Putting aside his Stavka work in 1945, Stalin had picked up the routines of his social life. His options had been narrowed by his own actions. In the mid-1930s he had turned for company to the extended families of the Alliluevs and Svanidzes. But then he had killed or arrested several of them, and the survivors were in a state of psychological shock not conducive to a dinner-party atmosphere.
The Germans had shot Yakov. Vasili was an over-promoted wastrel who irritated fellow officers in the Soviet Air Force and whose drunken parties earned ostracism from his father. Svetlana brought little joy. After breaking with Kapler she set out to inveigle Beria’s son Sergo into marriage – an unlikely venture since Sergo was already married. Thwarted, she instead married Grigori Morozov against Stalin’s wishes in 1943. The marriage was stormy and a divorce was agreed in spring 1947. That summer Stalin invited her to spend some weeks with him at Kholodnaya Rechka by the Black Sea.1 He had a dacha built for her down the steep slope from his own much bigger dacha.2 Although this was a pleasant gesture, they were not going to share an abode: they were edgy in each other’s company. Soon she turned her attentions to Zhdanov’s son Yuri, and the couple married in 1949. Stalin showed little enthusiasm even for this unexceptionable match and declined to attend the ceremony; and although he had Svetlana’s children to the dacha, his interest in them was fleeting. Svetlana and Yuri quickly fell out and separated. She exasperated Stalin. Individuals whom he wanted to integrate in his emotional world had to comply with his expectations or be cast from his affections.
Stalin remained a needy person: solitude did not suit him. He coped by joking with his dacha bodyguards. He teased his bodyguard chief Vlasik and his chief aide Poskrëbyshev. He chatted with his housekeeper Valentina Istomina; and even if the rumours of her having been his mistress remain unproven, he derived comfort from her companionship.
Yet these contacts did not make him a happy man, and his thoughts reverted to earlier periods in his life. In 1947 he wrote to a certain V. G. Solomin whom he had known in Turukhansk District in the First World War:3
I still haven’t forgotten you and friends from Turukhansk and indeed must never forget them. I’m sending you six thousand rubles from my [Supreme Soviet] deputy’s salary. It’s not so great an amount but it will still be of use to you.
On vacation at Kholodnaya Rechka in autumn 1948, he got downright nostalgic and ordered arrangements to be made to enable his Gori schoolmates to stay with him. Peter Kapanadze, M. Titvinidze and Mikhail Dzeradze were invited. There was initial embarrassment when they arrived. Kapanadze broke the ice by expressing his condolence about the death of that ‘poor boy’, Stalin’s son Yakov. Stalin replied that he was but one parent among millions who had lost a relative. Kapanadze, who had business to attend to, left after a few days. There was much singing on subsequent evenings but Titvinidze and Dzeradze got fidgety before a week was up. Stalin asked whether they were bored. Titvinidze replied that they knew he had much work to do. Stalin took the hint. Soon they were packing their bags and, after a warm farewell, were driven home to Georgia.4 He recognised that the past could not be restored by artificial means, and he never saw his friends again.
His Politburo subordinates were keener guests by the Black Sea or at the Blizhnyaya dacha. His dinner parties were now nearly always allmale affairs. For the politicians, an invitation signified continued favour and prolonged life. Hours of eating and drinking would usually be followed by a film-show. Stalin also still liked to sing those Church trios with Molotov and Voroshilov – accompanied by Zhdanov at the pianoforte – even though his voice had lost its strength and accuracy.5 Otherwise, though, the dinners were raucous. As previously, he tried to get his guests hopelessly pickled. Endless toasts would be given to distinguished visitors, and Stalin, despite his demurrals, liked to receive praise.
Yet the soft potency of hospitality at the dachas could harden in an instant. As his political guests knew all too well, the Boss used occasions of hospitality to loosen tongues. Many needed little encouragement. Pravda editor Leonid Ilichëv never forgot the last occasion he went to Blizhnyaya. Stalin had called him at midnight, inviting him over to discuss a forthcoming article. There he came upon Beria, Malenkov and Molotov relaxing with the Leader. After an hour’s work all moved to a lavishly prepared dinner table. Ilichëv was poured a glass of Georgian wine while Beria helped himself to a brandy and proposed a toast to Stalin. Prudently, because he had not yet eaten, Ilichëv swigged only half the glass and picked up a bite to eat. But Beria had spotted a breach of etiquette: ‘You should drain your glass when drinking to comrade Stalin.’ When Ilichëv muttered his excuse, Beria exclaimed in a tragic tone: ‘Comrade Stalin, will you permit me to drink your health by draining his glass?’ Stalin’s eyes glistened derisively but he said nothing. Ilichëv gripped his glass tight. Beria tried to snatch it off him shouting: ‘I wish to drink to comrade Stalin!’ But Ilichëv held on to the glass and drank its contents.
Stalin acidulously announced that the next toast should be to Beria and asked why Ilichëv appeared reluctant to join in. The Pravda editor was speechless with fear. ‘Well, then, comrade Ilichëv,’ ventured the teasing Stalin, ‘I’ll drain your little glass and drink to our much respected friend Lavrenti.’ Ilichëv could not afford to stay out of the toasting round and, after getting plastered, became the butt of everyone’s ridicule. As light dawned, Malenkov helped him into his coat and his waiting car.
Stalin asked the Politburo members what they thought of Ilichëv as an editor. He was using tomfoolery to make a professional assessment. Beria opined that Ilichëv talked too freely; Malenkov added that a ‘more solid’ kind of person was needed. After sobering up, the editor found he had been sacked.6 Yet he never blamed Stalin; he failed entirely to understand that it was by this social device that Stalin scrutinised and demeaned his minions. Those closer to Stalin were more aware of what was going on. So long as he kept the Politburo divided, his dominance was secure. Jealousy, misunderstanding and dispute were in the despot’s regular tool-kit. Politburo members understood all this but could do nothing about it short of assassinating him. If ever such a thought crossed the mind of his subordinates, they swiftly dismissed it. The gamble would have been altogether too risky because he was guarded by men personally devoted to him. Even if a group of the politicians had got together in a conspiracy, there was always the probability that the others would gang up against them. Arrest would have been certain.
Stalin’s actions remained brutal regardless of attempts to placate him – and he systematically undermined the position of those who had authority and prominence after the war.7 His methods were characteristically devious. Molotov’s wife Polina Zhemchuzhina was arrested in 1949. Zhemchuzhina was Jewish and Stalin objected to the warmth of her welcome for Israeli envoy Golda Meir in Moscow.8 Molotov abstained in the Politburo vote on her expulsion from the party, but then apologised to Stalin:
I declare that, having thought over this question, I vote for this Central Committee decision which corresponds to the interests of party and state and teaches a correct understanding of party-mindedness. Moreover, I confess my heavy guilt in not restraining Zhemchuzhina, a person close to me, from erroneous steps and links with anti-Soviet Jewish nationalists like Mikhoels.9
Molotov was not the only leader deprived of his marital partner. Yelena Kalinina and Tamara Khazan – wife of Andrei Andreev – had long been in labour camps (although Kalinina was released in time for her husband’s death).10
Soviet politicians had to become masters of ingratiation. After a contretemps with Stalin in December 1945, Molotov assured him: ‘I shall try by my deeds to become worthy of your trust, a trust in which every honourable Bolshevik sees not only personal trust but the party’s trust which is dearer to me than my life.’ His ‘crude, opportunistic mistake’ had consisted in allowing excerpts from Churchill’s speeches to be reproduced in Moscow.11 The matter was hardly of great importance but Stalin had refused to see it that way. ‘None of us’, he barked by telegram from Abkhazia, ‘has the right to undertake a unilateral disposition involving alteration of our course of policy. Yet Molotov has arrogated that right to himself. Why and on what grounds? Is it not because such tricks enter his plan of work?’12 Mikoyan too had to humble himself when Stalin was angered by decisions on grain procurement:13
I and others of course can’t pose questions in the way you can. I’ll make every effort to learn from you how to work properly. I’ll do everything to draw the necessary lessons from your severe criticism so that it will help me in future work under your fatherly leadership.
Some father! Some sons! The hands of Molotov and Mikoyan were steeped in the blood of the victims of Soviet state policies, and yet they too had to grovel. They knew they had to approach Stalin as if he were the USSR’s stern but fair patriarch – and just possibly they might survive.
Stalin’s paternal functions involved regular humiliation, and he was inventive in going about this. Molotov asked the Polish communist leader Jakub Berman for a waltz at one of Stalin’s soirées. This infringement of manly convention pleased and suited Stalin. Molotov led the fumbling Berman while Stalin presided at the gramophone. Berman was to put a positive gloss on the episode: the waltz with Molotov had been a chance not to whisper sweet nothings to the Soviet Minister of Foreign Affairs but to mumble ‘things that couldn’t be said out loud’.14 He contrived to forget how he and Molotov had been degraded for Stalin’s delight.
The Leader’s dominion involved chronometric regulation. Lunch was taken in the late afternoon around four or five o’clock and dinner was arranged for no earlier than nine o’clock. Stalin lived like this, and the entire ruling group had to adjust its collective body-clock to his habits.15 Kaganovich aped him to the minute.16 Molotov coped by taking little naps in daytime; such was his self-control that he was known to announce to his aides: ‘I’m now going to take a rest in the next room for thirteen minutes.’ He got up from the divan like an automaton and returned precisely thirteen minutes later.17 All knew that the Leader worked from the early evening onwards; everyone in the upper strata of the Soviet elite had to do the same – and their families had to put up with this as the price to be paid for sustaining life and privilege. With the communisation of eastern Europe the schedule of the working day changed there too. Throughout the USSR and across to Berlin, Tirana and Sofia the leading figures in party and government dared not stray from the proximity of the phone. Stalin could ring at any time of the night through to the early hours of the morning.18
As Stalin’s vacations in the south became longer, he resorted frequently to telegrams. He could not control the entire machinery of state in detail. This had long been obvious to him. ‘I can’t know everything,’ he said to Ivan Kovalëv, Minister of Communications after the Second World War. ‘I pay attention to disagreements and to objections, and I work out why they’ve arisen and what they are about.’19 Stalin explained that his subordinates constantly kept things from him and that they always concocted a compromise behind the scenes before they reported to him. To him this was tantamount to conspiracy. Only Voznesenski stood out against such practices – and Stalin admired him for this. Stalin hated the ‘insincerity’ of other Politburo members. He might not detect particular cases of trickery but he knew they could trick him, and he functioned on the assumption that they were not to be trusted. The result was that Stalin, depleted in energy, looked for discrepancies between the accounts of one leader and another.20 Any disagreement was likely to lie across fault-lines in policy. Stalin had hit upon an economical way of penetrating the secrets of what was being done in the corridors of the Kremlin.
Information also came to him by secret channels. The ‘organs’ – known as MGB from March 1946 and kept separate from the MVD – regularly reported on their eavesdropping of conversations among the Soviet leaders. Other Politburo members, he knew, were personally ambitious; and since they had repressed millions on his orders, he assumed they could form a violent conspiracy against him. Throughout the war with Germany he had ordered listening devices to be installed in the apartments of military personnel. The practice was applied to a growing list of civilian politicians. Even Molotov and Mikoyan were being bugged by 1950.21
Another of his modalities was to cultivate jealousy among his subordinates. There was constant bickering, and Stalin alone was allowed to arbitrate. He seldom allowed the highest political leaders to stay in a particular post for long. Nothing was left settled in the Kremlin: Stalin saw that job insecurity among his potential successors aided his ability to dominate them. The Moscow political carousel flung off some individuals from time to time, and the survivors regularly had to dismount and move from one seat to another. This was not enough by itself. Stalin’s ill health barred him from undertaking the detailed supreme supervision he had exercised in the 1930s and during the Second World War. He needed a dependable individual to act as his eyes and ears in the leadership just as Lenin had turned to him for help in April 1922. Stalin operated with cunning. At any given time after 1945 he had a political favourite, and he sometimes hinted that the favourite was his chosen successor. But such favour was never formally bestowed, and Stalin raised up individuals only to hurl them down later. No one could grasp the levers of power in such a fashion as to acquire the capacity to supplant Stalin.
There were many levers. In 1946 the Council of Ministers (as Sovnarkom was redesignated in the same year) had forty-eight ministries and committees, each being responsible for a large sector of state functions.22 Stalin ceased chairing it. Instead he increased the emphasis on ‘curatorship’. This was a system whereby every leading associate of Stalin was assigned responsibility for a group of institutions.23 Stalin, while wanting flux and vagueness as an ultimate safeguard of his rule, needed to assure himself that the state complied with his declared intentions. Curators were his solution. They met him frequently and never knew when he might haul them over the coals because one of their institutions had given him grounds for disquiet. Each group of institutions was the object of rivalry. Politburo members wanted to have as many as possible; this was a token of Stalin’s approval as well as a grant of real power. Reduction of the number signalled that a particular associate had fallen under the shadow of disapprobation – or even of the Leader’s lethal suspicion. His associates were under constant, intense pressure. Always they feared that some silly slip by one of their own subordinates might have adverse consequences for themselves. This could happen at any time because the Leader cultivated jealousies among all of them.
He also harangued them into adopting his own ferocious style of leadership: at a Party Central Committee plenum in March 1946 he declared: ‘A People’s Commissar must be a wild animal; he must work and take direct responsibility for work.’24 Rulership as Stalin recommended it to People’s Commissars and their curators was nothing like the model of bureaucratic life described by sociologists since Max Weber and Roberto Michels. Even in his last years, when the Soviet order was stabilised and in many ways petrified, it retained a militant and dynamic quality.
Politics were a bear-pit. Politburo members could bite and claw each other as brutally as they liked so long as they produced the outcome demanded by Stalin. Only in Stalin’s presence were they constrained to moderate their behaviour. The Politburo had ceased to convene in the war and the pre-war tradition was not resumed.25 Stalin continued to consult other leaders by informal methods. Always he liked to have leading figures in the Politburo write, telegram or telephone their assent to his preferences into policy. The Orgburo and the Secretariat – as well as the Council of Ministers and its Presidium – deliberated in his absence. The Party Congress, which had supreme formal authority over all party bodies, was not called until 1952. Stalin expected to rule through unofficial channels; he knew that disruption of institutional regularity helped to prolong his personal despotism. He could intervene with an order at his whim. He deliberately inflicted a contradictory pattern of work on his subordinates. They, unlike him, had to observe administrative procedures punctiliously. At the same time they had to obtain practical results regardless of the rulebook. The pressure was unremitting. This was the way he liked things, and the other leaders dared make no objection.
The fact that Stalin was often away from Moscow led many contemporaries (and subsequent commentators) to surmise that he was losing his grip on power. This was a misperception. On the large questions of the international, political and economic agenda there was little that escaped his adjudication; and Kremlin politicians were altogether too fearful of him to try to trick him. The framework of rulership at the centre and in the provinces also continued to exercise his attention. At the end of the war four bodies had immense importance. These were the government, the party, the security police and the army. Stalin needed all of them. He also required a situation in which no institution became so dominant as to threaten his position. The most obvious menace after the Second World War was the Red Army, and the country’s military hero Georgi Zhukov immediately came under his suspicion.
No sooner had Zhukov led the victory parade on Red Square and completed Allied military negotiations with Eisenhower and Montgomery in Berlin than he was pulled out of the limelight. Stalin had plenty of compromising material against him. The security agencies reported to the Kremlin that Zhukov had stolen a trainload of loot from Germany. The list was enormous, including 3,420 silks, 323 furs, 60 gilt-framed pictures, 29 bronze statues and a grand piano.26 This was established custom in the Red occupying forces. Practically every commander could have been arraigned on similar charges. Stalin played with the idea of a trial but in June 1946 limited himself to relegating the victor of Kursk and Berlin to the Odessa Military District (from which he was in turn dismissed in February 1947). Pravda steadily ceased to give prominence to the names of marshals. The police were empowered to tighten surveillance over the officer corps. Undeniably the Red Army (redesignated the Soviet Army in 1946) remained vital to the tasks of maintaining political control in the USSR and eastern Europe; it was also the recipient of budgetary largesse as Gosplan increasingly skewed central economic planning in favour of military expenditure. Yet Stalin remained eager to hold the armed forces under his civilian control.
The security agencies too came under suspicion. Here Stalin’s method was different. Beria in peacetime, unlike Zhukov, was too useful to discard. Yet it suited Stalin to replace him in the leadership of the police. Beria knew too much and had too many clients whom he had appointed to office. Stalin therefore put Beria in charge of the Soviet atom-bomb project and introduced younger men to the Ministry of State Security (MGB) and to the Ministry of Internal Affairs (MVD). The appointee to the MVD in December 1945 was Sergei Kruglov, and Alexei Kuznetsov was given oversight over security matters on the Politburo’s behalf; Viktor Abakumov became head of the MGB in May 1946. Although continuity of administrative leadership was desirable in theory, Stalin’s higher demand was his inviolable personal power. A police chief who settled into office could pose an acute danger to him, especially since the MGB had uniformed forces which could be deployed in the normal course of events. Stalin also retained his own parallel security agency in the form of the Special Department. He relied heavily on Poskrëbyshev to keep him apprised of anything important to his interests. He also ensured that his bodyguard chief Vlasik should be beholden to himself and to no one else. This was a police state where the ruler held his police in permanent mistrust.
Yet his simultaneous reliance on the MGB and MVD was intense. Without their operational efficiency it would have been difficult to reduce the standing of the Soviet Army leadership. The Soviet budget continued to allocate massive resources to the security agencies. The Gulag still produced a crucial proportion of the country’s diamonds, gold and timber, and the uranium mines were developed after 1945 with convict labour. Indeed Stalin’s reliance on the security agencies grew as he reinforced policies which frustrated the hopes of most citizens for political and economic relaxation. Coercion of society was hugely important.
Yet not even Stalin projected a future for the USSR when the MGB and MVD would be the effective government. The Council of Ministers retained that function. The increasing complexity of the economy required specialist knowledge lacking in the security agencies. The Council of Ministers also sought to free itself from excessive tutelage by party bodies: a technocratic imperative was pursued by several leading political figures. This was an old discussion that had exercised Stalin’s mind throughout the 1930s. As previously, he moved between two solutions. One was to give way to the ministerial lobby and put a stop to the party’s interference. This was the orientation espoused especially by Georgi Malenkov. The other solution was to extend and strengthen the powers of the party, if not to the pitch of the late 1920s then at least to the detriment of the Council of Ministers in the 1940s. Among the advocates of this orientation was Andrei Zhdanov. Stalin in the early years after the Second World War leaned positively in the direction of Zhdanov. But then Zhdanov fell into disfavour, and he began to give backing to Malenkov.27
The arguments, from a structural viewpoint, were finely poised. Zhdanov and his friends could indicate that the Council of Ministers, left to itself, could not guarantee Stalinist ideological rectitude. Without this, the October Revolution was undermined and the rationale of the USSR’s existence was ruined. The Soviet Union could not survive on technocratic impulses alone. Yet the other side of the debate had an equally strong case. The USSR functioned in a world of intense military and economic competition. If party doctrinaires held the whip hand over ministerial specialists, the country’s capacity to match the USA and its capitalist allies would be reduced. Pettifogging tutelage by the party would tie one of the Soviet Union’s hands behind its back in a contest which placed the West at an advantage.
Stalin did not need to be persuaded that the USSR had to become more competitive or that ideological indoctrination and political control were important. His state could do without neither government nor party; and even when he gave preference to one of them over the other, he omitted to make the choice a definitive one. The institutional tension worked to his personal advantage. By locking the two bodies in rivalry, he strengthened his position as arbiter. But this in turn meant that he had to settle for a lower level of administrative efficiency that he would otherwise have liked. He started from the premise that each institution pursued its interests at the expense of others. Persistent rivalries led to systematic obstruction. The tangled competences of government, party and police produce a thicket of bureaucratic paperwork which slowed down the processes of deliberation and implementation. Dynamism was introduced when Stalin himself gave a direct order or when he allowed an influential group of subordinates to pursue a desired initiative. But Stalin knew he could not know everything. The network of central institutional bodies worked well to maintain his despotism; it was less effective in facilitating flexible, efficient rulership. Stalin paid a price for his despotism.