only in general terms. This was very humiliating and painful for him.” Perhaps, says Julia Khrushcheva, it contributed to his later decision to denounce Stalin.4
That summer, it was Mikoyan’s turn. Two of his sons were pilots. Stepan was wounded, then during Stalingrad, 18-year-old Vladimir was killed. So Stalin “expressly ordered” his son Vasily to take Stepan into his own division and “make sure not to lose any more Mikoyans.” On Vasily’s orders, Stepan’s engineer claimed the plane was not ready for him to fly whenever possible. This indulgence did not last.
Among all the other children in Kuibyshev, Mikoyan’s younger boys Vano, fifteen, and Sergo, fourteen, were friends with the unhinged son of Shakhurin, the Aircraft Production Commissar. Volodya Shakhurin played a silly but risky game in which he pretended to “appoint” a mock government with the teenage Mikoyans as ministers, all recorded in his exercise book. When they returned to Moscow, this Volodya Shakhurin fell in love with Nina, daughter of Ambassador Umansky who was just leaving for his next posting.
“I won’t let you go,” young Shakhurin told Nina. The schoolchildren were walking across the Kamennyi Most, close to the Kremlin, when Shakhurin borrowed Vano Mikoyan’s pistol which he had been lent by his father’s bodyguards. The boy ran ahead with Nina then, on the bridge, shot her dead and killed himself. A horrified Vano Mikoyan ran back to the Kremlin to tell his mother. The NKGB discovered the gun belonged to the young Mikoyans who were also “ministers” in the schoolboy “government,” which was obviously a conspiracy. Vano was arrested.
“Vano just disappeared,” remembers Sergo. “My mother was frantic and they called the police stations.” Mikoyan, working down the corridor from Stalin himself, rang Beria, then called his wife Ashken: “Don’t worry. Vano’s in the Lubianka.”
Mikoyan knew that this could only happen with Stalin’s permission. The shrewd Armenian decided not to appeal to Stalin “so as not to make things worse.” Ten days later, Sergo was also arrested at Zubalovo and taken to the Lubianka in his pyjamas: “I
must tell Mama.”
“It’ll only take an hour,” they replied. Twenty-six schoolboys were arrested and imprisoned, including Stalin’s nephew, Leonid Redens, whose father had been shot in 1940.
The secret police reported the children’s innocence but Stalin replied: “They must be punished.” This was so vague that no one was quite sure what to do with the young prisoners. The boys were interrogated by Lieutenant-General Vlodzirmirsky, one of Beria’s cruellest torturers, “tall and handsome in his uniform,” who was, says Sergo, “very nasty. He shouted at us.” Sergo was placed in solitary for a week. In December, after six months in the Lubianka, the interrogations ceased and the children became really frightened. Sergo’s interrogator showed him a confession that he had been “a participant in an organization . . . to overthrow the existing government.”
“Just sign and you can see your mother again!”
“I won’t sign, it’s not true,” said Sergo.
“It doesn’t make any difference,” bellowed the general. “Sign—you go home. If not, back to your cell. Listen!” He could hear his mother’s voice in the next room. All the children signed their confessions. “Of course this could have been used against my father.” Sergo and Vano were driven with their mother back to the Kremlin. “I was very glad my father wasn’t there—I was afraid of his anger,” says Sergo.
Mikoyan told the elder boy: “If you’re guilty, I’d strangle you with my own hands. Go and rest.” He never mentioned it to the youngest. But the matter was not closed: after three days at home, the children had to go into exile. The Mikoyans spent a year in Stalinabad, cared for by their house-maid. Stalin never forgot the case and later considered using it against Mikoyan.5
41
Stalin’s Song Contest
At about 11 p.m. on 1 August 1943, Stalin and Beria arrived at Kuntsevo Station and boarded a special train, camouflaged with birch branches, armed with howitzers and packed with specially tested provisions. The train, which, with its theatrical shrubbery poking out of its guns, must have resembled a locomotive Birnam Wood, puffed westwards. The Kursk counter-attacks, Operations Rumiantsev, to the north, and Kutuzov, to the south, both named after Tsarist heroes, were so successful that Stalin felt safe to embark on this preposterously staged visit to the front.
Stalin slept at Gzhatsk, then headed towards Rzhev on the Kalinin Front. Transferring into his Packard, he set up his headquarters in a self-consciously humble wooden cottage with a picturesque veranda (still a museum today) in the hamlet of Khoroshevo where he received his generals. Knowing from Zhukov that Orel and Belgorod would fall imminently, Stalin ate “a cheerful supper” with his entourage.
The old lady who lived there was on hand to provide a touch of folksy authenticity until Stalin, who prided himself on his popular touch, unexpectedly insisted that he must pay her for his stay. He was unable to work out a sensible sum because he had not handled money since 1917 but, in any case, he had no cash on him. Stalin asked his flunkies for the money. Here was a classic moment in the farce of the workers’ State when, with much tapping of tunic pockets, jiggling of medals and rustling of gold braid, not one of the boozy, paunchy commissars could find a single kopeck to pay her. Stalin cursed the “spongers.” Since he could not pay in cash, he compensated the crone with his own provisions.
Then Stalin peered grumpily out at the village which he immediately noticed was teeming with ill-concealed Chekists: he asked how many there were, but the NKVD tried to conceal the real number. When Stalin exploded, they admitted there was an entire division. Indeed, the generals noticed that the village itself had been completely emptied: there was no one except the NKVD for miles around.
He slept on the old lady’s bed in his greatcoat. Yeremenko briefed him. Voronov was summoned, covering miles to make it to the mysterious meeting. “Finally we came to a beautiful grove where small wooden structures nestled among the trees.” Led into the cottage, Stalin stood in front of a “wretched wooden table that had been hastily dashed together” and two crude benches. A special telephone had been fixed to link Stalin to the fronts, with the wires going out of the window. Waiting to report to the Supremo, the generals were unimpressed with this mise-en-scène.
“Well, this is some situation!” whispered one general to Voronov who suddenly realized: “It’s intentional—to resemble the front.” Stalin cut off the briefing, contenting himself with giving some orders, then dismissed the generals who had to slog back to the real fray. Stalin asked if he could go further towards the fighting but Beria forbade him. He visited the hospital at Yukono, according to his bodyguards, and was depressed by so many amputees. Afterwards, he felt ill and his arthritis played up.218 Stalin returned by road in his armoured Packard and a convoy of security cars.
Suddenly the cars stopped. “He needed to defecate,” wrote Mikoyan, who heard the story from someone who was there. Stalin got out of the car and asked “whether the bushes along the roadside were mined. Of course no one could give such a guarantee . . . Then the Supreme Commander-in-Chief pulled down his trousers in everyone’s presence.” In a metaphorical commentary on his treatment of the Soviet people, and his performance as military commander, he “shamed himself in front of his generals and officers . . . and did his business right there on the road.”
On his return, Stalin was immediately able to deploy his heroic journey in a letter to President Franklin D. Roosevelt, with whom he was discussing the venue for the first meeting of the three leaders of the Grand Alliance: “Having just returned from the front, I am only now able to reply to your letter . . .” He could not meet FDR and Churchill at Scapa Flow in Orkney—“I have to make personal visits to . . . the front more and more often.” He proposed they meet in a more convenient place—Teheran, the capital of Iran, occupied by British-Soviet forces.
Stalin’s courtiers knew the significance of this visit to the front. A month later, Yeremenko, his host, prodded by Beria and Malenkov, proposed that Stalin receive the Order of Suvorov First Class for Stalingrad, and for giving “such valuable orders that guaranteed victory on the Kalinin Front, . . . inspired by the visit to the front of the Supreme Commander-in-Chief . . .”
On 5 August, when Orel and Belgorod fell, Stalin jovially asked Antonov and Shtemenko: “Do you read military history?” Shtemenko admitted he was “confused, not knowing how to answer.” Stalin, who had been rereading Vipper’s History of Ancient Greece, went on: “In ancient times, when troops won victories, all the bells would be rung in honour of the commanders and their troops. It wouldn’t be a bad idea for us to signify victories more impressively . . . We”—and he nodded at his comrades, “we’re thinking of giving artillery salutes and arranging some kind of fireworks . . .” That day, the guns of the Kremlin fired the first victory salvo. Henceforth, Stalin punctiliously worked out the salutes to be given for each victory and the staff had to get every detail correct. Just before 11 p.m. the messages were rushed to the stentorian newsreader Levitan who telephoned Poskrebyshev for Stalin’s approval. Then the salvoes resounded across the Motherland.
“Let’s listen to it,” Stalin often suggested in the Little Corner. The generals now competed to be the first to give Stalin good news. On the 28th, Koniev phoned to announce he had taken Kharkov but was told that Stalin always slept in in the mornings. Koniev daringly phoned Kuntsevo directly. A delighted Stalin answered it himself. But when there was a mistake in the victory announcements, Stalin yelled: “Why did Levitan omit Koniev’s name? Let me see the message!” Shtemenko had left it out. Stalin was “dreadfully furious.” “What kind of anonymous message is this? What have you got on your shoulders? Stop that broadcast and read everything over again. You may go!”
The next time, he asked Shtemenko to bring the communiqué on his own, asking, “You didn’t leave out the name?” Shtemenko was forgiven.1
As he massed fifty-eight armies, from Finland to the Black Sea, to embark on a colossal wave of offensives, an elated Stalin, having closed down the Comint
ern and enlisted the support of the Church by appointing a Patriarch, decided to create a new national anthem to replace the Internationale. It was to catch Russia’s new euphoric confidence. Stalin decided the quickest way to find the tune and words was to hold a competition that resembled a dictatorial Eurovision Song Contest, with Molotov and Voroshilov contributing to the lyrics, and Shostakovich and Prokofiev to the music.
In one week in late October, while the Allied Foreign Ministers were in Moscow preparing for the Big Three meeting, the anthem was forged in the white-hot frenzy of musical Stakhanovitism to be ready for the 7th November celebrations. In late September, Stalin invited composers from all over the Soviet Union to put forward their offerings. In mid-October, fifty-four composers, including Uzbeks, Georgians and some singing Jews, in traditional costume, arrived in Moscow to perform round one in the Stalin song contest. Before the music was even decided, Stalin appointed the lyricists, Sergei Mikhalkov and El-Registan, whose notes in the archives tell this story. They handed in their first draft. At lunchtime on the 23rd, the lyricists were summoned from the Moskva Hotel, that colossal Stalinist pile, across to the Kremlin where Molotov and Voroshilov received them. “Come in,” they said. “He is reading the lyrics.” They did not need to ask who “he” was. Two minutes later, Stalin called. Voroshilov, who was “cheerful and smiling,” took El-Registan’s hands: “Comrade Stalin,” he announced, “has made some corrections.” These were words they would hear often during the next two weeks. Meanwhile the dour Molotov was suggesting changes of his own.