In February 1941, Pavlov, commander of the frontline Western military district (Belorussia), asked Stalin for nearly 1 billion rubles for radio work, and another 650 million for rails and for mobilization of high school and college students to replace the republic’s dirt roads. Timoshenko answered that Stalin said, “We are not in a position to meet his fantastic proposals.” Zhukov, the new chief of staff, had been summoned to Stalin’s dacha on a Saturday evening to deliver a brief report, arranged by Timoshenko. In the company of the cronies, Zhukov and Timoshenko dined on thick borscht, stewed meats with buckwheat kasha, fruit, and compote, the kind of simple meal Stalin liked. As the conversation ranged over military needs, the despot relaxed, drinking Khvanchkara, a Georgian wine, joking, and exhibiting the cheerful mood that company often brought him. “Stalin said that we should think and work on the priority issues and bring them to the government for decisions,” Zhukov recalled. “But in this connection we need to work from our real possibilities and not fantasize about what we cannot produce in material terms.”82
Even while constraining the military’s limitless demands, Stalin had his secretariat on the special Kremlin phone system, driving factories beyond their limit. Where were the chassis, the motors, the trucks, the tires for the Soviet Union’s mechanized divisions? The despot, meanwhile, also summoned aviation industry bosses to the Imperial Senate’s Sverdlov Hall, the venue for Central Committee plenums, to hash out the issues with the newest aircraft. He paced, gripping his pipe, listening, waiting for the experts to finish before taking the floor to note that the old planes were easier to fly but easier to knock out. “Then Stalin went through the main military aircraft of the air forces of Germany, England, France, and the United States,” aviation commissar Shakhurin recalled. “He spoke about their weaponry, carrying capacities, rate of climb, maximum altitude. He did all this from memory, without any notes, which surprised the specialists and aviators present.” Stalin instructed them to “study the new planes. Learn to perfection how to fly them, to use in war their advantages over the old planes in speed and weaponry. That’s the only way.”83
From February 15 to 20, 1941, Stalin convoked the 18th party conference, where he got behind a further force-march of production, especially of MiG-3 aircraft, as well as the T-34 and KV tanks. A party conference involved less rigmarole than a party congress, but it afforded him a semblance of legitimacy to make changes to the Central Committee that only a congress could authorize. He also inserted several army officers into that body, characterizing them as “
Stalin added three new candidate members to the politburo: Malenkov and two Zhdanov protégés, Nikolai Voznesensky, deputy head of state planning, who had a doctorate in economics, and Alexander Shcherbakov, who, while remaining party boss of Moscow province and city, was promoted to a Central Committee secretary and handed Zhdanov’s portfolio as chief of the agitation-and-propaganda directorate.85 Stalin also removed the state security directorate from the NKVD and made it a self-standing commissariat (NKGB). Beria’s literate minion Merkulov remained in charge, now as a full-fledged commissar, and among Merkulov’s subordinates were mostly other Beria minions, starting with NKGB deputy commissar Bogdan “Bakhcho” Kobulov, whose brother Amayak remained in Berlin as the NKGB’s intelligence chief there.86
