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In war, the propaganda line switched: the old Marxist slogans were dropped, the emphasis was on national patriotism. "Let the manly images of our great ancestors—Alexander Nevsky, Dimitri Pozharsky, Alexander Suvorov, and Mikhail Kutuzov—inspire you!" exhorted Stalin. At this point the cruel, cumbersome five-year industrialization plans paid off. During the long winter of 1941-42, guns, tanks and planes came rolling out of the Ural factories, to be supplemented later by a stream of armaments from the U.S. and Britain. To a U.S. visitor who explained that strikes were holding up U.S. war production, Stalin snapped: "Don't you have police?"
That winter Stalin created a new army by drafting every able-bodied man & woman in Russia. From the Kremlin, which he never left, he directed the fighting. "No matter how they cry and complain," he told Chief of Staff Vassilevsky, when hard-pressed generals were calling for help at Stalingrad, "don't promise them any reserves. Don't give them a single battalion from the Moscow front." On a Kremlin visit shortly before the war's end, Tito heard Stalin call up Marshal Malinovsky whose army had been halted. "You're asleep there, asleep!" Stalin shouted. "You say you haven't tank divisions. My grandma would know how to fight with tanks. It's time you moved. Do you understand me?"
Stalin's armies beat their way to Berlin —at a cost of nearly 8,000,000 dead—and what his armies took he kept.
Talk & Doubletalk. In 1943, at a time when the Germans were still in Russia, Stalin was ready to talk with his wartime allies. "I think I can personally handle Stalin ..." confident Franklin Roosevelt had written to Winston Churchill. At Teheran, Roosevelt was persuaded by Stalin to take up residence in the Russian embassy. When Churchill raised the question of supervised elections in Poland, Stalin snapped: "You cannot do that. The Poles are an independent people and they would not want to have their election supervised by others." When Churchill mentioned the Vatican, Stalin asked: "How many divisions has the Pope got?" Reported Churchill later: "Stalin said the Russians did not want anything belonging to other people, although they might have a bite at Germany."
At Yalta, over a year later, Stalin bargained for Port Arthur, Dairen and the Kuril Islands in return for a promise to enter the war against Japan. "I only want to have returned to Russia what the Japanese have taken from my country," he said. "That seems," said Franklin Roosevelt, "like a very reasonable suggestion."
With his fellow Communist leaders, Stalin was also reasonable—in the same way. Making it clear to Tito that he had agreed to share Yugoslavia as a sphere of influence with the British, he asked that King Peter be reinstated: "You need not restore him forever," he told Tito. "Take him back temporarily, and then you can slip a knife into his back at a suitable moment." His agents had reported Tito's partisans flourishing red stars. "What do you need the red stars for?" he asked Tito. "You are frightening the British. The form isn't important."