Stalin: A Biography

Stalin had made his own preparations for travel. In 1941 he ordered the fitting out of a special railway carriage which would enable him to carry on working while travelling. At eighty-three tons, it was heavily armoured. Inside it had every facility — study, sitting room, toilet, kitchen and bodyguards’ compartment — fitted out in the solid style he favoured. There was nothing luxurious about the carriage; the heavy wood and metal of its interior bespoke a leader who disliked frippery and demanded to be guaranteed conditions of regular work. Carriage FD 3878 was like a mobile Kremlin office.⁴

Agreements with the Western Allies were put into place long before Stalin used his new facility. The USSR urgently needed supplies. Churchill had offered assistance after the start of Operation Barbarossa and military convoys were sent to the Arctic Ocean. But the British themselves relied on American supply ships. It was therefore important for the Soviet government, once Hitler had declared war on the USA, to seek help from Roosevelt. In fact it was in the American interest to comply with such requests if this meant that the Wehrmacht would be weakened by the strengthened resistance of the Red Army. The Lend– Lease arrangement already in place with the United Kingdom was extended to the USSR. Loans, military equipment and food were earmarked for Soviet use. Shipments to the USSR were made by Arctic convoys to Murmansk or else across the frontier with Iran. The war with Japan in the Pacific ruled out the other routes. Steadily, though, American jeeps, spam, sugar and gunpowder filled vital gaps in production. Destruction of British vessels was frequent under attack from German submarines but Stalin took the rate of loss as undeserving of comment when the Red Army was giving up the lives of millions of its troops against the Germans.

The other thing agitating Stalin left him even less satisfied. He wanted the Western Allies to organise the opening of a second front in Europe as a means of relieving the pressure on his own armed forces. He never lost a chance to demand greater urgency from the USA and the UK. Fresh to the anti-Hitler military struggle, the Americans talked airily about managing this by the end of 1942. Churchill was more circumspect and, on his Moscow visit in August 1942, pulled out a map of western Europe to explain the vast logistical difficulties of a seaborne invasion from Britain. Stalin continued to bait him: ‘Has the British navy no sense of glory?’⁵ Churchill was on the point of leaving for London without further discussion. He had had enough of the Soviet leader’s angry demands. Seeing that he had gone too far, Stalin invited him to yet another convivial dinner and the crisis faded. Roosevelt and his advisers, when they acquainted themselves with the military logistics, accepted the cogency of Churchill’s argument; and Stalin had to recognise that until they were ready and willing to launch their ships across the English Channel, there was nothing he could do to make them hurry.

Although Stalin went on rebuking Churchill and Roosevelt in his correspondence, he could also be tactful. To Roosevelt, on whom he was dependent for finance and military supplies, he wrote on 14 December 1942:⁶

Permit me also to express confidence that time has not passed in vain and that the promises about opening the second front in Europe, which were given to me by you, Mr President, and Mr Churchill in relation to 1942, will be fulfilled and will anyway be fulfilled in relation to spring 1943…

It made no difference. The Americans and the British refused to rush their preparations.