After returning from the Western Front, Stalin again had to turn his attention to developments in the south, where the Kursk offensive was still raging. The Battle of Kursk put an end to any chance for a German victory, but most of the Nazi forces escaped encirclement and withdrew to prepared defensive lines. Building on Soviet successes, the Supreme Command organized offensives in Ukraine, Crimea, and the Central Direction. The German forces switched to a defensive posture, launching only intermittent counterattacks. The most important developments were taking place at the southern end of the Soviet-German Front. In September the Red Army managed to capture the German bridgehead on the right bank of the Dnieper. At the same time, Hitler’s forces were pushed out of the economically important Donets Basin and, to the south, Novorossiisk and the Taman Peninsula. In the predawn hours of 6 November the Red Army liberated the Ukrainian capital of Kiev. By the autumn of 1943, Hitler’s forces had been rendered incapable of large-scale offensives. The Red Army advanced six hundred kilometers to the south and three hundred to the west, but these impressive victories came at the expense of heavy losses inflicted by a still capable enemy. Furthermore, many of the objectives assigned by Headquarters were not met. Soviet forces had made little progress in the Western and Northwestern Directions. The attempt to liberate Crimea had failed, and fierce counterattacks by the Wehrmacht made it impossible to build on the ousting of the Nazis from eastern Ukraine. The Germans were managing to evade a decisive blow. The successful approach used in Stalingrad, of encircling and liquidating enemy army groups, could not be repeated. The bloody war would not end any time soon.
British and American forces also made progress in 1943. Large deployments of German troops were defeated in North Africa and Sicily, and the southern portion of the Italian peninsula was occupied, bringing down Mussolini’s regime and taking Italy out of the war. The Allies were also achieving success against Japan, and Germany’s submarine fleet suffered significant losses in the Atlantic, making shipments of supplies and troops from the United States less dangerous. Allied bombing of Germany was causing increasing devastation. The British and Americans no longer worried that the Soviet Union would collapse under the weight of war, and such a realization relieved some of the pressure for major sacrifices by the Western allies. Moreover, the idea of an advance through the Balkans was beginning to look like a viable alternative to the opening of a second front in northern France. Churchill favored the Balkan approach, but Roosevelt, based on American interests, maintained his previous commitment to a landing on the French coast.
For Stalin, the opening of a second front remained a top priority in relations with his allies. While he of course wanted to relieve the suffering of his battered and exhausted country, he also saw such an opening as a matter of political prestige and a sign of his standing within the Big Three. Not surprisingly, on hearing in June 1943 that Churchill and Roosevelt were planning to postpone the opening of a front in northern France until the next year, his response was icy. “I must inform you,” he wrote his partners on 24 June, “that this is a matter not just of disappointing the Soviet government but of preserving its trust in its allies, trust that has been put to serious tests.”103 In August, the Soviet ambassador, who enjoyed good relations with the British establishment, was pointedly recalled from London. But the allies could not afford total alienation, and none wanted to go anywhere near the point of breaking off relations. This was evident in the decision that soon followed, after contentious negotiation, to hold the first face-to-face meeting of the Big Three. In November 1943 the allies gathered in Tehran, the site proposed by Stalin. This concession by Roosevelt and Churchill at least took some of the sting out of their decision to delay an invasion.
This trip, Stalin’s first outside the Soviet Union since coming to power, did not take him far from the Soviet border. After traveling to Baku by train, he took a short flight to the Iranian capital. As far as we know, this was Stalin’s first and last flight in an airplane, and he appears to have been anxious about it. According to the memoirs of General Sergei Shtemenko, who accompanied Stalin on the trip, a problem developed at the airport in Baku. Stalin refused to fly in a plane piloted by a high-ranking member of Soviet aviation, General Golovanov (mentioned above), and preferred to be flown by a less eminent pilot. “General-colonels rarely fly airplanes; we’d be better off flying with a colonel,” he is quoted as saying.104 Golovanov categorically denies this account, but he does say that while still in Moscow, Stalin wanted to discuss plans for the flight in detail. Among his instructions, he ordered Golovanov to check the reliability of the pilot.105 Stalin apparently had a difficult time during the flight. While meeting with UK Ambassador Archibald Kerr and U.S. Ambassador Harriman in September 1944, he told them that his ears hurt for two weeks afterward.106
The Tehran Conference got under way on 28 November 1943. This was Stalin’s third meeting with Churchill and his first with Roosevelt. Face-to-face contact with Roosevelt was particularly important. Stalin knew that the American and British leaders did not see eye to eye on everything, and one point of difference was the opening of a second front in northern France. Roosevelt and Stalin, each for his own reason, both advocated this second front. Stalin had two powerful cards in his pocket: the Red Army’s victories and a promise to take up arms against Japan after Hitler’s defeat. Beside a desire for good long-term relations with the USSR and its help against Japan, Roosevelt was also motivated by his reluctance to have Red Army troops moving deep into Western Europe. The result was a promise in Tehran that the United States and Great Britain would open a second front in the north of France in May 1944. Discussions also covered future Soviet efforts against Japan, the creation of a postwar international security system, the borders of a postwar Poland, and other issues. Stalin had every reason to come away pleased.
The Allied successes in 1943 left no doubt that Germany would ultimately lose the war, but when? How many lives would be sacrificed before that happened? Having learned a bitter lesson, Stalin no longer tried to assign a timetable to the fall of the Reich. The Germans put up a desperate fight. Holed up in defensive positions, they launched only occasional counterattacks. Meanwhile, the Red Army pushed forward, sometimes quickening the pace, sometimes slowing it. Both sides endured heavy casualties.
During the first five months of 1944 the Red Army achieved impressive victories at both ends of the huge Soviet-German Front, in Ukraine and outside Leningrad. Its forces, fighting fiercely, advanced hundreds of kilometers, in places even going beyond the Soviet border into Romania. But in the center of the Eastern Front, the Germans were unassailable. For the Red Army, the campaign of the summer of 1944 was dedicated to destroying the enemy forces at the front’s center. The well and stealthily prepared operation in Belarus was one of the most significant of the entire war. It led to the destruction of a huge Wehrmacht force.
Celebrating his triumph, Stalin ordered up an impressive propaganda spectacle. For several hours, beginning on the morning of 17 July, a column of more than fifty-seven thousand German prisoners of war, with generals and officers at the head of the line, was paraded through central Moscow. That evening they were loaded onto trains and sent to camps. Crowds of Muscovites lined the streets to observe this extraordinary event. “As the column of prisoners of war passed by,” Beria reported to Stalin, “the population behaved in an organized manner.” He described for the vozhd the shouts that could be heard: “Numerous enthusiastic exclamations and salutes in honor of the Red Army and our Supreme Commander-in-Chief,” as well as “anti-fascist cries of ‘Death to Hitler,’ ‘Death to fascism,’ ‘Let the scoundrels die,’” etc. After the columns had passed, crews of water trucks were brought in to pointedly wash the streets clean.107 On 16 August a similar spectacle took place in Kiev.108