Stalin полностью

Serious tensions had arisen in Soviet-German trade and economic relations, too. A Soviet delegation’s visit to Germany had begun in October 1939, in connection with the new trade agreement, and the Germans had sought to play the consummate hosts, housing the proletarian representatives in the Adlon, Berlin’s finest hotel.¹⁵⁵ But the Germans were outraged at a forty-eight-page shopping list presented in late November: not just fighter aircraft, naval cruisers, and artillery, but whole factories, up to 1.5 billion reichsmarks. On December 11, Ribbentrop had to remind Soviet ambassador Shkvartsev that “Germany is at war” and could not go “beyond the humanly possible.”¹⁵⁶

That same day, in a convoy near Suomussalmi, in central Finland, not far from the Soviet border, Mekhlis’s car became disabled under fire; several Soviets were wounded. Mekhlis did not reach the Soviet frontier post until thirteen hours later, evidently spending the night in the forest. That same night of December 11–12, after Molotov and Voroshilov had left the Little Corner at almost 1:00 a.m., the despot summoned Beria at 2:30. The unfolding catastrophe had finally been getting through via the brutal NKVD reports about the Red Army. On December 15, Stalin ordered Beria to set up seven new NKVD regiments in the rear of Soviet positions, to interdict any soldiers who retreated.¹⁵⁷ But the battlefield situation was not so easily reversed. The despot found himself meeting essentially every night with military men in the Little Corner. On December 15, they were present from 11:00 p.m. until 1:25 a.m.; Voroshilov and Molotov stayed until 5:00 a.m. The brass and the cronies were right back that night. From the evening of December 18 through to the wee hours of December 20, Molotov and Voroshilov were in the Little Corner on and off for nine hours, and then back again the evening of the 20th, until 3:45 a.m. By then, it was officially Stalin’s sixtieth birthday (December 21).¹⁵⁸

Victory in Finland was supposed to have been celebrated as part of the jubilee, and Zhdanov had commissioned a score from Shostakovich to be played in the streets of Helsinki. The Suite on Finnish Themes would go unperformed, but the birthday bash went ahead in the St. Catherine’s Hall of the Grand Kremlin Palace. The evening called for exactly sixty guests for Stalin’s sixty years (some accounts record seventy or eighty); Stalin shook each person’s hand individually. After the inevitable toasts to the despot, he answered with toasts to Soviet pilots, artillerymen, tank drivers, sailors, workers, peasants. Everyone got smashed. Molotov, noting that “I do not know a greater leader than Lenin,” observed in his toast that “in some ways Stalin has surpassed Lenin. Lenin for many years lived removed from his people, from his country, in emigration, but comrade Stalin the whole time lives and lived among the people, in our country.” The despot, entourage in tow, repaired to the adjacent St. George’s Hall for a night of entertainment. Molotov danced away, showing off the results of his tango lessons with Voroshilov, while also singing—in key.¹⁵⁹

Arkady Raikin, a twenty-nine-year-old born in tsarist Russia’s Latvian-speaking territory and educated in a Jewish heder, was a master of skits and impersonations, especially of heedless Soviet bureaucrats. That night, he had been summoned to the Kremlin for the first time, but then he was told that the summons was off, so he spent the night performing at a B-list gathering at the House of the Actor. Upon returning to his room at the Hotel Moskva, he was suddenly informed that he had been sought throughout the city—to perform for Stalin—but that now it was too late. Raikin went up to bed. Then the telephone interrupted his slumber at around 5:00 a.m.: he had to be downstairs immediately, whence he was whisked by government vehicle to the Kremlin, next door, and escorted into the St. George’s Hall. The entertainment planned by the committee for artistic affairs had long ended, but Stalin and his entourage were still there, so a second “concert” had to be conjured up. (Raikin had discovered upon exiting his hotel that the Bolshoi soprano Natalya Spiller had been bundled into the same waiting car.) The tables in the Grand Kremlin Palace still overflowed with food and drink, and Stalin asked Raikin the purpose of the little netlike string bag he was holding. Raikin said he had brought it for groceries, just in case some became available, the way Soviet inhabitants did when roaming urban streets.