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Thenceforth, while Stalin purged his foes and collectivized his peasants, Mikoyan kept store for the country without troubling his boss, making sure that the Red army and party leaders were well supplied if no one else was. Stalin called him a "genius of trade," and invited him into the little clique of Caucasians who lived in the Kremlin and dined with the dictator every night. Stalin liked Mikoyan's stories, and his silences. When Mikoyan's old revolutionary chief Kirov was murdered by Stalin, Mikoyan quietly slipped into Kirov's Politburo seat. When his old hero Ordzhonikidze, hounded by Stalin, committed suicide, Mikoyan raised no protest, later made a sycophant's speech praising the secret police as "the organization closest to the people."
Grand Quartermaster. All the time he was seeing and learning from every sort of foreigner. In 1936 he shopped the U.S. from coast to coast, bringing back to Soviet consumers such novelties as canned tuna, frozen foods and ice cream (now a great Russian favorite even in winter). He also returned with a lasting impression of "the initiative, inventiveness, the ability to get together, the simplicity in individual life" of Americans as he saw them at work. By 1939 he was welcoming Nazi negotiators with theater parties and banquets of caviar and Crimean champagne, then bargaining for weeks before selling them the cotton they were after. Says one such bargaining antagonist, now a DÜsseldorf businessman: "Mikoyan came closer to doing things as they are done in the West than any other Russian I ever met. A very impressive man."
A year later, when Hitler invaded Russia, the invaluable Armenian became grand quartermaster to the Red army, serving on the State Defense Committee (as Khrushchev never did), organizing the eastward retreat of Soviet factories, taking delivery on $11 billion worth of U.S. lend-lease supplies. New York's Governor Averell Harriman, wartime ambassador in Moscow, recalls Mikoyan as more international-minded and "less rigid" than Molotov, a wary bargainer but "one you could joke with."
Grand Taskmaster. After the war Stalin sent his favorite trader to exploit the new Soviet lands in Eastern Europe. Mainly on the theory that so smart an operator could not really be identified with so shortsighted a policy as Russia's postwar rape of the satellite economies, Mikoyan has often been pictured as a reluctant executor of these infamous deals, passing along orders with a shrug and a "that's-the-way-the-boss-wants-it." But this overlooks Mikoyan's survival instinct. While he ran the show for Stalin, Russia wrung $30 billion worth of goods out of Eastern Europe. It was Mikoyan who extracted uranium from Czechoslovakia and East Germany, and set up the iniquitous joint-stock companies by which Russia got properties for nothing in Hungary, Rumania and Bulgaria. It was Mikoyan who forced agreements granting special low prices to the Russians, e.g., Polish coal at one-twelfth world prices. Mikoyan's policies were aimed at destroying the independence of Eastern European economies, at wrenching them around to dependence on Soviet Russia, their industrial output geared almost exclusively to Stalin's military needs.