Stalin: A Biography

He also recalled how Stalin delighted in using pseudonyms. There were patches of comradeliness between them when the fighting was going in the USSR’s favour and he held Zhukov in esteem (despite keeping him under surveillance). Zhukov and he worked out an agreed code for their exchanges by land line or telegram: Stalin was ‘Vasilev’ and Zhukov ‘Konstantinov’. Stalin had used this pseudonym before 1917, and perhaps it signalled some kind of self-identification with Russia. False names were in any case a bit of a game: there was little chance of the German intelligence agencies being fooled by a pseudonym, especially one which had been used by Stalin in the past. Yet Stalin ought not to be judged too harshly. (There are abundant other reasons to indict him without artificially inflating the number.) The pressures on the two of them were immense, and it is no surprise that ‘Comrade Supreme Commander’ consoled himself with nicknames. In his lighter moments he knew how to encourage as well as how to terrify his military subordinates.

He would not be induced, however, to witness conditions at the front; indeed he scarcely left Moscow apart from completely unavoidable trips to the Allied conferences at Tehran and Yalta. While urging audacity upon his commanders, he took no risks with his personal security. There was one exception and it was much trumpeted in the press. In 1942 he made a journey to the front, ostensibly to monitor the progress of the campaign. When he got to within thirty or forty miles of active hostilities, he was greeted by military commanders on the Minsk Chaussée who advised him that they could not guarantee his safety if he travelled further. Stalin must have known that they would say this. This was the nearest he approached to any point of direct action in the war. He never saw a shot fired. But he made much of the conversation with his commanders and, after due display of disappointment, returned to the Kremlin. Much was made of the journey in official propaganda. Pravda reported it as if Stalin really had reached the front and given much needed orders on strategy and tactics to the frontal command.

Mikoyan told a less flattering tale of the journey. ‘Stalin himself,’ he wrote, ‘was not the bravest of men.’ Allegedly Stalin, as he talked with his commanders, felt an urgent call of nature. Mikoyan speculated that it might have been mortal fear rather than the normal effects of digestion. Stalin anyway needed to go somewhere fast. He asked about the bushes by the roadside, but the generals — whose troops had not long before liberated the zone from German occupation — could not guarantee that landmines had not been left behind. ‘At that point,’ Mikoyan recorded with memorable precision, ‘the Supreme Commander in sight of everyone dropped his trousers and did his business on the asphalt. This completed his “reconnoitring of the front” and he went straight back to Moscow.’²⁶

Avoidance of unnecessary risk was one thing, and Stalin took this to an extreme. But it is scarcely fair on Stalin to claim that he was a coward. Probably his behaviour stemmed rather from an excessive estimate of his own indispensability to the war effort. He looked on his military and political subordinates and thought they could not cope without him. Nor was he afraid of personal responsibility once he had got over the shock of 22 June 1941. He lived or died by his success in leading army and government. He exhausted every bone in his body for that purpose. And Zhukov credited Stalin with making up for his original military ignorance and inexperience. He went on studying during the fighting, and with his exceptional capacity for hard work he was able to raise himself to the level where he could understand most of the military complexities in Stavka. Khrushchëv later caricatured Stalin as having tried to follow the campaigns on a small globe he kept in his office, and this image has been reproduced in many subsequent accounts. In fact Stalin, while scaring his commanders and often making wholly unrealistic demands upon them, earned their professional admiration.