Titans of History (65 page)

His first wife was a party comrade called Antonina, whom he divorced to marry a glamorous and promiscuous Jewish woman
named Yevgenia, who held a salon for writers and film stars. At the time of Yezhov's downfall, his successor Beria began to investigate Yevgenia's sexually adventurous antics. Yezhov tried to divorce her in time, probably to save her and their adopted daughter Natasha, but possibly to save himself too. All her lovers, including the brilliant writer Isaac Babel, were arrested and shot. Yevgenia committed suicide.

In the autumn of 1938 Stalin promoted another protégé, Lavrenti Beria, to become Yezhov's deputy. In October the politburo denounced the management of the NKVD.

In November Yezhov appeared for the last time for the annual parade on Lenin's Mausoleum. He was sacked from the NKVD on November 23, though he remained officially commissar of water transport. But he barely turned up for work, instead losing himself in a series of drunken homosexual orgies, waiting for the knock on the door. When it came, and the inevitable trial and death sentence followed, Yezhov collapsed. On the way to the execution chamber he himself had designed, he wept, got hiccups and fell to the floor. He had to be dragged to his death.

Yezhov was a typical half-educated but diligently ambitious Soviet bureaucrat, but finding himself with an almost absolute fiat over life and death, empowered by Stalin himself, he reveled in the hunt, the details of administering murder and the slaughter itself, and personally spent nights torturing his victims. Stalin's “Bloody Dwarf” became the second most powerful man in the Soviet Union, but the stress almost drove him mad, and he ended a victim of his own meat grinder. A degenerate monster, a slavish bureaucrat, a slick administrator, a sadistic torturer yet also a broken reed, Yezhov pioneered a new sort of mass-production totalitarian slaughter for the mid-20th century. “Tell Stalin,” he announced at his trial, “I shall die with his name on my lips.”

1896–1974

If we come to a minefield, our infantry attacks exactly as if it was not there
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Georgi Zhukov to Dwight Eisenhower

The Soviet general Georgi Zhukov is much less famous in the West than generals such as Eisenhower and Montgomery, but he was undoubtedly the greatest commander of the Second World War, turning the tide against the Nazi invaders at Moscow, Leningrad and Stalingrad, and then leading the Red Army in its bloody counteroffensive all the way to Berlin. Without the heroic Soviet effort, with its sacrifice of 26 million lives, the war might have ended very differently. Zhukov was a communist and a ruthless Stalinist general, who placed results far above his concern for individuals and casualties and used summary executions at the front to enforce discipline. Yet he was also a gifted leader, who represents not the cruelty of his master, Soviet dictator Stalin, but the heroism of the Russian people.

Military service dominated Zhukov's life. Conscripted as a private in the First World War, this son of peasants was decorated and promoted. He then fought for the Bolsheviks in the Russian Civil War of 1918–21. Further promotions followed in the 1920s, and Zhukov became known both as a strict disciplinarian and as a diligent planner. When Stalin slaughtered the officers of the Red Army in the 1937 Terror, Zhukov survived and was promoted.

In 1939 Zhukov commanded the Soviet army against the Japanese
on the Khalkin-Gol River. His daring use of tanks led to the defeat of the Japanese within three days. The invaders lost as many as 61,000 of their 80,000 men, and the shock put them off attacking Russia ever again. Zhukov earned the title of Hero of the Soviet Union and in 1940 was appointed chief of staff, but staff work did not suit him: he was a fighting general. When Hitler invaded the Soviet Union in June 1941, Zhukov formed a tempestuous, but ultimately successful, partnership with Stalin. The Soviet dictator recognized Zhukov's brilliance and professionalism, accepting him as his military mentor and making him deputy supreme commander-in-chief.

Stalin used Zhukov as a troubleshooter, as the Germans thrust deep into Russia, taking millions of prisoners. When Minsk fell and Stalin almost lost his nerve, Zhukov—the toughest general in Russia—burst into tears. In July, after a row with Stalin, Zhukov was sacked as chief of staff. But he went on to command and save Moscow and Leningrad. In the latter, he bolstered the besieged city's defenses so that the city did not fall. In Moscow, he took over the defenses as the Germans advanced. With the loss of one quarter of the 400,000 men at his disposal, Zhukov managed to halt the German blitzkrieg in the freezing winter of 1941, just saving the capital and driving the Germans back 200 miles (320km). It was a vital victory.

The next task was to organize the Soviet counter-attack in the most dreadful battle of the war—Stalingrad. Zhukov, along with Marshal Vasilevsky and Stalin himself, conceived of the plan to lure German forces into Stalingrad. With a million men, more than 13,000 guns, 1400 tanks and 1115 planes, Zhukov oversaw the encirclement of the German Sixth Army. The average life expectancy of a Soviet soldier brought into the long battle was little more than twenty-four hours, and around a million men from both sides were killed. But Stalingrad turned the tide of the war.

Promoted to marshal, Zhukov next led the Red Army to victory in the greatest tank battle ever fought, at Kursk in 1943. The Red Army pushed ever westward, into Poland and then into Germany itself, where the last great battle of the European war was fought through the streets of Berlin. Stalin typically took overall command of the Battle of Berlin himself, forcing the two commanders, Zhukov and Marshal Konev, to compete in the race to the Reichstag. In the early hours of May 1, 1945 Zhukov telephoned Stalin to inform him that Hitler was dead. The next day the city surrendered.

When the war was over, Zhukov was a national and international hero. The Soviet military rank and file idolized him, and Western generals thought extremely highly of him. Ironically, all this made him a political threat: Stalin had him accused of Bonapartist tendencies and demoted him, but he ensured Zhukov was not arrested.

After Stalin's death in 1953, Zhukov was brought back to the center of Soviet politics as defense minister. He helped Nikita Khrushchev become Stalin's heir by arresting Lavrenti Beria, the head of Stalin's secret police, but he was independent and had a fractious relationship with the new leader. In 1957 he again supported Khrushchev, helping to defeat the old Stalinists, but afterward he was sacked, once more accused of Bonapartism.

Zhukov, who died in 1974, was tough and brutal and sometimes made costly mistakes. He believed in Stalinist methods and was arrogant about his own ability. But as Eisenhower was to put it, “no one did more to achieve victory in Europe than Marshal Zhukov”—he was undoubtedly the outstanding general of the Second World War. As his colleague Marshal Timoshenko noted, “Zhukov was the only person who feared no one. He was not afraid even of Stalin.” Ultimately, he represents native Russian military genius and now his statue on horseback stands just outside the Kremlin near Red Square.

1899–1947

You can get much further with a kind word and a gun than you can with a kind word alone
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Al Capone

Al “Scarface” Capone epitomized the murderous American Mafia mobsters who ran their rackets with impunity during the Prohibition era. Ironically, despite his deep involvement in organized crime and murder, the only charge he was ever convicted of was income-tax evasion.

Born in Brooklyn, New York, Alphonse “Al” Capone was the son of Gabriele Capone, an Italian barber who had arrived in America with his wife Teresina in 1894. Al embarked on his career in organized crime when he left school at just age fourteen, and fell under the influence of a gangster boss, Johnny “the Fox” Torrio. From there he graduated to the Five Points Gang in Manhattan. It was during this period that he was slashed in the face after a bar-room brawl, leaving him with the scar by which he would later be known. He was also suspected of involvement in two killings, though witnesses refused to come forward and nothing was ever proven.

Capone's mentor Torrio had left New York for Chicago in 1909 to run a brothel racket. Ten years later he sent for his protégé, and it was probably Capone who was responsible for the murder in 1920 of Torrio's boss, “Big Jim” Colosimo, with whom Torrio had fallen out. Torrio subsequently emerged as the undisputed kingpin of crime in the Windy City.

The introduction of Prohibition in 1920 endowed America's gangsters with a gold mine of opportunities. Trade in smuggled alcohol became big business, and speakeasies where bootlegged liquor was readily available became the defining image of the era. But behind the relaxed jollity of the speakeasy and the gangster glamour lay violence, wanton sadism and psychopathic brutality.

In 1923 a reform-minded mayor, William E. Dever, was elected in Chicago on a platform of reining in the mobsters. As a result, Torrio and Capone opted to relocate much of their business to the satellite town of Cicero. The following year, with council elections scheduled for Cicero, Capone was determined to ensure that his candidates won, by whatever means. In the resulting violence, his brother Frank was killed and an election official was murdered, amid a wave of kidnappings, ballot-box theft and general intimidation. When it was all over Capone had won in Cicero, in one of the most dishonest elections ever seen.

Within weeks Capone, apparently believing himself impregnable, shot dead a small-time gangster called Joe Howard who had insulted a friend of his in a bar. The crime made Capone a target for William McSwiggen—the “hanging prosecutor”—and though he failed to pin any charges on Capone, McSwiggen did succeed in putting the gangster firmly in the public spotlight, setting Capone on the road to becoming America's public enemy number one.

In 1925 Torrio retired after an attempt on his life by a rival concern, the North Side Gang run by Dean O'Banion, George “Bugs” Moran and Earl “Hymie” Weiss. Capone now took over from Torrio as the leading figure in the Chicago underworld. Thereafter, he developed an increasingly public persona, ostentatiously attending major sporting occasions, such as baseball games, and even the opera, presenting himself as an honest, successful businessman, with a flair for the common touch. In truth everyone knew the real source of Capone's wealth.

Protection rackets, illegal gambling, bootlegging and prostitution—wherever there was a quick buck to be made, Capone had a hand in it. His eye for profit was combined with a ruthless approach to dealing with possible rivals—and the greatest threat to his hegemony, in Capone's view, was the North Side Gang, the hoodlums who had earlier attacked Johnny Torrio.

The result was the 1929 St. Valentine's Day Massacre. Disguising his men as policemen, Capone sent them to Moran's warehouse at 2122 North Clark Street, where they lined seven of the North Siders up against a wall and machine-gunned them in cold blood. Several of the victims were also blasted with a shotgun in the face. The gang leader, Moran, escaped, but with his key lieutenants dead his operation went into steep decline. Capone was left as Chicago's undisputed Mr. Big.

But outrage over the killings generated pressure for more action on the part of the authorities against Capone. It was this that led the FBI to launch its ingenious bid to pursue Capone for income-tax offenses. Aware that he was unlikely ever to be indicted for any of his more violent activities (both because of the distance he now kept between himself and specific actions and because of the fear of reprisals that kept any potential witnesses from testifying), the federal government appointed a Treasury agent, Eliot Ness, and a hand-picked team of agents—the Untouchables—to go after Capone.

As a strategy it proved to be a stunning success. In June 1931 Capone was formally charged with income-tax evasion, and that October he was found guilty and sentenced to eleven years in prison. Initially sent to Atlanta penitentiary, in 1934 he was transferred to the maximum-security facility at Alcatraz. In 1939 he was released early, owing to ill health. But he was never able to regain control over his criminal empire. A shadow of his former self, Capone retreated into obscurity—finally dying of syphilis in 1947, a forgotten figure.

1899–1953

Let me have one night with him and I'll have him confessing he is the King of England
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Lavrenti Beria

Lavrenti Pavlovich Beria was a sinister Soviet secret policeman, psychopathic rapist and enthusiastic sadist who ordered the deaths of many and took a personal delight in the torture of his victims. The personification of the criminal monstrosity of the Soviet state, he was a coarse, cynical intriguer, a vindictive cut-throat, a deft courtier and a perverted thug. Yet he was also a highly intelligent, enormously competent and indefatigable administrator with the vision ultimately to reject Marxism and propose the sort of liberal program that Mikhail Gorbachev brought to fruition years later.

Beria was born in Georgia in 1899 to a very religious mother but of uncertain paternity—he was probably the illegitimate son of an Abkhazian nobleman. In Baku during the Russian Civil War he worked as a double agent, serving both the anti-Bolshevik regime and the Bolsheviks. Once Baku was retaken by the Bolsheviks, he proved a shrewd politician, and in 1921 he joined the new secret police, the Cheka, rising quickly to become head of the Georgian branch. He first met Stalin, a fellow Georgian, in 1926, and always behaved toward him not like a Bolshevik comrade (as was then the fashion) but like a medieval liege to his king. Stalin decided to use him against the old Georgians who ran the Caucasus, promoting him against their protests to first secretary
of Georgia, and then of the entire Caucasus. When Stalin made his courtiers garden with him, Beria used an ax and told Stalin he would use it to tear out any weeds that he was ordered to extract. Beria understood Stalin's vanity and produced a book on the history of the communists in the Caucasus that inflated Stalin's importance before the Revolution.