Stalin: A Biography

Stalin did not receive explicit reports on this: the security agencies had long since learned that they had to give him the truth in ideologically acceptable terms, and Stalin did not want to hear that life was more congenial abroad. What he was told by the agencies was alarming enough. Booty brought back by soldiers included all manner of goods from carpets, pianos and paintings to gramophone records, stockings and underwear. Red Army soldiers had made a habit of collecting wristwatches and, as often as not, wearing all of them simultaneously. Even civilians who had not moved beyond the old Soviet frontiers but had been held under German military rule had had experience of a different way of life which had not been in every way uncongenial. Churches, shops and small workshops had been restored after the initial success of Operation Barbarossa. Such Soviet citizens had neither war booty nor the experience of foreign travel; but their expectation that things would change in the USSR was strong. Across the entire Soviet Union, indeed, there was a popular feeling that it had been worth fighting the war only if reforms were to ensue.¹²

And so beneath the draped red flags of victory there lurked danger and uncertainty for Stalin and his regime. He understood the situation more keenly than anyone near to him in the Kremlin. It was this awareness as well as a perennial grumpiness that had made him so curt with Khrushchëv after the fall of Berlin. He saw that critical times lay ahead.

Yet he would not have been human if warmer feelings had not occasionally suffused him. At the spectacular ceremonies he puffed out his chest. The stream of foreign dignitaries coming to Moscow at the end of the Second World War caught the sense of his mood. On such occasions he let pride take precedence over concern. Stalin, the Red Army and the USSR had won the war against a terrible enemy. As usual he compared current conditions with those which had prevailed under his admired predecessor. This was obvious from what he said to Yugoslav visitors:¹³

Lenin in his time did not dream of the correlation of forces which we have attained in this war. Lenin reckoned with the fact that everyone was going to attack us, and it would be good if any distant country, for example America, might remain neutral. But it’s now turned out that one group of the bourgeoisie went to war against us and another was on our side. Lenin previously did not think that it was possible to remain in alliance with one wing of the bourgeoisie and fight with another. This is what we’ve achieved…

Stalin was proud that he had gone one stage further than Lenin had thought possible. Whereas Lenin had hoped to preserve the Soviet state by keeping it out of inter-capitalist military conflicts and letting the great capitalist powers fight each other, Stalin had turned the USSR into a great power in its own right. Such was its strength that the USA and the United Kingdom had been obliged to seek its assistance.

How long, however, would the alliance hold after the end of hostilities with Germany and Japan? On this, Stalin was quietly definite when he met a Polish communist delegation:¹⁴

Rumours of war are being put about extremely intensively by our enemies.

The English [sic] and Americans are using their agents to spread rumours to scare the peoples of those countries whose politics they don’t like. Neither we nor the Anglo-Americans can presently start a war. Everyone’s fed up with war. Moreover, there are no war aims. We aren’t getting ready to attack England and America, and they’re not risking it either. No war is possible for at least the next twenty years.