RUSSIA: Stalin’s Hammer

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Moscow was gay and confident. Twice within the week gun salvos announced new successes. The Dnieper had been crossed. Kiev’s recapture was near. The winter’s chill breath was already upon the city, but nichevo—no matter. Victory was in the air and it smelled good after two cruel and distressing years.

The city put on a festive air. The streets were filled with officers and men in smart, bemedaled uniforms. The ballet, opera, concerts, plays, movies drew big crowds. Subway stations shone with bright pink paint; fresh plaster concealed the scars on bombed buildings.

Optimism. Moscow’s confidence stemmed from more than armed victory. Cordell Hull and Anthony Eden arrived for the eagerly awaited conference with Viacheslav Molotov. With Hull, in four planes, came the new U.S. Ambassador, W. Averell Harriman, the State Department’s experts on Russian, Baltic, Balkan affairs and the Secretary’s friend and adviser James C. Dunn. Also among the arrivals were Major General John R. Deane, U.S.A., secretary of the Joint Chiefs of Staffs, and Lieut. General Sir Hastings Ismay, Winston Churchill’s personal Chief of Staff. In Africa was U.S. Secretary of the Treasury Henry Morgenthau.

To the Russians, this assemblage bore promise of war’s end. True, there was friction among the Allies, but it was not beyond repair. Indeed, open discussion of the friction might be a healthy sign. The Government’s Izvestia ticked off samples of “developing cooperation”: the recent food conference at Hot Springs, Va.; agreement on the economic rehabilitation of freed territory; the creation, at Stalin’s suggestion, of the Inter-Allied Mediterranean Commission; the joint acceptance by the U.S.S.R., Britain and the U.S. of Italy’s re-entry into the war as a cobelligerent.

The Big Three had been allied for two years. Yet this was to be their first mutual effort to determine the political bases on which the alliance could rest, the best ways to defeat the foe and assure a lasting peace. If the three ministers could agree, their chiefs could come together for the final talks.

Realism. Behind this hope loomed harsh realities. Foreign Commissar Molotov can be expected to shy away from pious phrases, present Russia’s views and demands in hard, unequivocal words.

Molotov’s foremost demand will be for the second front. Furthermore, this familiar demand will be the keystone of the whole Soviet position, a pressure point to be used in bargaining for other demands. Said Izvestia last week: “The question of a decisive shortening of the war is unbreakably connected with the opening of a second front. . . . When there is agreement on this primary question … it will be easier to decide all other necessary questions.”

Nothing less than a definite promise of earlier action than is now planned will satisfy the Russians. Whether Messrs. Eden and Hull can make such a promise is doubtful. Allied military specialists will be conferring at the same time, but even they probably cannot add much to the detailed information on Anglo-U.S. plans which the Russians already have.

Other areas of difference, and the conflicting views in these areas, were also known in advance. The U.S.S.R. wants a strong, friendly, de-Nazied Germany, the U.S. and Britain want a weakened Germany. Russia, as her press plainly said last week, refuses even to discuss the Soviet domination of her “security belt” in the Baltic States, eastern Poland, prewar Rumania’s Bessarabia, the parts of Finland seized in 1940, all of which belonged to Czarist Russia.

The Russians want a strong and friendly Poland; according to Polish sources, the British have unofficially urged the Polish Government in Exile to cede the Pripet Marshes to Russia, keep the important city of Lwów, and presumably compensate themselves in East Prussia and German Silesia. In the Balkans, Russia will want a strong voice in Yugoslavia, Rumania and Bulgaria, where Soviet influence is strong.

The Russians are also eager to discuss the AMG (Allied Military Government in Occupied Territory), in which they see a pattern for the future. They dislike its present composition, have sharply attacked its work. Said Moscow’s War and the Working Class: “[AMG] is generally developing from foundations that have nothing in common with the principles of democracy.”

Policy-Makers. Basically, Russia’s prime objectives are: 1) complete defeat of Hitlerite Germany and 2) security from future attack. To achieve these goals, the Russians are prepared to use every weapon in the arsenal of power politics: military force, alliances or armed isolation, collective responsibility or exclusive spheres of influence. On the choice of the weapons depends the harvest to be reaped by the Red sickle.

This shrewd Realpolitik has not been the product of Stalin’s mind alone. He was helped a great deal by a small group of hardheaded party bosses, mostly unknown to the outside world. The group is bound by common bonds of Communist faith, strong nationalism, a long and harsh test of body & spirit in Czarist jails, exile, the civil war.

To each member of this band, Russia is an island lashed by angry capitalist waves. Each distrusts the outer world. Each, essentially, is comparable to a U.S. Midwestern isolationist set against a Red background. The band’s motto is the old Russian proverb: “S volkami zhit, po volchii zhit”—”He that lives among wolves must learn to howl.” With the capitalist wolves, these men propose to talk the wolfish language of power politics—tough, unsentimental, strongarm.

This group remained in the background while brilliant, flabby-fleshed Maxim Litvinoff had his internationalist innings in 1929-39. But when the Munich pact ended the Geneva daydreams, the nationalist band came to the fore. One of its members, Viacheslav Molotov, stepped into Litvinoff’s place as Commissar of Foreign Affairs.

Two other party bosses help to forge Russia’s Realpolitik:

> Dark, swarthy, forceful Andrei Zhdanov is the Leningrad party boss, a member of the Soviet Union’s omnipotent nine-man Politburo, an intimate friend of Stalin. Before the war, he urged seizure of eastern Finland and the Baltic States. When war came, he helped to pull Leningrad through the 515 terrible days of siege. A priest’s son, he fought with valor in World War I, helped to break up the Czarist Army with slogans of peace, bread and land, slowly climbed up the ladder of party hierarchy. Soapbox-oratory has given him a chronic hoarseness. He is a tremendously able organizer, an articulate speaker, a student of foreign affairs.

> Handsome, dark-eyed Andrei Andreyev, who looks something like Eden, heads the U.S.S.R.’s Parliament, the Supreme Soviet. A peasant’s son, he became a munitions worker, joined the Bolsheviks during World War I. His first key post was as head of the party’s Control Commission, which keeps the Reds on their toes, purges those who do not conform. Andreyev’s mind is intelligent and subtle. Close to Stalin, he is definitely one of Russia’s up-&-coming men.

Stalin’s Voice. These men proclaim no policy on their own. Their job is to advise Stalin, who makes the final decision. But these men are of the mold which produced Stalin himself, and their thought patterns are his. Once Stalin approves of a policy, it is announced in Foreign Commissar Molotov’s dull, stammering monotone.

Nicolai Lenin, his good friend, described Molotov as “Russia’s best filing clerk.” The epithet was unfair. True, Molotov is colorless, pedantic, phenomenally hardworking. His mind likes order, method, efficiency, and all that passes through it is filed neatly in mental pigeonholes. But he is no dullard. A clear thinker, he keeps his feet on a solid foundation of history, philosophy and economics. Like most Soviet leaders, he quotes from Hegel, Marx, Lenin, Plekhanov—and Stalin—at the drop of a gavel.

Leon Trotsky, his bitter enemy, called him “a social climber.” The epithet was untrue. Molotov is unassuming. He has had power for a quarter of a century. For half of this time, he has been Stalin’s Man Friday, which is as high as a man can climb in Russia. Molotov has not let the power go to his head.

He is reserved to the point of shyness. With strangers he is wary and reticent. With men he knows, he is warm and voluble. But he is still more voluble on the platform: two-hour speeches from him are not rare. His addresses are clear, often viciously ironic, but never so polished as the oratory of Roosevelt or Churchill. Some of the speeches he delivered in 1939-41 Molotov would probably just as soon forget.

In appearance Molotov is Teddy Roosevelt minus “T.R.’s” color. He is wide-browed, broad-shouldered, stocky. Almost alone among the Red leaders, he has retained the white collar and tie, the neat dark suit, the stiffly worn fedora. As a concession to his proletarian environment he sometimes wears a cap. But not even the cap can conceal his indisguisable middle-class look.

Red Conversion. “Molotov” is an underground pseudonym (Molot means hammer). Molotov was born Scriabin, the son of a store clerk in the village of Kukarka. At a sacrifice, the family sent him to gymnasia (high school) in nearby Kazan, to college in distant Petrograd. There the backwash of the bloody revolution of 1905 hit and converted him. At 1 6 he was a full-fledged, poster-writing, bomb-making revolutionary. At 19 he had been jailed, exiled.

Before the Red tide swept him into power eight years later, Molotov had been arrested six times, exiled twice, escaped from exile once. He went underground, organized railroad workers, studied Marxism, made friends. Among the latter was a dark, sturdy Georgian named Stalin. Molotov helped Stalin to publish Pravda, then the official organ of the Bolshevik underground.

In 1912, so the tale goes, 22-year-old Molotov fell in love with a girl in a boarding school. Climbing over a fence to meet his inamorata, he was captured by an alert guard. The price of the romance was expulsion from the university, later rescinded.

The revolution found Molotov hiding in Petrograd, with a faked passport. He led the armed workers into the streets, seized power, organized a Soviet regime. Impressed, Lenin sent him scooting all over hungry and devastated Russia to organize and purge.

By 1924, the Stalin-Trotsky feud reached a near-explosive point. In this tug of war, Molotov sided with his great and good friend Stalin.

The struggle was long and costly. After it ended, Molotov was rewarded with the Premiership, which he held for eleven turbulent years (1930-41). During these years, he graduated from machine politics to statesmanship. He fathered the collectivization of Russia’s farms, helped to put through the first two Five-Year Plans, worked on the new Constitution.

By 1939, the world crisis began to overshadow all else in the Russian mind. For the key job in the Foreign Commissariat, Stalin picked his top trouble shooter, Molotov. This was more than a change of faces in Narkomindel (Foreign Office). It was an about-face in Russian policy, from collective security to the two-fisted stand urged by Molotov and his fellow advisers.

In pursuit of this policy, Stalin and Molotov welcomed Joachim von Ribbentrop to the Kremlin and launched out upon the Soviet Union’s brief and fateful course of collaboration with Nazi Germany. Five weeks before Hitler attacked the U.S.S.R., Stalin took over the Premiership from Molotov, assigned him primarily to Foreign Affairs. In May 1942 Foreign Commissar Molotov climbed into a four-motored bomber, flew west to seek friends.

In London, he was known as “Mr. Smith.” In Eden’s room on May 26, Molotov signed (with Churchill’s pen) a 20-year pact which is still the basis of Anglo-Soviet Union relations.

In Washington, officials called him “Mr. Brown.” He signed no pact, returned to Russia with the hypocritical and widely misunderstood statement of “complete agreement on the urgency of a second front in 1942.” As the record later showed, there was no agreement, no promise; for their different purposes, President Roosevelt and the Russians had bamboozled their own peoples and the world.

Mme. Commissar. Molotov is married, has two teen-age daughters (one adopted). When he takes the girls picnicking, Ogpu guards form a discreet ring around them.

Mme. Molotov is better known as Paulina Zhemchuzhina (zhemchug means pearl). She is a slim, handsome woman, with a clear olive skin and discreet makeup. Moscow’s prewar foreign community knew her as a charming and lavish hostess, a lover of French literature, a well-dressed woman.

Her appearance makes it difficult to believe that she worked in a tobacco plant in her youth, propagandized soldiers in the years of the revolution. In 1932, after Stalin issued his famous dictum: Let us be gay, Comrades, Mme. Molotov became head of the Soviet perfume trust. Said she of her work: “My husband works on their souls, I on their faces.” She put rouge and lipstick on the face of Russia’s womanhood, filled Russia’s air with the odor of cheap perfume. In the interest of cosmetics, she visited the U.S. in 1936, lunched with Mrs. Roosevelt, bought machinery.

In 1937, she became Vice Commissar of Food (Fisheries). Two years later, she suddenly disappeared from the Red horizon. Her friends say she is ailing, today devotes her attention solely to her devoted family.

The Molotovs live in a three-room Kremlin apartment, once occupied by Czar’s servants. Their nextdoor neighbor is Stalin.

Stalin’s Friend. On Molotov’s 50th birthday (he is now 53), Russia heaped honor upon him. Of its eight pages, Pravda devoted a laudatory seven to his work. The Government decorated him with the Order of Lenin. The city of Perm was renamed Molotov; the town of Nolinsk. Molotovsk; the Red Hydropress plant in Taganrog the Molotov Plant. Alexander Lozovsky, then a trade-union bigwig, paid him a lush compliment: “Comrade Molotov combines Russian revolutionary ability with American efficiency.” For helping to boost tank production, the Soviet Government a fortnight ago gave him its highest civilian honor: Hero of Socialist Labor.

All these served to underline once again Molotov’s position as Stalin’s friend, teammate and confidant. His years as Premier and Foreign Commissar have matured him, added to his already big stature. He is still the tough, alert, suspicious politician he was 20 years ago. But the new experience and knowledge have made him a formidable opponent at a conference table.

At the Moscow conferences, Molotov will make no move without Stalin’s consent. But Stalin’s mind, to a degree unsuspected abroad, will reflect Viacheslav Molotov’s advice.