Armageddon - Max Hastings [74]
If Stalin did not embark upon a systematic Holocaust, his anti-semitism was almost as profound as that of Hitler. He shared his German counterpart’s sexual prurience, together with an energy in the hours of darkness which seemed wholly appropriate to the nature of his toils. This son of a cobbler and a washerwoman, his face deeply marked by smallpox, had never been a soldier, yet affected military garb from 1941 onwards, to reflect his role as Russia’s supreme warlord. Portraits of Suvurov and Kutuzov, the nation’s great military heroes, were accorded prominent places in his study. Zhukov, however, observed in retirement: “Stalin always somehow remained a civilian.” Like Hitler and in contrast to Churchill, he never visited the fighting fronts—or at any rate never put himself within range of gunfire—not least because he was frightened of flying. He did, however, devote thirty minutes each evening to watching newsreels from the battlefields. “He was of small stature,” wrote Milovan Djilas, “and disproportioned, his trunk too short, his arms too long. His face was pale and rough, ruddy around the cheekbones, his teeth black and irregular, his moustache and hair thin. An admirable head, though, like that of a mountain man, with lively and impish avid yellow eyes . . . One felt the intent, constant activity of the mind.”
Stalin, self-educated, had read obsessively all his life. In the 1930s he and his circle shared an implausible enthusiasm for Galsworthy’s The Forsyte Saga, as an exposition of the corruption of capitalism. Now, there was no circle, for Stalin had murdered them all. He stood alone, served only by lackeys: Beria—“our Himmler” as Stalin introduced him—Zhanadov, Voroshilov, Molotov and a handful of others. In contrast to Hitler, Stalin never excelled as a public performer. He broadcast only with reluctance, at moments of crisis. His genius lay in judgement of men, committee management, mastery of the dark recesses of power. He displayed a compulsion to liquidate perceived threats to his authority which was more draconian than that of Germany’s Führer. If the German generals’ attempt to overthrow Hitler in 1944 was feeble, no man ever dared to raise a hand against Stalin. All those who might have done so were dead. Hitler crippled his own war effort by maintaining in power such old Nazi loyalists as Göring, even when their incompetence was plain. Stalin never indulged in sentiment. Those who failed, and suffered mere dismissal, considered themselves fortunate. Most were shot.
In the eyes of the democracies, before 1939 the Soviet Union’s only merit was that it did not practise external aggression in regions of interest to them. Hitler became the enemy of the Western powers not because of what he did within the frontiers of Germany—even to the Jews—but because he sought world dominance. The democracies indulged Stalin, by contrast, because the victims of his tyranny, far more numerous than those of Hitler, were his own people. That perception changed with the Nazi–Soviet Pact of 1939, and Stalin’s annexation of eastern Poland and invasion of Finland. As war