Since the marshals now resembled Christmas trees of braid and clanking medals, the Generalissimo’s uniform had to be completely over-the-top: the tailor of the élite, Lerner, created a gilded Ruritanian extravaganza with a golden cape. Khrulev dressed three strapping officers in these Göringesque outfits. When Stalin wandered out of his office to see Poskrebyshev, he snarled: “Who are they? What’s this peacock doing here?”
“Three samples of the Generalissimo’s uniform.”
“They’re not right for me. I need something more modest… Do you want me to look like a doorman?” Stalin finally accepted a white gilded high-collared tunic with black and red–striped trousers which made him look like a bandmaster, if not a Park Avenue doorman. When he put it on, he regretted it, muttering to Molotov: “Why did I agree?”
Malenkov and Beria were left with the gold star of the Hero of the Soviet Union: how to get him to accept it? Here Stalin’s court dissolves into an opéra bou fe farce in which the cantankerous Generalissimo was virtually pursued around Moscow by courtiers trying to pin the medal on him. First Malenkov agreed to try but Stalin would not listen. Next he recruited Poskrebyshev who accepted the mission but gave up when Stalin resisted energetically. Beria and Malenkov tried Vlasik but he too failed. They decided it was best to ambush Stalin when he was gardening because he loved his roses and lemon trees so they persuaded Orlov, the Kuntsevo commandant, to present it. When Stalin asked for the secateurs to prune his beloved roses, Orlov brought the secateurs but kept the star behind his back, wondering what to do with it.
“What are you hiding?” asked Stalin. “Let me see.” Orlov gingerly brought out the star. Stalin cursed him: “Give it back to those who thought up this nonsense!”
Finally, he accepted the medaclass="underline" “You’re indulging an old man. Won’t do anything for my health!” Stalin did not just accept the rank of Generalissimo in order to join Franco. Vanity merged with politics: it helped diminish the dangerously prestigious marshalate. On 9 July, he further watered down their honours by promoting Beria, their scourge, to Marshal, equal to Zhukov or Vasilevsky.
The victor’s good humour, though, could be chilling. Whenever he saw the Shipbuilding Commissar Nosenko, he joked “Haven’t they arrested you yet?” The next time he saw him, he chuckled: “Nosenko, have you still not been shot?” Nosenko each time smiled anxiously. Finally at a celebratory Sovnarkom meeting, Stalin declared, “We believed in victory and… never lost our sense of humour. Isn’t that true, Comrade Nosenko?”3
A week later, Stalin, who, according to Gromyko, now “always looked tired,” mounted his eleven-coach armoured train for the journey to Potsdam: he travelled in four green carriages that had been taken from the Tsar’s train in some museum, along a route of exactly 1,923 kilometres, according to Beria, who organized perhaps the tightest security ever for a travelling potentate. “To provide proper security,” he wrote to Stalin on 2 July, “1,515 NKVD/GB men of operative staff and 17,409 NKVD forces are placed in the following order: on USSR territories, 6 men per kilometre; on territory of Poland, 10 men per kilometre; on German territory, 15 men per kilometre. Besides this on the route of the special train, 8 armoured trains will patrol—2 in USSR, 2 in Poland and 4 in Germany.” “To provide security for the chief of the Soviet delegation,” there were seven NKVD regiments and 900 bodyguards. The inner security “will be carried out by the operative staff of the 6th Department of the NKGB” arranged “in three concentric circles of security, totalling 2,041 NKVD men.” Sixteen companies of NKVD forces alone were responsible for guarding his phone lines while eleven aeroplanes provided quick links to Moscow. In case of urgent need, Stalin’s own three planes, including a Dakota, stood ready. The secret police were “to guarantee proper order and purges of anti-Soviet elements” at all stations and airports.[235]
The night before he arrived in Potsdam, Stalin called Zhukov: “Don’t get it into your head to meet us with an honour guard and band. Come to the station yourself and bring anyone you consider necessary.”
At 5:30 a.m. on 16 July, the day of Stalin’s arrival, the United States tested a nuclear bomb in New Mexico that would change everything and, in many ways, spoil Stalin’s triumph. The news was telegraphed to Harry S. Truman, who had succeeded Roosevelt as President, with the understatement of the century: “Babies satisfactorily born.”
Stalin and Molotov, attended by Poskrebyshev, Vlasik and Valechka, found the platform virtually empty except for Zhukov, Vyshinsky and a table bearing three telephones connected to the Kremlin and the armies. “In good spirits,” Stalin raised his hat and climbed into the waiting ZiS 101 armoured limousine but then he opened the door and invited Zhukov to ride with him to his Babelsberg residence, “a stone villa of two floors” with “fifteen rooms and an open veranda,” Beria informed him, “supplied with all necessary electricity, heating and organized telephone stations with VCh for 100 numbers.” It had been Ludendorff’s home. Stalin hated the extravagant furniture and ordered much of it to be removed—as he once had done in his Kremlin flat.
Stalin was late for the conference but it mattered little: the great decisions had been made at Yalta. The other leaders had arrived on the 15th and gone sightseeing to Hitler’s Chancellery. Beria, who was already in Berlin to oversee the arrangements, accompanied by his son Sergo, longed to visit the ruins but obediently waited to ask Stalin’s permission. Stalin refused to go himself, no tourist he. So Beria, in a baggy suit and open-necked shirt, went with the immaculate Molotov.
At midday on Tuesday the 17th, Stalin, resplendent in a fawn Generalissimo’s uniform, arrived at Truman’s “Little White House” for their first meeting. The new President said nothing about the topic that dominated the conference. Sergo Beria wrote that his father, informed by spies in the American nuclear project, gave Stalin the news during this week: “I didn’t know then, at least not from the Americans,” was how Stalin put it. Beria had first informed him of the Manhattan Project in March 1942: “We need to get started,” said Stalin, placing Molotov in charge. But, under Iron Arse, it advanced with excruciating, ponderous slowness. Finally in September 1944, the leading Russian nuclear scientist, Professor Igor Kurchatov, wrote to Stalin to denounce plodding Molotov and begged Beria to take it over. Stalin had little conception of nuclear fission’s world-shattering importance nor of the vast resources it would require. He and Beria distrusted their own scientists and spies. Nonetheless, they were aware of the urgency in procuring uranium, and twice during the conference, Stalin and Beria debated how to react to the Americans.[236] They had agreed that Stalin should “pretend not to understand,” when the subject was mentioned. But so far, Truman said nothing. They discussed Russia’s entry into the war against Japan. Truman asked Stalin to stay for lunch but he refused: “You could if you wanted,” said Truman.
Stalin stayed, unimpressed by the Missouri haberdasher who was no substitute for FDR: “They couldn’t be compared,” he said later. “Truman’s neither educated nor clever.” (Truman was nonetheless charmed: “I like Stalin!” but, revealingly, he reminded the President of his patron, T. J. Pendergast, the machine politician boss of Kansas City.)
235
The NKVD had mended all the electrical systems of Babelsberg and, as at Yalta, they even brought their own fire brigade. More than that, Stalin had his own “organized store of economic supplies with 20 refrigerators… and 3 farms—a cattle farm, a poultry farm and a vegetable farm” plus “2 special bakeries, manned by trusted staff and able to produce 850 kg of bread a day.”
236
Beria had also secured as much uranium as possible in a special operation in the ruins of Berlin: he and Malenkov reported to Stalin they had found “250 kgs of metallic uranium, 2 tons of uranium oxide and 20 litres of heavy water” at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute, rounded up key German physicists, and spirited all this treasure back to the USSR. Roy Medvedev in his