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Khrushchev became the Politburo's military representative in the Ukraine, then the main theater of the German attack. At one point, he desperately telephoned Moscow to ask for weapons. Georgy Malenkov, then a member of the State Defense Committee, told him to use "pikes, swords, homemade weapons—anything you can make in your own factories." Replied Khrushchev: "You mean we should fight tanks with spears?" Malenkov answered that "you'll have to do the best you can. Light up bottles of gasoline or kerosene and throw them at the tanks."
In those dark days, says Khrushchev, when the Germans marched to within sight of the Kremlin before their attack was blunted, Stalin was "paralyzed by his fear of Hitler, like a rabbit in front of a boa constrictor." When Soviet generals were captured, Stalin branded them traitors and banished their families to Siberia. He refused to sign any official documents "for fear that history would record him as a defeated leader," and he grew suspicious of everyone.
Khrushchev fell under suspicion when a project in which he was involved —the offensive at Kharkov in 1942 —failed disastrously. Some 200,000 Soviet troops walked into a German trap and were killed or captured. Says Khrushchev: "A few days after the disaster I received a call from Moscow. I was ready for anything, including arrest." Stalin reminded him that a gendarmerie officer had been hanged by the Czar as a result of several serious Russian defeats during World War I. Replied Khrushchev: "Comrade Stalin, I remember this event well. The Czar did the only right thing. [Colonel] Myasnikov* was a traitor." Khrushchev was saved, he believes, because he had advised Stalin against overextending Soviet forces at Kharkov, and his warning had been overheard by several men in the dictator's hierarchy.
Burning the Dead. The war, and Khrushchev's fortunes, took a turn for the better with the Soviet victory at Stalingrad and then in the massive tank battle at Kursk. After Stalingrad, where German Field Marshal Friedrich von Paulus' Sixth Army was destroyed, the Soviets were unable to bury the German dead in the frozen earth. Says Khrushchev: "We gathered thousands of corpses and stacked them in layers alternating with layers of railway ties. Then we set these huge piles on fire. Napoleon or someone once said that burning enemy corpses smelled good. I don't agree."
Khrushchev professes to have found Allied intentions toward the end of the war puzzling. "I wouldn't exclude the possibility that their desire to postpone an assault on Hitler's Western front was dictated by their desire to put a greater burden on the shoulders of the Soviet Union and to bleed us even more. Or perhaps it's as they explained: they weren't sufficiently prepared."