After dressing in his usual formal manner, Hitler meets with his staff to celebrate the holiday, drinking a rare glass of wine and making jovial small talk. Then he descends once again into his War Room. He seeks the latest reports from Bastogne, certain that he can renew his stalled attack if only he captures the road octopus. There is a gleam in Hitler’s eye as he scrutinizes the maps, despite his declining physical condition. It is a gleam that his generals know all too well, for it is the look the Führer shows when he is divining some ingenious way to outwit his enemies.

Just yesterday, the German submarine U-486 sank the troopship SS Leopoldville off the coast of France, sending eight hundred American servicemen to the bottom of the Atlantic. And Hitler’s special V-1 rocket-propelled bombs rained down death on the British city of Oldham, killing twenty-seven innocent civilians as they gathered to celebrate Christmas Eve.

No matter what the Allies might think, Adolf Hitler is far from beaten.

11

MOSCOW, RUSSIA

DECEMBER 25, 1944

5:00 P.M.

Joseph Stalin is plotting to take over the world.

He does not celebrate Christmas. This religious holiday has no place in the godless Communist Soviet Union. So instead of sitting before a Christmas tree to unwrap presents with his eighteen-year-old daughter, Svetlana, the Soviet dictator now works at his desk in the Kremlin. Because the Communist philosophy frowns on opulence, Stalin’s second-floor office is dark and cramped. The room smells of smoke from his Dunhill pipe. He hates noise, so as Stalin hunches over a small desk and dictates to a young secretary, his voice is the only sound breaking the complete quiet of the room.

“I have received your letter regarding sending to Moscow a competent officer from General Eisenhower,” Stalin writes to U.S. president Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Outside the window, snow falls on Red Square. The temperature is well below freezing, and the Moscow River will soon be covered in a thick sheet of ice. Should he choose to do so, Stalin could escape to his seaside dacha on the Black Sea, in the town of Sochi, where there is no ice and where the sun shines warm and bright in the dead of winter. He can wade in his saltwater swimming pool, which the architects have kept to a discreet five-foot depth, knowing that the five-foot-four Stalin does not swim.

But the coming holiday, not to mention the ongoing war, would make Stalin’s absence from Moscow conspicuous. Instead, the dictator remains in the Kremlin as a show of solidarity with the Soviet people. He works by day and spends evenings smoking his pipe and playing chess. Sometimes he watches Charlie Chaplin films and Russian comedies—but always in private.

Because what the ultrasecretive mass murderer does not want the world to know is that he loves to laugh. It is a secret he shares with his mistress Valentina Istomina—but then, it would be almost impossible to hide this from her, as the buxom “Valechka” is also Stalin’s longtime housekeeper.1

“Naturally, I agree with your proposal as well as I agree to meet the officer from General Eisenhower and to arrange an exchange of information from him.”

Signed: “J. Stalin.”

A little-known fact is that Russian is actually Stalin’s second language. He learned it late in life, and still speaks it with the coarse Georgian accent of his youth.2 English is his third language, and Stalin understands it far better than he lets on. This has been an advantage in global negotiations with his British and American allies. He eavesdrops on their conversations and adjusts his bargaining position accordingly. Stalin dictates this letter without punctuation and using improper grammar, perpetuating the myth that he is not fluent in FDR’s mother tongue.

He uses the same ruse with Winston Churchill, who wrote to wish Stalin a happy fifty-sixth birthday. “Thank you for congratulations,” Stalin now pens. “And good wishes for my birthday. I have always greatly appreciated your friendly sentiments.”

That note will be sent to 10 Downing Street in London, even though Churchill is currently enjoying a raucous Christmas celebration aboard the HMS Ajax off the coast of Greece.3

Even as the British officers are celebrating, Stalin-backed Greek Communists are on the move. They are attempting to take control of the entire country, despite the agreement between Churchill and Stalin at their Moscow meeting just two months ago that Greece would be a British sphere of influence. Churchill is learning the hard way that Joseph Stalin is not a man to be trusted.

It is a lesson that young Svetlana Stalin knows all too well.

*   *   *

Svetlana once enjoyed Christmas Day a great deal.

Her mother has been dead for thirteen years. Natasha Alliluyeva simply went to bed one night and did not come down for breakfast in the morning. A maid found her alone in her bedroom, dead from a pistol shot. A suicide note was visible on the nightstand.4

Natasha was twenty-three years younger than Stalin, a second wife to replace the one who had died from typhus. Due to the dictator’s long-standing proclivity for brutal rape, Natasha incredibly may have been his illegitimate daughter.

“The devil knows whose daughter you are—maybe mine,” Stalin once sadistically taunted her.

The suicide was Natasha Alliluyeva’s final protest against the Soviet leader’s nonstop cruelty and philandering, the bitter end to fourteen years of abuse and neglect.

When her mother died, the five-year-old Svetlana knew nothing about her father’s monstrous behavior. All she knew was that her mother was suddenly and mysteriously taken from her in the night. It would be years before she’d come to understand her father’s evil disposition, and begin to distance herself from his foul temper and hard drinking.

Yet Joseph Stalin was devoted to Svetlana. “He was a very simple man, very rude, very cruel,” she will remember years later. “There was nothing in him that was complicated. He loved me and wanted me to be with him.”

Four years after Natasha’s suicide, the Soviet dictator received a most curious party invitation.5 The year was 1935. Stalin was invited to a Christmas gala at the British embassy in Moscow. Although he did not believe in Christmas, Stalin saw an opportunity for Svetlana—and maybe even for himself.

Clearly, Stalin could not attend a Christmas party. The Russian people would never have understood. Atheism was the established philosophy in the Soviet Union.

Yet Stalin had celebrated Christmas as a boy, back home in Georgia. Even though his tyrannical alcoholic father often beat him so severely that he urinated blood, young Joseph had a loving mother, and knew the joy and warmth that came with the Christmas season.

Christmas remained important to Stalin as he became a young man. From age fifteen to nineteen, he studied for the priesthood. He had always been rebellious and was only at the seminary because his parents forced him to attend. But still, he remained loyal to the church until the seminary raised its fees and Stalin turned his back on his faith.

That cold night in 1935, Stalin sent Svetlana across the river to the British embassy in his place, perhaps thinking that nothing more might come of it than just a unique holiday experience for his precious daughter.

When she returned, Svetlana gushed about the presents and the wonderful decorations, in particular the stately Christmas tree.

It was the image of the tree that got to Stalin.

Svetlana’s description thawed his frozen heart. If the British could experience such a magical celebration, why couldn’t the Soviet people? Of course, celebrating Christmas was still out of the question. But the ruthless dictator also realized that he could manipulate such a holiday to his advantage.