World War II Behind Closed Doors (15 page)

It was at this moment that Stalin benefited from the atmosphere of terror he had created over the previous years. Despite all the mistakes he had made, no one in the Soviet leadership was willing to come forward and replace him. Every member of the Politburo feared that the merest suggestion that they had been plotting against Stalin would mean torture and death, even with the leader in such a weakened state.

On 30 June the principal figures of the Politburo, including Beria, Mikoyan and Molotov, trooped off to Stalin's low, green-painted dacha hidden in a grove of trees just outside the capital. When they arrived they found Stalin sitting in an armchair, and he shrank back at their approach.

‘Why did you come?’ he asked.

According to Mikoyan, ‘He [Stalin] appeared very guarded, somehow strange, and it was even stranger that he asked us that question. After all, considering the situation he should have called us himself. I have no doubt that he had decided that we had come to arrest him’.
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Beria's son told how his father concentrated his attention on Stalin's face when they arrived, and was convinced that Stalin ‘believed that they were coming to tell him that he had been relieved of his functions’.
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Later on, when the Red Army started to fight back against the Nazis, some people would interpret this episode as another example of the Soviet leader's shrewdness. They would point out
that Stalin, an avid reader of history, was aware that Ivan the Terrible had been known to feign collapse and then withdraw, in order to identify those who then tried to plot against him. But it's an interpretation that could only have been arrived at with hindsight. In the dark atmosphere of June 1941, with the Red Army in headlong retreat and Minsk about to be captured by the Nazis, it was scarcely the time for some kind of Machiavellian plot by Stalin. No – at this, the lowest point in his leadership, Stalin thought that at last his colleagues had arrived to declare
him
‘an enemy of the people’.

But as the Soviet leader sat hunched and anxious in his armchair, Molotov told him something else entirely – that they had come because they believed it was necessary to establish a Government Committee on Defence.

‘Who will head it?’ asked Stalin, still clearly unsure of their intentions.

Molotov replied that they believed Stalin himself should take on this role. Relieved, he agreed, and then led a discussion about the roles each of them should take within the new committee.

Stalin returned to work in the Kremlin on 1 July. Certain of the support of his underlings, he now decided that it was time for him – the great Soviet leader – to speak to his people. So, on the 3rd, he made a broadcast that became famous not for its tortuous defence of the actions of the Soviet leadership in agreeing the pact with the Nazis in 1939, nor for its rallying cry to the various ethnic groups within the Soviet Union – Uzbeks, Tatars, Georgians, Armenians and the rest – to fight as one or risk enslavement at the hands of the fascists. Instead, the speech was chiefly remembered for the words Stalin spoke at the beginning: ‘Comrades, brothers and sisters’. For many Soviet citizens these simple words epitomized a new Stalin – a leader who cared about them not only as ‘comrades’ but as intimate members of the same family. The words demonstrated that Stalin was calling not for an ideological battle against Nazism, but for a struggle to defend the Motherland against a rapacious invader. And this was a fight that they could understand.

STALIN AND THE WESTERN ALLIES – THE FIRST DAYS

This alteration in Stalin's rhetoric did little, of course, to stem the German advance. And, in desperation, an approach was made in late July via one of Beria's agents, Pavel Sudoplatov, to the Bulgarian ambassador to Moscow, Ivan Stamenov, to see if it was possible to discover what Soviet territories the Nazis would take in exchange for stopping the war. Molotov even thought that this offer of trading territory for peace was a ‘possible second Brest-Litovsk Treaty’ and added the words that ‘if Lenin could have the courage to make such a step [in 1918], we had the same intention now’.
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Nothing came of the approach. Stamenov's view was that the Soviet Union would triumph in the end, despite any early setbacks, and even if such enquiries had been made of the Nazis, there seems no possibility, given the early victories of the German army, that Hitler would have contemplated a peace treaty at this moment of enormous success. But the fact that the Soviet leadership were prepared to investigate the possibility of a separate peace with the Nazis is significant. Not least because the suspicion that Stalin might try to opt out of the war and leave the Nazis in a position of relative stability in the East, with the ability then to concentrate all their resources on repulsing the Western Allies, was subsequently to be a recurring concern for Churchill and Roosevelt. The British signed a mutual-assistance agreement with the Soviet Union on 12 July 1941 in the wake of the Nazi invasion – one that explicitly stated that neither country would ‘negotiate nor conclude an armistice or treaty of peace [with Germany] except by mutual agreement’. But the Soviet leadership demonstrably broke that agreement just two weeks later when Beria's agent met the Bulgarian ambassador.

From the beginning of the alliance there was dissembling – on both sides. Whilst Churchill had announced in a speech on 22 June that, as a result of the Nazi invasion, his attitude to the Soviet Union was that: ‘The past, with all its crimes, its follies, and its tragedies, flashes away’,
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the reality was, as he had said in private to John Colville, his secretary, just before the invasion,
that: ‘If Hitler invaded Hell, I would at least make a favourable reference to the Devil’.
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It was not as if many people in power in Britain believed that the Soviet Union had much of a chance against the Germans. Many politicians and leading figures in the British military felt that the Soviets could not hold out for long. The War Office, for example, told the BBC not to give out the impression that ‘Russian resistance’ would last longer than six weeks.
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And then there was more straightforward prejudice to contend with. Lieutenant General Henry Pownall, deputy to General Sir Alan Brooke, Chief of the Imperial General Staff, recorded his view of Britain's new partner in his diary on 29 June: ‘I avoid the expression “Allies,” for the Russians are a dirty lot of murdering thieves themselves, and double crossers of the deepest dye. It's good to see the deepest cutthroats in Europe, Hitler and Stalin, going for each other’.
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In the United States the immediate reaction to the Nazi invasion was almost as circumspect. Acting Secretary of State Sumner Welles (deputizing for Secretary of State Cordell Hull who was recovering from illness) issued a statement on 23 June, after close consultation with President Roosevelt, which was careful to condemn as ‘intolerable’ both the ‘principles and doctrines of Nazi dictatorship’ and the ‘principles and doctrines of communistic dictatorship’ – though the United States government recognized that ‘Hitler's armies are today the chief danger of the Americas’. The statement left open the possibility of aid to the Soviet Union, but committed the USA to nothing.

Some American politicians openly voiced views similar to those Lieutenant General Pownall had confided to his diary: ‘It's a case of dog eat dog’, said Senator Bennett Clark of Missouri. ‘Stalin is as bloody-handed as Hitler. I don't think we should help either one’.
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Another American senator came up with this intensely pragmatic proposition: ‘If we see that Germany is winning, we ought to help Russia. And if Russia is winning we ought to help Germany, and that way let them kill as many as possible, although I don't want to see Hitler victorious under any circumstances’. These were the words, quoted in the American press, of Senator
Harry Truman, then a little-known politician from Missouri – words that would come back to haunt him when he became President of the United States in the spring of 1945 and had to negotiate personally with Stalin. But the prize for cynicism went to Senator Robert La Follette, a member of the tiny ‘Progressive Party’ and a committed isolationist, who wrote in the magazine
The Progressive
that the United States would shortly witness the ‘greatest whitewash act in history’ in order to get the country into the war: ‘The American people will be told to forget the purges in Russia…the confiscation of property, the persecution of religion, the invasion of Finland and the vulture role Stalin played in seizing hold of prostrate Poland, all of Latvia, Estonia and Lithuania. These will be made to seem the acts of a “democracy” preparing to fight Nazism’.

But in those early days of the invasion Stalin would have been less concerned about how the Soviet Union might be perceived in the future and more concerned with trying to ensure that the Soviet Union actually had a future. And his first message to Churchill, delivered by Maisky, the Soviet ambassador to Britain, on 19 July reflected that reality. Stalin emphasized the difficulties of the current military situation and asked if Churchill would help by organizing an immediate second front in France. Churchill's rejection of this request was to be repeated many times during the following years; in his reply to Stalin's July communication, for example, he emphasized the difficulties posed by the presence of forty German divisions in northern France. It was not, of course, to be until June 1944, nearly three full years later, that Stalin's request was finally granted.

But the British did mount a little-known military operation to try to help the Soviet Union that summer – on the remote island of Spitsbergen, part of the Svalbard archipelago, just 600 miles from the North Pole. And whilst this action was scarcely on the scale of the second front desired by Stalin, it was hugely indicative of the tensions that existed between the two new allies.

THE SPITSBERGEN ADVENTURE

In July 1941 a message was received in London from Sir Stafford Cripps, British ambassador to Moscow, to the effect that the Soviets would appreciate an attack on Spitsbergen, in order to make the sea route to the Soviet ports of Murmansk and Archangel more secure. After various revisions, the British eventually settled on a plan – Operation Gauntlet. The idea was that a task force of Canadian soldiers would be landed on Spitsbergen, where they would immobilize the coal mines to prevent the Germans using the island as a base for their ships and U-boats, and evacuate the 2,000 Russian miners and around 700 Norwegians who lived there. (Although Spitsbergen was Norwegian territory, the Soviet Union operated a substantial mining concession at Barentsburg on the west coast.)

On 19 August a small fleet of three destroyers, two cruisers and the converted passenger liner
Empress of Canada
left the Royal Navy base of Scapa Flow, and after a brief stop in Iceland arrived off the coast of Spitsbergen on 25 August. It was then that the trouble began. When the Canadian soldiers landed at Barentsburg they discovered ‘a dozen scowling, silent Russians, very suspicious and extremely doubtful of our intentions, though they had been advised from Moscow we were coming’.
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In addition, ‘as we got into the town our senses were assailed by a sweet, sickening smell – the scent of eau de cologne. No liquor was permitted on the island for the miners, so they imported great cases of eau de cologne and drank it wholesale. The whole town reeked of the stuff’.
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The Allied soldiers found the Soviet consul initially unhelpful, but he eventually agreed to cooperate in the evacuation the next day. And so, on 26 August, most of the Soviet citizens boarded the
Empress of Canada
. But there remained a small number – including the consul – who seemed reluctant to go. There was a rumour that they had been selling coal to the Germans and were, naturally enough, frightened about what would happen to them when they were returned to the Soviet Union. The consul also demanded that some of the heavy machinery at the mine be transported
away on the
Empress of Canada
– something that the British and Canadians couldn't manage.

Brigadier Potts, commander of the troops, visited the consul in his cottage on the edge of the town in an attempt to break the impasse. During the meeting the consul began to drink a bottle of champagne and various other alcoholic drinks – including a bottle of Madeira (‘No eau de cologne for him’, noted one of the Canadians)
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and remained intransigent. He eventually got so drunk that he passed out and, according to a report of the incident written by Major Bruce Blake, a liaison officer, ‘The Consul was [then] carried aboard [the waiting ship] on a stretcher covered by a sheet so that his own people should not know what had happened to him’.
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The
Empress of Canada
finally left at midnight on 26 August, carrying the whole Russian population away to Archangel. On the morning of 29 August, Maisky, the Soviet ambassador in London, phoned the Foreign Office to complain about the behaviour of the British and Canadians. Charges of lack of cooperation and courtesy were staunchly rejected by the Western Allies, who must have suspected that the source of the complaint was the consul, now anxious to defend himself against news of his drunken antics.

But the behaviour of the British and Canadians at Spitsbergen was also questionable. While waiting for the
Empress of Canada
to return from Archangel, they carried out their orders and demolished mining equipment so as not to leave it for the Germans, but something else happened too – much of the town accidentally burnt down. ‘The fire started at about 0600 hours on 1st September in the Terminus shed of the railway’, says a report sent by the War Office to the Foreign Secretary, Anthony Eden, on 11 September.
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‘The fire spread very rapidly owing to the nature of the buildings, which were of wood, well soaked in oil and coal dust…. An inquiry into the incident was held but it was found impossible to discover the cause of the fire’. This idea that it was ‘impossible’ to discover how the fire started is surely disingenuous, since untransmitted film footage taken by a newsreel cameraman, now held in the Imperial War Museum, clearly shows the almost
reckless abandon with which the Allied soldiers set fire to mining equipment and blew up communications masts. Whatever else it may have been, this was scarcely an operation carried out with military precision, and the destruction of Barentsburg was almost certainly a result of their negligence. And although the official line taken by the British government was that the operation was a success, a private Foreign Office memo sent later in September records that ‘the WO [War Office] may have a guilty conscience about this [the burning of Barentsburg] as I have heard from more than one source that according to eye-witnesses the behaviour of the Canadian troops left a great deal to be desired’.
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