Man of Steel

Behind blackout curtains, the lights burned late in a second-floor room of the Kremlin. Often last week, as in other weeks, they burned until four or five in the morning. Joseph Stalin was studying the greatest battle in history. One night the ballet season came to Moscow. A great Moscow crowd applauded the lyricism of Tchaikovsky's Swan Lake. But this year it was not for Joseph Stalin, who loves the ballet. He was absorbed with the most crucial reflections and decisions of his life. And now with a British mission in Moscow and a U.S. mission on the way, Occidentals caught occasional glimpses of the Dictator, learned how he lived, how he worked, how he thought:

Hour after hour, from noon when Stalin reached his office until early dawn when he retired to his apartment on the same floor, there were deferential callers. They found him looking tired. His thick hair and bushy mustache were greying. His belly was fattening under his khaki shirt. But usually his dark eyes flashed at his callers. He spoke to them brusquely, toughly, brandishing his arms.

Everything, during these hours, was momentous, but sometimes Joseph Stalin got off simple, heavy jokes. He said that the Nazis were too smart to put the Italians in the front line; Hitler used them for dishwashers. He laughed loudly at this one, but behind his own laughter he could hear the mechanized, Hitlerian tramp of destiny.

Every night there came times when there were no more officers or politicos waiting to see him. At his desk at the end of the long room he was alone. He considered the vast bloody picture puzzle of reports and rumors that he had been putting together all day. The war was going none too well. In the center, yes, Timoshenko was sharply counterattacking, the Germans were falling back. But in the north Voroshilov might soon be trapped in Leningrad. And in the south Budenny's defense of Kiev and Odessa was gravely threatened by new German eruptions east of the Dnieper. Aside from possibilities of more immediate catastrophes, if the Germans could hole up in these great Russian cities before winter, they might prepare crushing flank movements for the spring.

Stalin sometimes let his mind play on Japan and his problems in the East. But how far away, how far ahead, did it pay to think? The crisis was on Russian soil, right now. And where was the great aid that Churchill and Roosevelt had talked about? So far he had received only a few squadrons of British planes and a few tankers of American oil. He was fed to his pipe-clamping teeth with talk.

From where he sat he could see portraits of Marx and Engels and a pale death mask of Lenin. But the Russian past all seemed very far away now--even the recent past in which he had consolidated his own dictatorship by executing hundreds of old friends and Old Bolsheviks. He was a hard man, worthy of the name of steel. He could feel it in himself. If anyone could come through the great historic grinding in which he now found himself, he could.

But now he could not depend on his own personal political shrewdness, on his personal stony capacity for the killing of those who opposed him. Now he was forced to admit that he depended on the millions of Russian soldiers. For once Joseph Stalin depended more on the Russians than they did on him.

He had been mistaken about them, he admitted, in Finland. He and his generals had told them that in Finland they were really fighting for Russia. It had been wrong, psychologically. Most of them had been too young to care that Finland had once been part of Russia.

Now the Russians were fighting on their own soil for their own homes. He knew that their morale was high. He had seen it make a great difference. He hoped it would make the difference. And he bluntly told callers that Russia would eventually win the war.

But at midnight, every night, he was glad to try to forget some of it for a while. He went to his apartment and dined with his wife.* If anything was likely to delay him, he thoughtfully called her up and told her so.

* Stalin's first wife was a Georgian girl, Ekaterina Svanidze, whom he married in 1903, who died in 1907. His second wife was Nadezhda Sergeievna Alleluieva, whom he married in 1919, who died mysteriously in 1932. His present wife, with whom he has his midnight suppers, is presumably the black-haired, strong-bodied musician's daughter, Marina Raskova, an aviatrix. In 1938, with a group of her sister flyers, she made a beeline jump of 3,671 miles for a new women's international distance record.

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