Stalin: A Biography

Their stubbornness increased the urgency for Stalin to accede to their invitation to a meeting of the Big Three. Thus the Tehran Conference was organised. Churchill knew his Allied partners well by that time but Stalin and Roosevelt had never met. The Soviet and American leaders set about charming each other. They hit it off well. Stalin was on his best behaviour, impressing the President as someone he could have dealings with. Both Stalin and Roosevelt wanted to see the British Empire dissolved, and Roosevelt said this when they were alone together. Roosevelt prided himself on understanding how to handle Stalin, who appeared to him a crude but reliable negotiator; it did not occur to him that Stalin was capable of turning on his own bonhomie to suit his purposes. Roosevelt was ailing by the middle of the war. His energy and intellectual acumen were running out. At the Tehran and Yalta Conferences Stalin made the most of his friendly relationship with Roosevelt and tried to hammer a wedge between him and Churchill. He did not always succeed. But he did well enough to prevent Churchill from insisting on a firmer line being taken against Soviet pretensions in eastern Europe.

Yet Churchill too had to be conciliated. Churchill had been the world’s loudest advocate of a crusade against Soviet Russia in the Civil War. He had referred to the Bolsheviks as baboons and had called for the October Revolution to be ‘strangled’ in its cradle. Stalin brought up the matter in a jovial fashion. Churchill replied: ‘I was very active in the intervention, and I do not wish you to think otherwise.’ As Stalin contrived a smile, Churchill ventured: ‘Have you forgiven me?’ Stalin’s diplomatic comment was that ‘all that is in the past, and the past belongs to God’.⁷

The Western leaders of the Grand Alliance could at any rate count on royal treatment à la sovíetique when they made journeys to meet Stalin. It was Churchill who got the most sumptuous welcome by dint of going to Moscow. In October 1944 Molotov as People’s Commissar for External Affairs put on an enormous party at which the tables heaved with food and wine. The British official group ate heartily before leaving for a concert in the Chaikovski Hall. The orchestra played Chaikovski’s Fifth Symphony and Rakhmaninov’s Third. Stalin had agreed to dine that night at the British embassy. Churchill and he were getting on well at the dinner party, and such was Stalin’s bonhomie that he came through to the lower rooms so that the rest of the visiting Britons could see him. They toasted him before he went back to a further bout of eating and drinking. Usually Stalin staved off inebriation by drinking a vodka-coloured wine while others drank spirits. He had admitted this stratagem to Ribbentrop in 1939.⁸ But that night he allowed himself to become well oiled before leaving the den of Anglo-Saxon capitalist reaction at four o’clock in the morning.⁹ By custom Stalin was wide awake at that hour; but his British hosts did not know that: they were left with the impression of a genial guest who had shared in the mood of the occasion.

There had been similar hospitality at the Tehran Conference and this created the atmosphere among the Big Three for agreement on large decisions. Stalin, Roosevelt and Churchill were determined to prevent Germany from ever again becoming a menace to world peace. The most effective step, they concurred, would be to break up the state,¹⁰ and some in Roosevelt’s entourage wished to go as far as the compulsory deindustrialisation of the country. Borders in eastern and central Europe also attracted attention at Tehran. Stalin’s concern with Soviet security induced Churchill to propose a redrawing of the European map. He demonstrated this with the aid of three matchsticks. Apparently he thought that without a visual aid he would not get his point across to the Caucasian. Churchill wanted to shift both Poland and Germany westward.¹¹ The western edge of the USSR in his estimation should end at the line proposed in mid-1920 by Lord Curzon (which, as Anthony Eden pointed out, was virtually the same as what was known in the West as the Ribbentrop–Molotov frontier — Molotov did not demur).¹² The USSR would be expanded at Poland’s expense. Poland would be compensated by acquisitions in eastern Germany.¹³ To guarantee his continental security Stalin also demanded that the city-port of Königsberg should pass into the possession of the USSR, and Roosevelt and Churchill agreed.¹⁴

Stalin had to adjust his daily timetable to achieve his goals; for whereas he could intimidate all leading Soviet politicians and commanders into adopting his nocturnal work-style, he could not expect Roosevelt and Churchill to negotiate by candlelight. Stalin played his hand with an aplomb sustained by a secret advantage he held over his interlocutors in Tehran: he had their conversations bugged. Beria’s son Sergo wrote about this:¹⁵