Escorted by fighters, Major Otis Bryan flew the presidential party on the 650-mile flight to Tunis, tracing the North African coastline. Hopkins’s son Sergeant Robert Hopkins, a Signal Corps photographer, was waiting to greet them at the airfield.
The plan had been that Roosevelt would spend the night in General Eisenhower’s guest villa located just beyond the ruins of Carthage on the shore of the Gulf of Tunis. Before Eisenhower, the villa had been Field Marshal Erwin Rommel’s residence until he was routed by General Bernard Montgomery’s Eighth Army earlier in the year. In the morning FDR was scheduled to fly to Cairo, but the flight was delayed until late the next evening. The official explanation for the change was that flying at night was safer because the Germans still held the island of Crete. But it was also true that FDR was in no hurry to get to Cairo, no hurry to see Churchill, and if he stayed in Tunis, he could use the time getting to know General Eisenhower. The president had told everyone Marshall was going to command D-day, but he had actually not yet made up his mind. He used the day to tour battle sites with Eisenhower. Their car was driven by the general’s attractive young driver, Kay Summersby, who had been an ambulance driver during the London Blitz and, as a member of the British Mechanized Transport Corps, had been assigned to Eisenhower in 1942. Breaking for a picnic lunch near a grove of trees Roosevelt spotted, the three sat and talked. They were not exactly alone: three trucks and eight motorcycles manned by military police ringed the car at a distance, plus the usual Secret Service personnel. As the three inside relaxed and ate chicken sandwiches, FDR, remembered Summersby, told them stories and asked and answered questions: he was checking out the general.
At 10:40 that night, accompanied by generals, admirals, Secret Service men, Hopkins, Leahy, McIntire, and his valet, Arthur Prettyman, the president took off in the Douglas C-54 bound for Cairo, a flight of 1,851 miles. A rigged-up bed awaited him on the plane: a rubber mattress stretched across two seats from which the backs had been removed, closed off by a green curtain so that the president could sleep.
A clear, beautiful dawn was breaking as they approached the Egyptian coastline. Roosevelt had asked Bryan to detour southward, and Reilly to wake him at dawn, so that as it became daylight, he could follow the course of the Nile to Cairo and see the southernmost pyramids, the monuments, and the Sphinx. Reilly called him at 7:00 a.m. As the spectacle of the river unfolded and the monuments came into view, Major Bryan circled so that Roosevelt could get his fill of the majestic panorama. Commented Roosevelt after looking at the Pyramids, “Man’s desire to be remembered is colossal.”
It didn’t seem to bother him that because of his sightseeing proclivities the plane was more than two hours off schedule and the two groups of P-39s ordered to rendezvous with and guard his plane never found it. He was not overly concerned with physical danger.
It was said the only thing he was afraid of was fire. He had had plenty of exposure. As a child of three, he had been at his grandfather Delano’s house, Algonac, in Newburgh, New York, down the Hudson from Hyde Park, when his mother’s youngest sister, Laura, curling her hair too close to an oil lamp, flew down the steps and out onto the lawn, wrapped in a robe that was aflame. The family saw her and tried to help her, but it was too late, she couldn’t be saved. At the age of seventeen FDR helped the farm superintendent at Springwood tear up part of the floor in the parlor and throw water on the cellar beams, which were on fire. That same winter at Groton he was in the bucket brigade that tried to save a stable full of horses and remembered “a horrible scene…the poor horses…lying under the debris with their hide entirely burned off.” He was at Harvard when the top two floors of Trinity Hall burned. As editor of the Crimson, he fought for the installation of dormitory fire escapes. In 1915, when Springwood was rebuilt, he insisted that the walls be fireproof. At Shangri-La, the president’s wartime retreat in Catoctin Mountain Park in Maryland, he had an escape hatch built into the outer wall of his lodge near his bedroom door. It was hinged at the bottom to open outward, forming a ramp he could either be wheeled down and out or crawl down and out.
ROOSEVELT WAS TYPICALLY a curious traveler, always interested in seeing the places of which he had such detailed geographic knowledge. His deep, continuing interest in stamps, which he had started collecting when he was ten years old, both arose from and fueled his interest in geography. He now had more than a million stamps, collected in 150 matching volumes, which he worked on whenever he had a chance. Several volumes, always the heaviest items in his luggage, went with him wherever he went. The previous January when flying from Bathurst, Canada, to Casablanca, he had ordered a detour so that he could look at Dakar, the seaport on the westernmost tip of Africa that jutted out into the Atlantic and dominated the North and South Atlantic shipping lanes, so crucial to the Allied cause, that had caused such anguish until taken during Operation Torch.
In Cairo, FDR was lodged at a villa on a canal near the base of the Great Pyramid and the Sphinx belonging to Alexander Kirk, the American ambassador to Egypt. Churchill’s villa was a half mile distant. Because Cairo was filled with Axis spies and the city was seething with unrest, security was extreme. Reilly set up barbed-wire entanglements patrolled by troops twenty-four hours a day around both residences, closed down the tour guides and their camels at the Pyramids, and replaced the household servants at both villas with American and British mess staff.
Winston Churchill, Chiang Kai-shek (this would be his first meeting with the president), and Madame Chiang were waiting impatiently for FDR in Cairo. All three were looking forward to conferring with Roosevelt as well as his principal advisers, General Marshall, Admiral King, General Arnold, Admiral Leahy, and, of course, Hopkins. But if the meetings were of first importance to them, they were of secondary importance to Roosevelt, now that Molotov would not be present.
The Cairo Conference had been scheduled for a variety of reasons: to publicize the importance of China to the war effort, to allow Churchill and the British military to confer with Roosevelt and the American military establishment, and to give Molotov a taste of what was to come in Tehran. But another reason was the inescapable fact that it provided a cover for Tehran—a valid excuse for a long ocean voyage by the president in case Stalin did not show. Without the Russian presence, Robert E. Sherwood would later write, “aside from the declaration assuring the freedom and independence of Korea, the effect of these meetings on the progress of the war or on history was negligible.”
Churchill was pleased Molotov would not be present in Cairo. It was his view that the combined American and British chiefs of staff should decide on tactics and strategy before meeting the Russians. He was, therefore, planning on “many meetings” between the two staffs during the four days in Cairo, particularly because the Combined Chiefs had not met in more than three months. He wanted, in essence, to erect a wall, with the president and himself on one side and Stalin on the other. That was exactly what Roosevelt did not want. He had warned the prime minister politely a few days prior to the meeting that he was going to limit discussions as to strategy as much as possible, because “it would be a terrible mistake if U.J. [Roosevelt and Churchill sometimes referred to Stalin as Uncle Joe between themselves] thought we had ganged up on him on military action.” Roosevelt was carefully, but systematically, limiting the ties, not of friendship, but of partnership, with Churchill; the prime minister fought against it, as did the British foreign secretary, Anthony Eden.
In Roosevelt’s mind Great Britain was on a par with his other two allies, China and Russia: he was supreme. He therefore avoided having the opening Cairo Conference be a joint Anglo-American meeting by the simple expedient of inviting Chiang Kai-shek to attend. He also instructed Marshall, Leahy, and King that he wanted their meeting with Chiang to be separate from and precede any meeting with the British. Anthony Eden later painfully described the situation to the British War Cabinet: “It was unfortunate from our point of view that the Conference in Cairo opened with a discussion of the Japanese war on account of the presence of Chiang Kai-shek.”
Roosevelt conferred with Chiang at length. (Britain still had extraterritorial rights to Shanghai, Canton, and Hong Kong; Chiang wanted British warships out of Chinese ports after the war; FDR promised him “that’s what will happen.”) Chinese matters, Churchill later complained, “lengthy, complicated and minor…occupied first instead of last place at Cairo.” So devious was Roosevelt that the U.S. staff floated comments that led the British to believe, remembered Lord Ismay, Churchill’s chief of staff, that the Chinese had arrived before they were meant to, which was not the case. “The American chiefs of staff, so far from upset by the premature arrival of the Chinese delegation, seemed positively pleased to have a chaperone,” Ismay observed.
IT WAS NO SECRET to any member of the American military staff that Churchill did not favor Operation Overlord, the invasion of France, or that Roosevelt relied almost exclusively on Marshall’s advice, and that the central tenet of Marshall’s European war plan was Operation Overlord. Roosevelt had chosen Marshall in April 1939 because he was smart, like himself an independent thinker, and had a reputation, dating from World War I, for speaking his mind. Without consulting anyone, even his then secretary of war, Harry Woodring, Roosevelt decided to jump Marshall over the four generals who outranked him and make him chief of staff.
Roosevelt liked to meet with his Sunday and evening visitors in his oval study on the second floor of the White House. He used the room a great deal; it was convenient and easy for him, because his bedroom was next door. The room was handsome and informal, with books piled high on some tables, models of famous sailboats resting on others. Besides his desk there was a scattering of comfortable chairs and a big leather sofa where FDR sat when he had company. In front of the sofa was a tiger rug. Prints and paintings of the great sailing vessels of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries lined the walls—a small part of his collection of more than twelve hundred naval prints and paintings. It was the room of someone who loved the sea. Behind the desk was a sheaf of roll-out maps, set so that Roosevelt could pull them out. The two women who bookended his life were also present: the portraits of his wife and his mother faced each other on opposite walls.
On a Sunday in April 1939, Roosevelt summoned Marshall to the room to tell him he was making him chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Marshall, a rather stiff, formal man, said he replied that he “wanted the right to say what I think and it would often be unpleasing. ‘Is that all right?’ He said, ‘Yes.’ ”
From Roosevelt’s point of view Marshall was ideal for the job: he was not only independent but indefatigable, efficient, and dedicated. His word was rarely questioned because it was conceded that he was always right. The announcement of his appointment was made on September 1, 1939, the day Germany invaded Poland.
Marshall was sure that the way to beat Hitler was to build up Allied forces in England, ferry them across the channel, invade France, and march on to Berlin. It was the shortest route and would result in the fewest casualties. Secretary of War Henry Stimson agreed. Roosevelt fully backed the plan, code-named Overlord, which had been in the planning stages for two years. Stalin had been led to believe that it would take place in 1942 or 1943.
Churchill, by contrast, could be said to be lukewarm at best on the cross-channel operation; he wanted to attack through the Balkans. He also, according to his doctor, who was his confidant, was haunted by memories of the Battle of the Somme in World War I, during which so many British soldiers had died.
When the Combined Chiefs finally sat down together without the president and the prime minister at Cairo, the subject of their talks was almost exclusively the war in Asia. General Ismay complained that “there was no time left to reach agreement as to the exact line which should be taken with the Russians about a Second Front in Europe.” That was Roosevelt’s plan. Roosevelt’s circle had learned this technique from their chief. The president used it when he wanted to stifle debate without seeming to and reach consensus where there was contention. At a meeting he would simply preempt the conversation or perhaps introduce a new subject, dawdle along, talking about various things, or even tell stories, in order to compress the decision into the final moments of a meeting. Then, for lack of time, the decision he wanted, even if unpopular or unexpected, could not be challenged.
Churchill attempted to hide his lack of enthusiasm for the cross-channel invasion from Hopkins, but he wasn’t subtle enough. “Winston said he was a hundred per cent for OVERLORD. But it was very important to capture Rome, and then we ought to take Rhodes,” Hopkins noted mockingly, two days before they were due to arrive in Tehran.
Hopkins would probably not have been surprised to learn that the British plan, according to Major General Sir John Kennedy, assistant chief of the imperial general staff, was “to continue the offensive in Italy, to increase the flow of supplies to partisans in the Balkans, to bring about an upheaval by inducing the Balkan powers to break away from Germany, to induce Turkey to enter the war, and to accept a postponement of OVERLORD.” (Kennedy would also write, “Had we had our way, I think there can be little doubt that the invasion of France would not have been done in 1944.”)
Churchill had been arguing incessantly and obdurately against Overlord for another reason: he mistrusted Stalin. As he had explained to Averell Harriman earlier in the year, “Stalin’s unrelenting pressure for a second front in 1943 sprang from his designs on the Balkans. What better way to keep the Western Allies from landing in the Balkans than to tie them down in a long and costly battle for Western Europe?”
He had been very effective thus far in postponing Overlord. His dogged pursuit of divergent war plans was actually a tactic: to engage in battles that would tie up Allied troops and the crucial landing craft—basically anywhere—so they wouldn’t be available for the cross-channel invasion.
Roosevelt, used to arguing with Churchill, left Cairo in high good humor but on guard, as is apparent in the note he wrote to his secretary, Grace Tully, the day after Thanksgiving: “The Conference goes fairly well—my role is that of peacemaker. I’ve seen the Pyramids & made close friends with the Sphinx. Congress should know her.”
All of this set the stage for Tehran.
The president wasn’t sure where he was going to live in Tehran or how long he would stay: both things depended on Stalin. He was going beyond caution in being so accommodating so that Stalin would have no excuse to back out. The morning he arrived in Cairo, Monday, November 22, Roosevelt had sent Stalin a message that he would reach Tehran on November 29 and would “remain for two to four days depending upon how long you can find it possible to be away from your compelling responsibilities.” He had then asked that Stalin let him know “what day you wish to set for our meeting” and commented that the Soviet legation and the British legation in Tehran were situated near each other “whereas my legation is some distance away,” which would mean driving to and fro and thus “taking unnecessary risks.” At the end of the message Roosevelt had posed a seemingly casual but sharp question, fishing for an invitation to stay at the Russian embassy as Stalin’s guest. “Where do you think we should live?” he asked.
This was a charmingly audacious strategy: to show his confidence in Stalin by putting himself in Stalin’s hands, hoping to win his trust as quickly as possible. He could, of course, have stayed at the British embassy if it was merely a matter of security considerations. Churchill had already asked him to do just that and would have been thrilled if he had agreed. But because FDR intended to present himself to Stalin as a unique and trustworthy leader, and America as the major force in the world, he wanted to make sure that he was perceived as standing alone: he had refused. He didn’t want the prime minister of Great Britain, the former secretary in charge of the colonies of the greatest colonial empire in the world, wound round his neck like a millstone. That was why Roosevelt had started the “distancing” in Cairo, serving notice on the British there that he expected to have a free hand in Tehran—behavior that was causing Churchill considerable anguish.
THE PRESIDENTIAL PARTY drove to the Cairo West Airport, waited until a light fog lifted, and took off a little after 7:00 a.m. Major Bryan then flew the thirteen hundred miles east to Tehran over the Suez Canal and circled twice at a low altitude over Jerusalem while FDR pointed out prominent landmarks. They flew over Bethlehem, Jericho, the river Jordan, the Dead Sea, flew over the desert that was Palestine, flew east, and descended again over the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers. Then Bryan turned northeast, circled Baghdad, and headed for Iran. Once in Iranian airspace they saw below them the U.S.-staffed freight trains on the Trans-Iranian Railroad carrying Lend-Lease supplies, as well as American and British convoys carrying more American Lend-Lease supplies over the Abadan–Tehran highway that ran from Basra on the Persian Gulf to Tehran. More than a hundred thousand tons a month were moving to Russia through Iran.
Tehran, the capital of Iran, lies in the southern foothills of the Alborz Mountains, which run parallel to the Caspian Sea and rise to almost nineteen thousand feet.
The previous January, about to fly over the Atlas Mountains on the way to the Casablanca Conference, Ross McIntire had wanted Roosevelt, who suffered from chronic sinusitis, to put on his oxygen mask, but fearing that if he asked him to, the president would refuse, McIntire had resorted to trickery: he enlisted the aid of Admiral McCrea, asking him to put on his face mask, after which he would put on his own, explaining, “If I suggest it to him, he probably won’t do it. However if he sees us with ours on, he’ll probably follow suit.” The subterfuge had worked, FDR had reached for his oxygen mask, “and away we went over the mountains.”
Now, as they approached Tehran and saw the mountains encircling the city, McIntire was ready to reach for an oxygen mask, but the perfect visibility enabled Bryan to stay under six thousand feet and successfully snake his plane through the twisting mountain passes.
The plane landed at the Russian army field, Gale Morghe, five miles south of the city, on Saturday, November 27, 1943, at 3:00 p.m. Exiting the plane, the presidential party saw that the field was “covered” with newly arrived U.S. Lend-Lease planes, each sporting a huge, shiny red Soviet star. The airfield was ringed with Iranian soldiers, but in the interests of security Major General D. H. Connolly, commanding general of the Persian Gulf Service Command, stood alone on the tarmac to greet the president’s plane and usher him and his party into a car for the ride to the American legation.
The American legation was fully prepared, expecting to house FDR and his party. The American diplomatic community, including Louis G. Dreyfus, the U.S. minister to Iran, had been kept in the dark as to the upcoming conference until the very last moment. Dreyfus had returned from a trip to find soldiers installing a new telephone system in the complex and army tents on the legation lawn. He had then been told the president was coming, that the president would stay at the legation, and that he had to move out.
Roosevelt made the long, dangerous trip to Tehran to get to know Stalin, and for that plan to work, it was important to distance himself from Churchill and retain the uniquely positive impression the Russians had of him. As the New Deal president, Roosevelt had won the approval of Pravda, and of Stalin, from the start of his presidency. FDR had ignored the anti-Communist sentiment endemic in America and forced the recognition of the Soviet Union by the United States the year he took office. Stalin had been waiting fourteen years for that to happen. Now FDR was intent on clearly and painstakingly demonstrating to Stalin that the United States was on its own path and that he was playing his own hand. For that, he knew instinctively, details were important. Given the paranoid, suspicious personality he was dealing with, in retrospect it seems remarkably clever that Roosevelt went to such great lengths to start off the relationship on the right foot.
Roosevelt had sent Stalin the cable asking him where he should stay—essentially fishing for an invitation—only five days before he was due to arrive. It had gone out from the Map Room in Washington at 2:55 p.m. on November 22. The embassy delivered the cable to the Kremlin, which dated it as received on November 24 (no hour). It was then translated and delivered to Stalin, but two days had passed since it was sent. By that time Stalin was well on his way by train to Tehran, and the train was having serious communications problems.
In the meantime, Andrei Vyshinsky, the first assistant commissar for foreign affairs, called on the president and, possibly after a few hints, invited him to stay at the Russian embassy in Tehran. Vyshinsky, however, a small man with bright black eyes, horn-rimmed glasses, thinning reddish hair, and a mustache, had presided over the infamous Moscow show trials in 1936–38 and was notorious as “cringingly sycophantic” to his seniors. State Department and presidential records are silent as to their appraisal of him in Cairo, but it was obvious that the invitation did not have Stalin’s approval or the stamp of an official invitation. Nevertheless, the day after that, the twenty-fourth, Reilly had walked through the Russian embassy as well as the British and U.S. embassies to check security issues and suitability. The Russian and British embassies not only were in the center of Tehran but had gardens back-to-back across the street from each other. Therefore, with a fence thrown up across the street, the two embassies could be connected. The American legation, a mile away, was pronounced “adequate” by Reilly. He said the route to the other embassies presented no security problems, although distance would later be cited as the main reason that Roosevelt stayed in the Russian compound. (The traffic in Tehran was indeed horrendous. The streets were thronged with people, cars, and horse-drawn droshkies, slowing traffic to a crawl.) “We have made no commitments as to a residence for the president,” Reilly stated. “He can stay at the U.S., the British, or the Russian embassy, if invited.”
The British embassy would probably have been the least comfortable of the three, judging by Lord Ismay’s description of it as “a ramshackle house built by the Indian Public Works Department.”
Major General Patrick Hurley, former secretary of war, distinguished looking, a smooth talker, whom Roosevelt had appointed minister to New Zealand, was in Tehran as Roosevelt’s personal representative. He cabled FDR on Friday morning, November 26, to say that the Russian chargé d’affaires, Mikhail Maximov, had actually come through with a formal invitation to stay: “The Russian Government cordially invites you to be its guest at its embassy while here.” However, as the invitation still lacked Stalin’s imprimatur, it was refused.
Upon inspection, Hurley found that the conference location and Roosevelt’s possible living quarters were both located in the main embassy building of the Soviet compound, which included several smaller buildings. It was a large, handsome, square building, built of light brown stone, fronted by a wide portico with white Doric columns. It stood in the center of a large park that contained a lake, fountains, flower beds, and a network of walking paths. Hurley pronounced it as ideal a place for Roosevelt to stay as could be found in Tehran. It had the additional attribute of being the only building heated by steam in the entire city; portable oil stoves served for all other buildings. This was an important consideration because the days were mild but the nights cold. It had a pleasant vista, with windows fronting on the cedars, willows, and ponds of the embassy gardens that surrounded it. The quarters earmarked for the president consisted of a large bedroom, a sitting room next to the conference room that would be the main venue for the meetings, a large dining room, a kitchen deemed adequate for the Filipino mess boys from Shangri-La who prepared the president’s meals, plus a few smaller bedrooms.
The Russians, in fact, had gone to a great deal of trouble fixing up the residence for FDR. All Soviet personnel who worked in the office buildings and lived in the apartments on the grounds had been ordered to take their belongings and move to other quarters in the city by the evening of November 17. Worried that Roosevelt’s wheelchair would not fit through ordinary doorways, they had torn out and widened all the door openings where Roosevelt might pass. The bathroom was undergoing major changes, Hurley saw. The bathtub, toilets, and sinks had been ripped out; new ones, in evidence, were waiting to be installed. If Roosevelt had known earlier in the month of the work that had been going on, of the meticulous preparations that had started the first of the month and gone into high gear by mid-November, he would have been less worried.
Hurley reported, “From the standpoint of your convenience and comfort, from the standpoint of conference communications and security, these quarters are far more desirable than your own legation.” He gave the Russians a list of the furnishings FDR would need. However, even though the Russians, as he told the president, “still most cordially solicit your acceptance of their invitation,” he advised the Russians that Roosevelt planned to stay in the American legation. The rooms weren’t ready. There was no word from Stalin.
ROOSEVELT AND HIS PARTY proceeded directly to the American legation, where Minister Dreyfus and Hurley awaited. In the afternoon Admiral Brown and Dreyfus went to the Soviet embassy, where they were met by the chargé d’affaires, Maximov, who told them that he himself had not yet heard from the marshal. With all the Russians virtually paralyzed by Stalin’s lack of input, Brown and Dreyfus retreated, saying that Roosevelt would stay at his own legation. When told that Stalin had finally arrived, Roosevelt took the initiative. Seemingly confident that Stalin intended no slight in not responding to his wish to stay at the Russian embassy, he proceeded, through Harriman, to invite him to dinner; the marshal declined on the grounds that he had had a “strenuous” day and that it would be better to stay with the original plan and meet the following afternoon.
Roosevelt had, to borrow a phrase from John Maynard Keynes, the gift of instinctive judgment, and he was exhibiting it now.
STALIN HAD INDEED had a difficult trip. If he had not been interested in the shape of the postwar world and Russia’s place in it, which he expected to work out with Roosevelt, he would not have subjected himself to the ordeal: he hated to travel.
He had journeyed to Stockholm, London, and Berlin for party congresses as a young revolutionary, but his last trip outside the Soviet Union had been in 1913, when he had joined Lenin in Vienna. He had only visited the front once, although he intimated to Roosevelt and Churchill that he went often. Stalin rarely traveled beyond his dacha at Kuntsevo, about five and a half miles from the Kremlin, except to go to his dacha at Sochi, the showplace village perched in the foothills of the snow-peaked Caucasus Mountains on the edge of the Black Sea. Stalin had his winter vacation house there because of its famous sulfur baths. He was a hypochondriac, but he also suffered at various times from psoriasis, tonsillitis, occasionally from nephritis, pleurisy, and asthma, and, from his years of exile in Siberia, rheumatism. It was to deal with all his ailments that he spent so much time at Sochi: he was sure the Sochi waters and climate had a restorative effect on him. (It is possible that one reason he insisted on Tehran was that it would be a relief from snowbound Moscow.)
He left Moscow on the evening of November 22 in a special train camouflaged to look like an ordinary supply train. The long “saloon carriages” in which his party traveled were interspersed between freight cars carrying sand and gravel. Stalin’s carriage, a green armored bulletproof car that reputedly weighed ninety tons, consisted of his bedroom/study paneled in mahogany, with bed, desk, chair, and a mirror, a bathroom, three two-passenger bedrooms, a conference room, and a kitchen with an electric stove.
The advisers he had chosen to bring with him to the conference numbered exactly two—in startling contrast to the large numbers accompanying Roosevelt and Churchill.
The first was Vyacheslav Molotov, the second most important man in the Soviet Union, with whom he could discuss strategy and policy. Molotov was his most intimate adviser, usually with him in the Kremlin for hours each day, the only person with whom he used the familiar ty the equivalent of the French tu. Born Vyacheslav Mikhailovich Skriabin, following a practice common at the time, he adopted the name Molotov, “hammer” in Russian: people called him Stalin’s hammer.
Molotov had been at college in St. Petersburg when the revolution began; as order broke down, he became a bomb-making revolutionary. He had been arrested by the Okhrana, the tsar’s secret police, almost as many times as Stalin.
Molotov was deputy chairman of the State Defense Committee and commissar of foreign affairs. Stalin relied on him, but not to the extent Roosevelt relied on Hopkins. Molotov did not have the authority that Hopkins did to speak for his boss. Stalin never hesitated to overrule Molotov. “I always agree with Marshal Stalin,” said Molotov quickly to Eric Johnston, head of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, after Stalin overruled Molotov in Johnston’s presence and said correspondents could visit the front. “Mr. Molotov always agrees with me,” Stalin said, with a slight grin. As Sir Stafford Cripps, Britain’s ambassador to the Soviet Union in 1941, noted, Molotov wouldn’t even offer an opinion if he had not discussed it beforehand with Stalin: “We had a very unenlightening talk as always, as M will not commit himself without consultation even on matters of opinion…It really isn’t worth going to see him unless one sends a note beforehand so that he can get directions on it.”
Molotov and Stalin met putting out the first issues of the Bolshevik newspaper Pravda (Truth) in St. Petersburg in 1912. Stalin had been its first editor in chief. Molotov, only twenty-two, upon meeting him, had been bowled over. “He’s astonishing; he possesses internal revolutionary beauty, a Bolshevik to the marrow, clever, cunning as a conspirator,” he told a friend. He never lost his awe.
Molotov’s Kremlin office was near Stalin’s; his three-room apartment in the Kremlin was next door to Stalin’s. Stocky, with dark brown hair, brown eyes, rimless, round pince-nez, a mustache, and a square face, he always dressed in a neat dark suit, white shirt, and dark tie. Like Stalin, he was short. He rarely smiled. He was a workaholic, with the reputation of being the Politburo’s best filing clerk. George Kennan would write that he was the nearest thing known to a human machine. Churchill thought him Machiavellian because “he had lived and thrived in a society where ever-varying intrigue was accompanied by the constant menace of personal liquidation…He was above all men fitted to be the agent and instrument of the policy of an incalculable machine.” All agreed that he was reserved and hardworking. He spoke in a dull, stammering monotone, the stammer becoming more pronounced when Stalin was listening. Vladimir Pavlov, the interpreter Stalin most often used, preferred working for Stalin to Molotov: “It was easier…Stalin valued people who understood the issues under discussion, but simultaneously, were modest and did not try to distinguish themselves with their knowledge.” More important, according to Pavlov, was that not only did Molotov seem to enjoy dressing down his associates, but when one was denounced by the NKVD, he never attempted to defend the person, always immediately agreeing to an arrest. Still, at Stalin’s funeral, Molotov was the only pallbearer who cried. Communism was his religion, as it was Stalin’s. He had been in charge of the collectivization of the kulaks—Russian farmers who owned their land—who were offered a pittance for their crops. In protest, many resorted to burning their produce. (“The Kulaks are the most beastly, rude and wild exploiters. More than once in the history of other countries they have restored the power of the landowners, Tsars and corrupt priests,” Lenin had written.) Molotov had carried out and justified their annihilation and that of other resisting Russian and Ukrainian farmers whom Communist doctrine viewed as a capitalist class that had to be liquidated for the good of society. Once the farmers had been removed, they were replaced by party workers ignorant of farming techniques, which caused output to fall even more precipitously, putting even seed crops in short supply. The result of this experiment in social engineering had been the death from starvation of so many millions of Russians and Ukrainians that even Stalin had been appalled. “The Collective Farm policy was a terrible struggle…Ten millions…It was fearful. Four years it lasted; four years Molotov oversaw it. It was absolutely necessary for Russia, if we were to avoid periodic famines, to plough the land with tractors,” Stalin famously explained to Churchill. Collectivization finally did become more productive and dependable than traditional farming, but the toll had been huge.
In only one thing was Molotov unusual and vulnerable: his wife, who was slender, fashionable, and Jewish. Polina Zhemchuzhina, a lavish hostess before the war, had run the Soviet trust that manufactured and distributed cosmetics and toilet articles. Her job had been to show Russian women how to wear makeup. “My husband works on their souls, I on their faces,” she once said. (Just before he died, Stalin had Polina arrested and thrown in prison along with other Jews he suspected of Zionism; Molotov’s position did not change.)
The second conference adviser he had brought with him was Marshal Kliment E. Voroshilov, blond, blue-eyed, a genial and swaggering ex-cavalryman who sported an elegant mustache. A hero of the Russian Civil War and president of the Council of People’s Commissars, he had long been in Stalin’s good graces—he had roomed with Stalin in Stockholm in 1906—but he was more friend than adviser: “a good fellow but he is no military man,” as Stalin described him. There was no question of his loyalty, and Stalin felt comfortable in his company; he was one of the few surviving original members of the Politburo, the tight group of eight men and five alternates that ruled Russia. But he was no longer respected: Voroshilov had been commissar of defense when the Soviet Union invaded Finland in 1939. The Finns had acquitted themselves so brilliantly and the Red Army so miserably that he was removed from that post. After Hitler’s invasion Stalin made him commander in chief of the northwestern front, in charge of the defense of Leningrad. He was not up to that task, either. At one point, believing the future of the city looked hopeless, he was on the verge of surrendering, sure defeat was imminent.
Stalin had replaced him with Georgi Zhukov, who immediately took the necessary heroic measures. Zhukov, a brilliant general, stripped the guns off the Russian warships in the Baltic and repositioned them to help defend the city, energized the starving inhabitants, deployed the city’s defenses and resources, and finally saved Leningrad. The siege was lifted in January 1944. After Leningrad, Stalin cut the order “sending Comrade Voroshilov to do war work in the rear.” He would be dropped from the State Defense Committee later in 1944.
Voroshilov’s saving grace was probably his especially good singing voice. In the late nights when Stalin was in his cups, he loved to unwind by singing with Voroshilov and Molotov, who not only had a good voice but played the violin, the mandolin, and the piano. The three had been harmonizing until the early hours of mornings for years. Molotov was as essential to Stalin as Hopkins was to Roosevelt, but Voroshilov was the loyal court jester.
Also on the train was Lavrenti Beria, people’s commissar of internal affairs, better known as the head of the NKVD. He would take no part in the conference but bore the responsibility for Stalin’s personal security. Beria was an unsavory character. He was unattractive physically, “somewhat plump, greenish pale, and with soft damp hands” was one description. Averell Harriman’s daughter Kathleen wrote he was “little and fat with thick lenses which give him a sinister look.” Stalin’s daughter, Svetlana Alliluyeva, loathed him, as had her mother; while her mother was alive, Beria was not allowed in their house.
Also aboard the train were General Alexander Golovanov, the pilot who was to fly Stalin from Baku to Tehran; General Sergei Matveevich Shtemenko, later director of operations for the general staff, whose job it was to keep Stalin informed of all battle news; and Stalin’s physician, Professor Vinogradov.
Churchill and Roosevelt would be bringing the best of their country’s military staffs and civilian minds to Tehran. Except for Molotov, Stalin had left his in Russia. Stalin would explain this during the conference by saying that he had not expected military questions to be discussed, and therefore he had not brought his military experts with him, but “nevertheless Marshal Voroshilov would do his best.” Except for the plenary sessions, which were large, formal affairs, he would often be missing.
Fighter planes hovered over Stalin’s train during the journey. Three hours into the trip, having covered only fifty-four miles, the train stopped briefly at Golutvin station near the town of Ryazan’, where three men were discovered sitting on the train’s tender. They were apprehended, their identities were checked, and it was ascertained that they were common criminals hoping to hitch a ride in the darkness and had no knowledge of Stalin’s presence.
The train proceeded very slowly southward because there were constant problems. The rail equipment itself was in a terrible state; bearings kept melting down and the axle boxes burned; there was also the necessity of watching out for and repairing damaged rails as they crept through the devastated, war-torn landscape. The train crew had great difficulty keeping to the schedule. As the train stopped at Gryaz near the city of Lipetsk, German bombers suddenly emerged in the night sky. Soviet fighter pilots waited at their planes, ready to scramble, and anti-aircraft squads stood by their guns waiting to fire, as the bombers flew off into the distance.
Communications aboard the train were a major problem. As well as breaks in the rails, there were breaks in the telegraph wires, the result of warm, wet weather suddenly freezing into “glazed frost” that broke the wires, so that the secret telephone communication lines—the Kremlevka lines—gave only spotty service after Ryazan’. As the train proceeded south and approached Stalingrad, now reduced to rubble, where the fighting had been so violent and the devastation so widespread that 500,000 Russians and 200,000 Germans died, the train lost all contact with headquarters. Beria was so enraged he wanted to punish the “guilty” parties. The train arrived at Kilyazi station, fifty miles from Baku, on the Caspian Sea, the morning of the twenty-sixth. Stalin and his group immediately left for the airport. There, four American C-47s waited to fly them the 335 miles to Tehran. Stalin started walking to the plane designated for him, next to which his pilot, General Golovanov, stood, but as he walked, he changed direction, turning toward Beria’s plane. Beria’s pilot was a colonel, and “generals don’t often pilot aircraft, we’d better go with the Colonel,” Stalin said in explanation to Golovanov. “Don’t take it badly.”
It was a classic demonstration of Stalin’s paranoia: that it was safer to go with the pilot who flew all the time and safer also to change plans at the last moment to confound any possible conspirators.
The route, an hour by plane from Baku to Tehran, was over the shore of the Caspian Sea, then over the brown expanse of Azerbaijan, then over Tabriz with its scattered little mud houses. But Stalin did not, like Roosevelt, accommodate himself to plane travel. It is doubtful if he even looked out the window at the passing landscape, although he undoubtedly checked out the three formations of fighters, one to the left, one to the right, one above, because the flight was bumpy and Stalin was seriously uncomfortable. The plane dropped periodically into air pockets, and when it did, “he had clung to his armrests with an expression of utter terror on his face.”
Stalin arrived at Gale Morghe airfield at noon. Before exiting the plane, he chatted with the pilots; by way of thanks he sent each of them the new-style uniforms with epaulets marking their rank that he had ordered for the upper echelons of the Red Army earlier in the year. He wanted his air force pilots to look smart and well dressed.
Upon landing, he, too, would have seen the rows of P-39s that American Lend-Lease had given the Soviet Union, all sporting red stars. It is not known what kind of car awaited the marshal at the airport, but of the ten cars reserved for his use in Tehran, three were American: a special armored Packard, a special armored Lincoln, and a special armored Cadillac.
American technology was inescapable.