Simon Montefiore - Stalin

Stalin often told Molotov how he missed his homeland. Stalin had championed the Russian people as the ties that bound his empire; it was they who provided the dynamic power to promote Bolshevism and guaranteed his glory. His destiny was Russian. Hence Vasily said, “Papa was once a Georgian.” But his personal Russianness has been exaggerated. His lifestyle and mentality remained Georgian. He talked Georgian, ate Georgian, sang Georgian, personally ruled Georgia through the local bosses, becoming involved in parochial politics, missed his childhood friends, and spent almost half of his last eight years in his own isolated, fantasy Georgia.

Stalin based himself at Coldstream but constantly moved to new houses. It is claimed that they were gloomy. Certainly the wood panelling was sombre but when one visits them in the summer, they are delightful. Stalin usually ate and worked outside on the verandas and all had lush gardens full of flowers where he loved to walk. Above all, the houses were chosen for their vistas: the views from these grave houses are all breathtakingly beautiful.

He now started staying at the white mock-Baroque mansion in the lush gardens of Dedra Park at Sukhumi where Mandelstam had watched Yezhov dance the gopak . During the thirties, he had holidayed at a small dacha built by Lakoba, at New Athos; now he had another Cuban-style villa built next to it, all on one floor and with a splendid sea view. There was already a CC sanatorium by the lake at the remote Lake Ritsa which could only be reached by a long drive through a scenic gorge beside a bubbling torrent. In 1948, he ordered a new house to be joined to the old. [275] Most of Stalin’s houses were reached through an archway of the security building (though not Lake Ritsa and New Athos) before emerging in a lush garden with privet hedges and a path that led up to a Mediterranean-style villa surrounded by a veranda. Their biggest room was always the high-ceilinged wood-panelled dining room that boasted a long table that could be made smaller. All were painted a sort of military green, perhaps to camouflage them from the sky. All were virtually invisible, hidden up narrow lanes, and so concealed within palm and fir trees that it was hard to see them even from their own garden. Virtually all of them had their own jetties and all had summerhouses where Stalin worked and held dinners. All contained the tell-tale billiard room which was usually combined with a cinema, the film being projected out of little wooden windows across the billiard table onto the far wall. All had many bedrooms with divans and vast bathrooms with tiny baths made to fit Stalin’s height. All had been built or refashioned for Stalin by his court architect Miron Merzhanov who lived with Martha Beria’s mother, Timosha, Gorky’s daughter-in-law and Yagoda’s love. Merzhanov was arrested in the late forties like all of Timosha’s previous lovers.

Stalin had access to any of the innumerable State dachas, but there seem to have been about five around Moscow, several in the Crimea, including two imperial palaces, three in Georgia proper, and about five in Abkhazia that he used regularly. At least fifteen were kept staffed. Yet in many ways, he remained the itinerant, restless Georgian revolutionary of his youth. Accompanied by Poskrebyshev, constantly supplied by air with the latest CC papers, summoning his potentates at will, despatching telegrams round the world, he was always the fulcrum of power.

When he arrived, there was one ritual that was an echo of older times: Stalin had hung Lenin’s death mask on the wall at Kuntsevo where it was illuminated like an icon with a burning lamp. Whenever he went on holiday, the icon would travel with him. He ordered his commandant Orlov “to hang the face in the most visible place.”

As he moved in, the magnates and the entire Georgian leadership arrived simultaneously at their local houses, waiting to be summoned. Abakumov was ready to fly down at a moment’s notice with news of the latest interrogations. If there were Politburo rows, he summoned the magnates for Solomonic judgement. They dreaded having to spend any time with Stalin on holiday, which “was worse than the dinners,” according to Khrushchev who once endured a whole month. Fighting the Ukrainian famine and separatism, Khrushchev remained under a temporary cloud as he recuperated. Stalin ordered Kaganovich to supervise Khrushchev and beat any nationalism out of the Ukrainians, a feat he had formerly achieved in the late twenties. Khrushchev and Kaganovich, long-time allies, lived cheek by jowl, their families going on walks every weekend. Inevitably, they soon became mortal enemies. Both appealed to Stalin who summoned them to Coldstream. Over dinner and a movie, he stoked their hatred, enforced peace and ultimately recalled Kaganovich to Moscow.

His East European vassals, especially Gottwald, Bierut and Hoxha, did not dare resist a summons. But the two favourites were the local chiefs with whom Stalin could relax, partly because both were in their mid-thirties, partly because they were Georgians. Confiding in them more than in his own children, he appeared divine to them but also paternal.

Candide Charkviani, the cultured Georgian First Secretary, visited him “every second day.” It helped that Stalin had been taught the alphabet by a priest named Charkviani, even though he was no relation to Candide. He trusted Charkviani so much that he not only revealed his sleeping arrangements but when Candide told him about a Georgian prince who changed his underwear daily, Stalin showed him a chest of drawers full of “white cotton underclothes”: “It’s not hard for a prince,” Stalin quipped. “But I’m a peasant and I do the same.”

The other confidant was Akaki Mgeladze, the ruthless and sleekly handsome boss of Abkhazia, whom Stalin nicknamed “Comrade Wolf.” Stalin liked Charkviani for his knowledge of literature and Mgeladze for his political intriguing. He sometimes challenged Mgeladze to drive from his Sukhumi office to the dacha in seventeen minutes. Charkviani and Mgeladze hated each other, like their predecessors Beria and Lakoba. [276] This is based on Charkviani’s memoirs. Mgeladze’s memoirs, that almost rank alongside Mikoyan’s for their intimacy, have only just been published in Georgia. The Georgian and Abkhazian bosses were naturally rivals: in the case of Beria versus Lakoba, the Tbilisi boss destroyed the Sukhumi boss but it worked the other way round with Charkviani and Mgeladze.

Valechka, Vlasik and Poskrebyshev, who stayed in nearby dachas, plus a stenographer and cipher officer, were his other regular companions. With his “sad face, swivelling eyes and cunning,” Poskrebyshev sorted out the papers that arrived each day by plane from Moscow and then brought them up to the villa. Poskrebyshev, whom Stalin had lately nicknamed “the Commander-in-Chief,” defended the Generalissimo from unwanted callers. When Mikoyan phoned in October 1947, Poskrebyshev chided him: “You’ve already been told you shouldn’t bother Comrade Stalin on this question and you do it again.” To outsiders, for whom the Politburo was the holy of holies, this was a shocking display.

Stalin ate his meals outside, on the verandas, in the summerhouse or by Lake Ritsa, reading the papers. There were open magazines and books on virtually every surface and piles of papers. Before he set off for the south, he scrawled to Poskrebyshev: “Order all these books. Stalin. Goethe’s Letters , Poetry of the French Revolution , Pushkin, Konstantin Simonov, Shakespeare, Herzen, History of the Seven Years War— and Battle at Sea 1939–1945 by Peter Scott.” He still worked late into the evenings, starting his dinners late.