The World

* Penicillin had been discovered sixteen years earlier by a British scientist, Alexander Fleming. Keeping a messy laboratory, Fleming had returned to find his experiments overgrown with a fungus which had destroyed bacteria; using the fungus and the tears and snot of his assistants, he developed penicillin, the first natural antibiotic. ‘One sometimes finds what one isn’t looking for,’ he said, yet it was not really an accident as he was an enthusiastic innovator: ‘I play with microbes.’ He published his findings, but no one appreciated it until 1939, more than ten years later, when a Jewish-German refugee, Ernst Chain, and his colleague Howard Florey at Oxford infected eight mice with streptococci and gave four of them penicillin. Those four lived. In 1941, they tried it on a patient dying of infection, who then recovered. Now realizing its potential, they flew to New York where the Rockefeller Foundation created a team, backed by the US army, which included a scientist, Mary Hunt (nicknamed Mouldy Mary), who found penicillin in a rotting cantaloupe, which formed the basis of streptomycin. Antibiotics changed the world: people no longer died of minor infection, and the drugs later enabled doctors to limit infection even after massive surgery.

* When told that Pope Piux XII was concerned about Polish independence, Stalin quipped, ‘How many divisions has the pope?’ Pleased with his definition of hard power, Stalin repeated it on other occasions. ‘You may tell my son Josef,’ Pius later joked, ‘he’ll meet my divisions in Heaven.’

* To avoid scandal, Lucy quickly packed and left the Little White House.

* ‘You have of course read Dostoevsky?’ Stalin said to a Yugoslav Communist leader, Milovan Djilas, who confronted him with the Russian army’s mass rapes. ‘Do you see what a complicated thing is man’s soul? … Well, then imagine a man who fought from Stalingrad to Belgrade … And what is so awful about his having fun with a woman after such horrors?’

* On 4 May, SMERSH military intelligence found the charred remains, identified from Hitler’s jawbone, which along with fragments of his skull are in Moscow. In 1970, the rest of the body was secretly and anonymously buried under a Soviet military base in Magdeburg.

* Among the press covering the conference was Jack Kennedy, whose father got him the job working for Hearst.

* There was talk among Polish Stalinists of Poland joining the USSR. Stalin never considered this, partly because of the importance of Poland to the Allies. But like the tsars before him Stalin was determined to control Poland. Stalin was granted the great Prussian city of Königsberg, renamed after Stalin’s puppet president Kalinin and ethnically cleansed of Germans; it became a Soviet enclave. In Ukraine, as the war ended, Bandera managed to escape from German captivity and with US support settled in Munich, while his ally Shukhevych led a multi-year war against the Soviets, winning some victories (in February 1944, he killed top Soviet general Vatunin); 130,000 Ukrainians and over 30,000 Soviets were killed, until in 1950 Shukhevych was finally trapped and killed. In Munich in 1959, the KGB managed to assassinate Bandera. In the Baltics, anti-Soviet insurgents known as the Forest Brothers fought on for ten years. Stalin orchestrated massive purges of Ukraine, Belarus and the Baltics, so by 1950s the GULAG camps reached their peak of 2.5 million enslaved labourers. In his new west Ukraine, Stalin executed around 200,000 and deported 400,000. Between 1940 and 1953, around 10 per cent of the Balts were deported. One could argue that Stalin, Marxist pontiff and Russian imperialist, fatally overreached by consuming the Baltics. In 1990–1, it was the Balts, even more than the Georgians, who accelerated the break-up of the Soviet Union. Had Stalin not consumed these territories, one wonders if the USSR would have survived in 1991.

ACT TWENTY-ONE

2.3 BILLION

Nehrus, Maos and Suns, Mafiosi, Hashemites and Albanians

RADIANCE OF A THOUSAND SUNS: TRUMAN’S NON -SURPRISE AND THE AMERICAN CENTURY

The day before, 16 July 1945, as he watched the mushroom cloud of Operation Trinity, the exhilarated director of the secret Manhattan Project, Robert Oppenheimer, quoted the Bhagavad Gita: ‘If the radiance of a thousand suns were to burst at once into the sky, that would be like the splendor of the mighty one.’ But the ‘splendor’ had a fearsome power: ‘I am become Death, destroyer of worlds.’