Stalin: A Biography

Not only military dispositions but also arrangements about the entire civilian sector of society and economy were in Stalin’s hands. He kept a watch on all resources and wrote down details in a little notebook. He was always keen that his subordinates should husband the resources already in their possession. Everything from tank production to foreign currency reserves was recorded by him, and he was miserly in making additions to what was already assigned to institutions. His leading associates were instructed to take the same approach to their own underlings: Molotov for tanks, Mikoyan for food supplies, Kaganovich for transport, Malenkov for aircraft and Voznesenski for armaments. The little notebook ruled their lives.²⁷ Stalin was the linchpin of the Soviet war effort. The two sides of that effort, the military and civilian, were kept separate. Stalin did not want the commanders to interfere in politics and the economy nor the intervention of politicians in Stavka; and when he held meetings of the State Committee of Defence it was he who brought the two sides together.

42. THE BIG THREE

Vital interests of the USSR, the USA and the United Kingdom coincided after the events of June and December 1941. Churchill offered assistance to Stalin as soon as the German–Soviet war broke out. An agreement was signed on 12 July 1941. A British delegation headed by Lord Beaverbrook and accompanied by American diplomat Averell Harriman flew out for talks with Stalin in September. Negotiations ensued between Washington and Moscow when war started between Germany and the USA in December. A Combined Chiefs of Staff committee was created to co-ordinate American and British operations. The leaders of the Allied countries — Churchill, Roosevelt and Stalin — were soon as known as the Big Three.

The Grand Alliance was racked by mutual suspicions. A global war was being fought and the distribution of resources between the battlefields of Europe and Asia had yet to be agreed. There also had to be consultation about strategic operations. As the fighting continued between the Third Reich and the USSR, the Americans and British needed to decide when to open a ‘second front’ in western Europe. There was also the question of mutual assistance. Both the USSR and the UK looked to the USA, the world’s largest economic power, as a source of equipment, food and financial credit. The governments had to agree on the terms for this. War aims too had to be clarified. There was ceaseless tension between the Americans and the British since Washington had no desire to prop up the British Empire in the event of Allied victory. Similarly neither the Americans nor the British wished to give Stalin a free hand in his dealings with eastern Europe. Nor had the Allies discussed what to do with Germany after Hitler. Such were the dilemmas which would eventually necessitate the involvement of the supreme leaders.

The Big Three kept in contact by means of telegrams and embassies. Direct negotiations, however, were also desirable. The problem was that Roosevelt was physically disabled, and frequent long air-trips were too gruelling for him. Churchill, though, was an enthusiastic voyager. The British Prime Minister crossed the Atlantic to meet Roosevelt in Placentia Bay in August 1941 and in Washington the same December. He made still more dangerous flights to hold talks with Stalin in Moscow in August 1942 and October 1944 (which involved stop-overs in Gibraltar, Cairo, Tehran and the airfield at Kuibyshev).

Stalin, obsessively wishing to control everything in Moscow and being unwilling to risk journeys by air, held out against any such trips whenever he could possibly avoid them. Molotov as People’s Commissar of External Affairs had been dispatched to Berlin in 1940. He also flew to the UK over the Baltic and across the North Sea in May 1942; such was his distrust of perfidious Albion that he slept with a revolver under his pillow. Stalin egocentrically expected others to take the risks. His immobility exasperated Roosevelt and Churchill. Roosevelt described the splendours of the Ghiza pyramids to persuade the Soviet leader to fly to Cairo.¹ As he pointed out, he himself was willing to travel even though the USA Constitution restricted the time a president could spend abroad.² Stalin could not put off a meeting of the Big Three indefinitely; and after turning down Cairo, Baghdad and Basra, he agreed to Tehran in November 1943. It was not far from the USSR and he had assured himself that the Soviet embassy in the Iranian capital could guarantee safety. Otherwise he refused to travel outside the territory of Soviet jurisdiction. The next conference was held at Yalta in the south of the RSFSR in February 1945. Stalin had got used to working at night and sleeping for most of the day. He had to go back to a more conventional schedule for meetings with Roosevelt and Churchill.³