Interview with Hugh Lunghi, 1/7/96
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INT: ... You obviously were aware of
that at the time, and was it discussed among your people?
HL: Yes, it was discussed among some of our
people - yes, certainly, certainly. Our chiefs of staff had been there, and of course so had our
Foreign Office people. They had been there, and they talked about this, and one got gleanings of
this. I wasn't actually at that plenary session, but at other plenary sessions I was in the
background, in case I was wanted by the chiefs of staff.
So one got an idea of the general atmosphere. There was
argument going on, yes, very strong argument going on, particularly over Poland, and over
reparations which Stalin was claiming from Germany - $20 billion was the
amount he claimed to begin with, and Roosevelt and his advisers thought that was a bit much,
and of course Churchill, for his part, thought that would be absurd because it would
bleed Germany white, as had happened after the Versailles Treaty, and the burden of setting
Germany up would fall on us, we thought at that time, and indeed feeding Germany. Stalin
talking about the Ruhr, which he came on to in more detail at the Potsdam Conference, of course;
and so there was argument about that as well. Oh, there were tremendous arguments. But, as I
say, again there were the two levels, where you got... at the ceremonial the dinners and so on,
there was friendship and light, and they were drinking toasts to each other and calling each other
great, and how much they had done during the war. There was all this - a tremendous lot of
mutual flattery, tremendous lot going on. But then, of course, in the background you got this sort
of atmosphere.
INT: Well, Stalin was obviously in a
very strong position at Yalta because his forces were in occupation of much of Eastern Europe.
Can you give an idea of how he appeared then, and also - you had met him many times - what
sort of a person he was?
HL: Stalin was in the very strongest position at Yalta, stronger than...
than anybody, I suppose, because we were still engaged in the war against Japan, or at least the
Americans were and so were we. The war against Germany was really coming to an end. Stalin
was really ebullient at Yalta. He had aged since I last saw him, which was only a few months
before. He was already going grey. I mean, his hair was iron grey, I suppose, when I first saw
him in Moscow in 1943, and at Teheran - he was then 64. Now, he was - what? 65-66.
He was not the youngest: of course, Roosevelt was the youngest of them; Churchill was the
oldest, as he said on several occasions, when he claimed the privilege of signing. Stalin as a
person - well, when I first met him, I really got a shock, because I had seen his portraits in Red
Square as sort of icons, where he was really statuesque almost in his... when you saw his
portraits, full-length portraits; a tremendous figure. But when I first saw him, I was shocked
because he was so small; he was no taller than me, in fact rather shorter than me - he must have
been about five foot five inches - but he was pretty stolidly built. He was over five foot; very
quiet; he hardly raised his voice in discussions with us. He did against his subordinates; he didn't
shout at them exactly, but sotto voce he would... you could tell he was furious with them. But
with us he was really sweetness and light all the time. When you shook his hand,
he was...
(Cut)
INT: Tell me a bit more about Stalin's
appearance - his face particularly.
HL: Stalin, when he looked at you, he didn't look at you, because he
always looked to the side; he held his head on one side, like that, and always looked to the side;
he never looked you straight in the eyes which to me ... I mean, I'd read about him, obviously...
rather betrayed his sort of suspicious, locked-in nature. He had a withered left arm, and he held
this in his right hand, with his palms upright, cupped like this. This was a typical stand of his. But
then he'd shake you by the hand very formally; very soft hand, he had. And then... when I looked
at his face - and this was particularly noticeable in the evenings at banquets, when he came with
his talcum-powdered face after his shave - that it was very pockmarked. Actually I noticed that
the very first time I met him, because of course on the portraits you didn't see this. Bushy
eyebrows; hardly ever smoked a pipe, smoked cigarettes; was very quiet, but when he spoke...
again, when I first met him, I got rather a shock because of his very marked Georgian accent. He
spoke in short sentences. He was obviously always master of his brief: I never saw him refer to
notes. He must have done at some time, but I never saw him refer to notes. Very rarely did he
consult his subordinates. Occasionally he would get a note or a bit of advice from Molotov, who
was sitting next to him, or from Maisky who was interpreting at Yalta. Maisky had been the
Soviet ambassador in Britain. But he was always very self-assured; hardly ever laughed - a rather
dry, sort of repressed laugh most of the time, whenever he did, whenever people cracked a joke.
He'd very rarely crack a joke, and certainly never against himself, which Churchill did. So, on the
whole he appeared to me the first time, and even subsequently, as rather a kindly old uncle,
really; they called him Uncle Joe, and he looked like an uncle or a grandfather to me -
"dedushka" in Russian, or "dyadya", "uncle". I could imagine the Russians... in fact, Russian
children sometimes called him Dyadya Stalin. I remember them... not in the streets, but when we
met them, talking about Dyadya Stalin; it was a sort of an affectionate name, and I rather felt that
he was a kindly old uncle. But then, of course, when you saw him in action at the conferences,
his eyes would go sort of slit-eyed, and he would become... he could become quite sort of vicious
in his remarks, in his remarks to Churchill, accusing the British of not wanting to fight, being
afraid of fighting, you see - this was all over the second front. And then, when he sneered about
foreigners - the Latin Americans, the Argentinians had to be punished, he said, after the war, for
allegedly helping the Germans, not coming into the war, which they didn't towards... the
Brazilians as well he wasn't very keen on. The Swiss he said were "swine". (Laughs) The Swedes
he didn't like at all; the Swedes were always snubbed at diplomatic parties in Moscow - so much
so that the Swedish ambassador left Moscow after a while. And obviously, all Russians took their
cue... Russians officials, I mean, took their cue from Stalin; they had heard this kind of attitude
towards foreigners. There was a xenophobia, there really was on his part, and Russian officials,
as I say, took their lead from Stalin and behaved in the same way towards foreigners. In any case,
all foreigners... as far as Stalin was concerned, all foreigners who lived in Russia were potential
enemies; certainly potential spies. That's why we were circumscribed so much in Moscow, and
why, as we thought, he was so cruel to our people, not letting us evacuate our wounded who had
come off the convoys - this was earlier on in the war - not letting us set up a hospital for them,
and so on.
INT: He sounds thoroughly suspicious
and xenophobic, paranoid, all these things.
HL: Xenophobic... Paranoid, of course - yes, of course, in his obsession
with security. And one learned later, of course, he only visited the Russian front once, although at
these conferences he was always saying, "I'm very busy and I have to visit the front." Of course
he was very busy conducting the war, but he did this all from Moscow; but because of his
paranoia, we are told now that he never visited the front except once, and then in a train, in
an armoured train, with a security train in front of him and a security train before him. So
obviously the paranoia was there. Obviously, we couldn't probe his mind at that time; we
only saw these outward symbols of his paranoia, which I've already talked about.
INT: Right, well, it gives a fair
indication of his character. Let's move on to VE Day, not the same day as VE in the rest of
Europe, but give us an idea of the celebrations that took place in Moscow on VE
Day.
HL: Do you want me to talk about leading up to it and the fact...
INT: Let's go into VE Day itself. It was
the 9th of May, as far as the Soviet Union was concerned. What sort of celebrations took place, if
you were caught up in them; whether there was a brief moment of joy before the Cold War
settled in the not too distant future.
HL: It settled in before that, actually. Yes, OK. VE Day, as far as we
were concerned in Moscow, we had celebrated on the 7th and 8th of May. But Stalin didn't want
to proclaim VE Day until he, the real victor of the war, as he saw himself, he said that the war
was over, and that was on the morning of the 9th of May, a couple of days after we had
started our celebrations, when the German army had already surrendered to Eisenhower. It was a
sort of bright and chilly, cloudy morning, bits of sunshine, and we decided straight away - well,
more or less straight away, round about 11 o'clock, I suppose - to walk into Red Square to see
what was going on. And of course, we were in our uniforms. And before we got to Red Square,
there was singing and dancing, and people came running towards us, shaking us by the hand.
When we got into Red Square, again slapping on the back; we were thrown into the air. And
when we looked across to the Embassy, the American Embassy, which was then just across - you
could just see it from the Red Square, between the Kremlin and what was then the Lenin
Historical Museum - you could see the American Embassy, and we could see
American soldiers being tossed in the air. So there was a tremendous air of jollification, and there
was colour about it, not only with their red flags but there were even Union Jacks and American
flags being waved, which was rather nice to see - a few. But the women had their sort of head
scarves and coloured dresses, and the sunshine was picking out the colours then. So it was a
marvellous occasion, and we were clearly being treated as allies and friends, and that was very
pleasant. And then we were told that... in the evening, we walked through Red Square, down over
the bridge, along Sofyiskaya Embankment, to our Embassy, which was opposite the Kremlin, of
course, and on the way the Russians said to us, "Well, you'll be in Red Square in the evening:
there'll be a tremendous bonfire..." ... not bonfire, not bonfire... tremendous...
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