Stalin: A Biography

Yet his reclusive tendency retained at least some advantages and was not as harmful to the regime as it would have been elsewhere. Many Soviet citizens inferred that a wise patriarch commanded the political and military agencies of the state. This may have helped more than it hindered the war effort. Stalin was inept at tasks of self-endearment or public reassurance. His characteristic inclination at large gatherings and in radio broadcasts was to project ferocity. If people had seen him more often, the illusion of his well-meaning sagacity could have been dispelled. His seclusion allowed them to believe in the sort of Stalin they wanted. They might persuade themselves that all the troubles of the inter-war period would be resolved once the Germans had been defeated. There was immense popular expectation that a victorious Stalin would sanction a relaxation of the Soviet order. People in their millions had got him wrong. But their mistake helped them to fight on for victory despite the horrific rigours.

Abroad his re clusiveness worked even better. Little was known about him. He had baffled even many Moscow-based diplomats before the war.⁹ Interest had been greatest among communists, but loyal members of the Comintern did not stray beyond the pieties offered in the official biography; and renegades such as the Trotskyists, who knew a lot more, were a vociferous but ignored minority. The general public in the West were hardly better informed after the Nazi–Soviet pact in August 1939. David Low, cartoonist for London’s Evening Standard, produced wonderful images of Stalin and Hitler embracing while each hold a dagger behind the other’s back. Stalin was represented as a baleful tyrant. Yet it was Hitler rather than Stalin who held the attention of Western commentators. This remained the situation until Operation Barbarossa. It was then that Stalin became the hero of the anti-Nazi belligerent countries. The same fact reduced the incentive to pry into the dark corners of Stalin’s career. If his Red Army was fighting back, he had to be supported and his communist loyalists in Western countries needed to be treated as patriots rather than subversives. British diplomats and journalists ceased any criticism. Stalin was their new idol.

When the USA entered the war in December 1941, the adulation crossed the Atlantic. In the following year Time magazine named Stalin its Man of the Year. The commendation noted brightly:¹⁰

The trek of world dignitaries to Moscow in 1942 brought Stalin out of his inscrutable shell, revealed a pleasant host and an expert at playing his cards in international affairs. At banquets for such men as Winston Churchill, W. Averell Harriman and Wendell Wilkie, Host Stalin drank his vodka straight, talked the same way.

More generally the editorial declared:

The man whose name means steel in Russian, whose few words of English include the American expression ‘tough guy’, was the man of 1942. Only Joseph Stalin fully knew how close Russia stood to defeat in 1942, and only Joseph Stalin fully knew how he brought Russia through.

This comment set the tone for Western descriptions of him for the rest of the war. He had already won Time magazine’s accolade as Man of the Year at the beginning of 1940.¹¹ But whereas earlier he had been praised as a master of clever, pragmatic manoeuvres, the current emphasis was upon straightforwardness and steadfastness. He was being hailed as a statesman with whom the West could do business. Churchill kept his reservations to himself in the interests of the Grand Alliance. The cult at home acquired its affiliate shrines in the lands of capitalism — and it was just as vague and misleading in the West as it was in its homeland.¹²