World War II Behind Closed Doors (24 page)

‘That is the only way’, said Stalin, making virtually his first positive remark in the meeting so far.

No doubt encouraged by the Soviet leader's response, Churchill launched into an almost bloodthirsty account of just what ‘more and more aeroplanes and bigger and bigger bombs’ could achieve. He added that ‘if need be, as the war went on, we hoped to shatter almost every dwelling in almost every German city’. ‘These words’, say the official minutes, ‘had a very stimulating effect upon the meeting, and thenceforward the atmosphere became progressively more cordial’.

Showing another deft politician's touch, Churchill attempted to redefine the concept of a second front. ‘What was a second front?’ he asked rhetorically. ‘Was it only a landing on a fortified coast opposite England? Or could it take the form of some other great operation which might be useful to the common cause?’ Against this background, he moved seamlessly into the one piece of good news he had to impart – that the Western Allies were planning a landing in North Africa in October 1942. To illustrate the advantages of this attack, Churchill drew a picture of a crocodile and explained to Stalin that it was the intention of the British and the Americans to attack the soft underbelly of the beast. By the end of the meeting Stalin appeared to have cheered up considerably, having grasped the benefits of an Allied landing in North Africa, and the conference ended at 10.40 p.m. on a positive note.

Churchill was pleased with this first encounter, but by the next day it was clear that he had not succeeded in ‘handling’ Stalin as
well as he might have thought. Churchill now had to endure a meeting with the implacable and uncharmable Molotov, who almost acted as if the previous evening's conversation about the North African operation had not taken place and simply reiterated the Soviet demand for a second front. Then an ‘aide mémoire’, written by Stalin, arrived.
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It was a document that in effect accused the British once again of breaking their word. ‘As is well known’, it said, ‘the organization of a second front in Europe in 1942 was pre-decided during the sojourn of Molotov in London…. It is easy to grasp that the refusal of the government of Great Britain to create a second front in 1942 in Europe inflicts a moral blow to the whole of Soviet public opinion, which calculates on the creation of a second front, and that it complicates the situation of the Red Army at the front and prejudices the plan of the Soviet Command’.

Stalin was as truculent as ever, if not more so. And at the second meeting between Churchill and Stalin, on the night of 13 August, the Soviet leader was at his most brutally sarcastic. He suggested that the British had failed to open up the second front because they were scared of the Germans. Churchill grew angry and was visibly upset. Eventually he became so exasperated by Stalin's bitter attack that he launched into a defence of the British position so eloquent that the translators could not keep up. ‘The words aren't important’, said Stalin once Churchill had finished speaking. ‘What matters is the spirit’.

Churchill was dismayed by the meeting. And when he returned to his dacha, the government house just outside Moscow that had been set aside for his use, the American ambassador, Averell Harriman, who had accompanied him to the talks had to spend several hours with him to try to placate his wounded feelings. In his report to the War Cabinet written the following day, 14 August, Churchill openly questioned why Stalin's behaviour had suddenly changed since the positive first meeting. One possibility, he admitted, was that this was a straightforward Soviet tactic, one that the British party knew Eden had suffered the previous December; but Churchill also raised the possibility that the ‘Council of Commissars’, to whom he supposed Stalin had been
compelled to report after the meeting, had disliked the news that the British had brought. (This wholly erroneous belief that there were darker forces behind Stalin, and that Stalin was not complete master of Soviet foreign policy, would reappear at various crucial moments in the relationship between the Allied leaders over the course of the war.)
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On 14 August, Churchill stomped furiously around the dacha in his dressing gown. He told the assembled company that he was not prepared to attend the dinner in his honour that the Soviets had arranged for that night. Clark Kerr, the British ambassador who witnessed these scenes, had little patience with Churchill's mood and wrote that he felt at the time that what the Prime Minister really required was ‘good root [kick] up the arse’.
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Eventually Churchill was persuaded that it would be diplomatic suicide not to attend the gala dinner, and he grumpily agreed to go. But, seemingly in protest, he decided to put on ‘a dreadful garment that he claimed to have designed himself to wear during air raids’. It looked, recorded Clark Kerr, ‘like a mechanic's overalls or more still like a child's rompers or crawlers’. Despite their otherwise revolutionary beliefs, the Soviet leadership still maintained that suits or uniforms were the appropriate garb for formal occasions, and they were astonished at the outlandish and inappropriate attire the guest of honour had decided to wear. After this bad start the evening grew worse when many in the British party were stand-offish with the Soviets. Colonel Ian Jacob, military assistant secretary to the War Cabinet, recorded in his diary that: ‘It was extraordinary to see this little peasant [Stalin], who would not have looked at all out of place in a country lane with a pickaxe over his shoulder, calmly sitting down to a banquet in these magnificent halls’.
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General Sir Alan Brooke complained in his diary that ‘there were 19 courses and we only got up at 12.15 a.m. having been 3 and a quarter hours at table’.
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His view of Stalin was less patronizing than Jacob's, but one still detects that he thought Stalin was not quite a gentleman. ‘By the end of the dinner’, recorded Brooke, ‘Stalin was quite lively, walking around the table to click
glasses with various people he was proposing the health of. He is an outstanding man, that there is no doubt about, but not an attractive one. He has got an unpleasantly cold, crafty, dead face, and whenever I look at him I can imagine him sending off people to their doom without ever turning a hair. On the other hand there is no doubt that he has a quick brain and a real grasp of the essentials of war’.
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Another member of the British party, the interpreter Arthur Bryant,
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observed that Brooke was rather rude at dinner. The British general gave short replies to the enquiries of his dinner partner, Marshal Voroshilov, and never asked any questions himself.

Churchill left the banquet after one o'clock – early by Soviet standards of hospitality – and returned fuming to his dacha. He railed to his doctor, Sir Charles Wilson [later Lord Moran]: ‘Stalin didn't want to talk to me. I closed the proceedings down. I had had enough. The food was filthy I ought not to have come’.
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Sir Charles tried to argue with him, saying, ‘It wasn't a question of whether Stalin was a brigand or not, but if we did not work in with him it would mean a longer war and more casualties’. This appeal had little effect, as still the next day Churchill was furious, declaiming, ‘Did he [Stalin] not realise who he was speaking to? The representative of the most powerful empire the world has ever seen?’
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He announced he wanted to leave Moscow and had no desire to see Stalin again.

Next morning Sir Archibald Clark Kerr had to use all his considerable powers of diplomacy to convince Churchill to meet the Soviet leader again. He told Churchill, as they paced together around the garden of the dacha, that ‘he [Churchill] was going about this whole business the wrong way….
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What was wrong was that he was an aristocrat and a man of the world and he expected these people to be like him. They weren't. They were straight from the plough or the lathe. They were rough and inexperienced. They didn't discuss things as we discussed them’. Then, after this somewhat patronizing assessment of the Soviet leaders, Clark Kerr warned, as Churchill's doctor had warned the night before, of the consequences of not dealing successfully with Stalin. ‘If Russia went down from want of support, his support, which only he
could give…. How many young British and American lives would have to be sacrificed to make this good?’ Clark Kerr admonished Churchill once again for being ‘offended by a peasant who didn't know any better’. Eventually, after Clark Kerr had worked his persuasive magic, Churchill agreed to attend one last meeting with Stalin that evening.

This final encounter seemed destined at first to be trapped once again in the familiar litany of the Soviet leader demanding that the British keep their ‘promise’ and provide a second front during 1942, as Churchill explained once more both the difficulties of a cross-Channel crossing and that a ‘promise’ had never been made. When Churchill reiterated that British forces would suffer great losses in any attempted cross-Channel operation in 1942, Stalin replied that ‘the Red Army was losing 10,000 people every day’ and that ‘without taking any risks one cannot wage war’.
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According to Pavlov, the Soviet interpreter, ‘the atmosphere in the meeting became extremely incandescent’. But then, after the formal discussions ended, Stalin asked Churchill back to his personal apartment in the Kremlin for supper. Churchill saw this as a real sign that the ice was breaking in their relationship, especially when Stalin introduced his daughter, Svetlana, to him. But soon the Soviet leader returned to his bitter tirade against the British. ‘Have the Royal Navy no sense of honour?’ he demanded, referring to the cessation of Arctic convoys to the Soviet Union. Churchill replied that ‘Britain was a sea power’ and that ‘he knew a lot about sea warfare’. ‘Meaning I know nothing?’ said Stalin.

But gradually, as the drink flowed and the suckling pig was eaten, the mood lightened. Churchill was bold enough to ask if the current problems of the Soviet Union were as difficult to deal with as the forced collectivization of the peasants. ‘No’, replied Stalin. ‘That was much harder’.

‘What did you do with all the kulaks [wealthier peasants]?’ asked Churchill.

‘We killed them’, replied Stalin.

After this particularly revealing exchange the conversation moved on to a series of faintly disparaging comments about their
own staff, with Churchill finally daring to tease the slab-faced, uncharismatic Molotov, who had joined them in the early hours and was drinking solidly.

‘Were you aware’, Churchill remarked to Stalin, ‘that your Foreign Secretary on his recent visit to Washington said he was determined to pay a visit to New York entirely by himself, and that the delay in his return was not due to any defect in the aeroplane, but because he was off on his own?’

‘It was not to New York he went’, said Stalin. ‘He went to Chicago, where the other gangsters are’.
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Churchill returned to his dacha at three o'clock in the morning. His spirits completely turned around in twenty-four hours. Clark Kerr was there to meet him and recorded that: ‘It was clear that he [Churchill] was in triumphant mood’.
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Churchill lay on a sofa and ‘began to chuckle’ and kicked his legs in the air. ‘It had all been grand. He had cemented a friendship with Stalin. My God! He was glad that he had come. Stalin had been splendid. What a pleasure it was to work with “that great man”. The glee of the PM was a pleasure to see…my God, he talked! Stalin this and Stalin that…’ The Soviet leader was now a joy to deal with rather than a disrespectful, awkward Asiatic. The prime minister prepared to leave for London immensely encouraged at the personal rapport that he clearly felt had developed during the final night of carousing.

Churchill's conduct during the four-day visit was on occasions not just eccentric but, as Clark Kerr and others at the British embassy in Moscow noted at the time, positively childish. It is interesting to imagine what might have happened had Churchill not listened to Clark Kerr and simply departed in a huff. How can one justify the sulky behaviour of the Prime Minister at the dinner in his honour? And, perhaps more worryingly, is it not extraordinary that Churchill's opinion of Stalin could be so changed by one visit to his private apartments?

The whole episode was more like the early stages of a romance than a conversation between statesmen. Indeed, Sir Alexander Cadogan, the Permanent Secretary to the Foreign Office who
accompanied Churchill to Moscow, specifically referred to these exchanges as a ‘courtship’.
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Churchill was not just intoxicated by alcohol, but by the heady prospect of intimate friendship with a man whom he knew would be recognized by history as one of the most important figures of the twentieth century. But that desire clouded his mind as to the reality. Stalin was not interested in friendship. He had no friends.

And had Churchill not been swayed by that intimate evening in Stalin's rooms, he would perhaps have taken on board two other key points from his visit to Moscow. The first was that nothing of substance had been achieved. Stalin was still angry about the cessation of the convoys and the ‘betrayal’ over the second front. Nothing that Churchill had said had fundamentally shifted his predominently negative view about the contribution of Britain as an ally to the Soviet war effort. And second, and more importantly, Stalin had not bothered to conceal his overt brutality from Churchill. Both in the formal meeting, talking about his desire to destroy German civilians, and in the informal setting of his rooms, where he talked about killing the kulaks, Stalin had behaved true to form. He had shown himself to be a ruthless dictator who happily admitted to killing his own people, and self-evidently presided over a system in which there was no democracy, no free speech and no rule of law. In his memoirs Churchill acknowledged that, when Stalin referred to the destruction of the kulaks, he had the ‘strong impression’ of ‘millions of men and women being blotted out and displaced forever’.
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But he believed that ‘with the World War going on all round us it seemed vain to moralise aloud’.