Conversations with Stalin (12 page)

Bulganin was in a general's uniform. He was rather stout, handsome, and unmistakably Russian, with an old-fashioned goatee, and extremely reserved in his expression. General Antonov was still young, very handsome, dark and lithe. He, too, did not mix into the conversation unless it concerned him.

Seated across from Stalin, face to face, I suddenly gained confidence, though he did not turn to me for a long time. Not until the atmosphere had been warmed by liquor, toasts, and jesting did Stalin find the time ripe to liquidate the dispute with me. He did it in a half-joking manner. He filled for me a little glass of vodka and bade me drink to the Red Army. Not understanding his intention immediately, I wished to drink to his health. “No, no,” he insisted, while smiling and regarding me probingly, “but just for the Red Army! What, you won't drink to the Red Army?”

I drank, of course, though even at Stalin's I avoided drinking anything but beer, first, because alcohol did not agree with me, and, second, because drunkenness did not agree with my views, though I was never a proponent of temperance.

Thereupon Stalin asked me about the affair of the Red Army. I explained to him that it had not been my intention to insult the Red Army, but that I had wished to call attention to irregularities of certain of its members and to the political difficulties they were creating for us.

Stalin interrupted: “Yes, you have, of course, read Dostoevsky? Do you see what a complicated thing is man's soul, man's psyche? Well then, imagine a man who has fought from Stalingrad to Belgrade—over thousands of kilometers of his own devastated land, across the dead bodies of his comrades and dearest ones! How can such a man react normally? And what is so awful in his having fun with a woman, after such horrors? You have imagined the Red Army to be ideal. And it is not ideal, nor can it be, even if it did not contain a certain percentage of criminals—we opened up our penitentiaries and stuck everybody into the army. There was an interesting case. An Air Force major had fun with a woman, and a chivalrous engineer appeared to protect her. The Major drew a gun: ‘Ekh, you mole from the rear!'—and he killed the chivalrous engineer. They sentenced the Major to death. But somehow the matter was brought before me, and I made inquiries—I have the right as commander in chief in time of war—and I released the Major and sent him to the front. Now he is one of our heroes. One has to understand the soldier. The Red Army is not ideal. The important thing is that it fights Germans—and it is fighting them well, while the rest doesn't matter.”

Soon after, upon my return from Moscow, I heard, to my horror, of a far more significant example of Stalin's “understanding” attitude toward the sins of Red Army personnel. Namely, while crossing East Prussia, Soviet soldiers, especially the tank units, pounded and regularly killed all German civilian refugees—women and children. Stalin was informed of this and asked what should be done. He replied: “We lecture our soldiers too much; let them have some initiative!”

That night at his villa, he then asked: ‘‘And what about General Korneev, the chief of our Mission, what kind of man is he?”

I avoided saying anything bad about him and about his Mission, though all sorts of things could have been brought up, but Stalin himself concluded: “The poor man is not stupid, but he is a drunkard, an incurable drunkard!”

After that Stalin even joked with me, on seeing that I was drinking beer. As a matter of fact, I don't even like beer. Stalin commented: “Djilas here drinks beer like a German, like a German—he is a German, by God, a German.”

I did not find this joke at all to my liking; at that time hatred for the Germans, even for those few Communist émigrés, was at its height in Moscow, but I took it without anger or inner resentment.

With this, it appeared, the dispute over the behavior of the Red Army was resolved. Stalin's relation to me got back on the original track of cordiality.

And so it went, until the rift between the Yugoslav and Soviet Central Committees, in 1948, when Molotov and Stalin dredged up in their letters that same dispute over the Red Army and the “insults” that I had dealt it.

Stalin teased Tito with obvious deliberateness—in a manner that had in it as much malice as jest. He did it by speaking unfavorably of the Yugoslav Army while flattering the Bulgarian Army. That previous winter Yugoslav units including many draftees who were engaged for the first time in very serious frontal attacks had suffered defeats, and Stalin, who was apparently well informed, took the opportunity to point out, “The Bulgarian Army is better than the Yugoslav. The Bulgars had their weaknesses and enemies in their ranks. But they executed a few score—and now everything is in order. The Bulgarian Army is very good—drilled and disciplined. And yours, the Yugoslav—they are still Partisans, unfit for serious front-line fighting. Last winter one German regiment broke up a whole division of yours. A regiment beat a division!”

A bit later Stalin proposed a toast to the Yugoslav Army, but he did not forget to add to it, “But which will yet fight well on level ground!”

Tito had kept from reacting to Stalin's comments. Whenever Stalin made some witty remark at our expense, Tito looked at me silently with a restrained smile, and I returned his look with solidarity and sympathy. But when Stalin said that the Bulgarian Army was better than the Yugoslav, Tito could not stand it, and shouted that the Yugoslav Army would quickly rid itself of its weaknesses.

One could detect in the relation between Stalin and Tito something special, tacit—as though these two had a grudge against one other, but each was holding back for his own reasons. Stalin took care not to offend Tito personally in any way, but at the same time he kept taking sideswiping jabs at conditions in Yugoslavia. On the other hand, Tito treated Stalin with respect, as one would one's senior, but resentment could also be detected, especially at Stalin's remarks on Yugoslav conditions.

At one point Tito brought out that there were new phenomena in socialism and that socialism was now being achieved in ways different from those of the past, which gave Stalin an opportunity to say, “Today socialism is possible even under the English monarchy. Revolution is no longer necessary everywhere. Just recently a delegation of British Labourites was here, and we talked about this in particular. Yes, there is much that is new. Yes, socialism is possible even under an English king.”

As is known, Stalin never upheld such a view publicly. The British Labourites soon gained a majority at the elections and nationalized over twenty per cent of the industrial production. Nevertheless, Stalin never recognized these measures as being socialistic nor the Labourites as being socialists. I maintain that he did not do so primarily because of differences and clashes with the Labour Government in foreign policy.

In the course of the conversation about this, I interjected that in Yugoslavia there existed in essence a Soviet type of government; the Communist Party held all the key positions and there was no serious opposition party. But Stalin did not agree with this. “No your government is not Soviet—you have something in between De Gaulle's France and the Soviet Union.”

Tito remarked that in Yugoslavia something new was taking shape. But this discussion remained unfinished. Within myself I could not agree with Stalin's view; neither did I think that I differed with Tito.

Stalin presented his views on the distinctive nature of the war that was being waged: “This war is not as in the past; whoever occupies a territory also imposes on it his own social system. Everyone imposes his own system as for as his army can reach. It cannot be otherwise.” He also pointed out, without going into long explanations, the meaning of his Panslavic policy. “If the Slavs keep united and maintain solidarity, no one in the future will be able to move a finger. Not even a finger!” he repeated, emphasizing his thought by cleaving the air with his forefinger.

Someone expressed doubt that the Germans would be able to recuperate within fifty years. But Stalin was of a different opinion. “No, they will recover, and very quickly. That is a highly developed industrial country with an extremely qualified and numerous working class and technical intelligentsia. Give them twelve to fifteen years and they'll be on their feet again. And this is why the unity of the Slavs is important. But even apart from this, if the unity of the Slavs exists, no one will dare move a finger.”

At one point he got up, hitched up his pants as though he was about to wrestle or to box, and cried out almost in a transport, “The war shall soon be over. We shall recover in fifteen or twenty years, and then we'll have another go at it.”

There was something terrible in his words: a horrible war was still going on. Yet there was something impressive, too, about his cognizance of the paths he had to take, the inevitability that faced the world in which he lived and the movement that he headed.

The rest of what was said that evening was hardly worth remembering. There was much eating, even more drinking, and countless senseless toasts were raised.

Molotov recounted how Stalin stung Churchill. “Stalin raised a toast to secret agents and to the Secret Service, thus alluding to Churchill's failures at Gallipoli in the First World War, which occurred because the British lacked sufficient information.” Molotov also cited, not without glee, Churchill's bizarre sense of humor. “Churchill had declared in Moscow, in his cups, that he deserved the highest order and citation of the Red Army because he had taught it to fight so well, thanks to the intervention at Archangel.” One could tell in general that Churchill had left a deep impression on the Soviet leaders as a farsighted and dangerous “bourgeois statesman”—though they did not like him.

During the ride back to his villa, Tito, who also could not stand large quantities of liquor, remarked in the automobile: “I don't know what the devil is wrong with these Russians that they drink so much—plain decadence!” I, of course, agreed with him and tried in vain, who knows after how many attempts, to find an explanation of why Soviet high society drank so desperately and determinedly.

On returning to town from the villa in which Tito was housed, I collected my impressions of that night in which actually nothing significant had happened: there were no points of disagreement, and yet we seemed farther apart than we ever were. Every dispute had been resolved for political reasons, as something hardly to be avoided in relations between independent states.

At the end of our visit (following the dinner with Stalin), we spent an evening at Dimitrov's. To fill it up with something, he invited two or three Soviet actors, who gave short performances.

Of course there was talk of a future union between Bulgaria and Yugoslavia, but it was very general and brief. Tito and Dimitrov exchanged Comintern reminiscences. All in all, it was more a friendly gathering than a political meeting.

Dimitrov was alone at the time because all the Bulgarian émigrés had long since gone to Bulgaria—in the footsteps of the Red Army. One could tell that Dimitrov was tired and listless, and we knew at least part of the reason, though nothing was said about it. Although Bulgaria had been liberated, Stalin would not permit Dimitrov's return, with the excuse that it was not yet the right time, for the Western states would take his return as an open sign of the establishment of Communism in Bulgaria—as though such a sign was not evident even without this! There had been talk of this, too, at Stalin's dinner. Winking noncommittally, Stalin had said, “It is not yet time for Dimitrov to go to Bulgaria: he's well off where he is.”

Though there was nothing to prove it, still it was suspected even then that Stalin was preventing Dimitrov's return until he himself settled affairs in Bulgaria! These suspicions of ours did not yet imply Soviet hegemony, though there were premonitions of this too, but we saw the matter as a necessary accommodation with Stalin's alleged fears that Dimitrov might push matters toward the left too soon in Bulgaria.

But even this was significant and sufficient—for a beginning. It evoked a whole series of questions. Stalin was a genius, but Dimitrov was hardly a nobody. By what token did Stalin know better than Dimitrov what ought to be done in Bulgaria? Did not holding Dimitrov in Moscow against his will undermine his reputation among Bulgarian Communists and the Bulgarian people? And, in general, why this intricate game over his return, in which the Russians were not accountable to anyone, not even to Dimitrov?

In politics, more than in anything else, the beginning of everything lies in moral indignation and in doubt of the good intentions of others.

We returned via Kiev, and at our wish and that of the Soviet Government we remained two or three days to visit the Ukrainian Government.

The Secretary of the Ukrainian Party and Premier of the Government was N. S. Khrushchev, and his Commissar for Foreign Affairs was Manuilsky. It was they who met us and it was with them that we spent the entire three days.

At the time, in 1945, the war was still on and one was permitted to express modest wishes. Khrushchev and Manuilsky expressed one—that the Ukraine might establish diplomatic relations with the “people's democracies.”

However, nothing came of it. Stalin soon enough encountered resistance even in the “people's democracies,” so that it hardly would occur to him to strengthen any Ukrainian separateness. As for the eloquent lively old veteran Manuilsky—a minister without a ministry—he later gave speeches in the United Nations for two or three years, only to disappear one day and to sink into the anonymous mass of the victims of Stalin's or someone else's displeasure.

Khrushchev's destiny was quite different. But at that moment no one could have surmised it. Even then he was in the top political leadership—and had been since 1939—though it was considered that he was not as close to Stalin as Molotov and Malenkov were, or even Kaganovich. In Soviet top echelons he was held to be a very skillful operator with a great capacity for economic and organizational matters, though not as a writer or speaker. He came to leadership in the Ukraine after the purges of the mid-thirties, but I am not acquainted with—nor was I then interested in—his part in them. But it is known how one rose in Stalin's Russia: certainly by dint of determination and dexterity during the bloody “anti-kulak” and “anti-Party” campaigns. This would have had to be especially true for the Ukraine, where in addition to the afore-mentioned “deadly sins” there was “nationalism” as well.