Any evaluation of Joseph Stalin as a war leader in the Great Patriotic War of 1941–45 needs to start long before it broke out. For Stalin’s extraordinary personal toughness had been molded in numerous prisons decades before he had come to power; it is thought he killed his first victim as early as 1902, when he was twenty-four.
In the period before the German invasion of the Soviet Union on June 22, 1941, Stalin had been exiled for four years to a freezing and lonely Siberia; he had risked his life in the Russian underground fighting the czarist Okhrana secret police while Lenin and other Bolshevik leaders were safely plotting in Swiss libraries and cafés; he had played a dangerous and active supporting role in the October Revolution; he had overseen deliberate mass starvation policies at Czaritsyn (the city later called Stalingrad) on the River Volga during the Russian civil war; he had forced through the farm collectivization program that drove millions into exile, starvation, and death. He had organized show trials that led to the executions of hundreds of his Old Bolshevik comrades such as Grigory Zinoviev, Nikolai Bukharin, and Lev Kamenev on trumped-up treason charges; he gave orders for further mass starvation to crush the kulaks and Ukrainians (over four million dead); and perhaps above all he had murdered millions more in purges in which the victims’ names were picked pretty much entirely at random in order to terrorize the entire population. This was the man whom Adolf Hitler decided to attack in Operation Barbarossa.
In his great comparative study of Hitler and Stalin, Alan Bullock describes Stalin’s regime in the late 1930s by quoting the French revolutionary Pierre Vergniaud, “There is reason to fear that, like Saturn, the Revolution may devour each of its children in turn.”1 In Russia this was sometimes literally so. In his book Stalin: The Court of the Red Tsar, Simon Sebag Montefiore records occasions on which parents were forced to eat their own babies in the famines in Ukraine that the Bolsheviks engineered in the early 1930s in order to wipe out their class and ethnic enemies. In the Lubyanka prison in Moscow, he tells us, “many of the prisoners were beaten so hard that their eyes literally popped out of their heads. They were routinely beaten to death, which was registered as a heart attack.”2 Stalin even went so far as to pass a politburo resolution legalizing torture, though the Bolsheviks—astonishingly enough, like the Nazis—thought themselves decent, idealistic, even moralistic. Anyone who admires Arthur Koestler’s masterpiece, Darkness at Noon, will immediately recognize the syndrome. (Stalin also saw himself as a poet, albeit of verses as seemingly unlikely as: “The pinkish bud has opened / Rushing to the pale-blue violet / And, stirred by a little breeze / The lily of the valley has bent over the grass.”)3
Of the 1.5 million people Stalin ordered to be arrested in 1937 alone, more than 700,000 were shot. He loved to hear how his enemies died, as they were taken downstairs in the Lubyanka prison in Moscow to be executed in a purpose-built bunker. To roars of laughter from his entourage, his lieutenants would act out the pleadings of his victims as they begged for their lives just prior to receiving the bullet in the back of the head from the chief executioner, Vasily Blokhin. For some reason, both Winston Churchill and Franklin Roosevelt believed that they could somehow soften such a man as Stalin, or at the very least make him behave as other statesmen did.
The reason that Stalin was a monster was not only because he was an ambitious, cynical, cunning, murderous, vengeful, narcissistic, imperious, self-centered paranoiac—although he was indeed all of those things—but was intimately bound up with his devout Marxism-Leninism. “Nothing,” writes Stephen Kotkin, Stalin’s most recent biographer, “not the teenage girls, the violence, the camaraderie, diverted him from his life’s mission.”4 The overriding driving force in his life was class warfare in its rawest state; his all-purpose remedy to all the ills of society was to conduct relentless merciless warfare against the bourgeoisie. Mastery of the ideology of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, not just the apparatus, explains Stalin’s long and exceptionally tight grip on power.
Stalin had embraced Marxism-Leninism as an adolescent while studying at the Tiflis Theological Seminary in the late 1890s. He declared himself an atheist and took on communism as his faith with all of the zeal (and ultimately the ruthlessness) of a convert. He refused to sit his final exams in May 1899, and by June 1907 his devotion to the Communist cause was such that he organized the spectacular robbery of 341,000 rubles (the modern equivalent of $3.6 million) from the Imperial Russian State Bank in central Tiflis, in which forty people were killed and fifty injured. It made headline news around the world. Although the Bolsheviks specifically outlawed such actions in their constitution, and Stalin, therefore, always officially denied involvement, it had been his heist, and after it he recognized an enhanced respect from his comrades.
We too often tend to ignore or at least downgrade the importance of ideology in Communist regimes because the lexicon is hard to decipher, the concepts and phraseology are fundamentally very boring and complex—indeed, they can make the theological controversies of seventeenth-century England seem fascinating and straightforward—and of course they bear no relation to the realities of everyday life as it is lived by millions of people. Yet to the Bolsheviks themselves, ideology was everything, and at the heart of it all was the class struggle. As Stalin put it in a speech in July 1928:
It has never been seen and never will be seen that a dying class surrenders its positions voluntarily without attempting to organize resistance. . . . The advance towards socialism cannot but cause the exploiting elements to resist the advance, and the resistance of the exploiters cannot but lead to the inevitable sharpening of the class struggle.5
Nikita Khrushchev used to say that Stalin “was incorruptible and irreconcilable in class questions. It was one of his greatest qualities, and he was greatly respected for it.”6
Part of Stalin’s disastrous mismanagement of prewar Russian foreign policy, which allowed him completely to miss the buildup to Operation Barbarossa, lay in his total faith in Marxism-Leninism. He genuinely believed that there was little to choose between the capitalist countries of Germany, Italy, America, France, and Britain, despite the bacillus of fascism’s having infected the first two but not the last three. Because under Marxist-Leninist thought capitalism inevitably leads to imperialism and thus fascism, Stalin was unable or unwilling intellectually to differentiate between the actions of Nazi Germany and the “bourgeois” West, leaving him open to be duped into the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact of August 1939, which partitioned Poland and allowed Hitler a free hand in the West to crush France. Because his ideology declared wars between the capitalist powers to be endemic and something to be encouraged, he assumed that the pact would allow the Soviet Union to become what he called “the laughing third man in a fight,” while the capitalist-imperialist powers destroyed each other.7
Within two years this woeful rigidity had left the USSR wide open to the largest invasion in the history of mankind, when Hitler unleashed more than three million soldiers across the borders of the Soviet Union, in more than 160 divisions. Russia was appallingly unprepared for the onslaught; the fortifications in the west of the country were still in the early stages of construction and the Red Army was stationed too far west. Illustrating his naïveté regarding Hitler, on the very day that the German invasion swept eastward, trains carrying oil and grain were going westward from Russia to Germany in fulfillment of the provisions of the Nazi-Soviet Pact. There is some irony in the fact that Stalin didn’t trust anyone—except the least trustworthy man in the world, Adolf Hitler.
Stalin’s refusal to accept that the Germans were going to attack, despite some eighty detailed warnings from Churchill and the Comintern’s own spy networks—his spy Richard Sorge even gave him the correct day, June 22, 1941, for the invasion—meant that 80 percent of the Soviet air force was wiped out in the western regions before it even had a chance to get off the ground. The Russian armed forces weren’t even fully mobilized after Hitler attacked, because Stalin did not want to be seen to be provoking him, despite the buildup over the previous months on Russia’s borders.
In 1937 Stalin had moved against the one organization that he would later need most to defeat Germany—the Red Army—executing three of its five marshals, fifteen of its sixteen army commanders, sixty of the sixty-seven corps commanders, and all seventeen commissars. Marshal Mikhail Tukhachevsky was the model of the modernizing, thoughtful military reformer, but Stalin had him shot on trumped-up charges, along with tens of thousands of colonels and other officers whose loss he could ill afford four years later. Although the Red Army was the only institution of the state that could organize a coup against him, there is no indication whatever that it was planning to, and his purge of it was wildly overdone, given the darkening international situation. Stalin knew perfectly well that these Red Army officers were loyal to the Communist Party and that the treason charges against them were baseless. Some future marshals were imprisoned, tortured, but not shot, such as Konstantin Rokossovsky, who had his fingernails pulled out and several ribs broken during interrogations. When Stalin reappointed him to high command in 1941 he asked him where he had been, while knowing the answer perfectly well. Rokossovsky told his daughter that the reason that he always carried a revolver with him was so that he could never be arrested again.
In May 1926 the Soviet military rode on maneuvers on bicycles because they had so few tanks; in 1940 they had been effectively defeated by tiny Finland. After the Red Army massacres, it was small wonder that Russia was so unprepared for Hitler’s invasion. The genesis of this disastrous policy can be seen in Stalin’s idiotically isolationist speech to the 18th Party Congress in March 1939, in which he urged the Communist Party “to be cautious and not allow Soviet Russia to be drawn into conflicts by warmongers who were accustomed to have others pull the chestnuts out of the fire,” i.e., the capitalist powers of the West.8 Instead, right across the vast Russian empire Stalin created abattoirs for humans, supervising everything down to the best foliage to grow over the mass graves. “If only Stalin knew what was going on” was a frequent cry heard by Russians at each heartless new atrocity, yet Stalin knew precisely what was going on. It was he, or occasionally he and V. I. Molotov, his foreign minister, who drew up the lists for torture and execution, often entirely at random because it was the arbitrariness and the vast numbers that mattered in creating the Great Terror by which he ruled. The way that he was somehow personally absolved of the horrors was reminiscent of the way that many Germans similarly absolved Hitler of responsibility for his country’s fate before 1945. The plain fact is that over a decade of relentless totalitarian propaganda glorifying the leader worked, in both Hitler’s and Stalin’s cases.
When he was told about the German invasion shortly after dawn on June 22, 1941, Stalin could not believe the news and said that it must have been due to a conspiracy in the Wehrmacht, adding that “Hitler surely doesn’t know about it.”9 He ordered Molotov to ask Friedrich von Schulenburg, the German ambassador, for clarification. Marshals Semyon Timoshenko and Georgy Zhukov—both of whom had been kept in the dark about intelligence reports warning of Barbarossa—implored Stalin for permission to take immediate countermeasures, but even once Stalin had been informed that the German government had indeed officially declared war he still continued to stipulate that Soviet ground forces should not infringe German territorial integrity. (It was hardly a difficult instruction for the Russians to adhere to.) As Stalin’s biographer Robert Service has written, “A military calamity had occurred on a scale unprecedented in the wars of the twentieth century.”10 The Germans penetrated hundreds of miles in days, captured three and a half million prisoners in a matter of weeks, and reached the outlying Moscow subway stations in less than four months.
Stalin was unable to focus his mind on anything on the morning of the invasion, and he let Molotov make the rallying address to the nation at noon. Visitor books and meeting agendas show Stalin hard at work consulting the military high command later that day, however, and a new high command, the Stavka, was established the next day, the twenty-third of June. Because of the military disasters taking place, Marshal Timoshenko was appointed its chairman by Stalin, who also refused the position of supreme commander de jure while of course retaining it de facto.
On June 29, 1941—one week into the invasion—Stalin suddenly disappeared from view and withdrew to his dacha outside Moscow, not taking calls or giving orders, as the western front continued to collapse under the German onslaught. Was he doing what Ivan the Terrible had once done when he withdrew to a monastery, in order to underline his own indispensability? Or had he suffered a debilitating collapse in morale, or even a mental breakdown, as some historians have surmised? We cannot know; certainly Stalin never spoke of it later.
After four days, five key figures in the politburo and Stavka—Molotov, Georgy Malenkov, Marshal Kliment Voroshilov, Anastas Mikoyan, and the NKVD chief of secret police Lavrenti Beria—drove out to the dacha to find out what was going on. There they found Stalin slumped in an armchair. The way that he muttered “Why have you come?” implied to Mikoyan that Stalin feared that they were going to arrest him. Molotov said they needed a new State Committee of Defense to coordinate Russia’s fightback. A suspicious Stalin asked who would chair it. Molotov proposed Stalin himself, which elicited the single word: “Good.” From fearing a coup that would inevitably have cost him his life to being declared chairman of the key defense committee was a fine result for Stalin.
Thereafter Stalin operated a complex chain of command, principally made up of the Stavka, the politburo, and the State Committee of Defense, the last of which had dual military and civilian connections and frequently changing personnel. He consigned some key individuals—such as Russia’s greatest soldier of the war, Marshal Zhukov—to operational and staff appointments in turn. His motive was to ensure that no one other than he should have an overall view of the war’s progress, but he was also influenced by czarist military practice, which had a separate imperial and army staff, and the Leninist principle of the party always having the leading role in every aspect of society.
Stalin finally spoke to the nation on July 3, the first of only nine public wartime speeches that he delivered of any length. In this he was much more like Hitler—who gave only one public speech during the whole of the calendar year 1944—rather than Churchill, who made several hundred speeches during the war, and President Roosevelt, who delivered weekly fireside chats over the radio as well as States of the Union speeches in Congress and press conferences in the Oval Office. Nor did Stalin write in Pravda or the other newspapers, continuing his practice of never permitting his name to be attached to articles that he had not written himself. He did not authorize any new photographs of himself and was almost completely reclusive during the war except for the annual October Day parades at the Kremlin. This sense of mystique helped his image enormously. Time magazine made him its Man of the Year for both 1939 and 1942.
Stalin did not take over the chairmanship of the Stavka until August 8, 1941, by which time he had had the commander of the western front, Dmitri Pavlov, shot, although this time there was no show trial, torture, or forced confession. Voltaire had joked at the time of the execution of Admiral Byng that the British executed their commanders “pour encourager les autres” (“to encourage the others”) but with Stalin it was literally true. Yet he could be just as harsh toward his own family. Stalin’s son Yakov, a lieutenant in the 14th Armored Division, was captured near Vitebsk in July 1941, whereupon Stalin had Yakov’s wife, Yulia, arrested and interrogated. Because all Russians had been ordered to fight to the death, anyone who had become a prisoner of war became legally a traitor to the Soviet Union, and their families were treated as “traitor-families,” so Stalin was merely treating his son’s family according to his own merciless rules, without favor. Later in the war he refused to exchange his son for Field Marshal Paulus, who had been captured at Stalingrad in February 1943, saying that he would not exchange a field marshal for a lieutenant, and in April 1943 Yakov was shot for refusing to obey a prison guard at the Sachsenhausen concentration camp, although there are other versions of how he died, too, including that he deliberately walked into an electric fence, a case of suicide by attempted escape. Yet Stalin was not heard denouncing Nazi brutality during the conflict. He knew this was war to the knife, in which horrific ill treatment of prisoners of war would be routine on both sides and the Geneva Convention completely ignored.
Stalin took relatively few strategic decisions during the war, but when he did overrule Zhukov and Timoshenko it tended to lead to larger Russian losses. He ordered Kiev to be defended to the last man in 1941, for example. “How can you even think of giving up Kiev to the enemy?” he said to Zhukov, the chief of staff, at one Stavka meeting, accusing him of speaking nonsense. “If you think the Chief of Staff can’t talk anything but absolute nonsense,” Zhukov bravely replied in the third person, “he’s got no business here.”11 Kiev fell anyway, on September 19, after far more loss of life than was necessary. Robert Service is right when he says that in his refusal to contemplate strategic withdrawals, Stalin “acted like a military ignoramus just as he had been proved a diplomatic one in mid-1941.”12
Most military historians believe that Russia could have won the war with far fewer than the 13 million servicemen’s and -women’s deaths that it was to suffer between 1941 and 1945. On July 28, 1941, Stalin signed Order No. 227, titled “Not a Step Backward!,” which stated that any retreat without direct sanction from the Kremlin would be treated as treason and thus punishable by death. During the Battle of Stalingrad alone, some 13,500 Russian soldiers—almost an entire division—were shot by the NKVD for cowardice, even though men were sent into battle without rifles, being told to pick up those dropped by the men who had been killed in front of them. Yet it is worth considering whether such a war would have been won had Stalin, Zhukov, and the others not been such tough, utterly pitiless men who took little or no notice of the numbers of casualties. Stalin of course was inured to such numbers from his mass purges of the 1930s, and it may be that without such extreme sanctions, no one would have come forward to fight under such terrible conditions and against such odds.
After the Battle of Stalingrad was won—not least by Marshal Rokossovsky’s successfully encircling the besieging forces in Operation Uranus in mid-November 1942—Stalin did not visit the city; indeed, he hardly ever left the Kremlin and his dacha, except to go to the Tehran and Yalta conferences. He never left the Soviet Union to attend Allied conferences except at Tehran in November 1943. As Marshal Biryunov recalled of the supreme commander, “Not once did his eyes behold a soldier in combat.”13 The closest he ever got was to within forty miles of the Minsk front in 1942, although Pravda entirely untruthfully reported him making key decisions on the front line there.
“Stalin himself was not the bravest of men,” recalled Mikoyan, at least once Stalin was safely dead. Nikolai Voronov, commander of the Red Army artillery between 1941 and 1950, added, “I saw Stalin seldom in the first days of the war. He was depressed, nervous and off-balance. When he gave assignments, he demanded that they be completed in an unbelievably short time, without considering real possibilities. In the first weeks of the war, in my opinion, he misconceived the scale of the war, and the forces and equipment that could actually stop the advancing enemy on a front stretching from sea to sea.”14
“The reality of war for him,” as Robert Service writes of Stalin, “was his conversations with Zhukov, his inspection of maps and the orders he shouted down the telephone line at frightened politicians and commanders.”15 He was the ultimate coordinator, but he generally didn’t interfere with military dispositions after it became clear that Zhukov and the other senior marshals knew better than the senior politicians what they were doing. He would set up debates in the Stavka between experts without letting on which side he supported, which is a sensible management technique whether you are a dictator or not. He certainly stimulated production impressively: In the last six months of 1942 the USSR built fifteen thousand aircraft and thirteen thousand tanks. The all-purpose Soviet T-34 tank wasn’t as good as the panzers ranged against it, but the sheer numbers of them that were produced meant that it won the Battle of Kursk in July 1943. As Stalin is supposed to have once remarked, “In the end, enough quantity becomes quality.”
Less applicable today was Stalin’s other management technique of constantly threatening to shoot underlings. To Nikolai Baibakov, who was in charge of evacuating the Caucasian oil installations, he said, “Bear in mind that if you leave the Germans even one ton of oil, we’ll shoot you. But if you destroy the installations prematurely and the Germans don’t grab them and we’re left without oil, we’ll also shoot you.” Baibakov somehow steered through this shooting range and died in 2008. When General Alexander Stepanov, the army commissar on the western front, suggested moving the staff headquarters eastward from Perkhushkovo in October 1941, the following conversation took place:
STALIN: Comrade Stepanov, find out whether your comrades have got spades.
STEPANOV: What’s that, Comrade Stalin?
STALIN: Do the comrades have spades?
STEPANOV: Comrade Stalin, what kind of spades do you mean: the type used by sappers or some other?
STALIN: It doesn’t matter which type.
STEPANOV: Comrade Stalin, they’ve got spades! But what shall they do with them?
STALIN: Comrade Stepanov, pass on to your comrades that they should take their spades and dig their own graves. . . . Stavka will remain in Moscow. And you are not moving from Perkhushkovo.16
Yet it was not true that the Stavka would necessarily stay in Moscow. On October 18, 1941, Stalin even had his personal train made ready to spirit him out of Moscow and go behind the Urals. If that had happened, and once it became known despite the official news blackout, the collapse in Russian morale might well have allowed the Wehrmacht to win the war in the east. Somehow, however, the Russians hung on in Moscow and also Leningrad, even though Leningrad was subjected to a grueling nine-hundred-day siege where there were incidents of cannibalism.
In 1997 the Finnish-based historian Albert Axell published a book titled Stalin’s War: Through the Eyes of His Commanders for which he tape-recorded interviews with thirty of Stalin’s surviving combat generals. “No excuses were accepted for slipshod work and penalties could be very severe,” Axell wrote. “Stalin never forgave carelessness in work or failure to finish a job properly,” recalled Marshal Aleksandr Vasilevsky, who had almost daily contact with Stalin during the war, “even if this happened with a highly indispensable worker without a previous blemish on his record.”17 Yet he would also look into the day-to-day problems of the army; when Marshal Kirill Maretsov told Stalin that his officers had nowhere to meet their wives and girlfriends for conjugal visits, Stalin had houses specially built for the purpose. Told that a bomb had fallen on the general staff’s kitchens, Stalin ordered three sandwiches per person per day to be brought them in baskets. These kinds of small things were remembered by the generals, who were almost uniformly positive about Stalin’s leadership even forty years after his death. (Of course they were hardly a statistically valid market sample, because they were the ones who had survived.)
Stalin’s political decisions as a war leader were vital in strengthening Russian morale. He allowed an element of market economics to encourage peasants to sell vegetables to alleviate urban malnutrition; he permitted Anna Akhmatova’s poems and Dmitri Shostakovich’s Seventh Symphony to be broadcast; he dropped “The Internationale” as the national anthem for something more Russian and less cosmopolitan (which also contained a verse praising him); he met Acting Patriarch Sergei and opened Russian Orthodox churches after decades of imprisoning and killing priests; and he abolished the Comintern, the international Communist organization, while of course keeping iron control over foreign Communist parties by other means. Yet as soon as it was clear that Russia was going to win the war, he started to reimpose strict Marxism-Leninism; as early as 1942 it became illegal to praise American technology, for example.
Sir Frank Roberts, the British minister in Moscow between 1945 and 1947, wrote that “Roosevelt and Churchill were susceptible to Stalin because he did not fit the dictator stereotype of the time. He was not a demagogue; he did not strut in flamboyant uniforms. He was soft-spoken, well-organized, not without humour, he knew his brief—an agreeable façade concealing unknown horrors.”18 It was true that the marshal’s uniform that Stalin wore every day was not flamboyant, but the horrors were not entirely unknown to Roosevelt and Churchill. The massacre of twenty-two thousand members of the Polish officer corps in the Katyn Forest in April and May 1940 grew out of Stalin’s obsessive hatred of the Poles, at whose hands he had been humiliated in the Soviet-Polish War of 1920–21.
Once eastern Poland fell into Stalin’s hands in October 1939 as a result of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, the NKVD moved in to wipe out the Polish leadership and intelligentsia through incarceration and liquidation. In the Katyn Forest, Vasily Blokhin, Stalin’s much-practiced executioner in chief, personally shot seven thousand Poles in twenty-eight days, so many that he had to wear a leather butcher’s apron to protect his uniform from the blood and gloves because otherwise he would get blisters on his trigger finger. This won him a place in The Guinness Book of Records as the most prolific executioner in history. Once the Germans uncovered the corpses in 1943, first Churchill and then Roosevelt realized that Stalin was lying when he claimed the Poles had been massacred by the Nazis, a lie that the Russians admitted was untrue only in the year 1990. As Alan Bullock so comprehensively demonstrated in his Hitler and Stalin: Parallel Lives, the Nazis actually learned most of their repression techniques from the Bolsheviks.
Even though Stalin had wanted to preempt Hitler’s attack at Kursk in July 1943, he allowed himself to be outvoted by Zhukov, Vasilevsky, and Aleksei Antonov at the Stavka—the correct decision, as it turned out. In that sense, Stalin’s war leadership was closer to Churchill’s than to that of Hitler, who did not allow himself to be outvoted by expert opinion. Stalin also released Zhukov to be battlefield commander at Kursk while nevertheless having the homes of Zhukov, the greatest of his marshals, as well as Marshals Kliment Voroshilov and Semyon Budyonny bugged by the NKVD. He also seriously considered having the second-best Russian general of the war—Marshal Ivan Konev—shot soon after Barbarossa. Stalin encouraged intense rivalry among his generals, and as soon as the war was over he humiliated even Zhukov when he sent him into internal exile by giving him the lowly command of the military district of Odessa. It was not possible in a totalitarian dictatorship for the dictator to share glory any more than power, because the two have throughout history always been so closely allied. Even though Zhukov had no interest in or intention of overshadowing Stalin, his very presence in Moscow would have had that effect.
Stalin used the smoke screen provided by the war to commit major acts of racial genocide, against the Poles, Balts, Moldavans, and Bessarabians, the Volga Germans, the Crimean Tatars, the Chechens, and the Inguch. Just as this kind of terror had not started with the war, neither did it end with it. Stalin was planning a pogrom against Russian Jews, insinuating there was a doctors’ plot against him, when he fortuitously died in March 1953.
“DEAR WINSTON,” President Roosevelt wrote to Churchill on March 18, 1942, “I know you will not mind my being brutally frank with you when I tell you that I think that I can personally handle Stalin better than either your Foreign Office or my State Department. Stalin hates the guts of all your top people. He thinks he likes me better, and I hope he will continue to do so.”19 Proud of his ability to charm anybody, Roosevelt hoped to win Stalin over to his vision of a postwar partnership between the two coming superpowers. Just over three hundred letters were sent between Roosevelt and Stalin, the first from Roosevelt soon after Hitler had invaded the Soviet Union, and the 304th also by Roosevelt the day before he died in April 1945.
“When they are discussing American aid to the Soviet Union,” writes the historian Richard Overy of this correspondence, “they could be the managers of two large retail companies. Stalin’s prose throughout is utilitarian, his letters much briefer than Roosevelt’s, occasionally mendacious but most of the time simply economical with the truth.”20 Roosevelt wanted to give Russia massive economic and military help through Lend-Lease and he wanted to create a lasting peace based on the four powers: Russia, the USA, Britain, and China. He hoped to create a close personal rapport with Stalin, albeit not one that could approximate the one he had with Churchill.
Stalin meanwhile wanted the Lend-Lease aid presented as a gift with no strings attached; he wanted a second front as soon as possible and an equal say in the postwar world with America and Britain (like Churchill he could not see the relevance of China at the time). He also wanted total Soviet domination of Eastern Europe, especially when it became clear that there would not be a Soviet-occupied zone in Italy.
From the start of their correspondence, Roosevelt wanted to meet Stalin, possibly in Iceland and preferably without Churchill’s being present, so that he could establish a personal rapport. Instead, they first met at Tehran when Churchill was present, though Roosevelt and Stalin made teasing jokes at Churchill’s expense, in front of him. It is possible to see the Tehran Conference of November 1943 as the moment in modern history when the USSR first became a major player in global rather than merely regional affairs, an achievement that must be properly accredited to Stalin.
Stalin’s letters abound with his utter distrust of Roosevelt and the Americans. In 1944 and 1945, for example, he alleged that the U.S. Army was deliberately allowing the Germans to transfer troops against the Red Army; he insinuated that the Americans had given the Russians false intelligence on German plans; and he showed fury at any opposition to his plans to turn Poland into a satellite state. On December 27, 1944, he wrote to Roosevelt to complain that the Western Allies were effectively supporting Polish democrats, whom he characterized as “a criminal terrorist network against Soviet officers and soldiers on the territory of Poland: ‘We cannot reconcile with such a situation when terrorists instigated by Polish emigrants kill in Poland soldiers and officers of the Red Army, lead a criminal fight against Soviet troops who are liberating Poland, and directly aid our enemies, whose allies they in fact are.’”21 To describe Polish democrats as the allies of the Nazis shows Stalin’s mentality at the time, only two months before Yalta.
Similarly, Stalin never really acknowledged the vital help given to his armies by the Royal Air Force and the United States Army Air Force. “As you are aware,” Roosevelt wrote to Stalin in 1943, “we are already containing more than half the German Air Force in Western Europe and the Mediterranean.”22 Stalin was indeed aware but he was profoundly ungrateful; indeed, like Charles de Gaulle, he employed ingratitude as a weapon, believing, as he put it, that “gratitude is a dog’s disease.”23 Neither man felt he had anything to be grateful for. De Gaulle thought his time in London served Churchill’s and Roosevelt’s purposes. Similarly, Stalin’s Marxism-Leninism taught that if the capitalists accommodated the Soviet Union in anything at all it was solely because it was in their own interests—such as mollifying their domestic workers’ militancy or opening up new markets. So nothing ever needed to be given them in return. The constant “Niet” used by Maxim Litvinov, Molotov, and later Andrei Gromyko was thus an ideological as much as a diplomatic statement. As soon as any ambassadors seemed to be showing gratitude to Western powers, such as Ivan Maisky in London, they were recalled.
As both Churchill and Roosevelt hailed from their countries’ aristocracy—the class that Stalin himself had largely succeeded in liquidating en masse inside Russia—and represented the bourgeoisie politically, Stalin was bound to perceive them as class enemies, because he saw absolutely everything through the prism of class warfare. Stalin told Marshal Tito that the only difference between Churchill and Roosevelt was that whereas Churchill would put his hand in your pocket to steal a kopeck—that is, one hundredth of a ruble—Roosevelt only bothered pickpocketing you for “larger coins.” In fact it was Stalin who had his hands deep into Western pockets, whether it was for the five thousand aircraft or the seven thousand tanks or the fifty million pairs of boots that America provided to the Russians gratis, on top of millions of tons of aluminum and grain. The historian Antony Beevor points out the great irony, though one rarely acknowledged by Russian historians, that had it not been for the tens of thousands of Studebaker and Dodge trucks that Roosevelt gave Stalin with no strings attached, the Red Army could not have reached Berlin before the Americans in 1945.24
Nonetheless, Churchill and Roosevelt, and their successors Clement Attlee and Harry Truman, suffered from a profound sense of blood guilt vis-à-vis the Soviets. Whereas Britain lost 388,000 and America 295,000 killed in the war, the Russians lost a staggering 27 million soldiers and civilians, nearly forty times as many as the United Kingdom and the United States combined. Very often it had been Stalin’s own strategy that had led to this huge number of deaths of course, but that did not lessen the sense of disparity felt by Western leaders.
Professor Kotkin is rightly at pains to point out that it was ideology rather than psychology that best explains Stalin’s actions. Stalin probably was not even beaten by his drunken cobbler father in Gori, and the same seminary that so radicalized him also turned out soft Mensheviks. It was in fact his struggle as a Bolshevik and devout Marxist in the life-or-death struggles before, during, and after the October Revolution that truly molded him. “Stalin’s marked personal traits,” writes Kotkin, “which colored his momentous political decisions, emerged as a result of politics.”25 Even his most pronounced personality trait, his chronic paranoia, in Kotkin’s correct estimation “closely mirrored the Bolshevik Revolution’s inbuilt structural paranoia, the predicament of a Communist regime in an overwhelmingly capitalist world.”
Stalin had once asked a victim about to be executed in 1937, “Can you explain your conduct by the fact that you have lost your faith?”26 For Marxism-Leninism was a faith for him, one that was far more powerful than the Christian one he had been taught in his seminary. It took someone deeply imbued in Marxist-Leninist dialectic theology to be able to believe both that capitalist imperialism was in its death throes and that it also posed a mortal threat to the USSR. Indeed, Leninism stated that the closer to death that capitalism became, the more rather than less dangerous it would become, and Stalin believed it implicitly. His last book was about his belief that it was the historic destiny of Marxism-Leninism to establish a utopian society peopled by the New Socialist Man (who seems uncannily like Hitler’s Übermensch Aryan superman).
Marxist-Leninist faith must carry much of the responsibility for the twenty-seven million Russians who died in the Great Patriotic War, on top of the untold millions more both before and after it. If Stalin had not been dictator of Russia in the 1930s its people and institutions would have been vastly stronger. Instead, Stalinism—which was not a perversion of communism, as modern Marxists try to argue, but rather the logical, final, and most highly developed stage of communism—gave Hitler his great opportunity.