A few days later, at Kuntsevo, Timoshenko and Zhukov tried to persuade Stalin to mobilize, convinced that Hitler would invade. Timoshenko advised him on handling Stalin: “He won’t listen to a long lecture… just ten minutes.” Stalin was dining with Molotov, Zhdanov and Voroshilov, along with Mekhlis and Kulik. Zhukov spoke up: should not they bolster defences along the Western frontier?
“Are you eager to fight the Germans?” Molotov asked harshly.
“Wait a minute,” Stalin calmed the stuttering Premier. He lectured Zhukov on the Germans: “They fear us. In secret, I will tell you that our ambassador had a serious conversation with Hitler personally and Hitler said to him, ‘Please don’t worry about the concentration of our forces in Poland. Our forces are retraining…’” The generals then joined the magnates for Ukrainian borscht soup, buckwheat porridge, then stewed meat, with stewed and fresh fruit for pudding, washed down with brandy and Georgian Khvanchkara wine.5
Kulik’s imbecilic advice unleashed another paroxysm of terror that would bring death to a Politburo family. On hearing that the Germans were increasing the thickness of their armour, he demanded stopping all production of conventional guns and switching to 107mm howitzers from World War I. The Armaments Commissar, Boris Vannikov, a formidable Jewish super-manager, who had studied at Baku Polytechnic with Beria, sensibly opposed Kulik but lacked his access to Stalin. Kulik won Zhdanov’s backing. On 1 March, Stalin summoned Vannikov: “What objections do you have? Comrade Kulik said you don’t agree with him.” Vannikov explained that it was unlikely the Germans had updated their armour as swiftly as Kulik suggested: the 76mm remained the best. Then Zhdanov entered the office.
“Look here,” Stalin said to him, “Vannikov doesn’t want to make the 107mm gun… But these guns are very good. I know them from the Civil War.”
“Vannikov,” replied Zhdanov, “always opposes everything. That’s his style of working.”
“You’re the main artillery expert we have,” Stalin commissioned Zhdanov to settle the question, “and the 107mm is a good gun.” Zhdanov called the meeting where Vannikov defied Kulik. Zhdanov accused him of “sabotage.” “The dead hold back the living,” he added ominously. Vannikov shouted back:
“You’re tolerating disarmament in the face of an approaching war.” Zhdanov stiffly “declared he was going to complain about me to Stalin.” Stalin accepted Kulik’s solution, which had to be reversed when the war began. Vannikov was arrested.[172] Only in Stalin’s realm could the country’s greatest armaments expert be imprisoned just weeks before a war. But Kulik’s motto, “Prison or a medal,” had triumphed again. As the poison spread, it reached Kaganovich’s brother. In the almost biblical sacrifice of a beloved sibling, Lazar’s steeliness was grievously tested.6
Vannikov was cruelly tortured about his recent post as deputy to Mikhail Kaganovich, Lazar’s eldest brother and Commissar for Aircraft Production. The air force was always the most accident-prone service. Not only did the planes crash with alarming regularity, reflecting the haste and sloppiness of Soviet manufacturing, but someone had to pay for these accidents. In one year, four Heroes of the Soviet Union were lost in crashes and Stalin himself questioned the air-force generals even down to the engineers working on each plane. “What kind of man is he?” Stalin asked about one technician. “Maybe he’s a bastard, a svoloch.” The crashes had to be the fault of “bastards.” Vannikov was forced to implicate Mikhail Kaganovich as the “bastard” in this case.
Meanwhile, Vasily Stalin, now a pilot avid to win paternal love, usually by denouncing his superiors to his father, played some part in this tragedy. He remained so nervous that, Svetlana recalled, when his father addressed him at dinner, he jumped and often could not even reply, stammering, “I didn’t hear what you said, Father…What?” In 1940, he fell in love with a pretty trumpet-playing blonde from an NKVD family, Galina Bourdonovskaya, and married her. Yet he was truculent, arrogant, drunken and, while often bighearted, more often dangerous. In this peculiar world, the “Crown Prince” became, according to Svetlana, “a menace.”
“Hello dear Father,” he wrote on 4 March 1941. “How’s your health? Recently I was in Moscow on the orders of Rychagov [the Chief of the Main Directorate of the Air Force], I wanted to see you so much but they said you were busy… They won’t let me fly… Rychagov called me and abused me very much saying that instead of studying theory, I was starting to visit commanders proving to them I had to fly. He ordered me to inform you of this conversation.” Vasily had to fly in old planes “that are terrible to see” and even future officers could not train in the new planes: “Father, write me just a couple of words, if you have time, it’s the biggest joy for me because I miss you so much. Your Vasya.”
This subtle denunciation cannot have helped Pavel Rychagov, thirty-nine, a dashing pilot just promoted to the high command. He arrived drunk at a meeting to discuss the planes. When Stalin criticized the air force, Rychagov shouted that the death rate was so high “because you’re making us fly in coffins!” Silence fell but Stalin continued to walk around the room, the only sounds being the puffing of the pipe and the pad of soft boots.
“You shouldn’t have said that.” He walked round the deathly quiet table one more time and repeated: “You shouldn’t have said that.” Rychagov was arrested within the week along with several air-force top brass and General Shtern, Far Eastern commander, all later shot. They, like Vannikov, implicated Mikhail Kaganovich.7
“We received testimonies,” Stalin told Kaganovich. “Your brother’s implicated in the conspiracy.” The brother was accused of building the aircraft factories close to the Russian border to help Berlin. Stalin explained that Mikhail, a Jew, had been designated head of Hitler’s puppet government-in-waiting, an idea so preposterous that it was either the moronic solecism of an NKGB simpleton or, more likely, a joke between Stalin and Beria. Did they remember Ordzhonikidze’s fury on the arrest of his brother? Ordzhonikidze had been Kaganovich’s closest friend.
“It’s a lie,” Kaganovich claimed to have replied. “I know my brother. He’s a Bolshevik since 1905, devoted to the Central Committee.”
“How can it be a lie?” retorted Stalin. “I’ve got the testimonies.”
“It’s a lie. I demand a confrontation.” Decades later, Kaganovich denied that he had betrayed his own brother: “If my brother had been an Enemy I’d have been against him… I was sure he was right. I protected him. I protected him!” Kaganovich could afford to give an opinion but he also had to make clear that if the Party needed to destroy his brother, his brother must die. “Well, so what?” he added. “If necessary, arrest him.”
Stalin ordered Mikoyan and that sinister duo Beria and Malenkov to arrange a confrontation between Mikhail Kaganovich and his accuser, Vannikov, but “Iron Lazar” was not invited to attend.
“Don’t make him anxious, don’t bother him,” said Stalin.
Mikoyan held the “confrontation” in his office in the same building as the Little Corner where Mikhail defended himself “passionately” against Vannikov.
“Are you insane?” he asked his former deputy who had spent nights at his home during the Terror, afraid of arrest.
172
This was far from the only such madness: on other occasions, Stalin commissioned a tank based on a crazy principle that “in being destroyed, it protects.”