46
The true victor of the war, Stalin enjoyed the prestige of a world conqueror yet the disparity between his political power and his personal exhaustion made him feel vulnerable.
The Generalissimo and Molotov were satisfied, though never satiated, by their prizes. At a southern dinner, Stalin sent Poskrebyshev to bring the new map. They spread it on the table. Using his pipe as a baton, Stalin reviewed his empire: “Let’s see what we’ve got then: in the north, everything’s all right, Finland greatly wronged us, so we’ve moved the frontier farther from Leningrad. The Baltic States, which were Russian territory from ancient times, are ours again, all the Belorussians are ours now, Ukrainians too, and the Moldavians are back with us. So to the west everything’s okay.” But he turned to the east: “What have we got here? The Kurile Islands are ours and all of Sakhalin . . . China, Mongolia, all as it should be.” The Dunhill pipe trailed round to the south: “Now this frontier I don’t like at all. The Dardanelles . . . We also have claims on Turkish territory and on Libya.” This could have been the speech of a Russian Tsar—it was hardly that of a Georgian Bolshevik. Molotov shared this mission: “My task as Foreign Minister was to expand the borders of our Motherland. And it seems Stalin and I coped . . . quite well. Yes I wouldn’t mind getting Alaska back,” he joked. But Molotov understood that there was no contradiction between Bolshevism and empire-building: “It’s good the Russian Tsars took so much land for us in war. This makes our struggle with capitalism easier.”1
But Stalin’s courtiers noticed that his triumph had turned his head. “He became conceited,” said Molotov, “not a good feature in a statesman.” His prestige was so great that he was absolute in all matters: his mere words were taken as “Party orders and instantly obeyed.” Yet he now ruled in a very different way: he “stepped aside from direct ruling,” said one of his officials, and assumed the Olympian mantle of a paramount leader, like the old Chairman Mao, who liked to guide his men with anecdotes, signs and hints. He used secrecy, caprice and obscurity to maintain his mastery over his younger, stronger, ambitious magnates. He dominated his entourage by mystery.
“He never gave direct orders,” wrote his Georgian boss, Charkviani, “so you had to make your own conclusions.” Stalin understood that “it doesn’t matter what part of the pool you throw a stone, the ripples will spread.” He once showed his Abkhazian leader, Mgeladze, his beloved lemon trees again and again until the apparatchik finally understood and declared that Abkhazia would produce lemons for the whole USSR.
“Now you’ve got it!” smiled Stalin. Unless he was in a temper, he usually ended his orders: “Do as you wish” but no one mistook his meaning. If, on the other hand, he gave a direct order, writing “I don’t think my reasons need to be discussed, they are perfectly clear,” or simply shouted his wishes, he was instantly obeyed. In the MGB, the mere mention of the Instantsiya justified any act of barbarism.
However, the Generalissimo was also weaker and older than before. Shortly before the victory parade, Stalin had experienced some sort of heart attack or what Svetlana called “a minor stroke,” hardly surprising given the strain of warlordism on his remarkably durable metabolism. “Certainly overexhausted,” observed Molotov, Stalin already suffered from arthritis but it was the hardening of his arteries, arteriosclerosis, that reduced the flow of blood to the brain and could only impair his mental faculties. After returning from Potsdam, he fell ill again, making him feel weaker at the very moment when his position was strongest. They brought him under the power of doctors, a profession he despised and which he had corrupted (making his own physician Vinogradov testify at the show trials during the thirties). Poskrebyshev, the ex-nurse, became his secret doctor, prescribing pills and remedies.
These contradictions gave Stalin a deadly unpredictability, lashing out at those around him. The hopes and freedoms of the war made no difference to his belief that the problems of the USSR were best solved by the elimination of individuals. The poverty of his empire compared to the surging wealth of America dovetailed with his own feeling that his powers were failing, and the inferiority complexes of a lifetime.
Usually “calm, reserved and patient,” he often “exploded instantly and made irrelevant and wrong decisions.” Khrushchev said, “after the war, he wasn’t quite right in the head.” He remained a supreme manipulator though it is likely that the arteriosclerosis exacerbated his existing tempers, depression and paranoia. He was never mad: indeed, his strangest obsessions always had a basis in real politics. Yet mortality made him realize the sterility he had created inside himself: “I’m a most unfortunate person,” he told Zhukov, “I’m afraid of my own shadow.” But it was this supersensitivity that made him such a frightening but masterful politician. His fear of losing control of his empire was based on reality: even in his own Politburo, Mikoyan felt the war was a “great school of freedom” with no need to “return to terror.”
Stalin despised this laxity. He even joked about it when he sent some writers to tour conquered Japan and asked Molotov if they had departed. It turned out they had put off the trip: “Why didn’t they go?” he asked. “It was a Politburo decision. Maybe they didn’t approve of it and wanted to appeal to the Party Congress?” The writers left quickly. But he sensed this lax attitude all around him.
“He was very jittery,” said Molotov. “His last years were the most dangerous. He swung to extremes.” He was jealous of Molotov and Zhukov’s prestige, suspicious of Beria’s power, and disgusted by the soft smugness of his magnates: even when he was ill and old, he was never happier than when he was orchestrating a struggle. It was his gift, his natural state. Some backs would have to be broken.2 Stalin ruled “through a small group close to him at all times” and formal “government ceased to function.” Even on long holidays away from Moscow, he maintained his paramount power by directing each portfolio through his direct relationship with the official in question, and no one else. His interventions were almost deliberately capricious and out of the blue.
More than ever, his courtiers had to know how to handle him but first, they had to survive his nocturnal routine. It is no exaggeration to say that henceforth Stalin ruled, from Berlin to the Kurile Islands, from the dinner table and the cinema. The defiance of time itself is the ultimate measure of tyranny: the lights in his capitals—from Warsaw to Ulan Bator, from Budapest to Sofia—shone throughout the night.
The magnates met at the Little Corner after which the Generalissimo always proposed a movie. He led his guests along the red-and-blue-carpeted corridors to the cinema which had been luxuriously built in the old winter garden on the second floor of the Great Kremlin Palace. Beria, Molotov, Mikoyan and Malenkov remained his constant companions but his proconsuls in Finland and Ukraine, Zhdanov and Khrushchev, often visited too.
Then there was the whole new court of European vassals: his favourites were the Polish leader Boleslaw Bierut, “polite, well-dressed, well-mannered,” a “perfect gentleman with women” but a ruthless Stalinist with “a fanatical faith in the dogma,” his deputy Jakob Berman, the Czech President Clement Gottwald, Hungary’s Matyas Rakosi. The prouder Yugoslavs, Marshal Tito and Milovan Djilas, were less liked. Each of them was honoured to come to Moscow to pay homage and receive Stalin’s sacerdotal wisdom and imperial commands. They too had to learn how to behave in the cinema and at dinner.
The sight of the Generalissimo and his guards approaching was a terrifying one for any young official who happened to be walking along these corridors. The plain-clothed guards walked twenty-five steps in front and two metres behind Stalin, while the uniformed guards followed him with their eyes. Amid this phalanx of myrmidons, walking noiselessly but quickly and jauntily, with a heavy, pigeon-toed step, came the potbellied emperor with his fine mountain man’s head, his sloping shoulders, the tigerish creases of his roguish smile. Anyone who saw him approaching had to stand back against the wall and show their hands. Anatoly Dobrynin, a young diplomat, once found himself in this dilemma: “I pressed my back against the wall.” Stalin “did not fail to notice my confusion” and asked “who I was and where I worked.” Then “stressing his words by a slow moving of the finger of his right hand” before Dobrynin’s face, he declared, “Youth must not fear Comrade Stalin. He is its friend.” Dobrynin shuddered.
The walk to the cinema took a few minutes. Decorated in blue, there were rows of soft upholstered armchairs set in pairs, with tables between each seat with mineral water, wine, cigarettes, boxes of chocolates. The carpet was grey with rugs on it. Before Stalin arrived, the Politburo took their seats, leaving the front row empty. They were met by the Minister of Cinema, Ivan Bolshakov, who had run the film industry since 1939 and became a vital but comical presence in the entourage. Bolshakov was terrified of Stalin since his two cinematic predecessors had been shot. As Stalin got older, the cinema became an obsessive ritual, as well as an aid, and venue, for governing.
Bolshakov’s big decision was which film to show. This he judged by trying to guess Stalin’s mood. He observed the Leader’s gait, intonation of voice and sometimes, if he was lucky, Vlasik or Poskrebyshev gave him a clue. If Stalin was in a bad mood, Bolshakov knew it was not a good idea to show a new movie. Stalin was a creature of habit: he loved his old favourites from the thirties like Volga! Volga! or foreign films such as In Old Chicago, Mission to Moscow, the comedy It Happened One Night, or any Charlie Chaplin.
Stalin now possessed a new library of American, English and German films that had until recently been the property of Goebbels. If Stalin was in a bad mood, one of the Goebbels films would please him. He liked detective films, Westerns, gangster films—and he enjoyed fights. He banned any hint of sexuality. When Bolshakov once showed him a slightly risqué scene involving a naked girl, he banged the table and said: “Are you making a brothel here, Bolshakov?” Then he walked out, followed by the Politburo, leaving poor Bolshakov awaiting arrest. From then on, he cut even the slightest glimpse of nudity.
Stalin ordered Bolshakov to interpret the foreign films. Yet Bolshakov spoke only pidgin English. He therefore spent much of his time preparing for these midnight sessions by having interpreters go over the film for him and then learning the script. This was a challenge because at any time, he had hundreds of films to show Stalin. Thus his interpretation was usually absurdly obvious and very late, long after it was clear what the character had already said. The Politburo laughed and teased the flustered Bolshakov on his translations. Beria pointed at the screen and called out: “Look he’s started running . . .” All laughed—but Stalin, who evidently enjoyed this farce, never demanded a proper interpreter.
In 1951, Bolshakov asked Stalin to approve the film Tarzan: one imagines his translation of Tarzan’s jungle-swinging shriek and courting grunts with Jane thoroughly entertained his audience. If Bolshakov showed the old favourite, Volga! Volga!, Stalin liked to show off how well he knew it and would perform every part just before the actor.
If Stalin was in a good mood, Bolshakov had the chance to choose a new Soviet movie. Stalin remained the censor of the entire industry: no movie could be shown without his personal approval. When he was in the south for months, no decision could be made so he had to see all the new films when he returned.
As Stalin approached, Bolshakov took up position outside the cinema. He once frightened Stalin by lurking in the shadows: “Who are you? What are you doing?” Stalin barked. “Why are you hiding?” Stalin scowled at Bolshakov for weeks afterwards. Taking his seat in the front row with his guests around him, usually mixing a spritzer of Georgian wine and mineral water, he always asked: “What will Comrade Bolshakov show us today?” Bolshakov announced the movie, sat down at the back and ordered the projectionists to begin. Once, one of them dropped and broke part of the projector, which spread mercury on the floor. They were accused of attempting to assassinate the Generalissimo.244
Stalin talked throughout the film. He enjoyed cowboy films especially those directed by John Ford, and admired Spencer Tracy and Clark Gable but he also “cursed them, giving them an ideological evaluation,” recalled Khrushchev, “and then ordering new ones.”245
Stalin admired the actors, frequently asking “Where’ve we seen this actor before?” After the war, actors and directors often joined Stalin’s dinners, particularly the Georgian director of films featuring the heroic Leader, Mikhail Chiaureli, and the actors who often played him, Mikhail Gelovani (who did Stalin with a Georgian accent) and Alexei Diky (increasingly after the war, with a Russian accent). “You’re observing me thoroughly,” Stalin told Gelovani. “You don’t waste time do you?” He once asked Diky how he would “play Stalin.”
“As the people see him,” replied the actor.
“The right answer,” said Stalin, giving him a bottle of brandy.
When the film was over, Stalin always asked his fellow intellectual:
“What will Comrade Zhdanov tell us?” Zhdanov gave his pompous verdict followed by Molotov’s laconic judgement and Beria’s sarcastic jokes. Stalin enjoyed joking about the auteurs: “If Comrade [director or screenwriter]’s no good, Comrade Ulrikh’ll sign his death sentence.”
Bolshakov once called Beria and Molotov to ask if Zhukovsky, a film about the aviator, could be launched on Air Force Day, but Stalin, on holiday, had still not seen it. It was his decision not theirs, they replied, so Bolshakov launched the film. When Stalin returned, he watched Zhukovsky and then said: “We know you decided to put it on the screens of the USSR! They want to trick me but it’s impossible.” Bolshakov froze. On whose authority, asked Stalin? Bolshakov replied that he had “consulted and decided.”
“You consulted and decided,” repeated Stalin quietly. He got up and walked to the door, opened it and repeated: “You decided.” He went out, leaving a doom-laden silence. Then he opened the door again, smiling: “You decided correctly.” If Stalin hated the film, he would simply walk out but not before teasing Bolshakov.
Bolshakov made notes of all these august critiques. In the morning, he called the directors or scriptwriters and passed on the comments without specifying their source but no doubt his quivering voice and breathless awe made it obvious.246
Stalin imposed politics on film but also film on reality. Djilas noticed how he seemed to mix up what was going on “in the manner of an uneducated man who mistakes artistic reality for actuality.” He revelled in films about murdering friends and associates. Khrushchev and Mikoyan repeatedly sat through a British film, no doubt one of the Goebbels collection, about a pirate who stole some gold and then, “one by one,” killed his accomplices to keep the swag.
“What a fellow, look how he did it!” exclaimed Stalin. This was “depressing” for his comrades who could not forget that, as Khrushchev put it, “we were temporary people.” Stalin’s isolated position made these films increasingly powerful. After the war, Stalin wanted to impose taxes on the peasants even though the countryside was stricken with famine. The whole Politburo sensibly opposed this, which angered Stalin. He was convinced the peasants could afford it: he pointed to the plenty shown in his propaganda movies, allowing him to ignore the starvation. After seeing the movie on Catherine the Great’s admiral, Ushakov, Stalin became obsessed with building a powerful fleet, quoting a character in the film who says: “Land forces are a sword in one hand, sea forces a sword in the other.”
He often insisted on seeing two movies in a row and afterwards, around 2 a.m., would say: “Let’s go and get something to eat,” adding “if you have time” as if there was any choice in the matter.
“If that’s an invitation,” replied Molotov, “with the greatest satisfaction.” Then Stalin turned to his guests, often Tito or Bierut: “What are your plans for tonight?” as if they would have any at that hour. Stalin laughed. “Hmm, a government without a state plan. We’ll take a bite.” The average “bite” lasted the interminable six hours until dawn.3
Stalin ordered the omnipresent Poskrebyshev to summon the cars but when they were delayed, he trembled “with rage, shouted, his features distorted, sharply motioned and poured invective into the face of his secretary who was . . . paling as if he had heart failure.” Poskrebyshev rounded up other guests. The guests had to prepare for the dinners, resting in the afternoon because “those sleeping at Stalin’s table came to a bad end,” said Khrushchev.247 Sometimes he invited his Georgian film directors and actors to liven up the party: “Do you know if Chiaureli and Gelovani are in Moscow now?”
Foreign guests rode with Stalin who always sat in the fold-up seat right behind the driver and sometimes turned on a light above him to read. Molotov usually took the other folding seat with the favourite, Zhdanov, and any other guests in the back seats. Beria and Malenkov, “that pair of scoundrels” as Stalin called them, always shared a car.248 As the cars sped out of the city at the speed that Stalin relished, he planned the route, taking “strange detours” to confuse terrorists.
After driving ten miles up the Government Highway, they reached a barrier, turned left and approached a clump of young fir trees. After another checkpoint, they entered the gates of Kuntsevo. Once inside, they passed a big map in the hall where Stalin, Zhdanov and Molotov stopped to make grand geopolitical statements and capricious decisions. Zhdanov, his rival Malenkov and Voznesensky always had their notebooks ready to record Stalin’s orders while Molotov and Mikoyan, Old Bolsheviks, regarded themselves as above such sycophancy.
The lavatories were in the basement and when the guests washed before dinner, Molotov joked at the urinals: “We call this unloading before loading!” This lavatory was one of the only rooms in Moscow where the magnates could indulge in honest discussion: Beria and the others whispered to each other about the tedium of Stalin’s tales of his Siberian exile. When he claimed to have skied twelve kilometres to shoot twelve partridges, Beria, already coming to loathe Stalin, insisted, “He’s just lying!”
They entered the roomy dining room with a long table with about fourteen covered chairs along each side; there were comfortable chairs alongside it, high windows with long drapes, and two chandeliers and lights set in the walls. As in all Stalin’s houses, the walls, floors and ceilings were made of light Karelian pine panelling. It was so clean, so “dead quiet” and so “isolated from the other world,” that visitors imagined they were “in a hospital.”
Stalin always sat to the left of the head of the table with Beria at the end, often as tamada, and the guest of honour on Stalin’s left. As soon as they sat down, the drinking started. At first it was civilized, with a few bottles of wine, sometimes weak Georgian “juice” and some champagne, which Stalin greatly enjoyed. Mikoyan and Beria used to bring wine.
“Being Caucasian, you understand wine better than the others, try it . . .” Stalin would say: it was soon clear that he was testing the wines for poison so they stopped bringing it. Stalin provided his own wine and genially opened the bottles himself. As the evening went on, the toasts of vodka, pepper vodka and brandy became more insistent until even these iron-bellied drinkers were blind drunk. Stalin liked to blame Beria for the excessive drinking. At Georgian dinners, hosts customarily play at forcing their guests to drink, and then taking umbrage if they resist. But by now, this hospitality was grossly distorted and represented nothing but power and fear. After Stalin’s binges in 1944–45, Professor Vinogradov warned him to cut down on the drinking and he started to water down his drinks, diluting wine with mineral water. Nonetheless he occasionally over-imbibed and Svetlana saw him singing a duet with the legless but proud Health Minister. Forcing his tough comrades to lose control of themselves became his sport and a measure of dominance.
The drinking started with Stalin not Beria: he “forced us to drink to loosen our tongues,” wrote Mikoyan. Stalin liked the old drinking game of guessing the temperature. When Djilas was there, Beria was three degrees out and had to drink three vodkas. Beria, whom Svetlana called “a magnificent modern specimen of the artful courtier,” played up to Stalin’s longing to see his courtiers humiliate themselves, and policed the drinking, ensuring that no one missed a bumper.
“Come on, drink like everyone else does,” Beria tormented Molotov because he “always wanted to make a show in front of Stalin—he would never lag behind if Stalin said something.” Sometimes Stalin defended foreign visitors and he spared Kaganovich because “Jews weren’t great drinkers.” Even during these sessions, Beria’s mind throbbed with sexual imagery: after forcing Djilas to down a pepper vodka, he sneered that it was “bad for the sexual glands.” Stalin gazed at his guest to see if he was shocked, “ready to burst out laughing.”
Secretly, Beria hated these drinking sessions—he complained bitterly about them to Nina, Khrushchev and Molotov. Nina asked why he did it: “You have to put yourself on the same level as the people you’re with,” he replied, but there was more to it than that. Beria relished his power: in this, as in many other things, “I couldn’t resist it.” Khrushchev agreed that the dinners were “frightful.”
Sometimes the drinking at these Bacchanals was so intense that the potentates, like ageing, bloated students, staggered out to vomit, soiled themselves or simply had to be borne home by their guards. Stalin praised Molotov’s capacity but sometimes even he became drunk. Poskrebyshev was the most prolific vomiter. Khrushchev was a prodigious drinker, as eager to please Stalin as Beria. He sometimes became so inebriated that Beria took him home and put him to bed, which he promptly wet. Zhdanov and Shcherbakov could not control their drinking and became alcoholics: the latter died of the disease in May 1945 but Zhdanov tried to fight it. Bulganin was “practically an alcoholic.” Malenkov just became more bloated.
Beria, Malenkov and Mikoyan managed to suborn a waitress to serve them “coloured water” but they were betrayed to Stalin by Shcherbakov. After swallowing some colossal brandies, Mikoyan staggered out of the dining room and found a little room next door with a sofa and a basin. He splashed his face with water, lay down and managed to sleep for a few minutes, which became a secret habit. But Beria sneaked to Stalin who was already turning against the Armenian: “Want to be smarter than the rest, don’t you!” Stalin said slowly. “See you don’t regret it later!” This was always the threat chez Stalin.4
Stalin’s Mitteleuropean vassals coped no better. Gottwald became so inebriated that he requested that Czechoslovakia join the USSR. His wife, who came with him, heroically volunteered: “Allow me, Comrade Stalin, to drink in my husband’s place. I’ll drink for us both.” Rakosi foolishly told Beria that the Soviets were “drunkards.”
“We’ll see about that!” scoffed Stalin who joined Beria in “pumping” the Hungarian with drink.
In summertime, the guests staggered outside onto the verandas. Stalin asked Beria or Khrushchev’s advice on his roses (which he lovingly clipped), lemons and kitchen garden. Stalin supervised the planting of a vegetable garden where he devised new varieties such as crossing pumpkins with water melons. He fed the birds every day. Once, Beria built a greenhouse as a present to Stalin. “What fool ordered this?” Stalin asked. “How much electricity do you spend on floodlights?” He had it destroyed.
The standard of drunken horseplay was not much better than a university fraternity house. Khrushchev and Poskrebyshev drunkenly pushed Kulik into the pond—they knew Stalin had lost respect for the buffoon. Kulik, famously strong, jumped out soaking and chased Poskrebyshev who hid in the bushes. Beria warned: “If anyone tried something like that on me, I’d make mincemeat of them.” Poskrebyshev was regularly pushed in until the guards became so worried that a drunken magnate would drown that they discreetly drained the pond. The infantilism delighted Stalin: “You’re like little children!”
One evening, Beria suggested that they do some shooting in the garden. There were quails in a cage. “If we don’t shoot them,” said Beria, “the guards’ll eat them!” The Leader, who was probably already drunk, staggered out and called for guns. Stalin, old, weak and tipsy, not to mention his frail left arm, first felt “giddy” and fired his gun at the ground, only just missing Mikoyan. He then fired it in the air and managed to pepper his bodyguards, Colonels Tukov and Khrustalev, with shot. Afterwards Stalin apologized to them but blamed Beria.249
In the dining room, the maids, plump peasant women wearing white pinafores, like Victorian nurses, emerged with an array of Georgian dishes which they laid on the sideboard or the other end of the long table, then disappeared. When one of them was serving tea to Stalin and the Polish leaders, she stopped and hesitated. Stalin noticed immediately: “What’s she listening to?” If there were no foreign eminences, dinner was served by one of the housekeepers, usually Valechka, and a bodyguard. The guests helped themselves, then joined Stalin at the table.
“Gradually Stalin began to take a great interest in his food,” recalled Mikoyan. The weary Generalissimo was fuelling his failing energy with “enormous quantities of food suitable for a much larger man.” “He ate at least twice as much as I did,” wrote Mikoyan. “He took a deep plate, mixed two soups in it, then in a country custom that I knew from my own village, crumbled bread into the hot soup and covered it all by another plate—and then ate it all up to the end. Then there would be entreés, the main course and lots of meat.” He liked fish, especially herring, but “he also liked game—guinea-fowl, ducks, chickens” and boiled quails. He even invented a new dish which he called Aragvi, made of mutton with aubergines, tomatoes, potatoes and black pepper, all in a spicy sauce, which he ordered frequently. Yet he was so suspicious that he usually tried to persuade Khrushchev, the greediest of the magnates, to try his lamb or herring before he did.
The dinners were a sort of culinary imperialism, designed to impress with their simplicity yet awe with their power—and they worked. While the independent Yugoslavs were appalled by the coarseness of the company, the pliant Poles were impressed by the “delicious roast bear” and regarded their host as “a charming man” who treated them with paternal warmth, always asking if their families enjoyed their Crimean holidays. With outsiders, Stalin retained his earlier gift of being a masterful practitioner of “the human touch.” This charm had its limits. Bierut persisted in asking Stalin what had happened to the Polish Communists who had disappeared in 1937.
“Lavrenti, where are they?” Stalin asked Beria. “I told you to look for them, why haven’t you found them?” Stalin and Beria shared a relish for these sinister games. Beria promised to look for the vanished Poles but when Stalin was not listening, he turned on Bierut: “Why fuck around with Joseph Vissarionovich? Fuck off and leave him alone. Or you’ll regret it.” Bierut did not mention his lost friends again.
Stalin suffered from bad teeth which affected his court since he would only eat the softest lamb or the ripest fruit. His dentures, when they were fitted, unleashed yet another vicious competition. This gourmand also insisted on Bolshevik austerity, two instincts that were hard to match as his courtiers competed to procure the choicest cuts for him. Once he enjoyed a delicious lamb but asked a bodyguard: “Where did you get the lamb?”
“The Caucasus,” replied the guard.
“How did you fuel the plane? With water? This is one of Vlasik’s pranks!”250 Stalin ordered a farm to be built at Kuntsevo where cows, sheep and chickens could be kept and the lake stocked with fish, and this was managed by a special staff of three agricultural experts. When Beria delivered thirty turbots, Stalin teased his guards: “ You couldn’t find turbot but Beria could.” The guards sent them for laboratory analysis and revealed that Beria’s fish were rotten.
“That trickster can’t be trusted,” said Stalin. Despite his swelling paunch, Stalin criticized the spreading flab of “Malanya” Malenkov, ordering him to take exercise in order to “recover the look of a human being.” Beria joined in teasing his ally: “So, that human-being look, where is it? Have you lost any weight?” But Khrushchev’s gluttony entertained Stalin who whispered to the guards: “He needed more than two fish and some pheasants, the glutton!” Yet he encouraged the spherical Khrushchev to eat more: “Look! The giblets, Nikita. Have you tried them yet?”
The potentates tried to control their diets by living on fruit and juices one day a week to “unload,” but it did not seem to work. Beria insisted on eating vegetables as his diet, for he was already as fat as Malenkov.
“Well Comrade Beria, here’s your grass,” announced Stalin’s housekeeper.5
Stalin believed his dinners resembled a “political dining society” but his “fellow intellectual” Zhdanov persuaded him their wide-ranging discussions were the equivalent of the symposia of the ancient Greeks. Nonetheless these vomit-flecked routs were the closest he came to cabinet government. The Imperium was truly being “governed from the dining table,” Molotov said. The leadership was like “a patriarchal family with a crotchety head whose foibles caused the home folks to be apprehensive” but “unofficially and in actual fact,” wrote Djilas, “a significant part of Soviet policy was shaped at these dinners. It was here that the destiny of the vast Russian land, of the newly acquired territories and . . . the human race was decided.” The conversation meandered from jokes and literature on to “the most serious political subjects.” The Politburo exchanged news from their fiefdoms but the informality was illusionary: “The uninstructed visitor might hardly have detected any difference between Stalin and the others but it existed.”
At dinner, Zhdanov, “the Pianist,” was the most loquacious, showing off about his latest cultural campaign or grumbling that Molotov should have let him annex Finland, while his chief rival, the obese super-clerk, Malenkov, was usually silent—“extreme caution with Stalin” was his policy. Beria, the most sycophantic yet the most irreverent, was artful at provoking and manipulating Stalin or, as his wife put it, “playing with the tiger”: he could shoot down anyone else’s proposal if they had not first checked it with him. Beria was “very powerful” because he could “pick the exact moment to . . . turn Stalin’s goodwill or ill will to his advantage.”
When foreigners were absent, the fate of men was often decided. Yet Stalin talked about their acquaintances murdered during the thirties “with the calm detachment of a historian, showing neither sorrow nor rage, just a light humour.” Once he wandered up to one of his marshals who had been arrested and released: “I heard you were recently in confinement?”
“Yes, Comrade Stalin, I was, but they figured out my case and released me. But how many good and remarkable people perished there.”
“Yes,” mused Stalin thoughtfully, “we’ve lost a lot of good and remarkable people.” Then he walked out of the room into the garden. The courtiers turned on the Marshal. “What did you say to Comrade Stalin?” demanded Malenkov who always behaved like the school prefect. “Why?” Then Stalin reappeared holding a bouquet of roses which he presented to the Marshal as a weird sort of apology.
Supreme power is often the supreme power to bore: nothing beats the obligatory tedium and inebriated verbosity of the absolute monarch in decline. The old Generalissimo had become repetitive, irritable and forgetful. Beria and Khrushchev knew by heart Stalin’s exaggerated exploits in exile, his trips to London and Vienna, his childhood beatings at the hands of his father. Stalin dwelt more and more on the curious happiness of his exile, perhaps the only true harmony he had known. He now received an appeal for help from a friend from his Turukhansk exile during the First World War: “I am daring to trouble you from the village of Kureika,” wrote an old teacher named Vasily Solomin who lived on a pension of 150 roubles. “I remember when . . . you caught a sturgeon. How much happiness it gave me!”
“I got your letter,” replied Stalin. “I haven’t forgotten you and my friends from Turukhansk and be sure I’ll never forget you. I send you 6,000 roubles from my deputy’s salary. The sum isn’t very large but it’ll be useful. Good health, Stalin.”
Each magnate policed the others, constantly vigilant to protect their interests and avoid provoking the old tiger. It became increasingly difficult to discuss real politics. When Mikoyan told Stalin there was a food shortage, Stalin became anxious and, while feasting on the myriad dishes, kept asking “Why’s there no food?”
“Ask Malenkov, he’s in charge of Agriculture,” replied Mikoyan. At that moment, the heels of both Beria and Malenkov landed hard on Mikoyan’s foot under the table.
“What’s the use of it?” Beria and Malenkov attacked Mikoyan afterwards. “It just irritates Stalin. He begins to attack one or other of us. He should be told only what he likes to hear to create a nice atmosphere, not to spoil the dinner!”6
They studied Stalin like zoologists to read his moods, win his favour and survive. The key was to understand Stalin’s unique blend of supersensitive discomfiture and world-historical arrogance, his longing to be liked and his heartless cruelty: it was vital not to make him anxious. When Mikoyan’s aircraft designer brother was in trouble, he “advised Artyom how to handle Stalin.” Khrushchev noticed how the Pole, Bierut, “managed to avoid disaster because he knew how to handle Stalin.”
There were certain key rules which resemble the advice given to a tourist on how to behave if he is unlucky enough to encounter a wild animal on his camping holiday. The first rule was to look him straight in the eyes. Otherwise he asked: “Why don’t you look me in the eye today?” But it was dangerous to look into his eyes too much: Gomulka, one of the Polish leaders, took notes and showed respect but his intensity made Stalin nervous: “What kind of fellow’s Gomulka? He sits there all the time looking into my eyes as though searching for something.” Perhaps he was an agent?
The visitor had to maintain calm at all times: panic alarmed Stalin. Bierut “never made Stalin nervous and self-conscious.” Visitors must show respect by taking notes, like Malenkov, but not too frantically like Gomulka: “Why does he bring a notepad with him?” Stalin wondered. If the guards were over-formal in clicking their heels, Stalin became flighty: “Who are you? Soldier Svejk?” he snapped. Yet firmness and humour with Stalin usually worked well: he admired and protected Zhukov and appreciated Khrushchev for their strong views.
He knew Beria and Malenkov tried to prefix decisions so he appreciated Voznesensky’s honesty. But he no longer appreciated the bluntness of old comrades. Voroshilov, “the most illustrious of the Soviet grandees” whom he now distrusted for his taste for splendour and Bohemian circle, tried to remind him of their long friendship: “I don’t remember,” Stalin replied. Mikoyan was one of the frankest and often contradicted Stalin, which had been acceptable during the war, but no longer: once when they were discussing the Kharkov offensive, Mikoyan courageously blurted out that the disaster was Stalin’s fault. The military genius was furious, becoming ever more suspicious of Molotov and Mikoyan.
The potentates could never meet in private: “Danger lurked in friends and friendship,” wrote Sergei Khrushchev. “An innocent meeting could end tragically.” Although Khrushchev, Malenkov, Mekhlis, Budyonny and others lived on Granovsky Street, they virtually never visited their neighbours. Stalin relished their mutual hatreds: Beria and Malenkov loathed Zhdanov and Voznesensky; Mikoyan hated Beria; Bulganin hated Malenkov. Their homes were all now bugged. (“I’ve been bugged all my life,” Molotov admitted when his bodyguard confided that his own house was wired.) But Beria claimed that he deliberately criticized policy at home because otherwise Stalin would become suspicious. Their importance depended not on seniority but purely on their relationships with Stalin. Thus Poskrebyshev, a factotum, if CC member, openly insulted Mikoyan, a Politburo member, when the latter was under a cloud.
Stalin had to be consulted about everything, however small, yet he did not want to be harassed for decisions because this too made him nervous. Beria boasted that while Yezhov rushed to Stalin with every detail, he himself only consulted him on major questions. If Stalin was on holiday, the safest option was to make no decisions at all, a strategy perfected by Bulganin who rose without trace as a result. If in doubt, appeal to Stalin’s sagacity: “Without you no one will solve this question,” read one such note. Stalin liked to hear everyone else’s opinion before giving his own but Mikoyan preferred “waiting to hear what Stalin would say.”
Beria said the only way to survive was “always to strike first.” It was sensible to denounce your fellow bosses at all times or, as Vyshinsky put it, “keep people on edge.” When Molotov made a mistake, Vyshinsky revelled in it. But the denouncers were on edge too: Manuilsky wrote a ten-page denunciation of Vyshinsky: “Dear Comrade Stalin, I’m turning to you about the case of Vyshinsky . . . Abroad without the control of the CC, he is a person of petit bourgeois and boundless self-importance, for whom his own interests take precedence.” Stalin decided to do nothing with this but, as always, he informed the victim: later that day, Vyshinsky was found staring into oblivion: “I’m only theoretically alive. I just got through the day. Well at least that’s something, thank God!”
The overriding rule was to conceal nothing from Stalin: Zhdanov neutralized his crisis in Leningrad, Khrushchev, his youthful Trotskyism, by submissive confession to Stalin. Stalin’s eye for any weakness was aquiline: when Vyshinsky felt ill and walked out of a diplomatic meeting, Stalin heard about it instantly and phoned his subordinate, Gromyko: “What happened to Vyshinsky? Was he drunk?” Gromyko denied it. “But the doctors say he’s an alcoholic . . . Oh well all right!”7
After dinner, Stalin solemnly toasted Lenin whose illuminated bust flickered on the wall: “To Vladimir Illich, our leader, our teacher, our all!” But this sacerdotal blessing ended any remaining decorum. When foreigners were not present, Stalin criticized Lenin, the hero who had turned against him: he even told young Sergo Beria stories about Lenin’s affairs with his secretaries. “At the end of his life,” Khrushchev thought he “lost control over what he was saying.” It was probably after 4 a.m.; the guests were desperately drunk, tired and nauseous but the omnipotent insomniac was awake, vigilant and almost sober.
There was a short rest to wash their hands, another opportunity to roll their eyes at Stalin’s latest peccadillo: the magnates chuckled at the ever-increasing number of locks on the doors and whispered about another of Stalin’s boasts of his drinking exploits: “You see, even in youth, he’d drink too much!” Then it was back to the dinner which now sank to the level of a Neanderthal stag night.
Sometimes Stalin himself “got so drunk he took such liberties,” said Khrushchev. “He’d throw a tomato at you.” Beria was the master of practical jokes along with Poskrebyshev. The two most dignified guests, Molotov and Mikoyan, became the victims as Stalin’s distrust of them became more malicious. Beria targeted the sartorial splendour of the “dashing” Mikoyan. Stalin teased him about his “fancy airs” while Beria delighted in tossing Mikoyan’s hat into the pine trees where it remained. He slipped old tomatoes into Mikoyan’s suits and then “pressed him against the wall” so they exploded in his pocket. Mikoyan started to bring spare pairs of trousers to dinner. At home, Ashken found chicken bones in his pockets. Stalin smiled as Molotov sat on a tomato or Poskrebyshev downed a vodka full of salt that would make him vomit. Poskrebyshev often collapsed and had to be dragged out. Beria once wrote “PRICK” on a piece of paper and stuck it onto Khrushchev’s back. When Khrushchev did not notice, everyone guffawed. Khrushchev never forgot the humiliation.
Sometimes Svetlana popped in during dinner but could not hide her embarrassment and distaste. She thought the magnates resembled “Peter the Great’s boyars” who had almost killed themselves with drink to entertain the Tsar at his drunken “Synod.”
After dinner, “Stalin played the gramophone, considering it his duty as a citizen. He never left it,” said Berman. He relished his comic records, including one of the “warbling of a singer accompanied by the yowling and barking of dogs” which always made him laugh with mirth. “Well, it’s still clever, devilishly clever!” He marked the records with his comments: “Very good!”
Stalin urged his grandees to dance but this was no longer the exhilarating whirligig of Voroshilov and Mikoyan tripping the light fantastic. This too had become a test of power and strength. Stalin himself “shuffled around with his arms spread out” in Georgian style, though he had “a sense of rhythm.”
“Comrade Joseph Vissarionovich, how strong you are!” chirped the Politburo. Then he stopped and became gloomy: “Oh no, I won’t live long. The physiological laws are having their way.”
“No no!” Molotov chorused. “Comrade Joseph Vissarionovich we need you, you still have a long life ahead of you!”
“Age has crept up on me and I’m already an old man!”
“Nonsense. You look fine. You’re holding up marvellously . . .”
When Tito was present, Stalin waved away these reassurances and looked at his guest whose assassination he would later order: “Tito should take care of himself in case anything happens to him. Because I won’t live long.” He turned to Molotov: “But Vyacheslav Mikhailovich will remain here.” Molotov squirmed. Then, in a bizarre demonstration of his virility, Stalin declared: “There’s still strength in me!” He slipped both arms around Tito’s arms and thrice lifted him off the floor in time to the Russian folk song on the gramophone, a pas de deux that was the tyrannical equivalent of Nureyev and Fonteyn.
“When Stalin says dance,” Khrushchev told Mikoyan, “a wise man dances.” He made the sweating Khrushchev drop to his haunches and do the gopak that made him look like “a cow dancing on ice.” Bulganin “stomped.” Mikoyan, the “acknowledged dancer,” still managed his wild lezginka, and “our city dancer” Molotov immaculately waltzed, displaying his unlikely terpsichorean talent. Ever since the thirties, Molotov’s party trick had been gravely slow-dancing with other men to the guffaws of Stalin: his last male partner, Postyshev, had been shot long ago.
Polish security boss Berman was amazed when the Soviet Foreign Minister asked him to slow-dance to a waltz. “I just moved my feet in rhythm like the woman,” said Berman. “Molotov led. He wasn’t a bad dancer. I tried to keep in step but what I did resembled clowning more than dancing. It was pleasant but with an inner tension.” Stalin watched from the gramophone, grinning roguishly as Molotov and Berman glided across the floor. It was Stalin who “really had fun. For us,” said Berman, “these dancing sessions were a good opportunity to whisper to each other things that couldn’t be said out loud.” Molotov warned Berman “about being infiltrated by various hostile organizations,” a warning prearranged with Stalin.251
There were rarely women at these dinners but they were sometimes invited for New Year’s Eve or on Stalin’s birthday. When Nina Beria was at Kuntsevo with her husband, Stalin asked her why she was not dancing. She said she was not in the mood so Stalin went over to a young actor and ordered him to ask Nina to dance. This was to tease the jealous Beria who was furious. Svetlana hated her visits to these orgies. Stalin insisted she dance too: “Well go on, Svetlana, dance! You’re the hostess so dance!”
“I’ve already danced, Papa. I’m tired.” Stalin pulled her hair, expressing his “perverse affection in its brutish form.” When she tried to flee, he called: “Comrade Mistress, why have you left us poor unenlightened creatures without . . . direction? Lead us! Show us the way!”
When Zhdanov moved to the piano, they sang religious hymns, White anthems and Georgian folk songs like “Suliko.” When Georgian actors and directors such as Chiaureli were present, the entertainment was more elevated. Chiaureli’s “imitations, songs, anecdotes made Stalin laugh.” Stalin loved singing and was very good at it. The two choirboys, Stalin and Voroshilov, joined Mikoyan, Beria and Zhdanov at the piano.252
It was almost dawn but the haunting nostalgia of these songs from those lost worlds of seminaries and church choirs was instantly shattered by Stalin’s explosions of anger and contempt. “A reasonable interrogator,” said Khrushchev, “would not behave with a hardened criminal the way Stalin behaved with friends at his table.” When Mikoyan disagreed with Stalin, he flared up: “You’ve all got old. I’ll replace you all.”
At about 5 a.m., Stalin dismissed his exhausted comrades who were often so drunk they could hardly move. The guards ordered the cars round to the front and the chauffeurs “dragged away their charges.” On the way home, Khrushchev and Bulganin lay back, relieved to have survived: “one never knows,” whispered Bulganin, “if one’s going home or to prison.”
The guards locked the doors of the dacha and retired to their guardhouse. Stalin lay on one of his divans and started to read. Finally, drink and exhaustion soothed this obsessional Dynamo. He slept. His bodyguards noted the light go out in Stalin’s quarters: “no movement.”8