Killing Patton The Strange Death of World War II's Most Audacious General

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BOLSHOI THEATER

MOSCOW, RUSSIA

OCTOBER 14, 1944

7:00 P.M.

The houselights are up in Moscow’s legendary Bolshoi Theater as Olga Lepeshinskaya waits in the wings. The twenty-eight-year-old prima ballerina adjusts her costume and stretches her long, willowy legs as she prepares to take the stage. The acoustics in this legendary auditorium are among the best in the world, allowing Lepeshinskaya to hear with utter clarity the sounds of the last-minute tunings of violins and clarinets arising from the orchestra pit, and also vivid snippets of conversation from the 2,185 Russians noisily filing into their seats. She can hear their words of eagerness about enjoying this sold-out Saturday night performance, and the relief in their voices that after many hard-fought years the tide of war is turning in their favor.

Ever since Adolf Hitler ordered his armies to attack more than three years ago, the people of the Soviet Union—or Russia, as it is still commonly known—have seen more than ten million of their men and boys in uniform die. Amazingly, an equal number of civilians have also perished, done in by military bombardment, the random shooting of innocent women and children, and starvation. The German invaders cut off food supplies and appropriated harvests for themselves. Moving quickly and ruthlessly, the German war machine advanced a thousand miles from its own borders to the outskirts of Moscow before being repelled. At one point, German tanks and infantry stood just twenty-two miles from where these Muscovites sit right now.

But during the past six months, fate has turned against the German army. A summer offensive by Soviet forces pushed the Wehrmacht back. The long siege of Leningrad has come to an end, and just a few days ago that city was lit in the evening after three long years of blackouts. Truly, this is a night for all Russians to celebrate.

In keeping with the wartime austerity, the once-stately Bolshoi no longer sports gold leaf decorations. These have been painted over with a stark white paint, and the seats upholstered in plush crimson have been replaced by hard-backed chairs that not only fit more bodies into the ninety-year-old theater, but also make it possible to stage political rallies here in addition to the world’s finest ballets—thus, the countless hammer-and-sickle emblems lining the walls.

Olga Lepeshinskaya smiles as she peeks her head around the curtain to clandestinely observe the house. Tonight she will dance Giselle, in one of the most famous romantic roles in ballet. Just having a stage is a luxury, for as part of her wartime service Lepeshinskaya has performed in woods, meadows, and bombed-out churches to entertain the Soviet troops as part of the Bolshoi’s First Brigade frontline theater. Everything about the Bolshoi—the cavernous hall, the polished wood of the stage, and the many boxes lining the walls—feels like an extravagance after dancing in the dirt and rubble of the battlefield.

Suddenly a roar sweeps through the crowd. The audience turns and looks upward to the balcony that houses what was called the Imperial Box back before the days of Communist rule. A short, very overweight man bobs down toward his seat at the front of the box. The whole world knows the sight of Winston Churchill, prime minister of Great Britain. Why he happens to be in Moscow, attending the ballet, is a mystery to the crowd. But his presence here reinforces the solidarity between the Allied forces of the United States, Great Britain, and the Soviet Union. Together they will surely defeat Hitler and Germany.

The ovation is thunderous, and Churchill obliges the audience with a great wave of his hand before taking his seat.

As the house lights go down, Olga Lepeshinskaya gazes up at the box where Churchill sits. Her eyes study its other occupants, searching in vain for her lover. She sees American ambassador to the Soviet Union W. Averell Harriman; his young daughter, Kathleen; and Soviet diplomat Vyacheslav Molotov—but not the man she longs to see.



Winston Churchill watching a military operation through a window

Then: commotion. However, it is dark, and the blinding footlights obscure Olga’s view. What could be happening?

Twenty minutes later, as Lepeshinskaya’s flawless dancing once again proves that no one—perhaps with the possible exception of her nemesis, Galina Ulanova—deserves the title of prima ballerina more than she, a quick look up at Churchill’s box explains the source of the commotion.

For there, sitting next to Churchill, is the unmistakable profile of Olga Lepeshinskaya’s lover. He has not been to the ballet once since the war began. Iosif Vissarionovich’s face is pockmarked, his left arm shorter than the right, and he is the tiniest man in the box.1 Olga Lepeshinskaya does not call him Iosif, not even when they are alone. Instead, she knows him by his adopted name, the one that translates to “man of steel.”

Then, strangely, just before the end of the first act, Olga Lepeshinskaya is puzzled to see him move to the back of the box, where he cannot be seen.

When the first act of the ballet is complete, the houselights come back up, and the whole audience once again rises to its feet to give Churchill an ovation.

But the British leader refuses to bask in the acclaim alone. He beckons to the back of the box, encouraging another man to step forward.

So it is that Olga Lepeshinskaya’s lover appears and stands at Churchill’s right. The Soviet audience applauds thunderously, dazzled to see in the flesh the man whom they alternately love and fear.

All hail Marshal Joseph Stalin.

* * *

In his lifetime, Stalin will murder millions of people. Some will be shot, others will be denied food and ultimately die of starvation, millions will be sent to die in the deep winter snows of Siberia, and many will be tortured to death. Already, during one infamous murder spree in April and May of 1940, some twenty-two thousand Polish nationals were shot dead. What began as an attempt to execute every member of the Polish officer corps soon expanded to include police officers, landowners, intelligence agents, lawyers, and priests. The shootings were conducted for nights on end, often beginning at dusk and continuing until dawn. Some were mass killings carried out in the Katyn Forest, while others were individual executions inside the Kalinin and Kharkiv prisons. Mikhailovich Blokhin, chief executioner at Kalinin, personally shot seven thousand men in the back of the head as they knelt before him. Those killings took place inside a cell whose walls were lined with sandbags to deaden the sound. As soon as a victim fell dead, he was dragged from the room and thrown onto a truck for delivery to the burial site, while another handcuffed prisoner was marched before Blokhin and told to kneel. Noting that Russian pistols had so much recoil that his hand hurt after just a dozen killings, Blokhin opted for the smoother feel of the German Walther PPK.



Joseph Stalin in 1945

The killings continued for two long months.

In order to prevent global outrage in case word of the atrocity spread, Stalin ordered his troops to make it seem as if German soldiers had carried out the executions.

His cruelty is so perverse that even those who serve him are in constant fear for their lives. Stalin has a standing order that none of his bodyguards are to enter his bedroom. Ever. Once, just to test them, he lay on his bed and screamed out in agony. Thinking the Soviet leader was in mortal danger, the guards rushed into the room to save his life. Stalin’s scream was fake. He was testing his guards.

Each man was then executed for failure to follow orders.

* * *

Stalin will ultimately order between fifty million and sixty million deaths, far more than his hated rival Adolf Hitler.

The entire population of Great Britain is forty-seven million people. Stalin, in effect, will eventually slaughter the equivalent of every man, woman, and child in Winston Churchill’s beloved homeland. He will do so without compassion or guilt, all the while living a life of luxury and debauchery in stark contrast to the rigors of the Communist lifestyle his government imposes.

Yet Winston Churchill has not come to Moscow to repudiate Stalin. He has come to befriend him.

For even though Stalin and his American counterpart, President Franklin D. Roosevelt, often treat Churchill as a drunken fool, the British leader is a most astute man. He is well aware that Roosevelt and Stalin are making plans to exclude Britain from the redrawing of maps once the war is over. Churchill has flown to Moscow to negotiate directly with Stalin. Tonight he has shown his solidarity with the Soviet leader by requesting that the performance include not just Giselle, but also a special demonstration of songs and dances by the Red Army choir.

Since the evening of October 9, when Churchill first met with Stalin at the Kremlin, a rather precarious diplomatic dance has been taking place between the two men. The Russians have pushed the German army hundreds of miles back, and it is clear that the Soviet Union will become the reigning superpower in Eastern Europe.

Rather than retreating once the war ends, Stalin has indicated that he will occupy countries such as Poland and Hungary. Churchill has no plans to stop him. Britain’s global empire has been almost completely lost during the war—he seeks to regain some of the lost territory by dividing control of Europe between the Soviet Union and England.

Already, Soviet forces have captured all of eastern Poland. Rather than sympathize with the Polish people, who are vowing to fight for their homeland, Churchill upbraids them for being arrogant, and for wanting to “wreck” Europe. “I don’t know if the British government will continue to recognize you,” Churchill has informed the Polish government, which is now operating in exile. Meanwhile, even though Poland is not his to give away, American president Franklin Roosevelt has already secretly promised this sphere of influence to the Soviets.

Even the fearful Polish people themselves cannot foresee the horrors of the day in the not-so-distant future when every aspect of their lives will be overseen by a secret police loyal to their Soviet masters. They will live in constant fear of being hauled off to Mokotów Prison, in Warsaw, where some of them will be tortured in a most horrific manner: skulls crushed, fingernails ripped off, torsos beaten with everything from brass rods to rubber truncheons. All because Churchill and Roosevelt gave their nation away to Joseph Stalin in the name of world peace.



But the rest of Eastern Europe is still up for grabs. Churchill has brought with him a handwritten piece of paper that he jokingly calls his “naughty document.” On it, he’s scratched out the names of Eastern European countries and the percentage Great Britain will control. Russia will get 90 percent of Romania, and Britain 10 percent. Britain will get 90 percent of Greece, and the Soviets will get 10 percent.

So it goes for each nation in Eastern Europe: Yugoslavia, Bulgaria, Hungary, and so on.

The negotiations continue for days. Stalin and Churchill go back and forth diplomatically, but the truth is that Stalin has no plans to honor this agreement.

Churchill inspired and encouraged the British people during the harrowing early days of the war, when Britain was under daily German attack, but this political mission reflects the darker side of his character. An island nation is in constant need of resources to ensure stability and prosperity. British politician Horace Walpole, speaking two hundred years earlier, spoke emphatically about England’s need to control other countries so that they might provide the wealth Britain’s limited size could not. Without these resources, Walpole wrote, “we shall be reduced to a miserable little island, and from a mighty empire sink to as insignificant a country as Denmark or Sardinia. Then France will dictate to us more imperiously than we ever did to Ireland.”

Churchill understands this harsh political reality. And though he won’t admit it to Stalin, both men know that England has already seen its global power seriously diminished. Without the Americans, the Germans most likely would have defeated the British long ago. Even now, as Churchill attempts to seduce a madman, American soldiers flood the streets of London. They are paid a higher salary than their British counterparts, and spend it freely. British soldiers seethe at the sight of American GIs with English girls on their arms, but there is nothing the Tommies, as they are called, can do about it.

Horace Walpole’s prediction has come to pass. Instead of France, as it was in Walpole’s time, it is Stalin and the Soviet Union who are now dictating terms to Churchill and Great Britain.

* * *

Olga Lepeshinskaya beams as Joseph Stalin and Winston Churchill join in the ovation. She has danced Giselle beautifully. The two world leaders now clap their hands enthusiastically to show their approval as the ballet comes to an end.

Her days of dancing on the front lines are most assuredly over. The German threat against Moscow is no more, and those Soviet soldiers fighting their way west into Czechoslovakia and Hungary push the buffer between the Soviet people and imminent peril farther and farther into the distance. But Olga does not know that for every mile the Soviet soldiers conquer, their insatiable desire to rape and plunder goes unchecked. In Giselle, such rapists are hunted down by spirits from beyond the grave for their barbarous acts. Yet in the real world, their acts not only go unpunished, but they are seen as acts of heroism by the barbaric Soviet leadership.

A large bouquet of roses, grown in the warmth of a greenhouse for just this purpose, is carried onstage and presented to Olga Lepeshinskaya. The audience is still on its feet. She curtsies as she accepts the bloodred flowers. But when she looks up at the box where her beloved sat just moments ago, he and Winston Churchill are gone.

In six days of negotiations, the two men have redrawn the map of Europe. But Churchill has been wasting his time. For the Russians have no plans to honor their promises. When the war finally ends, they plan to grab as much land as possible, ensuring that millions of people will soon live their lives under the murderous thumb of Marshal Joseph Stalin.

Time to celebrate.