In high spirits at this instant success, Stalin and his companions left the Little Corner and probably headed over to Kuntsevo for dinner and then a film, but these dinners were not the drunken carousals of later years. When the exhausted Berias and Molotovs staggered home with only a few hours until they had to start work again, Stalin read his history books on his divan until he fell asleep in the early hours.6
Within four days of the launch of Operation Uranus, the German Sixth Army, 330,000 men, was encircled in what Stalin called the “decisive moment of the war.” As the Russians tightened their grip, Manstein’s counter-attack failed to break through. The Luftwaffe proved incapable of supplying from the air. The encircled Germans suffered a cruel slow death from starvation, ice and dynamite. On 16 December, the Russians counter-attacked into Manstein’s rear, threatening to cut off Army Group Don and break through towards Rostov. In the Little Corner, the impatient Stalin chose General Rokossovsky, not the Stalingrad commander Yeremenko, to oversee Operation Ring, the liquidation of the Sixth Army.
“Why don’t you say anything?” he asked Zhukov, who had frowned.
“Yeremenko will be very hurt,” replied Zhukov.
“It’s no time for feeling hurt,” said Stalin. “We’re not schoolgirls. We’re Bolsheviks!”
On 10 January, Rokossovsky attacked the benighted Germans, slicing their pocket in half. The Sixth Army diminished daily. The military defeat became a human struggle for survival, as the Germans ate horsemeat, cats, rats, each other, and finally nothing. On 31 January, Field Marshal Paulus surrendered and 92,000 starving, frostbitten scarecrows, barely recognizable as men let alone soldiers, became prisoners. Stalin himself wrote out this news flash: “Today our armies trapped the commander of the Sixth Army near Stalingrad with all his staff…”7
Now a confident, preening Stalin and a gold-braided, bemedalled, imperial Bolshevik Russia emerged, blood-spattered but swaggering with pride, from behind the iron mask of Soviet austerity, to fight their way into Europe.[212]
On 6 January 1943, Stalin, having consulted two old comrades Kalinin and Budyonny, overturned the Bolshevik slogan “Down with the golden shoulder boards!” and restored the auric epaulettes and braid of Tsarist officers. He teased Khrulev “for suggesting we restore the old regime” but personally instructed the media how to spin it: the gold braid was not “just decoration but also about order and discipline: tell about this.”
Two weeks later, he promoted Zhukov to Marshal. On 23 February, the omniscient military amateur himself joined the Marshalate: during the next two years, Stalin rarely appeared out of its uniform.
Simultaneously, he slightly clipped Beria’s powerful wings: in April,[213] he brought military counter-intelligence, with its dreaded Special Departments, under his own aegis as Defence Commissar. He renamed it Smersh, an acronym for “Death to Spies” that he coined himself, but kept Abakumov in charge. This slick but vicious secret policeman of thirty-five had worked closely with Beria but Stalin, the ultimate patron, now took him under his wing.
Yet Stalin’s world-historical triumphs were always embittered by private disappointments.8 Soon after Stalingrad, Stalin received two disturbing messages: a letter that denounced the debauchery of his son Vasily and revealed the seduction of his adored Svetlana, and a German offer to exchange his prisoner son, Yakov.
40. SONS AND DAUGHTERS
Stalin’s and the Politburo’s Children at War
The unprecedented surrender of a German Field Marshal humiliated Hitler just as acutely as Yakov’s capture exposed Stalin: both dictators expected these embarrassments to fall on their swords. Now Count Bernadotte of the Red Cross approached Molotov with an offer to swap Yakov for Paulus. Molotov mentioned the offer but Stalin refused to swap a marshal for a soldier.
“All of them are my sons,” Stalin replied like a good Tsar, telling Svetlana, “War is war!”
The refusal to swap Yakov has been treated as evidence of Stalin’s loveless cruelty but this is unfair. Stalin was a mass murderer but in this case, it is hard to imagine that either Churchill or Roosevelt could have swapped their sons if they had been captured—when thousands of ordinary men were being killed or captured.[214] After the war, a Georgian confidant plucked up the courage to ask Stalin if the Paulus offer was a myth.
He “hung his head,” answering “in a sad, piercing voice”: “Not a myth… Just think how many sons ended in camps! Who would swap them for Paulus? Were they worse than Yakov? I had to refuse… What would they have said of me, our millions of Party fathers, if having forgotten about them, I had agreed to swapping Yakov? No, I had no right…” Then he again showed the struggle between the nervy, angry, tormented man within and the persona he had become: “Otherwise, I’d no longer be ‘Stalin.’” He added: “I so pitied Yasha!”
A few weeks later, on 14 April in a POW camp near Lübeck, Yakov, who courageously refused to cooperate with the Germans, committed suicide by throwing himself onto the camp wire. At the Little Corner that night, oblivious to Yasha’s heroism, Stalin worked with Molotov and Beria before heading off to dinner at about 1 a.m. He did not find out the truth for some time but when he did, he regarded his son with pride. Once at Kuntsevo, he left his own dinner and was found looking at Yasha’s photograph.
“Did you ever see Yasha?” he asked the Georgian after the war, drawing out the photograph. “Look! He’s a real man eh! A noble man right to the end! Fate treated him unjustly…” He ordered the release of Yakov’s wife Julia (though she returned damaged by the trauma). Like Nadya, Yakov forever troubled him.1
Stalin now received a letter from the leading documentary film-maker Roman Karmen that denounced Colonel Vasily Stalin for the seduction of his wife and flaunting his debauchery. This letter opened a can of worms that ruined Stalin’s relationships with both drunken Vasily and treasured Svetlana. Stalin started to look into their lives and what he found shocked him profoundly.
By the climax of Stalingrad, Vasily was back in Moscow, living a life that was a caricature of the decadent wassails of aristocratic swells in Pushkin’s Onegin. Spoiled by the sycophancy of his own Tsarevich’s court, scarred by a mother’s loss and a father’s irritation, over-promoted and arrogant yet also terrified of his eminence and wildly generous to friends, Vasily took over Zubalovo, once the home of his ascetic mother and severe father, and turned this mansion (rebuilt after its dynamiting) into a pleasure dome of drinking, dancing and womanizing. The Tsarevich’s set were glamorous film stars, screenwriters, pilots, ballerinas and freeloaders, a sort of Stalinist “Ratpack”: Karmen and his beautiful actress wife, Nina, were the centre of it along with the dashing poet Konstantin Simonov and his film-star wife, Valentina Serova. Stalin knew them all personally and liked Simonov’s best-selling collection of love poems With You and Without You.
212
This confidence was immediately reflected in Stalin’s ungrateful treatment of his Western allies despite their gallantry in risking their lives to deliver aid to Russia: Mikoyan reported that the British had brought radio equipment on their Naval Mission in Murmansk “without documentation. Either we should ask them to take it back or give it to us. I ask directions.” Molotov simply wrote “Agreed.” But Stalin grumpily scribbled in his blue crayon: “Comrade Molotov agreed—while Mikoyan suggested nothing!” As for the Royal Navy’s radio: “I propose confiscate the equipment as contraband!”
213
On 16 April 1943, Stalin once again split the huge NKVD into two separate agencies—the NKGB under Merkulov, containing the State Security police, and the NKVD under Beria that controlled the normal police and the huge slave labour camps. However, Beria remained
214
Yakov’s daughter Gulia believes Stalin “did the right thing.” Svetlana Stalin compares his behaviour to Margaret Thatcher’s refusal to negotiate with the terrorists holding Terry Waite: “We don’t talk to those people.” Yakov was not the only one of Stalin’s family in encirclements: Artyom Sergeev was caught too—but he broke out and made it back to Moscow where he told his story to Mikoyan. He was sent to a Deputy Defence Commissar who told him: “You’re a Lieutenant and I’m Deputy Commissar. You mustn’t repeat this to anyone more senior. Forget it all. There are those who might not understand and this could ruin your life so write and sign here: ‘I was not there and I saw nothing.’”