Simon Montefiore: Stalin

The magnates’ families recognized their tense waiting for the call to the cinema or dacha from Stalin’s secretaries. At weekends, the only chance they got to see their families, the leaders were especially tense whenever the phone rang. They did not eat during the day to leave room for the endless procession of dishes. But when the call came, Sergei Khrushchev noticed how hastily his father departed.

The chauffeurs of the leaders were very pleased when their bosses were invited to Stalin’s place. Voroshilov was now invited less often than before the war. “My old man ain’t invited there very much anymore,” his veteran chauffeur would complain.

This resembles the blinding in one eye of Marshal Masséna by the Emperor Napoleon on a shooting expedition. The incident convinced Beria and Khrushchev even more that Stalin’s shooting tales were lies and that he could not shoot at all.

Vlasik and Lieut.-Gen. Sasha Egnatashvili, the trusted son of the Gori innkeeper and Keke’s protector, were probably responsible for Stalin’s food which was prepared at an MGB laboratory named “The Base” and then marked “No poisonous elements found.” A recent book claims that Egnatashvili was Stalin’s food taster, which is apparently a myth. Stalin however often did get his entourage to try food and wine before he did. When he arrived at a party, he brought his own box of wine and his own cigarettes which he opened himself. He would only eat or drink if he had broken the seal himself, leaving the food, unfinished wine and cigarettes to be divided up by Vlasik. The waste was vast; the temptation for venality irresistible but dangerous. Vlasik could never resist such goodies.

This male slow-dancing symbolizes the sinister degeneracy of Stalin’s dictatorship but it was not unique. In November 1943, at President Roosevelt’s Thanksgiving party in Cairo, just before their departure to meet Stalin in Teheran, there was a shortage of female dancers. So Churchill happily danced with FDR’s military assistant General Edwin “Pa” Watson.

They were so pleased with these sessions that they made a record of this murderous boy band with Voroshilov on lead vocals, backed up by Zhdanov on piano. There one can actually hear the fine voices and tinkling piano of a night at Kuntsevo. This remarkable recording is in the possession of the Zhdanov family.

There was a little villa down the steps on the cliffside for Svetlana. When Stalin saw it, he muttered, “What is she? A member of the Politburo?” Vasily’s cottage adjoined the guardhouse: visitors drove through a long tunnel within the guardhouse to reach Stalin’s house.

Mikoyan too felt his icy disapproval. He sensed his two old comrades were closet Rightists, absurd in Molotov’s case. But during the complex arguments about whether to strip Germany of its industry or build the eastern sector as a satellite, and the endless crises of famine and grain, Mikoyan had become a moderating voice. When Mikoyan did not report properly from the Far East, he received another sharp note from Stalin: “We sent you to the Far East not so you could fill your mouth with water [say nothing] and not send information to Moscow.”

It was Shakhurin whose son had killed his girlfriend and then himself on Kamennyi Most in 1943.

Abakumov appears as the consummate cunning courtier, utterly submissive to Stalin’s mysterious whims, in Solzhenitsyn’s novel of the post-war Terror, The First Circle , and as a shrewd and debauched secret-police careerist in Rybakov’s Fire and Ashes , the last volume of his Children of the Arbat trilogy.

Stalin himself soon retired as Armed Forces Minister, handing this to Bulganin, another ally of Zhdanov who hated Malenkov because he had removed him from the Western Front in 1943. The ruling inner circle of Five (Stalin, Molotov, Mikoyan, Malenkov and Beria) gradually expanded to embrace Zhdanov, Voznesensky, Bulganin and Kuznetsov, regardless of whether they were yet formally Politburo members.

In late 1946, Zhdanov suffered heart trouble and had to rest in Sochi, reporting to Stalin on 5 January 1947, “Now I feel much better… I don’t want to end the course of treatment… I ask you to add 10 days to my holiday… Let me return the 25th… For which I’ll be enormously grateful. Greetings! Your Andrei Zhdanov.”

Zhdanov discussed the campaign with his son Yury, who had studied chemistry, taken a master’s degree in philosophy—and remained Stalin’s ideal young man and his dream son-in-law. Zhdanov explained that “after the war, with millions dead and the economy destroyed, we have to form a new concept of spiritual values to give a foundation to a devastated country, based on classical culture…” Zhdanov, raised on nineteenth-century “authors from Pushkin to Tolstoy, composers like Haydn and Mozart,” sought “an ideological basis in the classics.”

“I have fulfilled the orders according to Comrade Stalin’s instructions which I wrote down about the play,” Simonov wrote to Poskrebyshev on 9 February 1949, delivering the work for inspection.

Eisenstein died before he could shorten the beard, cut the kiss and show why The Terrible “needed to be cruel.” This was a mercy since it seems unlikely he would have survived the anti-Semitic purge of 1951–53.

The first two candidates to lead this wartime PR campaign, Polish leaders of the Bund ( Jewish Socialist Party), V. Alter and G. Ehlich, demanded too much and were arrested, respectively being shot and committing suicide in prison.

Fefer was the author of an absurd poem during WWII called “I a Jew” in which he praised the great Jewish Bolsheviks from King Solomon to Marx, Sverdlov and “Stalin’s friend Kaganovich” which no doubt enormously embarrassed the latter.

Zhdanov’s chief ideological anti-Semite was the tall, thin and ascetic CC Secretary Mikhail Suslov, who had played a key role in the Caucasian deportations and then served as Stalin’s proconsul in the Baltics which he brutally purged after the war. Working alternately under both Zhdanov and Malenkov, he became one of Stalin’s youngish protégés.

Churchill himself had bouts of jealousy of his generals: “Monty wants to fill the Mall when he gets his baton! And he will not fill the Mall,” Churchill told Sir Alan Brooke on his way back from Moscow in October 1944. “He will fill the Mall because he is Monty and I will not have him filling the Mall!” It was, wrote Brooke, “a strange streak of almost unbelievable petty jealousy on his part… Those that got between him and the sun did not meet his approval.” There was a great tradition of rulers jealous of, and threatened by, brilliant but overmighty generals: Emperor Justinian humiliated Belisarius; Emperor Paul did the same to Suvorov.

The size and quality of their Stalin portrait was as much a mark of rank as the stars on an officer’s shoulder boards: a life-size oil original by a court artist like Gerasimov was the sign of a potentate. Budyonny and Voroshilov also boasted life-size portraits of themselves in military splendour on horseback with sabre by Gerasimov. These “grandees” were now so pompous, recalled Svetlana, that they made “authoritative speeches” on “any pretext,” even at lunch in their own homes while their families “sighed with boredom.”