Stalin: Waiting for Hitler, 1929-1941 полностью

STALIN PACED AND PACED IN HIS KREMLIN OFFICE, with his usual short steps, gripping a pipe in the hand of his good arm. It was Saturday, June 21, 1941. The night before, he had repaired after midnight to his Near Dacha, in the woods at Kuntsevo, returning to the Kremlin in the afternoon.³ From his office suite on the bel étage of the tsarist-era Imperial Senate, a person could see the whole world—or, at least, Stalin’s world. Over the years, many of the party bosses and industrial managers, military men and secret police, scientists and artists who were granted an audience surmised that he paced to control his explosive emotions or, alternately, to unnerve those in his company. Invariably, he alone was up, trundling back and forth, sidling up to people while they were speaking or just after they had finished, looking them in the eye or the back. Only a few intimates knew that Stalin suffered nearly constant pain in the joints of his legs, which may have been a genetic condition and which the movement partly alleviated.⁴ He also strolled the Kremlin grounds, between the Senate and the Arsenal, usually alone, touching the leaves on the trees and shooing away the black ravens. (Afterward, the guards came and massacred the birds.)⁵ Stalin’s nearly constant motion mimicked his cascading thoughts. For a full year now, essentially since the stunning fall of France to the Germans in June 1940, he had lived in a state of unbearable tension.⁶

Pravda (June 21) reported that Turkmenistan’s Central Committee had just concluded a two-day plenum devoted to cotton. The newspaper also rebuked the Stalingrad Tractor Factory for not producing a single ax or frying pan, of the tens of thousands ordered; exhorted a loss-free gathering of the grain harvest; and remained silent about how the German embassy personnel were being evacuated, along with oil paintings, antique rugs, and silver.⁷ The NKGB, for its part, reported the mass German exodus and that the Italian embassy, too, had received instructions to evacuate.⁸ Intelligence warnings of imminent titanic war were coming from everywhere. The Soviet agent Pavel Shatev (“Costa”), an ethnic Macedonian separatist, reported from Sofia (June 21) that a German emissary had told an official of allied Bulgaria that “a military confrontation is expected on June 21 or 22.”⁹ Zhou Enlai passed on, through Comintern channels, that Chiang Kai-shek “is declaring insistently that Germany will attack the USSR, and is even giving a date: June 21, 1941!” which prompted Dimitrov to phone Molotov that morning. “The situation is unclear,” Molotov told him. “There is a major game under way. Not everything depends on us.”¹⁰

Stalin had eliminated private property and made himself responsible for the Soviet equivalents of Washington, Wall Street, and Hollywood all rolled into one, and all rolled into one person, an extreme despotism. He complained of fatigue, especially toward the end of his long workdays, and suffered from insomnia, a condition never acknowledged publicly, but manifest in the now fully nocturnal rhythm of the vast functionary kingdom under him. A tiny group of insiders knew of his infections and multiday fevers. Rumors of various health problems had circulated abroad, and the use of foreign doctors had long ago been discontinued, but a narrow circle of Russian physicians had acquired detailed knowledge of his illnesses and of his bodily deformities, including his barely usable left arm, the thick, discolored toenails on his right foot, and the two webbed toes on his left foot (an omen, in traditional Russia, of Satanic influence). For long periods, Stalin resisted being seen by any doctor, and he had ceased using medicines from the Kremlin apothecary that were issued in his name.¹¹ The household staff had stopped bringing his meals from the Kremlin canteen, cooking them in his apartment and, in his presence, tasting from the plates. All the same, Stalin’s stomach was a wreck. He suffered from regular bouts of diarrhea.¹²