Dinner With Churchill: Policy-Making at the Dinner Table (11 page)

C
HAPTER
4

Dinners in Moscow August 1942

C
hurchill believed that his persuasive powers and personal charm would be effective not only with a well disposed ally like Roosevelt, but even with a far less congenial one like Joseph Stalin. Which is why he launched his usual first-phase tactic, one that had worked so well with Roosevelt: a
personal
letter-writing campaign. This began in June 1940, when he used the occasion of the appointment of Sir Stafford Cripps as British Ambassador to the Soviet Union to contact the Soviet leader directly.

Churchill had reason to regard this exercise of personal diplomacy a success: by July 1941 he and the Soviet leader
were exchanging birthday greetings,
3
and Stalin
immediately
responded affirmatively to Churchill’s request for a meeting.

Getting to Moscow required stopovers at Gibraltar, Cairo and Teheran for refuelling. As usual, Churchill turned these stops on an arduous journey to his advantage, finding time at Teheran for both his beloved baths and lunch with the Shah. In Teheran, amid an “atmosphere of deck chairs and whiskey and soda”, Churchill escaped the “continuous
hooting
of the Persian motor cars”
4
and the heat by spending the night at the British summer legation high in the mountains above the capital. Not every Churchill whim was catered to. The Prime Minister’s request that his bed at the legation in Teheran be dismantled, carted up to the cooler mountains and there reassembled, was refused. One of Churchill’s
wartime
private secretaries, Leslie Rowan, and Commander Thompson spent the night in “a magnificent Persian tent in the garden” of the summer legation.
5

Dinner at the legation featured turkey with all the trimmings.
6
A British bodyguard recalls the dessert served up by the kitchen staff. A large plate of fresh Persian peaches with the tops cut off were filled with melted chocolate and topped with whipped cream. Then the top was replaced “at a jaunty angle”.
7

On his arrival in Moscow on the evening of 12 August 1942, after the usual airport ceremony, Churchill promptly went to his villa eight miles outside Moscow. He was, as he put it “regaled in the dining room with every form of choice food and liquor, including caviar and vodka, but with many other dishes and wines from France and Germany, far
beyond
our mood or consuming powers”.
8

The 67-year-old Churchill, despite the long flight, insisted
on an immediate appointment with Stalin – though he did take some time to bathe. He also took time to feed the
goldfish
at the villa Stalin had assigned him. Alexander Cadogan, the Foreign Office’s permanent Under-Secretary, ever
interested
in food, noted there were excellent raspberries growing in the gardens of the villa.

Churchill had two reasons for anticipating a tough slog in Moscow. First was his long-standing and well-known
hostility
to Communism, Bolshevism, and all that the Stalin
regime
represented. He had made no secret of his desire to see the regime toppled in 1919, and had cooperated with efforts to overthrow it. But in 1942, as he put it, “If Hitler invaded hell, I would make at least a favourable reference to the devil in the House of Commons”.
9
Stalin was to be wooed, but at dinner the Prime Minister would presumably dine with a rather long spoon.

His second reason for anticipating a difficult meeting was the news he was bringing to Stalin: there would be no second front in Europe in 1942 to ease the pressure on Soviet forces fighting on the Eastern front. Before the meeting, Churchill had written obliquely to the Soviet leader: “We could …
survey
the war together and take decisions hand-in-hand. I could then tell you plans we have made with President Roosevelt for offensive action in 1942.”
10
That action was Operation Torch in North Africa, rather than the cross-Channel
invasion
that Stalin favoured.

So worried was Churchill about this visit that he had
decided
to take Averell Harriman, Roosevelt’s emissary, with him. He had written to the President: “Would you be able to let Averell come with me? I feel that things would be easier if we all seemed to be together. I have a somewhat raw job.”
11
Roosevelt promptly agreed.

The food laid out on his arrival at his dacha was not the only display of Stalin’s hospitality. One aide recalls the breakfasts the Soviets provided: “caviar, cake, chocolates, preserved fruit, grapes, none of the normal breakfast dishes. Fortunately coffee and an omelette appeared and all was well. Leslie Rowan told me that when he asked for an egg and bacon, they produced four eggs and nine rashers of
bacon
– all very nice except that one remembers that the vast majority of the population are practically starving”.
12
This may be why Churchill later described his quarters as being “prepared with totalitarian lavishness”.
13

Churchill set off for his first meeting with the man he called “the great Revolutionary Chief and profound Soviet Union statesman and warrior”.
14
The meeting, not a dinner, lasted from seven to eleven p.m.

Although it began badly, as Churchill had anticipated, in the end, after Stalin reacted positively to tales of the British bombing of Germany, it ended on a sufficiently cordial note for Churchill to tell Sir Charles Wilson: “When I left we were good friends and shook hands cordially. I mean to forge a solid link with this man.”
15

That left Churchill to dine alone. “It was now after
midnight
, and the PM, who had had no dinner, proceeded to eat a huge meal. Presently, he put his half-finished cigar across the wine glass. He was plainly very weary.”
16
It is unclear whether an entirely new feast had been prepared, replacing what had been set out earlier, as original records may have been destroyed by the Ninth Directorate of the KGB, which was then in charge of serving the elite.
17

Discussions the following day proved fruitless. Churchill could pry no response from Stalin other than a repeated
demand
for a second front, prompting a disgruntled Churchill
to announce to his staff that further meetings would be
useless
. He did, however, feel compelled to stay for Stalin’s
closing
official banquet for his own staff and the British guests – some hundred in all – the following night.

The menu did not reflect any wartime food shortages in the hard-pressed Soviet Union.

“The dinner dragged on,” moaned Churchill’s doctor, “the list of toasts – 25 of them – appeared interminable.”
19
Churchill later told Sir Charles: “The food was filthy.” As was the Prime Minister’s changeable mood. Being assigned the place of honour on the Soviet leader’s right was no
compensation
for the abuse to which Churchill felt he and his
entourage
were still being subjected. Unusually, Churchill wore his siren suit to this dinner instead of the traditional black tie that he often wore for such formal banquets.

At seven o’clock the next evening, after a day of staff meetings, Churchill went to see Stalin to say goodbye as he planned to leave Moscow early the following morning. The possibility that his ally would leave contemplating an open breach had its intended effect on Stalin, who quite
unexpectedly
invited Churchill to his Kremlin apartment for drinks. “I said that I was in principle always in favour of such a policy,”
20
responded Churchill.

Drinks became dinner, and what a dinner it was. This dinner was as close to the one-on-one, table-top
diplomacy
that Churchill preferred as anyone was ever likely to get in the Kremlin. It included interpreters, both A.H. Birse (stepping in at the last minute for Churchill) and Vladimir Pavlov (for Stalin), and, at Stalin’s suggestion, Foreign Minister Vyacheslav Molotov. Even the serving staff was minimal: this apparently impromptu dinner was on a serve-yourself basis. Stalin brought in his daughter, Svetlana, to meet Churchill, and uncorked various bottles, “which began to make an
imposing
array.”
21

At first, Stalin ate very little. The Prime Minister reported that even after some three to four hours of talk – just the sort of substantive conversation that Churchill had always assumed would more likely produce results in the informal
setting of a private dinner than in a meeting room – “there was no response from this hard-boiled egg of a man.”
22

New allies. With Stalin, Moscow, 14 August 1942

Churchill later recalled:

Perhaps any disgust on Churchill’s part was tempered by his life-long fascination with the exotic, and undoubtedly by his sense of triumph at breaking through the frost that had characterised Soviet–UK relations. He cabled Clement Attlee, the Deputy Prime Minister, in London: “I have just had a long talk, with dinner lasting six hours, with Stalin and Molotov alone in his private apartment … We …
parted
on most cordial and friendly terms …”
24

The Prime Minister returned to his villa at a quarter past three on the morning of 16 August, convinced his special brand of personal diplomacy, practised at a private dinner, had succeeded. We “ended friends,”
25
Churchill told Wilson as he left for a four-thirty flight to Teheran, and reported to the Cabinet, with a copy to President Roosevelt, that he had had “an agreeable conversation” with the Soviet leader. “I am definitely encouraged by my visit to Moscow.”
26

Once in Teheran, Churchill again rested in the British summer legation. Then on to Cairo, and, after
recuperating
from understandable fatigue, inspecting the troops,
several
meetings and a visit to Montgomery’s forward position, back to London.