Titans of History (62 page)

Hitler signed the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact with the Soviet dictator Josef Stalin which partitioned eastern Europe between
these two brutal tyrants. In September 1939 Hitler conquered Poland, a move that triggered British and French declarations of war. But in the spring of 1940 the German armies turned west, conquering Norway, Denmark, the Low Countries and France in a lightning campaign. In 1941 both Yugoslavia and Greece fell, and only Britain remained undefeated. Hitler now dominated his barbaric continental empire and appeared impregnable.

In June 1941, Hitler launched a surprise attack on Stalinist Russia in Operation Barbarossa, the largest and most brutal conflict in human history in which 26 million Soviets alone died. He moved east to command his greatest enterprise from military headquarters in eastern Poland (the Wolf's Lair). German forces won a series of astonishing victories at the start of the Barbarossa campaign, almost taking Moscow, the Soviet capital, and capturing some 6 million prisoners.

Meanwhile another even more horrific project was gathering steam within Nazi-occupied Europe.
Mein Kampf
had spoken darkly of Hitler's intentions toward the Jews, and the Nuremberg Laws of 1935–6, which deprived Jews of their civil rights in Germany, had hinted at worse to come. As the war clouds gathered toward the end of the decade there were more ominous signs:
Kristallnacht
(Night of Broken Glass) in November 1938 had brought a wave of attacks on Jewish homes and properties across Germany.

Hitler was initially content to enslave and starve the Slavs and drive the Jews out of German lands; they were interned in ghettos and concentration camps across occupied Poland. But he now ordered a policy of extermination, using
Einsatzgruppen
(task forces) to shoot a million Jews. Barbarossa served as the trigger and excuse for the “Final Solution of the Jewish Question.” Under Hitler's orders to SS Reichsführer Heinrich Himmler, Jews were dispatched to extermination camps to be slaughtered in gas
chambers on an industrial scale. The Holocaust, as it became known, claimed 6 million Jewish lives, as well as the lives of many more minorities hated by the Nazis, including Gypsies, Slavs and homosexuals. It remains a crime of unparalleled magnitude.

But the Soviets defeated the Germans at Stalingrad in 1942–3. After their victory at Kursk in the summer of 1943, the Soviets slowly but inexorably destroyed Hitler's empire, advancing all the way to Berlin. In June 1944, the Allies invaded northern France in the D-Day landings and started to fight their way to meet the Soviets in Germany itself. Yet an ever more deluded, brutal Hitler refused to countenance reality, demanding that his soldiers fight to the last man. As Germany was slowly crushed between the Red Army in the east and the British and Americans in the west, Hitler fled to the
Führerbunker
in Berlin on January 16, 1945, along with support staff and, later, Eva Braun and the Goebbels family. On April 16 the Red Army launched the Battle of Berlin, attacking in a pincer movement that swiftly smashed into the city.

Hitler spent his time ordering nonexistent armies to launch nonexistent offensives, denouncing his potential successors Goering and Himmler as traitors, and holding dainty tea parties with his devoted female secretaries. Elsewhere in the bunker, his SS guards and female staff held wild drunken orgies. On April 28, hearing of Himmler's attempt to broker peace, Hitler furiously had SS officer Hermann Fegelein (Eva Braun's brother-in-law and Himmler's golden boy) shot in the Chancellery garden.

On April 29 Hitler married Eva Braun in a civil ceremony in the
Führerbunker
. The next day, Braun and Hitler swallowed cyanide capsules—previously tested on his dog, Blondi—and Hitler shot himself in the right temple. Scotching rumors that he escaped to South America, eyewitness claims that his body was burned were substantiated when officers of SMERSH (the Red Army counter-intelligence unit) discovered remains near the bunker, confirmed
by dental records as Braun's and Hitler's. His skeleton was buried under the Magdeburg Soviet airbase in East Germany, then dug up and incinerated in 1970 on the orders of KGB chief Yuri Andropov. In 2000 part of the skull was put on display by the Federal Archives Service in Moscow.

1889–1964

A moment comes, which comes but rarely in history, when we step out from the old to the new; when an age ends; and when the soul of a nation long suppressed finds utterance
.

Jawahalarl Nehru, fondly nicknamed Pandit-ji, was the first prime minister of India, which he ruled for almost twenty years, and the father of the greatest democracy on earth. Yet he was also an often-flawed politician whose socialistic planning policies held back the Indian economy, whose centralizing tendencies exacerbated the tragedy of Partition and whose foreign policies played into the hands of the Soviets. However his legacy is not just the success of democratic India but also the most successful political dynasty of modern democracy: in east Asia and the Middle East, dynasty is central to power. India was dominated by Nehru and his family and remains so well into the 21st century.

The descendant of lawyers to the East India Company, Nehru was the son of Motilal Nehru, a successful and wealthy lawyer, anglicized and sophisticated, who was one of the leaders of the Indian Congress Party, at times its president. Nehru was given the
best English education, studying at Harrow School, which had been attended by that long-time foe of Indian independence Winston Churchill himself—and then Trinity College, Cambridge. But Nehru—who at Harrow and Cambridge was sometimes known as Joe Nehru—was involved with his father and Gandhi in the independence movement from an early age. At times he and his father were arrested together and Nehru, despite conflicts with Gandhi during the 1930s, had emerged as a leader in his own right by the start of the war. Nehru spent much of the time in and out of British jails as the British government wrestled with the challenge of whether to keep India or give it independence. There were rumors of Nehru's schisms with Gandhi but the latter recognized him as his protégé and heir in 1941.

By the end of the war it was clear that Britain would indeed yield to Indian demands for independence: in 1946 the British prime minister Clement Attlee dispatched a Cabinet mission to decide how to proceed. Consulting with the two leading parties, Nehru's Congress representing the Hindus and the All-India Muslim League under Muhammad Ali Jinnah, the British proposed a decentralized India with some self-government for Muslim and Hindu provinces. Leader of the largest party in the newly elected Constituent Assembly, Nehru became the prime minister of a provisional government. Attlee sent Lord Louis Mountbatten out to India as the last viceroy with orders to grant independence no later than 1948. But Mountbatten himself made the fateful decision to accelerate events in 1947. Mountbatten was faced with opposition to dividing India from the Hindu elite and opposition from the Muslims to centralizing India under a Hindu elite. Under this mounting pressure, Mountbatten finally agreed to a hurried and ill-conceived partition of the Raj into two countries, India and Pakistan, that would result in the massacre of a million people—and a vast migration. Mountbatten was frustrated by Jinnah and the Muslims but became close to Nehru; it is
likely that Nehru had an affair, or at least a romantic relationship with the formidable vicereine, Lady Edwina Mountbatten.

On August 15, 1947, Nehru declared Indian independence with the famous words:

Long years ago we made a tryst with destiny, and now the time comes when we shall redeem our pledge, not wholly or in full measure, but very substantially. At the stroke of the midnight hour, when the world sleeps, India will awake to life and freedom. A moment comes, which comes but rarely in history, when we step out from the old to the new, when an age ends, and when the soul of a nation, long suppressed, finds utterance. It is fitting that at this solemn moment we take the pledge of dedication to the service of India and her people and to the still larger cause of humanity
.

Winning the first full elections and subsequent polls, Nehru became the first prime minister of an independent India and remained in office for the next sixteen years. He established democracy and stability in India, a colossal achievement, but many of his other policies were counterproductive.

A Fabian socialist, he practiced state planning on a scale that paralyzed and crippled the economy for decades. In foreign policy, his nonaligned movement, claiming neutrality between the USA and USSR, played into Soviet hands, bringing India far too close to the Soviets, who remained major funders of the Nehru/Congress family well into the 1970s: their KGB station in Delhi was the largest in the world.

In 1962 Nehru's forward policy on the Chinese border led to a short but dangerous war Sino-Indian war. He died in office, but apart from democracy, his chief legacies were his family and the Congress Party political machine.

From the earliest days of independence, his chief of staff and hostess had been his ambitious and ruthless only child, Indira, who had married Ferouz Gandhi (no relation to Mahatma) in 1941. By the 1960s, there were tensions between the old prime minister and his fiery daughter, whom he suspected of brazen ambition.

After the short premiership of Shashri, Indira Gandhi, despite being mocked by her rivals as “Dumb Doll,” won election as prime minister in 1966. In 1971, when East Pakistan tried to secede from Pakistan, Indira Gandhi backed the rebels and fought Pakistan in a short war, resulting in an independent Bangladesh. Victory over Pakistan made her overconfident. She won the 1971 election aided by her Eradicate Poverty campaign. But when she was indicted by the courts for electoral corruption and misuse of funds, she defied the resulting protests, refused to resign and declared a state of emergency, ruling by fiat, supported by her ambitious younger son and chosen heir, Sanjay. She imposed her powers ruthlessly, arresting thousands of opposition supporters. When she finally called elections in 1977, she and her son lost their seats and the new government arrested them and put them on trial.

However in 1980, Indira won a landslide election and returned to power until her assassination by her own Sikh bodyguards in 1984. As prime minister, she was succeeded by her diffident and gentle eldest son, Rajiv, a pilot (Sanjay had been killed in a flying accident in 1980), who governed until 1989 when his corruption-tainted government lost the elections. He was assassinated by Tamil Tigers in 1991 but his Italian-born widow Sonia assumed leadership of the Congress Party, which won the election of 2004. Refusing to become premier herself, she appointed Manoman Singh as PM but remained the power behind the scenes. Her son Rahul Gandhi became general secretary of the party: the dynasty remains ascendant.

1891–1940

There is no such thing as a writer who falls silent. If he falls silent it means he was never a true writer
.

Mikhail Bulgakov

Mikhail Bulgakov, the Soviet writer who was sometimes favored but often banned during his lifetime, left as his legacy one of the greatest novels of the 20th century.
The Master and Margarita
is a madcap, searing satire of Soviet Russia, defying tyranny and despotism, and a celebration of the ability of the human spirit to triumph over dictatorship.

The plot of
The Master and Margarita
, which took Bulgakov over a decade to write, is complex and fantastical. In one strand Bulgakov tells how the Devil (Voland, based on Stalin) and his henchmen, including a giant gun-toting cat, wreak havoc in 1930s Moscow, while in another, set in Jerusalem in AD 33, Bulgakov explores Pontius Pilate's role in the crucifixion of Christ. Meanwhile the Master, a writer persecuted by the Soviet authorities for his novel about this very subject, has retreated to a lunatic asylum, which seemingly offers a saner refuge than the outside world. His mistress, Margarita, refuses to despair, but dances with the Devil to save the Master.

Bulgakov was well aware that his masterpiece could never be published in his lifetime. As well as exploring the complex interplay between good and evil, courage and cowardice, innocence and guilt, the novel champions the freedom of the spirit in an
unfree world. Demonstrating the inability of those in power to legislate for the souls of the people they control, Bulgakov's work fundamentally challenged Stalinist Russia.

The Master and Margarita
was first published after Stalin's death, in magazine installments in 1967. Despite being heavily censored, it was an instant success. Its continued success is living evidence of its own premise that art will triumph over tyranny. In the 1960s Mick Jagger based the Rolling Stones song “Sympathy for the Devil” on the book.

Born in Kiev, the son of a professor, Bulgakov qualified as a physician in 1916 and served as a field doctor with the White Army during the Russian Civil War. Bulgakov was one of a handful of writers including Chekhov, Conan Doyle and Somerset Maugham, to practice medicine, an ideal education in the art of observation. His medical tales,
Stories of a Country Doctor
, are his best shorter pieces. His refusal to flee his homeland, or to become a mouthpiece for communist propaganda, rendered him, in his own words, “the one and only literary wolf” in the Soviet Union. In his first ten years as a writer, hostile notices outweighed the good by 298 to 3. His plays—even the less controversial adaptations and the historical works that he thought might be allowed to pass unnoticed—were stifled. He himself burned an early draft of
The Master and Margarita
, temporarily overwhelmed by the futility of writing the unpublishable. In a letter to the Soviet government in 1930, requesting permission to emigrate, Bulgakov outlined the fate he was facing as a banned writer: “persecution, desperation and death.” His contemporaries believed that his death in 1940, from inherited kidney disease, was as much attributable to his treatment by Stalin