World War II Behind Closed Doors (63 page)

One can only imagine Stalin's feelings as he read this grovelling apology from a man who now realized that, by standing up for his wife, he had placed himself in real danger. Most likely Stalin would have recognized the content and spirit of Molotov's apology as confirmation of his own view of the human condition. Faced with the threat of personal suffering, scarcely anyone would live and die for principle. And thus he proved once again, at least to his own satisfaction, that – when it came to the final test – almost all human beings were cynical and weak. Polina was arrested in January 1949 and sent into exile. She was released only after Stalin's death.

Stalin's desire to crush any potential opposition – and in particular anyone who showed true personal leadership and initiative during the war – was also demonstrated by his actions against the Soviet officials who had administered Leningrad during the war. The German siege of this city, which lasted from September 1941 to January 1944, was one of the most horrific and costly actions of the war. Over a million Soviets died, amidst scenes of starvation and cannibalism. The defence of Leningrad was led by Andrei Zhdanov, the local party secretary. And Stalin was extremely suspicious of the initiative that he and his colleagues had demonstrated during the siege. ‘It is very strange that Comrade Zhdanov doesn't feel any necessity to contact us in
Moscow at this difficult time’, he wrote to Leningrad party officials during the war. ‘We can suppose that Leningrad, together with Comrade Zhdanov, is not in the USSR but on some little island in the Pacific Ocean’.
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Despite Stalin's attacks on the Leningrad leadership, and in the face of appalling losses, the city held out against the Germans and its survival was subsequently lauded as an example of Soviet courage and tenacity. But those who endured the siege had changed. ‘I think I was aware’, says Yulia Kaganovich,
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a young woman at the time, ‘that my life before the victory, during the siege, was in some sense the life of a free person. I didn't feel that anyone was telling me what to do. You were needed and we understood what had to be done. A sense of having a fist pressing down on me and forcing me to do what I felt was wrong, that wasn't there. There was a sense of freedom, which, by the way, I only appreciated afterwards’.

‘In general’, says Valeri Kuznetsov,
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son of the second-in-command in Leningrad, Alexei Kuznetsov, ‘the war cured very many people of several illusions. To be more precise, it stopped them believing in the infallibility of the central leadership. Leningrad was unique. It was like a little island where people could make their own decisions’.

This, of course, was anathema to Stalin. And his first move to deal with this ‘problem’ was to move both leaders of wartime Leningrad to the Kremlin, where they had little chance of acting independently. Zhdanov, who during the siege had passed on effective control to his deputy when he found he could not fully cope, was sent in the spring of 1948 to a sanatorium. His drinking problem, already bad, had recently become worse. And despite the zeal with which Zhdanov had taken to his post-war task of persecuting those writers and artists who did not conform to the Communist ‘ideal’, Stalin was still suspicious of him. After a month in the sanatorium, Zhdanov was dead.

But whilst Zhdanov's death remains merely ‘mysterious’, there is no doubt about responsibility for the subsequent wide spread repression of several hundred people who had led Leningrad during the siege, most notably Alexei Kuznetsov. Fabricated
charges were laid, claiming that the Leningrad Communist Party had siphoned off money in order to give themselves autonomy from Moscow – but in reality it was Stalin's own paranoia that was the cause of the arrests. ‘I said to my wife: “This is madness”’, says Mikhail Tairov,
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then a member of the Leningrad regional administration. ‘“It makes no sense. Such good people that we survived the siege with – they are not guilty of anything”. And the next day they arrested me as well’.

Valeri Kuznetsov remembers the day they came for his father. ‘He got up and got dressed, and then I can remember him saying: “Wait for me. I'll be back soon for supper. Don't have supper without me…”. He [his father] went on foot through the nearest gate of the Kremlin. He turned and waved to us one more time. We were all standing at the window. That was the last time we saw him’.

Kuznetsov and the other leading members of the Leningrad Party were tortured into making false confessions and then shot. At the same time, at least two thousand members of the Leningrad elite were removed from their positions of power. Stalin had never forgotten this ‘island’ of initiative in the wartime Soviet Union. And to Stalin, initiative meant independence. And independence meant treachery.

THE DEATH OF STALIN

On 1 March 1953 Stalin collapsed following a drunken evening at his dacha with his cronies. He died four days later. For many of his closest colleagues – like Khrushchev, Beria and Molotov – his death came only just in time. Stalin had been planning still more repressions, most likely targeting the remaining senior figures who had served alongside him in the war.

Stalin left an eastern Europe dominated by the Soviet Union. Poland, in particular, was certainly as ‘friendly’ to the Soviet Union as Stalin could ever have wished. The nature of that ‘friendship’ was epitomized by a visit paid by the Polish leader, Bolesław
Bierut, to Moscow in 1950. Bierut asked Stalin about the fate of a number of Polish Communist leaders who had travelled to the Soviet Union in the 1930s and had subsequently disappeared (presumed murdered). Stalin turned to Beria and asked: ‘Where are they? I told you to look for them. Why haven't you found them?’ Then, as Bierut left Stalin's office, Beria turned to the Polish president and said: ‘Why are you fucking around with Iosif Vissarianovich [Stalin]? You fuck off and leave him alone – that's my advice to you – or you'll regret it’.
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Crude as Beria's words were, they are a fitting reminder of the threat that always lay just beneath the surface of Stalinism.

After Stalin's death there was a loosening of persecution – but only in relative terms. Although many prisoners were released from the Gulag system, the fundamental freedoms of speech and religion were never respected within the Soviet Union. The victimization of those who had been deported or imprisoned under Stalin continued in many cases until the fall of Communism, whilst those who had tormented them continued to prosper. ‘These people who were the guards, who participated in the deportations, who participated in all of those crimes, they all lived very well afterwards’, says Nina Andreyeva, who had been deported from eastern Poland to Kazakhstan in 1940. ‘They all received ranks, posts, all kinds of privileges, absolutely everything. And that man [the guard on her transport to Kazakhstan], he doesn't live far from us at all [in former eastern Poland – now part of Ukraine]. And there is one shop that we would often meet him in. Then he remembered me very well. He would greet me and ask me: “Please tell me, where is your brother [who, she learnt only in 1990, had been murdered by the NKVD during the war]? Maybe he is somewhere abroad? Maybe he is somewhere that is opposed to the Soviet authorities?” That kind of thing…. We were divided up into black and white. They were white and we were always black. And there was nothing you could do about it because they had the power. They had the power and so they had the truth…. And [only] when the Soviet Union collapsed, he [the guard] started to treat me politely and with respect. And once he implored me:
“Nina, I beg you to forget what happened. How can I be guilty? I was simply obeying orders”’.

But whilst Nina may have withheld her forgiveness to the man who guarded her during her deportation, he – along with everyone else who took part in the crime – has been spared any official punishment.

Even today a visitor to Red Square can see by the Kremlin wall a monument to the man who most needed to be held to account for his actions, and yet never was – Joseph Stalin. Like many tyrants before him – and no doubt many tyrants to come – he escaped this life untouched by justice.

POSTSCRIPT

Could the Western leaders in the Alliance have prevented the Soviet dominance of eastern Europe by acting differently during their partnership with Stalin? Which is a polite way of asking whether we were partly to blame for what happened and all the resultant misery.

In practical terms, the only way of preventing the physical occupation of eastern Europe by the Red Army would have been for someone else to have occupied this territory first. That would have meant either bringing forward the date of the second front and D-Day by at least a year, to 1943, or to have entered into some kind of partnership with the Germans towards the end of the war – conditional, presumably, on Hitler and the rest of the Nazi leadership having first been removed.

The second of these two options is the easier to dismiss – even though at the time there were people on the Allied side who seriously thought the threat from the Soviet Union so great that we should have enlisted the German army against them. George Earle, the former Governor of Pennsylvania who appeared earlier in this book when he protested to Roosevelt about Katyn, even met Baron Kurt von Lersner, a close friend of Franz von Papen, the former Chancellor of Germany, to discuss this possibility
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Von Lersner visited Earle in secret in Istanbul in 1943 and proposed – on behalf of a group of well-connected conspirators – that the Western Allies accept only ‘conditional’ surrender from the Germans. The idea was that senior German officers – with prior knowledge of the Western Allies' support – would remove Hitler and the other leading Nazis, and then the Wehrmacht would join with Western forces to keep the Soviets out of central Europe and Germany. Earle actually sent this proposal to President Roosevelt.

It would have been a disastrous course of action. Perhaps the Red Army would have been forced back, but at a terrible cost in Allied lives. Even more importantly, the Europe that would have then existed after the war would have been a good deal less stable than the one we were actually left with. That is because, even after Stalingrad, the German army was still a fearsome fighting machine. If the Western Allies had fought alongside the Germans and then reached some kind of uneasy peace with the Soviets – who would, of course, have felt betrayed by the West, probably fuelling a future conflict – who would then have disarmed the German army? Germany would have been unoccupied by the Western Allies and still immensely powerful. So, thankfully, Roosevelt filed Earle's plan in the bin.

The idea of bringing forward the second front to 1943 is harder to reject so swiftly. Indeed, the issues are so complex that one historian has written a whole book about the subject.
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It is clear that, had Churchill not pushed so hard for his ‘soft under belly’ approach – and we have seen just how nonsensical a description that turned out to be of southern Italy – then it might have been possible to mount a cross-Channel invasion in 1943. Allied forces might then have reached much further into eastern Europe by the end of the war than they actually did. The Soviet influence over eastern Europe would thus have been lessened. The problem is that the cost in human terms for the Western Allies would have been enormous.

What is sometimes forgotten in the West is the massively disproportionate losses suffered by the Soviets compared with the Western Allies. The Americans and British each suffered around 400,000 dead, whilst the Soviet Union endured a death toll of 27 million. Stalin always believed that Britain and America were delaying the second front so that the Soviet Union would bear the brunt of the war – so that Soviet lives were lost instead of British, American or other Allied lives. At no point in the documents, or even anecdotally, do Churchill or Roosevelt ever say that this was the case. But this does not mean that it was not so – that at some visceral level these extremely smart Western politicians did not realize that it was to their advantage that the Red Army rather than their own boys died fighting the Germans in the hottest part of the action. It is obvious, but it is worth stating – both Churchill and Roosevelt relied on votes to stay in power. And no votes are gained by incurring massive casualties. Would Churchill and Roosevelt really have been prepared to sacrifice perhaps a million more dead each in order to ensure an independent eastern Europe after the war?

And although it is true that the Americans did openly favour a second front in 1943 (although we shall never know if this aspiration would actually have been carried through even if the British had agreed), Roosevelt was also keen to get the Soviets into the war against Japan in order to reduce the number of potential American deaths and to win the war more quickly. Roosevelt was a master at judging American public opinion – and he had an election to fight in 1944. So it's impossible to believe that keeping American casualties down wasn't also a priority for him on the Western, as well as the Pacific, Front.

As for Churchill, he was opposed to a second front almost up to the moment when D-Day was finally launched. He feared another Dunkirk and the consequent loss of British life. But his opposition was based on a straightforward analysis of political cost and benefit. If Britain's survival had in any part been linked to the launching of a second front in 1943, of course he would have pressed for one. As it was, with the Soviets battling it out with the Germans, there seemed to be little urgency.

But even given that the second front was delayed until 1944, there were still ways in which both Roosevelt and Churchill could have played their cards differently. The unpleasant recriminations following Yalta were to some extent the responsibility of the Western Allies. Yes, of course Stalin did not live up to his promises. But he almost certainly didn't think he was expected to. Both Roosevelt and Churchill in their different ways – the President with his secret ‘chats’ in Tehran, the Prime Minister with his ‘percentages’ discussion – had shown that they were not averse to hard talk about ‘spheres of influence’. Stalin would most likely have perceived the content of those meetings as the reality, and aspects of Churchill and Roosevelt's public pronouncements as mere rhetoric to appease the voters.