Under the nuclear umbrella, wars of this sort developed the surreal quality that George Orwell had foreseen in Nineteen Eighty-Four. A stalemate, in horrible terrain and terrible weather, went on and on, punctuated by offensives that got nowhere and were probably not really meant to get anywhere. Meanwhile, American air power was used, and wrecked much of North Korea, though of course without affecting the Chinese bases. Stalin could sit back and rub his hands with glee at the discomfiture of America, and Mao could rejoice in the return of China as a military power: a very far cry from the days of yore, when the junks of the imperial navy had been smashed to matchsticks and the ports of the Mandate of Heaven had been grabbed by foreigners selling opium.
An effort, also surreal, was made at peace. At Panmunjom, between the front lines, teams of negotiators haggled for two years, while the war went on outside the barbed wire and the huts. Thousands of the Chinese and North Korean prisoners did not want to be repatriated at all, but the Communist side insisted, expecting that American public opinion (which had turned against the war) would eventually rebel. Delaying tactics were used: there were a few deluded souls in Chinese prisons who volunteered to stay there (they trickled back, crestfallen, decades later) and various well-meaning Western scientists, including Joseph Needham, were deployed to accuse the Americans (wrongly) of biological warfare.
This slow-moving but murderous farce went on until the Americans started to use nuclear language. Ostentatious test flights went ahead; the new President, Dwight D. Eisenhower, visited Korea late in 1952, and used harsh language. The threat of the bomb was real enough, but the key moment came in March, when Stalin died. His successors had had enough of direct confrontation, and sent peaceable messages to the West. In Korea, finally, on 27 July 1953, on an Indian proposal, a ceasefire was proclaimed at Panmunjom. ‘Only the provisional is lasting,’ says the French proverb, and so it proved, again in surreal circumstances, the armistice negotiation teams remaining in their huts, decades in, decades out, thereafter, while North Korea became the weirdest country on the globe, and South Korea became an extraordinary first-world success story. The Korean War ended, where it had begun, on the 38th Parallel, with hundreds of thousands of dead on the side of the South and the Americans, and millions on the side of the North and the Chinese. But it had a side-effect, not foreseen by Stalin. The Korean War created Europe.
6. The World at the Death of Stalin
When the dictator’s death was announced, his subjects reacted first as if stunned, and then with mass hysteria. A great silence is reported to have fallen almost everywhere in the huge empire that he had dominated, from Rostock on the Baltic to Vladivostok, ten time zones away. Stalin had been in the tradition of despots who had ruled Eurasia, the most recent of whom had been Genghiz Khan and Tamerlane, threatening the Balkans, Persia, China, one sign of their capital a pyramid of skulls. Stalin had their type of absolute power since 1929, but with modern methods of communication, and the USSR had been convulsed. The old peasantry had been destroyed, 40 million of them crammed into towns and cities in a few years, many other millions starved to death or deported, and the rest living a scratch existence. A vast industrial machinery had been set in place, then there had been more millions of deaths in the course of political troubles, the ‘Purges’. Then had come the Second World War, another near 9 million deaths in the armed forces alone, and no-one knows how many further civilian millions. In 1945 had come the great victory over Nazi Germany, with Soviet troops conquering Berlin. Russians, for generations looked down on by Germans as backward and lazy, now saw tens of thousands of these same Germans marching through the streets of Moscow as prisoners, some of them losing control of their bowels in fear. Later on, seven elaborate skyscrapers went up in the capital, built by the captive German labourers, who were regarded as better bricklayers than ever the Russian natives would be. (In 1953, 3 million of these prisoners of war were still working, as forced labour; of the 90,000 men who had surrendered at Stalingrad, only 9,000 ever managed to return.) Then, in 1949, Communism made another enormous demonstration of its strength. The Soviet Union exploded its first bomb. In China, after a long civil war, Mao Tse-tung defeated the anti-Communist Nationalists, and came to Moscow to celebrate, to get his orders. So too at intervals did some Mátyás Rákosi or Klement Gottwald from Budapest or Prague, fresh from some intra-Party knifing, their capitals grimly Stalinized. In the whole empire, factory chimneys fumed, proclaiming forced industrialization; in southern Russia there had been cannibalism; in places there were still shadowy guerrilla wars. But Stalin had not just survived Hitler; he had turned Russia into a superpower, her capital the centre of a hemispheric empire.
It was Stalin’s seventieth birthday, 21 December. In the preceding months, there had been endless tributes in the newspapers. Stalin was certainly a well-read man, but he claimed to dominate whole ranges of scholarship — even, at the time of the battle of Stalingrad, contributing an article to a zoological journal about a particular rock-fish that his rival, Trotsky, had apparently discovered (in Turkish exile). Now, scholars, artists, intellectuals, writers praised and imitated him: you had to open any article, more or less regardless of subject, with quotations from Stalin and Lenin. On 21 December Stalin’s face was shown on an enormous balloon above the Kremlin, and there were parades throughout the country, with floats to glorify ‘the greatest genius of all times and nations’. That evening, in the Bolshoy Theatre, there was a grand gala. On stage was a huge portrait of Stalin, and in front sat the leaders of Communism: Mao Tse-tung, fresh from his triumph; leaders of the various countries that the USSR had taken in 1944-5 in central Europe, including a bearded and weaselly little German, Walter Ulbricht; a veteran of the Spanish Civil War, ‘passionate’ Dolores Ibárruri, who had been the chief mouthpiece of the defeated left-wing side (her granddaughter in time became Russian interpreter for the king of Spain); and a small troop of hard faces from western Europe. The British, with a tiny Communist Party, were hardly represented (though, in 1953, for the funeral, a rich Communist-sympathizing London barrister, John Platts-Mills, did manage to attend, in his private aircraft), but the French were slavish and the Italians flattered. In the auditorium sat thousands of delegates, carefully ranked, with the senior families in the front rows, and, as first to enter, the family of Lavrenti Beria, who ran the security empire, with the millions of slaving prisoners. It was he who had stamped the Soviet atom bomb out of the ground, partly with internment camps, sharashki, where nuclear physicists worked as convicts. Speeches were then made, for hours on end, and a rising star was Nikita Khrushchev, whom Stalin had promoted (he was seated on the left, Mao Tse-tung on the right). Khrushchev’s speech ended with: ‘Glory to our dear father, our wise teacher, to the brilliant leader of the Party of the Soviet people and of the workers of the entire world, Comrade Stalin!’